... Chapter VII The Knowledge and the Ignorance Let the Knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Rig Veda. (IV. 2. 11.) Two are there, hidden in the secrecy of the Infinite, the Knowledge and the Ignorance; but perishable is the Ignorance, immortal is the Knowledge; another than they is He who rules over both the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Swetaswatara Upanishad... between the dual principles, between the Conscient and the Inconscient, between Heaven and Earth, between God and the World, between the limitless One and the limited Many, between the Knowledge and the Ignorance. We have arrived by the train of our reasoning at the conclusion that this need be no more than an error of the sense-mind and the logical intellect founded upon a partial experience. We... complete form its own real essence. But there is one point in the reasoning which till now we have left somewhat obscure, and it is precisely in this matter of the coexistence of the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Admittedly, we start here from conditions which are the opposite of Page 503 the ideal divine Truth and all the circumstances of that opposition are founded upon the being's ...
... the Knowledge, other that which comes by the Ignorance; this is the lore we have received from the wise who reveal That to our understanding." "He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality."(9, 10, 11) ā ā ā ā Page 54 The concept of Ignorance has been one of the central concepts in... next verse, however, points out that, according to the wisdom possessed by the ancients, who had realized and possessed the highest Reality, have a different view. According to them, the Knowledge and the Ignorance are to be known as both in one, and that by the Ignorance one grows right up to the point where one crosses beyond death, and one then becomes capable of gaining that Knowledge by which one... ignorance, avidyā, and the result, that comes from the knowledge, vidyā, are quite different when a synthetic path is followed. One who knows That as both in one, the Page 57 Knowledge and the Ignorance (vidyām ca avidyām ca ubhayam saha), follows the synthetic path, where neither multiplicity nor oneness is exclusively pursued. In that path, a point is reached in the pursuit of the m ...
... Truth and the Bliss. "May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, O God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi." This eleventh verse is very striking in its significance. We have the opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance familiar to Vedanta; and the Knowledge is likened to the wide... ordinary tendency of our human existence, from subjection to the sons of Danu or Diti. The idea is evidently identical with that of the Isha Upanishad which declares the possession of the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the unity and the multiplicity in the one Brahman as the condition for the attainment of Immortality. We then come to the seven divine seers. "The seers unconquered declared the Seer ...
... world-self also is our self, an integral world-knowledge. A knowledge that can be learned or constructed by the mind exists and has its value, but that is not what is meant when we speak of the Knowledge and the Ignorance. An integral spiritual consciousness carries in it a knowledge of all the terms of being; it links the highest to the lowest through all the mediating terms and achieves an indivisible... than itself. To live in the cosmic Ignorance is a blindness, but to confine oneself in an exclusive absolutism of Knowledge is also a blindness: to know Brahman as at once and together the Knowledge and the Ignorance, to attain to the supreme status at once by the Becoming and the Non-Becoming, to relate together realisation of the transcendent and the cosmic self, to achieve foundation in the supramundane... bliss of the Eternal. The Eternal is our refuge; all the rest are false values, the Ignorance and its mazes, a self-bewilderment of the soul in phenomenal Nature. Our conception of the Knowledge and the Ignorance rejects this negation and the oppositions on which it is founded: it points to a larger if more difficult issue of reconciliation. For we see that these apparently opposite terms of One and ...
... wise who revealed That to our understanding. विद्याञ्च अविद्याञ्च यस्तद् वेदोभयं सह । अविद्यया मृत्युं तीर्त्वा विद्ययामृतमश्नुते ॥११॥ 11) He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality. अन्धं तमः प्रविशन्ति येऽसम्भूतिमुपासते । ततो भूय इव ते तमो य उ सम्भूत्यां रताः ॥१२॥ 12) Into a blind... the World, Renunciation and Enjoyment, Action and internal Freedom, the One and the Many, Being and its Becomings, the passive divine Impersonality and the active divine Personality, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the Becoming and the Not-Becoming, Life on earth and beyond and the supreme Immortality. The image is of the world either as a garment or as a dwelling-place for the informing and governing... × Anyadeva—eva here gives to anyad the force, "Quite other than the result described in the preceding verse is that to which lead the Knowledge and the Ignorance." We have the explanation of anyad in the verse that follows. The ordinary rendering, "Knowledge has one result, Ignorance another", would be an obvious commonplace announced with an e ...
... Knowledge, other than that which comes by the Ignorance; this is the lore we have received from the wise who revealed That to our understanding." "He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality". 23 These verses show that he who follows after the Knowledge only enters as if into a blinder darkness... the Multiplicity, beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality. In other words, the Upanishad expounds an integral view of the One and the Many, of the One and the All, and of the Knowledge and the Ignorance, where the experience of the multiplicity has significance and role to play in the pursuit of the knowledge and of immortality, since the experience of the multiplicity enables one to cross... identical with the Reality which is described in the Gita as kshara (mutable), and akshara (immutable), and uttama (supreme). (f)But in due course of time, the distinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance became more separative. Ignorance came to be regarded as erroneous knowledge of the Many divorced from the true knowledge of the One; it also came to be regarded as a creative power of the ...
... Chapters XXVIII-LIII in the Arya with corresponding chapters in the 1940 edition of Book Two Ch. no. in Arya Title in Arya Ch. no. in 1940 Comment XXVIII The Knowledge and the Ignorance VII Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya . XXIX Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance VIII Revised form of a chapter originally published... Dream and Hallucination -- VI Entirely new chapter. Reality and the Cosmic Illusion -- VII Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya . The Knowledge and the Ignorance XXVIII VIII Revised form of a chapter originally published in the Arya . Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance XXIX IX Revised form of a chapter originally ...
... supracosmic beyond the individual and the universe. There is the one God who presents to us the many forms, names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is the distinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance, 2 the greater truth of an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood or mixed truth and falsehood of mortal existence. There is the discipline of an inward growth of man from the physical... with the Spirit. × Cittim acittiṁ cinavad vi vidvān . "Let the knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance." × Buddha himself does not seem to have preached his tenets as a novel revolutionary creed ...
... 11) Chittim achittim chinavad vi vidván, pṛishṭheva vítá vṛijiná cha martán; Ráye cha nah swapatyáya deva, ditim cha ráswa aditim urushya. In his wisdom may he distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance like wide open levels and those that hamper mortals; and, O god, for our felicity fruitful of its works enrich for us the divided being and widen the undivided. Sayana explains "like the ...
... travelling in the succession of its moments by the Ignorance. For this reason the Upanishad declares that Brahman can really be known only by knowing Page 490 him as both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and so only can one arrive at the status of immortality.—Ignorance is therefore the consciousness of being in the succession of Time, and it is so called because, actually self-divided by ...
... Other Writings from the Arya Essays in Philosophy and Yoga Chapter XXVIII The Knowledge and the Ignorance Argument Chapter XXVIII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939-40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter VII . The seven principles of existence are, then, one in their reality, inseparable ...
... it all things are perfect and to it all things are pure. But there is a yet more radical instance of the eventual unreality of opposites. For the sages make too an opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance,— vidyā avidyā, citti acitti ,—on which this question of good and evil seems very intimately to hang. Evil runs behind an ignorant urge of the soul in nature, is itself an ignorant perversion ...
... is the original cause of creation. He has one form of the solar light and flame, another heavenly in the mind, a third which dwells in the rivers. Night and Dawn are delivered of him, the Knowledge and the Ignorance suckle alternately the divine Child in their successive occupation of our heavens. And yet again it is Matarishwan, Master of Life, who has planted him for the gods secret in the growths ...
... subsequent systems of philosophy. In the second hymn of the fourth Mandala, we find the Rishi's prayer in the Page 17 following words: "May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and O God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi" (RV. IV.2.11). The state of knowledge here is ...
... from the crooked, the truth from falsehood); then indeed they held in them the bliss that is enjoyed in heaven. Rig Veda. IV. 1.17 May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, O God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi. Rig Veda IV.2.11 Now as the seven seers ...
... than itself. To live in the cosmic Ignorance is a blindness; but to confine oneself in an exclusive Absolutism of knowledge is also a blindness; to know Brahman as at once and together the Knowledge and the Ignorance, to attain to the supreme status at once by the Becoming and Non-Becoming, to relate together realisation of the transcendent and the Cosmic Self, to achieve foundation in the supramundane ...
... Knowledge, other that which comes by the Ignorance; this is the lore we have received from the wise who revealed That to our understanding. 11. He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality. अन्घं तमः प्रविशन्ति येऽसम्भूतिमुपासत|| ततो भूय इव ते तमो य उ सम्भूत्यां रताः| |12| | 12. Into ...
... Nammalwar; Historical Impressions; Notes from the Arya. Volume 18 — The Life Divine, Book One and Book Two, PART ONE. Book One: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe; Book Two: The Knowledge and the Ignorance —The Spiritual Evolution; Part I: The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance. Volume 19 — The Life Divine, Book Two, PART TWO: The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. ...
... subsequently it received careful revision at his hands and appeared in two volumes, each of twenty-eight chapters: Vol I: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe' Vol II: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution' Part I: "The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance' Part II: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. The argument, reduced ...
... श्रद्धयोपनिषदा तदेव वीर्यवत्तरं भवतीति खल्वेतस्यैवाक्षरस्योपव्याख्यानं भवति ॥१०॥ 10) He does works by OM who has the knowledge, and he also who has it not; but these are diverse, the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Whatsoever work one does with knowledge, with faith and with the secret of Veda, it becomes to him more virile and mighty. This is the exposition of the eternal letters. And the Second ...
... and ignorance are terms or results of our consciousness, and it is only by looking deeply into our consciousness that we can discover and determine the character and relations of the Knowledge and the Ignorance or of the Illusion, if it exists, and the Reality. Being is no doubt the fundamental object of inquiry, things in themselves and things in their nature; but it is only through consciousness ...
... some line of a more plastic course of thought and reasoning. Our regard can now be concentrated on the problem that is left by the exclusion of the illusionist solution, the problem of the Knowledge and the Ignorance. All turns round the question "What is Reality?" Our cognitive consciousness is limited, ignorant, finite; our conceptions of reality depend on our way of contact with existence in this ...
... Time-experience, the other knows its timeless self and consciously manifests itself in Time-experience. We realise now what the Upanishad meant when it spoke of Brahman as being both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and of the simultaneous knowledge of Brahman in both as the way to immortality. Knowledge is the inherent power of consciousness of the timeless, spaceless, unconditioned Self which shows ...
... about the increase. चित्तिमचित्तिं चिनवद् वि विद्वान् पृष्ठेव वीता वृजिना च मर्तान् । राये च नः स्वपत्याय देव दितिं च रास्वादितिमुरुष्य ॥११॥ 11) Let the knower discriminate the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the straight open levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; O God, for the riches, for the right birth of the Son, 20 lavish on us the finite and guard the Infinite. 21 ...
... the Knowledge, other that which comes by the Ignorance; this is the lore we have received from the wise who revealed That to our understanding. 11) He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality. VIDYA AND AVIDYA All manifestation proceeds by the two terms, Vidya and Avidya, the consciousness of ...
... vision of the Upanishads,—as when the Isha tells us that Brahman is both the mobile and the immobile, is the One and the Many, is the Self and all existences, ātman, sarvabhūtāni , is the Knowledge and the Ignorance, is the eternal unborn status and also the birth of existences, and that to dwell only on one of these things to the rejection of its eternal counterpart is a darkness of exclusive knowledge ...
... the straight from the crooked, the truth from falsehood); then indeed they held in them the bliss that is enjoyed in heaven. Rig Veda 1.20.7 May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, 0 God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi. Rig Veda IV2.11 Now as the seven seers of ...
... individual and the universe. There is also the idea of one God who presents to us various forms, names, powers, personalities of his godhead. There is, thirdly, the distinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the greater truth of an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood and mortal existence. Fourthly, there is the idea of the discipline of an inward growth of man from the physical through ...
... Impressions; Notes from the Arya. Volume 18 The Life Divine , BOOK ONE AND BOOK Two, PART ONE. Book One: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe; Book Two: The Knowledge and the Ignorance — The Spiritual Evolution; Part I: The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance. Volume 19 The Life Divine, BOOK Two, PART Two: The Knowledge and the Spiritual ...
... three times as expansive as the first, and is itself divided into two parts, each of fourteen chapters: Volume One: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe' Volume Two: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance -The Spiritual Evolution' Part One: 'The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance' Part Two: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution' From an inquiry into the ...
... Universe", with its twenty-eight chapters, appeared in November 1939, when Hitler had already overrun Poland and partitioned it with Russia. The second volume of The Life Divine, "The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution", appeared in two Parts in April 1940, synchronising with Hitler's swoop upon Denmark and Norway, followed by the massive invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg ...
... have to make a distinction between things of Knowledge and things of Ignorance. Although there Page 48 is a gradation between the two—Knowledge rolls or wraps itself gradually into Ignorance and Ignorance unrolls or unfolds itself slowly into Knowledge—still in the Divine Consciousness things of Knowledge alone exist, things of Ignorance cannot be said to exist there on the same title... even when we are sunk in the lowest stratum of Ignorance—in the domain of Matter —we have also there all the other strands behind, even the very highest, not merely as a passive or neutral entity, but as dynamic agents, exerting their living pressure to the full.Indeed the Ignorance is not mere Ignorance, but Knowledge itself, the very highest Knowledge, but in a particular mode of activity. What... multiplicity, becoming or existing as the multiplicity in a movement of Knowledge, becoming and appearing also at first in a movement and mood of Ignorance as the material multiplicity but gradually transmuting this ignorant multiplicity into a movement and embodiment of Knowledge. For the Knowledge was always there in and behind the Ignorance, secretly informing and guiding, moulding and transforming it. ...
... Naturally we have to make a distinction between things of Knowledge and things of Ignorance. Although there is a gradation between the two – Knowledge rolls or wraps itself gradually into Ignorance and Ignorance unrolls or unfolds itself slowly into Knowledge – still in the Divine Consciousness things of Knowledge alone exist, things of Ignorance cannot be said to exist there on the same title, because... even when we are sunk in the lowest stratum of Ignorance – in the domain of Matter – we have also there all the other strands behind, even the very highest, not merely as passive or neutral entities, but as dynamic agents exerting their living pressure to the full. Indeed the Ignorance is not mere Ignorance, but Knowledge itself, the very highest Knowledge, but in a particular mode of activity. What appears... ty, becoming or existing as the multiplicity in a movement of Knowledge, becoming and appearing also at first in a movement and mode of Ignorance as the material multiplicity but gradually transmuting this ignorant multiplicity into a movement and embodiment of Knowledge. For the Knowledge was always there in and behind the Ignorance, secretly informing and guiding, moulding and transforming it ...
... always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at... activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance. The methods also are those of a self-luminous knowing and seeing and feeling and a self-fulfilling action... is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery. This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself ...
... always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different, it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at... activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge, we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth conscious into ignorance. The methods also are those of a self-luminous knowing and seeing and feeling and a self fulfilling action... is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for, what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery. This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself ...
... and enter into the region of the Ignorance, was accorded to it for the play of self-choice, for the joy of self-discovery, for the delight of self-surrender and self-fulfilment. The Divine has two aspects in its manifestation, the one in which it is the All, the infinite and equal Brahman, spread wide as to include the two extremes, Knowledge and Ignorance, Birth and Death, impartially... Reality that is; the other is the reality that becomes – it is not the All, but the Over-All, the Transcendent that manifests and is being embodied; it is not the duality of Knowledge and Ignorance, but Supra-knowledge; it is not the duality of Birth and Death, but Immortality; it is the Divine in its own Truth-Nature that lies on one side beyond and behind, at the origin, and on the other, involved... the other, on the basis of that wide acceptation, chooses and selects, keeps back or dissolves and annihilates, in the progression of its increasing light, Page 171 the darkness, the ignorance that form one part of the dual Nature. The actual manifestation, the world as it stands, is in the hands of the Undivine. The Divine has to establish his reign through a working out ...
... beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a... a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the... life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal formations and through them to the thinking life of man. Mind founded in life developed intellect, developed its types of knowledge and ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truth-conscious existence. In this inevitable ...
... the Knowledge as well as in the Ignorance, while that of the Supermind can act only in Knowledge — below the Supermind Sachchidananda allowing the force to play according to the need of the Ignorance. Am I right about the Supermind's action? Not "can act" only, but "acts". All its native action is the action of the Knowledge; if it comes down it brings down the action of Knowledge. If it... under different conditions in the Knowledge or the Ignorance. The Supermind is the Truth-Consciousness, the Knowledge, and the Will there works out spontaneously the unmixed Knowledge — whereas below the Supermind it Page 276 allows the forces to play in quite another way and supports them or intervenes according to the need of the play in the Ignorance. Am I right in... also a Truth-consciousness? The Sachchidananda is not in itself an active con-sciousness, it is simply pure existence, consciousness and bliss. By a Truth-consciousness is meant — a Knowledge consciousness which is immediately, inherently and directly aware of Truth in manifestation and has not to seek for it like Mind. Sachchidananda is everywhere behind the manifestation and supporting ...
... whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and . delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called... called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind .and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear... life rose from the subconscience of the plant into conscious animal, formations and through them to the thinking life of man. Mind founded in life developed intellect, developed its types of knowledge and ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truth-conscious existence. In this inevitable ...
... a ware of the ignorance is already a step towards enlightening the ignorance and redeeming it into knowledge. By this knowledge of the ignorance you release it from the grip of death; when you have the full consciousness of the ignorance you transcend the region of death, and free from death, free from ignorance you have the knowledge of knowledge and with the knowledge of knowledge, that is to say... speaks of two kinds of knowledge that have to be known, two forms of consciousness that have to be acquired in order to become the full integral Divine being. First you have to know, to become aware of the existence of ignorance, the primal or primitive nature and through that awareness or knowledge probe into its character and movement and destiny. Ignorance, pure ignorance leads towards disintegration... of both. In psychological terms, the lower is the predominantly vital and physical ranges with a modicum of the mental shading into the higher mental. Up till here it is more or less the region of ignorance. Then comes the higher mind with its aspiring will: this is the purificatory agent – the purgatory – the crucible where forces are generated to stir and change and renovate the inferior sphere of ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XII The Origin of the Ignorance By energism of consciousness(Tapas.) Brahman is massed; from that Matter is born and from Matter Life and Mind and the worlds. Mundaka... cause of the Ignorance. And if Ignorance is not an element or power proper to the absolute nature of the Brahman or to Its integrality, there can be no original and primal Ignorance. Maya, if it be an original power of the consciousness of the Eternal, cannot itself be an ignorance or in any way akin to the nature of ignorance, but must be a transcendent and universal power of self-knowledge and all-knowledge;... start in approaching the problem, and it is evident then that the solution must be found in an action of consciousness manifesting itself as knowledge and yet limiting that knowledge in such a way as to create the phenomenon of the Ignorance,—and since the Ignorance is a Page 590 phenomenon of the dynamic action of Force of Consciousness, not an essential fact but a creation, a consequence ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XIII Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance From the kindled fire of Energy of Consciousness Truth was born and the Law of Truth; from that... which becomes, not a temporary action, but the law of its action. Nescience in Nature is the complete self-ignorance; the partial knowledge and general ignorance of man is a partial self-ignorance marking in her evolutionary order a return towards self-knowledge: but both are and all ignorance is, when examined, a superficially exclusive self-forgetful concentration of Tapas, of the conscious energy... is an ignorance, and this negative ignorance limits and often distorts even the practical truth, so that the conscious life of man proceeds according to an ignorance, a partial, a half-true half-false knowledge, not according to the real truth of himself of which he is oblivious. Yet because his real self is the true determinator and governs all secretly from behind, it is after all a knowledge behind ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XI The Boundaries of the Ignorance One who thinks there is this world and no other. Katha Upanishad. (I. 2. 6) Extended within the Infinite,... headless... selves, so are we ignorant of our universal self. This alone saves us that ours is an ignorance which is full of the impulse and strives irresistibly, eternally, by the very law of its being towards the realisation of self-possession and self-knowledge. A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of the consciousness of man the mental being,—or, looking at it... the past and the present;... he is today and he is tomorrow. Katha Upanishad. (II. 1. 12, 13.) It is now possible to review in its larger lines this Ignorance, or this separative knowledge labouring towards identical knowledge, which constitutes our human mentality and, in an obscurer form, all consciousness that has evolved below our Page 573 level. We see that in us it consists ...
... and a stranger, thy joy and thy sorrow, thy sin and thy virtue, thy strength and thy weakness, thy knowledge and thy ignorance. And yet it is none of these things, but something of which they are attempts and imperfect images. For beyond all these it is an original Page 164 self-knowledge and an infinite force and innumerable quality. But in thee there is a special movement, a proper... force to be every other being's force and thy knowledge to be a glimmer from the light that belongs to no man and thy works to be made for thee and be delivered from the error of thy personality. When that is done, thou shalt take thy free delight in the truth of thy individual being and in thy strength and in thy glory and in thy beauty and in thy knowledge; and in the denial of these things thou shalt... and all this joy is possible to thee. The Worker has the joy of her works and the joy of her Lover for whom she works. She knows herself to be his consciousness and his force, his knowledge and his reserving of knowledge, his unity and his self-division, his infinity and the finite of his being. Know thyself also to be these things; take thou also the delight of thy Lover. There are those who know ...
... law of life. The Self is Sachchidananda and there is no incurable antinomy between that and the world; only we see the world through the eyes of the Ignorance and we have to see it through the eyes of the Knowledge Our ignorance itself is only knowledge. developing out of its involution in the apparent nescience of Matter and on its way to a return to its conscious integrality. To accomplish that return... gathered up. Therefore we gave the first place to the "Life Divine". Here we start from the Vedantic position, its ideas of the Self and mind and life, of Sachchidananda and the world, of Knowledge and Ignorance, of rebirth and the Spirit. But Vedanta is popularly supposed to be a denial of life, and this is no doubt a dominant trend it has taken. Though starting from the original truth that all is... thought and are now meeting at its apex, the knowledge of the West and the knowledge of the East; but owing to the exigencies of the war this could not be fulfilled. The "Arya" except for one unfinished series has been an approach to the highest reconciling truth from the point of view of the Indian mentality and Indian spiritual experience, and Western knowledge has been viewed from that standpoint. Here ...
... manifestation there is a varying and developing degree of the Presence. *** The Brahman is there equally in the saint and the sinner, in the knowledge and in the ignorance, - it is the static Brahman. But the saint and the knowledge manifest and embody the dynamic Brahman. *** The stress of Life is to reveal and incarnate more and more of the dynamic Divine, the creative... Of Beauty and Ananda TRUTH is Beauty's substance-it is Beauty self-governed. Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate. Love is Beauty enjoying itself. Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates. Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts. *** All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty. Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with ...
... * The Brahman is there equally in the saint and the sinner, in the knowledge and in the ignorance,-it is the static Brahman. Page 23 But the saint and the knowledge manifest and embody the dynamic Brahman. * The stress of Life... TRUTH is Beauty's substance-it is Beauty self-governed. Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate. Love is Beauty enjoying itself. Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates. Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts. * All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty. ...
... only by knowing the One that this individual mind, life, body, soul can know itself or its action.—Thus ignorance of self is the nature of our mind, but an ignorance full of the impulse towards self-possession and self-knowledge. A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of man the mental being. Page 496 ... Boundaries of the Ignorance Argument Chapter XXXI of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised in 1939-40, becoming the present Book Two, Part I, Chapter XI . We know only a part even of our superficial life and conscious becoming, fastening only on a little of our experience of self and things, memorising less, using still less for knowledge and action. What ...
... being and becoming; an ignorance of our timeless and immutable self-existence and knowledge only of the cosmic becoming; an ignorance of our cosmic self and knowledge only of our egoistic existence; an ignorance of our eternal becoming in Time and knowledge only of the one life present to our memory; an ignorance of our larger and complex being in the world and knowledge only of our surface waking existence;... Chapter XXXII The Integral Knowledge Argument Chapter XXXII of The Life Divine as published in the Arya was extensively revised and enlarged in 1939-40, becoming the present Book Two, Part II, Chapter XV , "Reality and the Integral Knowledge". The ignorance in which we live is a sevenfold self-ignorance; an ignorance of the Absolute and knowledge only of the relations of being... existence; an ignorance of the higher principles of our existence and knowledge only of the life, mind and body; an ignorance therefore of the right law and enjoyment of living and a knowledge only of the confused strife of the dualities.—Our conception of the Ignorance determines our conception of the knowledge and by that of the aim of our existence, which coincides with the ideal of the earlier Vedic ...
... Truly speaking, I have no opinion. According to the truth-vision, everything is still terribly mixed, a more or less fortunate combination of light and darkness, of truth and falsehood, of knowledge and ignorance, and so long as decisions are made and action is carried out according to opinions, it will always be like that. Page 320 We want to give the example of an action that is carried ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XIV The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil The Lord accepts the sin and the virtue of none; because knowledge is veiled by Ignorance, mortal men are... are, unlike Truth and Good, very clearly results of the Ignorance and cannot exist where there is no Ignorance: they can have no self-existence in the Divine Being, they cannot be native elements of the Supreme Nature. If, then, the limited Knowledge which is the nature of Ignorance renounces its limitations, if Ignorance disappears into Knowledge, evil and falsehood can no longer endure: for both are... error and can at any moment be the cause of a falsification of knowledge, an unconscious or half-wilful self-deception, a refusal to admit true knowledge, a readiness to assert acceptable wrong knowledge as true knowledge. Page 643 This is in the field of cognition, but the same law applies to will and action. Out of ignorance a wrong consciousness is created which gives a wrong dynamic reaction ...
... beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a... a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the ...
... I AT THE ORIGIN OF IGNORANCE The Divine Consciousness, basically and essentially one and unique, has inherent in it four cardinal attributes—principles of its modulation, modes of its vibration—developing into or appearing as four aspects and personalities. They are Light, Force, Delight and Knowledge. Originally and in the supreme status the four movements... realities, a complete negation of the original attributes. Thus Light became obscurity or Inconscience, Life became death, Delight became pain and suffering, Power became incapacity, Knowledge Page 3 became Ignorance, and Truth became falsehood. In other words, Spirit became forthright Matter. What seemed, however, to be nothing more than an accident is pregnant nevertheless with a ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XIX Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge Seven steps has the ground of the Ignorance, seven steps has the ground of the Knowledge. Mahopanishad... true constitution of our being and we shall have conquered the Ignorance. The conquest of our constitutional ignorance cannot be complete, cannot become integrally dynamic, if we have not conquered our psychological ignorance; for the two are bound up together. Our psychological ignorance consists in a limitation of our self-knowledge to that little wave or superficial stream of our being which is... evolution, this process of heightening and widening and integralisation, is in its nature a growth and an ascent out of the sevenfold ignorance into the integral knowledge. The crux of that ignorance is the constitutional; it resolves itself into a manifold ignorance of the true character of our becoming, an unawareness of our total self, of which the key is a limitation by the plane we inhabit and ...
... direct conscious knowledge of this larger existence and nature such as the individual has of his own being and becoming. Here too there is a limited knowledge asserting itself in the midst of a vast Ignorance. Thirdly, the true relation between the being and the becoming has not been worked out on the basis of perfect self-knowledge but rather by the Ignorance, by a partial knowledge. As a consequence... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter IX Memory, Ego and Self-Experience Here this God, the Mind, in its dream experiences again and again what once was experienced; what has been seen and what has not been... that a self-knowledge based on the separative ego-sense is imperfect and that no knowledge founded upon it alone or primarily or on a reaction against it can be secure or assured of completeness. First, it is a knowledge of our superficial mental activity and its experiences and, with regard to all the large rest of our becoming that is behind, it is an Ignorance. Secondly, it is a knowledge only of being ...
... perfect possession and enjoyment of all that enters the field of universal movement. "All being has this divine enjoyment of existence for its aim and end, whether it seeks for it with knowledge or with ignorance, with the divine strength or the weakness of our yet undeveloped powers." 3 And this is as it should be; for the individual creature knows itself, albeit obscurely in its depths... existence different in being. Because of this liability of separative ego , the individual fails to realise itself as but a conscious form of the One, and instead of 'embracing all consciousness, all knowledge, all will, all force, all enjoyment and all being as one with its own', it regards all cosmic formations and movements as alien and not-self, anātma, excepting the limited mass of experiences ...
... inconsequence or a fiasco. To become aware of its own truth and all truth is the very aim of its existence and it cannot do so, so long as it has to tend towards truth, towards knowledge in ignorance and through the ignorance: it must develop or it must reach a power of itself whose very nature is to know, to see, to possess in its own power. This is what we call supermind and, once it is admitted,... secondary action of it in thought and life. It could even be a part of what could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer entirely or predominantly in the Ignorance. How far this would go, whether it would eventually embrace the whole of humanity or only an advanced portion of it, would depend upon the intention in the evolution itself... even if supermind is not a mere unwarranted speculation and is a concrete reality, there is no need and no place for its embodying itself here. Mind, as marking the full play of the knowledge possible to the ignorance, must have its field somewhere and to keep the earth as its natural field would best serve the economy of cosmic Nature. A materialistic philosophy would admit of no possibility of a ...
... issue, no goal for either life or knowledge. Consciousness cannot achieve its own entire meaning, its own supreme result without it; it will end in an inconsequence or a fiasco. To become aware of its own truth and ail truth is the very aim of its existence and it cannot do so, so long as it has to tend towards truth, towards knowledge in ignorance and through the ignorance: it must develop or it must reach... secondary action of it in thought and life. It could even be a part of v/hat could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer entirely or predominantly in the Ignorance. How far this would go, whether it would eventually embrace the whole of humanity or only an. advanced portion of it, would depend upon the intention in the evolution... even if supermind is not a mere unwarranted speculation and is a concrete reality, there is no need and no place for its embodying itself here. Mind as marking the full play of the knowledge possible to the ignorance must have its field somewhere and to keep the earth as its natural field would best serve the economy of cosmic Nature. A materialistic philosophy would admit of no possibility of a divine ...
... and supra-mental consciousness which is at the summit of our evolutionary destiny. When the summit is reached humanity will progress from a basis of knowledge to higher knowledge and not from ignorance to increasing knowledge as now. In the Truth-consciousness, there is an all-round and overwhelming order, peace, harmony and bliss. Not the transitional joy and pleasure of our conception... war against the forces of the ignorance, darkness and hostility of the forces that rule the earth-nature but its conquest over all these hostile and opposing forces is sure and inevitable. All that is needed on our part is collaboration with this slowly emerging force of Truth-consciousness and everything will be all right in time. "The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede, More and more... his life, he had to learn from both of them in depth and breadth, height and subtlety of knowledge not acquired from external sources but intuitive and over mental and latterly supramental he has no second. If the title "sakala-sastra-parang-gata" (One, who has acquired mastery over all branches of knowledge) is really applicable to any one, it is justly applicable to him and him alone in the' whole ...
... own being". In Mandala 1.95 there is mention of the "child" that is One – that child is Agni. He is called "the son of two mothers" – of different colours – of Day and Night – i.e. of Knowledge and Ignorance. Swarthe : means "by the right path". Anyanya means "to each other" – alternately. "Hari", "full of coloured light" ; •jSukra, "white, shining white". Suvarca, "full of bright light." Dasa ...
... their principle and power; for even at the first we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and first acted upon and inspired by that light and power and then itself changed into that substance and using entirely this new instrumentation... from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit; it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power... which relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be the highest or the main process of knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a secondary and a not indispensable process. In its form of verbal thought, it can almost be described as a concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance, because that Ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent ...
... Divinity. A Page 425 partial knowledge is imperfect knowledge and imperfect knowledge is to that extent ignorance, a contrary of the divine nature: but in its outlook on what is beyond its knowledge, this contrary negative becomes a contrary positive; it originates error, wrong knowledge, wrong dealing with things, with life, with action; the wrong knowledge becomes a wrong will in the nature... on the surface, this fact of ignorance is itself an operation of knowledge and not a true ignorance. Its phenomenon of ignorance is a superficial movement; for behind it is an indivisible all-consciousness: the ignorance is a frontal power of that all-consciousness which limits itself in a certain field, within certain boundaries to a particular operation of knowledge, a particular mode of conscious... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter IV The Divine and the Undivine The Seer, the Thinker, the Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal. Isha Upanishad ...
... but rather something which in essence is true, and yet no longer so at all in the mental atmosphere—it is an ignorance. So, to summarise, I shall say that knowledge, as it can be grasped by the human mind, is necessarily knowledge in ignorance, one could almost say an ignorant knowledge. Wisdom is the vision of truth in its essence and of its application in the manifestation. 12 September... of meaning—one is more specific, the other more general. In the most specific sense, the distorted medium is the mental medium which works in ignorance and which is therefore unable to express truth in its purity. But since life as a whole is lived in ignorance, the distorted medium is also the earth-atmosphere which, in its entirety, distorts the truth seeking to express itself through it. And here... so, since it is a power that belongs to the Spirit and arises in the human being together with the spiritual consciousness. Knowledge is something that the mind can obtain through much effort, although this is not the true knowledge, but only a mental aspect of knowledge; whereas Wisdom does not at all belong to the mind, which is altogether incapable of obtaining it, because, in fact, it doesn't ...
... अचित्तान् वि ते तिष्ठन्तामजरा अयासः ॥२॥ 2) Wholly consume our inner foes, consume the self-expression of the enemy who would war against us, O lord of the riches, consume, conscious in knowledge, the powers of ignorance; let them range wide thy ageless marching fires. इध्मेनाग्न इच्छमानो घृतेन जुहोमि हव्यं तरसे बलाय । यावदीशे ब्रह्मणा वन्दमान इमां धियं शतसेयाय देवीम् ॥३॥ 3) I desire and offer... पृथिव्या यथा दिवो जातवेदश्चिकित्वान् । एवानेन हविषा यक्षि देवान् मनुष्वद् यज्ञं प्र तिरेममद्य ॥२॥ 2) O Fire, as thou hast accomplished in sacrifice thy priesthood for the earth, 1 awaking to knowledge, O knower of the births, as thou hast accomplished it for heaven, 2 so with this oblation do sacrifice to the gods, carry yet further beyond the sacrifice with the human being today. ... and was the Priest of the call and mighty for sacrifice and was dual entity and by the law of his nature the creator of the Bliss, by his law of action carry on the sacrifice, thou who art awake to knowledge, thou establish our pilgrim-rite in the advent of the gods. SUKTA 18 भवा नो अग्ने सुमना उपेतौ सखेव सख्ये पितरेव साधुः । पुरुद्रुहो हि क्षितयो जनानां प्रति प्रतीचीर्दहतादरातीः ॥१॥ 1) O Fire ...
... illusion and delusion Forbearance has made the spirit sluggish, compassion filled it with affliction — It has no ardent yearning for the good of the world, It wields no sword of knowledge to cut down ignorance, Its humbleness makes it void of energy and its laziness empty of substance, Proud of its shaven pate and an inflated belly This is not Buddha's spirit. He is free from illusion... eternal Emanation: Dharma is fallen in the whirl of adharma in this age of Kali! Vainly you find fault with the Path and blame it. You cannot understand my violent purpose: A slave of ignorance, of sattva (Light) mixed with tamas Or else even in this violent act you could recognise your dearest friend, Recognise Krishna. You .understand Radha, Him you did not understand ...
... dullness or passivity which obscures the knowledge within and creates ignorance, mental inertia, slowness, forgetfulness, disinclination to study, inability to grasp and distinguish. Rajas is an undisciplined activity which obscures knowledge by passion, attachment, prejudgment, predilection and wrong ideas. Sattva is an illumination which reveals the hidden knowledge and brings it to the surface where... addition it had the view that all knowledge is within and has to be evoked by education rather than instilled from outside. The constitution of man consists of three principles of nature sattva , rajas and tamas , the comprehensive, active and passive elements of universal action, which, in one of their thousand-fold aspects, manifest as knowledge, passion and ignorance. Tamas is a constitutional... only be part of the material out of which the knower builds knowledge, the starting-point, the nucleus of fresh discovery and enlarged creation. An education that confines itself to imparting knowledge, is no education. The various faculties of memory, judgment, imagination, perception, reasoning, which build the edifice of thought and knowledge for the knower, must not only be equipped with their fit ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVI The Ascent towards Supermind Masters of the Truth-Light who make the Truth grow by the Truth. Rig Veda. (I. 23. 5.) Three powers of Speech that... in their principle and power; for even at the first we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and first acted upon and inspired by that light and power and then itself changed into that substance and using entirely this new instrumentation. In... from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit: it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our ...
... them? No! I can say, No! For, obviously there is an essential difference between a state of ignorance and a state of knowledge. Something painful happens to you, let us say; and in the ignorance this painful thing takes on a particular quality. But if you receive this painful thing in a state of knowledge, it does not have the same effect. Let us take even a material thing, say, a very material blow... like this ( gesture ). Well, when one is in the ordinary human state of ignorance the blow has its full effect. It depends exclusively on its violence, on what has given the blow and who has received it, you see. But if the same blow is given in the same way and by the same thing to a being who has knowledge instead of ignorance, instantaneously the reaction of the body will be such as to make the... one of knowledge, instead of being a reaction of ignorance. So one cannot say that it is the same thing. In moral things this is quite obvious, you see, because instead of receiving an emotional shock, for instance, with all the egoistic blindness of ordinary emotion, one objectivises, sees what it is, sees the combination in the vibration; and instantly one throws upon it light, knowledge and truth ...
... (Manishi) absorbs itself in God as the formal becoming (Paribhu) and separates itself from God in the true Idea (Kavi), then it loses Vidya, the knowledge of the One, and has only the knowledge of the Many which becomes no longer knowledge at all but ignorance, Avidya. This is the cause of the separate ego-sense. Avidya is accepted by the Lord in the Mind (Manishi) in order to develop individual relations... of uncompromising extremes. Later thought took one series of terms,—the World, Enjoyment, Action, the Many, Birth, the Ignorance,—and gave them a more and more secondary position, exalting the opposite series, God, Renunciation, Quietism, the One, Cessation of Birth, the Knowledge, Page 83 until this trend of thought culminated in Illusionism and the idea of existence in the world as a... highest term by including in it the whole infinite multiplicity of things. So great is this scruple in the Upanishad that having so expressed itself in the formula "By the Ignorance having crossed over death by the Knowledge one enjoys Immortality" that Life in the world might be interpreted as only a preliminary to an existence beyond, it at once rights the balance by reversing the order in the ...
... it is a subordinate process of the Eternal Seer, and Thinker. We have already seen that the Divine Maya comprehends both vidy ā and avidy ā - Knowledge and Ignorance. What we call "ignorance is mind separated in its knowledge from the source of knowledge and giving a force of rigidity and mistaken appearance of opposition and of conflict to the harmonious play of the Supreme Truth in its universal... therefore, is reaching out to the Truth held in the Higher Consciousness. The Divine Maya comprehends both vidy ā The Divine Maya which creates the world has the comprehension of knowledge and of ignorance. Ignorance of the mind also is held in it, so to say, and therefore it must have a Consciousness that contains all the finite. All the finite working of the mind is also contained in the Divine... then it has fallen in ignorance. When this falsifying stand is lost then Mind can get back to the Truth of itself and of things. Then mind would be an instrument of the Truth-Consciousness. "Self-ignorance is therefore the perversity of our existence and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance." All ignorance and perversity is only ...
... Spirit ] uses Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance and all the other dualities as elements in the manifestation and works out what has to be worked out till all is ready for a higher working. The Cosmic Spirit contains the Supermind, but it keeps it above and works for the present between the Overmind and the physical. It is only when the Ignorance is removed that the Supra mental becomes... conscious being and Nature. In Nature here the Divine is veiled, and the individual being is subjected to Nature which acts here as the lower Prakriti, a force of Ignorance, Avidya. The Purusha in itself is divine, but exteriorised in the ignorance of Nature it is as the individual apparent being imperfect with her imperfection. Thus the soul or psychic essence, which is the Purusha entering into the evolution... to that plane, the mental Purusha in the mental plane, the vital Purusha in the vital, the physical Purusha in the physical. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of two other planes of the being, the Knowledge or Truth plane and the Ananda plane, each with its Purusha, but although influences may come down from them these are superconscient to the human mind and their nature is not yet organised here. ...
... imperfect mind of man a consciousness that passes out of the mind's ignorance and possesses truth as its inherent right and nature. There is a truth-consciousness as it is called in the Veda, a supermind, as I have termed it, possessing Knowledge, not having to seek after it and constantly miss it. In one of the Upanishads a being of knowledge is stated to be the next step above the mental being; into that... necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere. But what shall be that ideal and that goal? That depends on our conception of the realities of life and the supreme Reality. Page 551 Here we have ...
... atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon which is based this inconscient creation. In ...
... which is by its ignorance or limitation of knowledge capable of error, mispresentation, mistaken or misdirected development from the known, of uncertain gropings towards the unknown, of partial creations and buildings, a constant half-position between truth and error, knowledge and nescience. But this ignorance in fact proceeds, however stumblingly, upon knowledge and towards knowledge; it is inherently... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter V The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, turn to Me. Gita. (IX. 33.) This Self... architect of error. Mind then is not a sovereign creator of things non-existent or erected in a void: it is an ignorance trying to know; its very illusions start from a basis of some kind and are the results of a limited knowledge or a half-ignorance. Mind is an instrument of the cosmic Ignorance, but it does not seem to be or does not act like a power or an instrument of a cosmic Illusion. It is a seeker ...
... But the question is not that; the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation of Knowledge proceeding to greater Page 271 Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or... one phase or force. As life has developed mind, and the embodiment has modified itself to suit this development (mind is precisely the main instrument of ignorance seeking for knowledge), so mind can develop supermind which is in its nature knowledge not seeking for itself, but manifesting itself by its own automatic power, and the embodiment can again modify itself or be modified from above so as to... ignorant and do not yet know that which we are seeking to realise; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun. When the Sun shall rise there will be no longer any need of the gleam. The supramental knowledge supports itself, it does not need to be supported by faith; it lives by its own certitude ...
... development. But the question is not that; the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation of Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible... one phase or force. As life has developed mind, and the embodiment has modified itself to suit this development (mind is precisely the main instrument of ignorance seeking for knowledge); so mind can develop supermind which is in its nature knowledge not seeking for itself, but manifesting itself by its own automatic power, and the embodiment can again modify itself or be modified from above so as to... ignorant and do not yet know that which we are seeking to realise; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun. When the Sun shall rise there will be no longer any need of the gleam. The supramental knowledge supports itself, it does not need to be supported by faith; it lives by its own certitude ...
... atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge' became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon which is based this inconscient creation. In the ...
... imperfect mind of man a consciousness that passes out of the mind's ignorance and possesses truth as its inherent right and nature. There is a Truth-Consciousness as it is called in the Veda, a Supermind, as I have termed it, possessing Knowledge, not having to seek after it and constantly miss it. In one of the Upanishads a being of knowledge is stated to be the next step above the mental being; into that... necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere. But what shall be that ideal and that goal? That depends on our conception of the realities of life and the supreme Reality. Here we have to take into account ...
... which creates, governs and upholds the worlds: it is the secret Wisdom which upholds both our Knowledge and our Ignorance. We have discovered also that Mind, Life and Matter are a triple aspect of these higher principles working, so far as our universe is concerned, in subjection to the principle of Ignorance, to the superficial and apparent self-forgetfulness of the One in its play of division and... This creative action of the All-existent has its nodus in the fourth, the intermediate principle of Supermind or Real-Idea, in which a divine Knowledge one with self-existence and self-awareness and a substantial Will which is in perfect unison with that knowledge, because it is itself in its substance and nature that self-conscious self-existence dynamic in illumined action, develop infallibly the movement... Supermind therefore proceeds by a double faculty of comprehensive and apprehensive knowledge; proceeding from the essential oneness to the resultant multiplicity, it comprehends all things in itself as itself the One in its manifold aspects and it apprehends separately all things in itself as objects of its will and knowledge. While to its original self-awareness all things are one being, one consciousness ...
... "Because thou knowest the wisdom that transcends Both veil of forms and the contempt of forms," — Book X, Canto 4 Compare: Isha: "One who knows both knowledge and Ignorance— by ignorance crosses over Death and by knowledge attains—enjoys —immortality" . "In a flaming moment of apocalypse The Incarnation thrust aside its veil" —Book X, Canto 4 Compare: ... Compare: "Who ever left the warm precincts of the cheerful day Nor cast one .longing lingering look behind" —T. Grey. "Only if God assumes the human mind And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride, Can he help man to grow into the God". —Book VII, Canto 3. Compare: The Indian mythological story of Vaman—the ...
... But the question is not that; the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from Page 190 an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation of Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or... one phase or force. As life has developed mind, and the embodiment has modified itself to suit this development (mind is precisely the main instrument of ignorance seeking for knowledge), so mind can develop supermind which is in its nature knowledge not seeking for itself, but manifesting itself by its own automatic power, and the embodiment can again modify itself or be modified from above so as to... ignorant and do not yet know that which we are seeking to realise; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun. When the Sun shall rise there will be no longer any need of the gleam. The supramental knowledge supports itself, it does not need to be supported by faith; it lives by its own certitude ...
... immobility, the oneness of the Brahman without attributes and the Lord of the universe with attributes, the inadequacy of Knowledge alone or of Ignorance alone for attaining Immortality, Immortality ob- Page 385 tained by simultaneous worship of Knowledge and Ignorance, the supreme liberation and realisation gained not by the constant cycle of birth, not by the dissolution of birth but... these difficulties: "It is said in the Upanishad, 'Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone'. Sankara says I am not willing to give to the words vidya (knowledge) and avidya (ignorance) their ordinary sense; vidya here signifies devavidya , 'the science of propitiating the gods'. The Upanishad... According to Sri Aurobindo: "There are four necessities of man's self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of the surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and collecting and systematising fragments and sections of knowledge, the small limited and half-competent creature of the cosmic Force which he now is in his phenomenal nature. He must know himself and discover ...
... "incurable unrest?" What use playing any longer the God's game of laughter and tears? Human life is but thwarted purposing, courage being met by defeat, wisdom being mocked by Death, and knowledge being fenced with ignorance? Yet Death will extend reluctant appreciation to Savitri —the strength of her great love deserves no less—and will grant her gifts to soothe her "wounded life". While not acknowledging... Death tries one more dialectical stunt, affirming the need for "knowing", but Savitri replies that there will be time for knowing when she has loved forever; in fact, knowledge best comes through love: I know that knowledge is a vast embrace: I know that every being is myself, In every heart is hidden the myriad One. I know the calm Transcendent bears the world ...
... from this first inkling into the processes of involution and evolution, Aswapati achieves his "soul's release from ignorance", and his mind and body experience their "first spiritual change". A wide God-knowledge poured down from above, A new world-knowledge broadened from within:... 7 He is a new man, poised for the achievement of greater things still, of ... whirl borne round inert on an immense machine". The impress of Shakti the Creatrix is everywhere, however veiled to our eyes. Light is hidden somehow in darkness, life in inconscience, knowledge in ignorance. There has been a 'descent', an 'involution', of God into matter; the ascent, the evolution, from matter to God is proceeding, and must conclude. Life is not unreal, life is not futile: ... Aswapati's being, having lately experienced a profound sea-change, tingle with a new consciousness of power and joy. What's the 'use' of this higher knowledge and power? There is a purposeful merging of the higher knowledge and the lower, from which results an integration and an advance. Such advance is also facilitated by lightning streaks of sudden illumination from the 'home-of-all ...
... capable. There is above, it a Supermind or eternal truth consciousness which is in its nature the self-aware and self-determining light and power of a Divine Knowledge. Mind is in ignorance seeking after Truth, but this is a self-existent Knowledge harmoniously manifesting the play of its forms and forces. It is only by the descent of Supermind that the perfection dreamed of by all that is highest in... with its gains bringing the light and power and bliss of the Spirit into life to transform it. Man's present existence in the material world is in this view or vision of things a life in the Ignorance with the Inconscient at its base, but even in its darkness and nescience there are involved the presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a mistake or a vanity and illusion ...
... calls the Higher Knowledge and the Lower Knowledge. The latter covers the world of phenomena, of outer objects and processes. In Vedantic terms, the Play of the Many as distinguished from the Work of the One. When it is contrasted instead of being merely distinguished, it is dubbed Ignorance - avidya in opposition to vidya . The knowledge that Page 98 is ignorance consists in being... with that of Sri Aurobindo has to be heard, insisting on a due regard for the apparently finite, temporal, non-divine. According to this voice, exclusive knowledge of the One is, in the final perspective, as much Ignorance as exclusive knowledge of the Many. The integral aim of life is manifestation (many-festa-tion?) of the Single, the Unitary, in a double awareness of both the Unique and the Multiple... of original work to each of these branches of knowledge, even though not of an outstanding quality everywhere. The desire to pursue various lines further even now persists, but here some words of the Mother to me keep ringing. In effect their import ran: "The plane of the mind is infinite. One can go on and on there, in fascinated pursuit of knowledge. No time will be left for the spiritual life ...
... terrain: A coalition of uncertainties There exercised uneasy government On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess, A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance. 94 Next Aswapati notices a higher slope in this steep ascent "where dawn-sheen gamboled with the native dusk". The region of twilight recedes, and morning beckons the Traveller... mystique A frame was made in which the sense could put Its symbol picture of the universe. 96 Although all this load of knowledge has some value, man is still unable to ford or canter across the stream of the last Ignorance that divides us from integral Truth. The million bits of truth isolated or analysed in the laboratories do not complete the sum; there is an exasperating... figure plays an allotted role in the cosmic play. The second of Mind's deputies is "a rash Intelligence" with its thousand shapes and numerous names: It licked at knowledge with a smoky tongue. A whirlpool sucking in an empty air, It based on vacancy stupendous claims, In Nothingness born to Nothingness returned, Page 106 ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXIII Man and the Evolution The one Godhead secret in all beings, all-pervading, the inner Self of all, presiding over all action, witness, conscious knower and absolute... mind is an instrument of the Ignorance, this can only be effected by a change of consciousness, a transition from a foundation in Ignorance to a foundation in Knowledge, from the mental to a supramental consciousness, a supramental instrumentation of Nature. Page 877 There is no conclusive validity in the reasoning that because this is a world of Ignorance, such a transformation can only... struggling towards knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a greater evolution ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter X Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge They see the Self in the Self by the Self. Gita. (VI. 20.) Where there is duality, there other sees... wisdom and right will in his use of world-power and world-knowledge. It is evident that our state on the surface is indeed a state of knowledge, so far as it goes, but a limited knowledge enveloped and invaded by ignorance and, to a very large extent, by reason of its limitation, itself a kind of ignorance, at best a mixed knowledge-ignorance. It could not be otherwise since our awareness of the world... , even to look into the future. It is true that this knowledge proper to the subliminal being is not complete; for it is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception, since it works not by knowledge by identity, but by a knowledge through direct contact and this is also a separative knowledge, though more intimate even in separation than anything ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVII The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature Thou art That, O Swetaketu. Chhandogya Upanishad. (VI. 8. 7.) The living being is none else than... multiplicity is the Self of all individual existences. 1 Moreover, it is through the knowledge of self and the world that man arrives at the knowledge of God and he cannot attain to it otherwise. It is not by rejecting God's manifestation, but by rejecting his own ignorance of it and the results of his ignorance, that he can best lift up and offer the whole of his being and consciousness and energy... the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him. In his attempt to cast his existence into the mould of this enlarging self-knowledge his whole view and motive of life, thought and action are progressively modified and transformed; his practical ignorance of himself, his nature and his object of existence diminishes: he ...
... the words of the Isha Upanishad, that first, by virtue of the second boon, he crosses beyond death by the knowledge of the Ignorance; next, by his third boon, he wins Immortality on mastering the supreme Knowledge. This is the fruit promised to him in the end. Nachiketas gained this knowledge, the entire method of the Yoga as revealed to him in person by the Lord of Death. Page 123 ... of this knowledge, he is aware of the Truth that lies beyond him, on the other shore. Nachiketas says to Yama, "Since I have been able to find you, I am sure of gaining this knowledge; there is none other so wise who can speak about it." The reason is that Yama has been called Vaivasvata, he is born of Vivasvan, the Sun-god, Surya Savitri. Surya Savitri stands for the highest Knowledge, He is the... "Nachiketas, listen then to the mystery of this Fire. I have knowledge of this Fire. The Fire takes one to the world of Infinity. The Fire is the basis of this universe. He is abiding in a cave, hidden within our secret being." Yama explained to Nachiketas further, "The Fire is the beginning of creation." He also revealed the secret knowledge about the method of kindling this Fire, the number of bricks ...
... the words of the Isha Upanishad, that first, by virtue of the second boon, he crosses beyond death by the knowledge of the Ignorance; next, by his third boon, he wins Immortality on mastering the supreme Knowledge. This is the fruit promised to him in the end. Nachiketas gained this knowledge, the entire method of the Yoga as revealed to him in person by the Lord of Death. Page 9 ... of this knowledge, he is aware of the Truth that lies beyond him, on the other shore. Nachiketas says to Yama, "Since I have been able to find you, I am sure of gaining this knowledge; there is none other so wise who can speak about it." The reason is that Yama has been called Vaivasvata, he is born of Vivasvan, the Sun-god, Surya Savitri. Surya Savitri stands for the highest Knowledge, He is... "Nachiketas, listen then to the mystery of this Fire. I have knowledge of this Fire. The Fire takes one to the world of Infinity. The Fire is the basis of this universe. He is abiding in a cave, hidden within our secret being." Yama explained to Nachiketas further, "The Fire is the beginning of creation." He also revealed the secret knowledge about the method of kindling this Fire, the number of bricks ...
... resistance He must invariably succeed? People have very queer ideas of omnipotence. Resistance is the very law of evolution. Resistance comes from Ignorance and Ignorance is a part of Inconscience. From the very beginning the opposition between Knowledge and Ignorance existed. The whole thing starts from Inconscience. It is the complete denial of the Divine. His Lila or Play is precisely the manifestation ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter I Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable The Unseen with whom there can be no pragmatic relations, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, undesignable... arbitrary self-effective cosmic construction, that too would be a sort of imposition. Our knowledge of the creation would be the knowledge of a temporary structure of evanescent consciousness and being, a dubious Becoming that passes across the vision of the Eternal, not a knowledge of Reality; that too would be an Ignorance. But if all is a manifestation of the Reality and itself real by the constituting... the awareness of individual being and world-being would be in its spiritual origin and nature a play of the infinite self-knowledge and all-knowledge: ignorance could be only a subordinate movement, a suppressed or restricted cognition or a partial and imperfect evolving knowledge with the true and total self-awareness and all-awareness concealed both in it and behind it. It would be a temporary phenomenon ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter III The Eternal and the Individual He am I. Isha Upanishad. (Verse 16.) It is an eternal portion of Me that has become the living being in a world... discover the origin and nature of the Ignorance Page 380 which we see emerging out of the inconscience of matter or disclosing itself within a body of matter and the nature of the Knowledge that has to replace it, to understand too the process of Nature's self-unfolding and the soul's recovery. For in fact the Knowledge is there concealed in the Ignorance itself; it has rather to be unveiled... as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge. The power of the individual to possess in his consciousness by self-knowledge his unity with the Transcendent and the universal, with the One Being and all beings and to live in that knowledge and transform his life by it, is that which makes the working out of the divine self-manifestation ...
... , the truth-principle might so far replace the principle we see here of an original ignorance seeking for knowledge and arriving only at a partial knowledge that the human mind could become a power of light, of knowledge finding itself, not the denizen of a half-way twilight or a servant and helper of the ignorance, a purveyor of mingled truth and error. Mind might even become in man, what it is in... as it departs more and more in this direction from its own highest truth that it becomes a creator or parent of ignorance and is or seems to be the highest power in a world of ignorance; it becomes itself subject to ignorance and seems only to arrive at a partial and imperfect knowledge. The reason of this decline is that it is used by the Supermind principally for the work of differentiation which... truth and become part and function of the supramental knowledge or at the least serve for a minor work of differentiation in the consensus of that knowledge: in the lower degree below Supermind it might be a mental gnosis, a spiritual or spiritualised perception, feeling, activity, sense which could do the works of knowledge and not of ignorance. Even at a still lower level it could be an in Page ...
... light and shade – more shade perhaps than light – of knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective... refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human... QUEST AND THE GOAL Man and the Gods 1 THE Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It is the body and substance, the very personification, of unconsciousness-Ignorance carried to the last limit and concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality at the summit. The supreme and original Reality is the quaternary: (1) Light, (2) Truth, (3) Love ...
... the truth principle might so far replace the .principle we see here of an original ignorance seeking for knowledge and arriving only at a partial knowledge that the human mind could become a power of light, of knowledge finding itself, not the denizen of a half-way twilight or a servant and helper of the ignorance, a purveyor of mingled truth and error. Mind might even become in man, what it is in... as it departs more and more in this direction from its own highest truth that it becomes a creator or parent of ignorance and is or seems to be the highest power in a "world of ignorance, it becomes itself subject to ignorance and seems only to arrive at a partial and imperfect knowledge. The reason of this decline is that it is used by the Page 188 Supermind principally for the work... truth and become part and function of the supramental knowledge or at the least serve for a minor work of differentiation in the consensus of that knowledge: in the lower degree below Supermind it might be a mental gnosis, a spiritual or spiritualised perception, feeling, activity, sense which could do the works of knowledge and not of ignorance. Even at a still lower level it could be an increasingly ...
... make a danger. There are also no Overmind Falsehoods. The Overmind is part of the Ignorance in this sense that it is the highest knowledge to which the Ignorance can attain, but the knowledge is still divided and so can be a knowledge of parts Page 155 and aspects of the Truth, not the integral knowledge. As such it can be misused and turned into falsehood by the Mind. What I said... embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness—but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-LifeMatter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become... 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 dispersion. In the Intuition the nature of Knowledge is Truth not global or whole, but coming ...
... This compassion observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm strength the battle and the struggle, the strength and weakness of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledge and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal. In the saint and philanthropist it may cast itself into the mould of a plenitude of... real truth. All are that Self, that One, that Divine whom we look on and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our seeking and declaring of knowledge and learning from those who have knowledge no human mind has ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled by the world, the master of the body; all life is only its shadow; the coming of the soul into physical... away this vain sorrow and shrinking, fight, O son of Bharata. But wherefore such a conclusion? This high and great knowledge, this strenuous self-discipline of the mind and soul by which it is to rise beyond the clamour of the emotions and the cheat of the senses to true self-knowledge, may well free us from grief and delusion; it may well cure us of the fear of death and the sorrow for the dead; it ...
... addition it had the view that all knowledge is within and has to be evoked by education rather than instilled from outside. The constitution of man consists of three principles of nature sattva., rajas and tamas, the comprehensive, active and passive elements of universal action, which, in one of their thousand fold aspects, manifest as knowledge, passion and ignorance. Tamas is a constituional dullness... which obscures the know- ledge within and creates ignorance, mental inertia, slowness, forgetfulness, disinclination to study, inability to grasp and distinguish. Rajas is an undisciplined activity which obscures knowledge by passion, attachemnt, prejudgment, predilection and wrong ideas. Sattva is an illumination which reveals the hidden knowledge and brings it to the surface where the observation... Above all, he has in a greater degree than other races the yet undeveloped faculty of direct knowledge, latent in humanity and now to be evolved, which is above reason and imagination, the faculty which in Sri Rama- krishna, the supreme outcome of the race, dispensed with education and commanded any knowledge he desired easily and divinely. It is a faculty which now works irregularly in humanity, un ...
... mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is delcared, the mind is to ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book 1, Canto... goods of the world, invite you to the enjoyment of pleasure and pain, to air the dualities of a life of ignorance normally lived upon earth, then indeed the senses become terribly suspect. But this need not be so. The senses instead of being tempters leading you out into the ignorance may verily be inspirers calling you, guiding you inward. Instead of opening out on the world of maya they... begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contribution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surupa ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVII The Gnostic Being A perfect path of the Truth has come into being for our journey to the other shore beyond the darkness. Rig Veda. ( I. 46. 11.) ... starting from this new basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of knowledge and a realised power of being. All therefore that is our attempt to be in the Ignorance, he will fulfil in the Knowledge. All knowledge he will turn into a manifestation of the self-knowledge of being, all power and action into a power and action of the self-force of being, all delight into... visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are things that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth of the Spirit. The gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge of what is to be willed and the power to effectuate its knowledge; it will not be led from ignorance to do what is not to be done. Moreover, its action is not the seeking for a Page 1011 ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVIII The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration As he mounts from peak to peak,... Indra makes him conscious of that goal of his movement. Rig Veda. (I. 10... into a partial consciousness, an ignorance seeking for more and more knowledge and mastery: but at some point there must be an ascent which substitutes the principle of knowledge, of a fundamental true consciousness, the consciousness of the Spirit, for the inconscience and ignorance. An evolution in the Inconscience is the beginning, an evolution in the Ignorance is the middle, but the end is the... break the walls of the Ignorance and extend ourselves inward into the secret principle of our present being and outward into cosmic being Page 750 as well as upward towards a higher principle. Up till now what Nature had achieved was an enlarging of the bounds of our surface Knowledge-Ignorance; what is attempted in the spiritual endeavour is to abolish the Ignorance, to go inwards and discover ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XX The Philosophy of Rebirth An end have these bodies of an embodied soul that is eternal; it is not born nor dies nor is it that having been it will not be again. It is... finis on the recurrence of the human birth for the individual. Man is there to move from the ignorance and from the little life which he is in his mind and body to the knowledge and the large divine life which he can compass by the unfolding of the spirit. At least the opening out of the spirit in him, the knowledge of his real self and the leading of the spiritual life must be attained before he can go... kept in motion by the desire of the individual, which becomes the effective cause of rebirth and by the mind's turning away from the knowledge of the eternal self to the preoccupations of the temporal becoming. With the cessation of this desire and of this ignorance, the Eternal in the individual draws away from the mutations of individual personality and experience into his timeless, impersonal and ...
... Government in India. This was a further serious complicating factor, and as the first months of 1942 registered a series of spectacular Japanese victories, many in India - in their flawed knowledge and half-ignorance - began to feel and even hope that British power would soon collapse in India too, and that the INA and the Japanese supporting army would accomplish their 'Chalo Dilli!' plan of conquest ...
... and Ritam the Truth-action, Vak the Truth-word. Day and Night also are its dual aspects, Light and Darkness - evolution and involution, expression and withdrawal, Being and Non-Being, Knowledge and Ignorance. The image of twin sisters (rivers) refers also to this double movement of consciousness, everywhere in Nature: ascent and descent, inward and outward, the two wings of the Cosmic Bird flying... Agni is its mouth. We bow to this most Ancient, the Brahman. (34) The Winds are its higher and lower breath, the Angiras ² became its eyes, That created the directions as openings to knowledge. To That the most Ancient, the Brahman we bow down. (35) The Pillar upholds here both Earth and Heaven. The Pillar upholds the vast Mid-Sphere, the Pillar upholds the six quarters; thus ...
... the mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is delcared, the mind is to 1 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book 1, Canto III ... perishable goods of the world, invite you to the enjoyment of pleasure and pain, to all the dualities of a life of ignorance normally lived upon earth, then indeed the senses become terribly suspect. But this need not be so. The senses instead of being tempters leading you out into the ignorance may verily be inspirers calling you, guiding you inward. Instead of opening out on the world of maya they may... begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it be- comes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contribution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surupa (beautiful ...
... It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is Page 147 the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge,is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is declared, the mind is to be expunged altogether or silenced at least... perishable goods of the world, invite you to the enjoyment of pleasure and pain, to all the dualities of a life of ignorance normally lived upon earth, then indeed the senses become terribly suspect. But this need not be so. The senses instead of being tempters leading you out into the ignorance may verily be inspirers calling you, guiding you inward. Instead of opening out on the world of maya they may... begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes trans-parept and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contribution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the sur ū pa (beautiful ...
... is not complete. According to Sri Aurobindo, knowledge, in order to be true and complete, must be a knowledge by identity. The subliminal knowledge is a knowledge by direct contact but not knowledge by identity. Therefore, a deeper and higher consciousness is needed to cure the deficiencies and mixtures of ignorance and knowledge that we obtain at the level of subliminal consciousness. (g) ... from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit; it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our... opens out to us wider vistas of knowledge and action, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness, no less than our external consciousness, is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable or erroneous as well as of true perception. It may also be noted that the knowledge proper to the subliminal being is ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXI The Order of the Worlds Seven are these worlds in which move the life-forces that are hidden within the secret heart as their dwelling-place seven by seven. Mundaka... All-Soul itself may have abruptly plunged its self-knowledge into this darkness of the Inconscience, carrying the individual souls within it to begin their upward evolution through an ascending scale of life and consciousness. Or, if the individual is not pre-existent, if we are only a creation of the All-consciousness or a fiction of the phenomenal Ignorance, either creatrix may have conceived all these... devolution Page 797 out of the superconscient Sachchidananda; but in this idea it would be nothing but an evolution of the Inconscience towards some kind of knowledge sufficient to allow, by the annihilation of some primal ignorance or some originating desire, the extinction of a misbegotten soul or an escape out of a mistaken world-adventure. But such theories either imply a premier importance ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVI The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence When all the desires that cling to the heart are loosed away from it, then the mortal becomes... is the beginning; an evolution in the Ignorance with its play of the possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle, and the cause of the anomalies of our present nature,—our imperfection is the sign of a transitional state, a growth not yet completed, an effort that is finding its way; a consummation in a deployment of the spirit's self-knowledge and the self-power of its divine being... being. But, by force of the secret Unity, the soul in becoming is urged by its own unseen reality and by the occult pressure of evolutionary Nature to come out of this state of Ignorance and recover eventually the knowledge of the one Divine Being and its oneness with it and at the same time to recover its spiritual unity with all individual beings and the whole universe. It has to become aware not ...
... activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-consciousness into ignorance.” 23 On 5 December Sri Aurobindo left his body as the outer consequence of a strange uraemic coma... activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-consciousness into ignorance.” (p. 589) It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo locates the Mind of Light in the descending order of the... vassal of the Ignorance, the disabilities of the human mind on which we have dwelt are not such as must remain irredeemably in possession and binding for ever. It could develop higher means and instrumentalities, pass over the last borders of the Ignorance into a higher knowledge, grow too strong to be held by the animal nature. There would be a liberated mind escaping from ignorance into light, aware ...
... activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance. " The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 70-71 Sweet Mother, I did not understand... inherent right of nature, by its own light: it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it. It may indeed, especially in its evolutionary action, keep knowledge behind its apparent consciousness and bring it forward as if from behind the veil; but even then this veil is only an appearance and does not really exist: the knowledge was always there, the consciousness its possessor and present revealer... the same time; one has the total knowledge of a thing, but one cannot express it fully all at once. There are no words or any possibility of expression, so long as we are what we are. We must necessarily make use of an inferior process to express ourselves, and yet, at the same time we have the full knowledge; it is only the necessity of transmitting his knowledge in words which compels us to veil ...
... It depends on what you mean by subjective and objective. Knowledge and Ignorance are in their nature subjective. But from the personal point of view, the Force of Ignorance may manifest as something objective, outside oneself so that even when one has knowledge for oneself one cannot remove the environing Ignorance. If that is so, Ignorance is not merely a subjective force in oneself, it is there in... experience and 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... power of (subjective) creative formation, mostly, I think, on the mental but partly too on the vital plane. This kind of formative faculty can be used for objective results if accompanied by a sound knowledge of the occult forces and their workings; but by itself it results more often in one's building up an inner world of one's own in which you can live very well satisfied, so long as you live in yourself ...
... Sri Aurobindo, "knowledge by identity, a knowledge by intimate direct contact, a knowledge by separative direct contact, a wholly separative knowledge by indirect contact" (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 525). There is in the Vedic and Upanishadic literature, a good deal of reference to the theme of knowledge, and there are words like vidyā and avidyā or knowledge and ignorance, citti and acitti... blind.ˮ ( First Cycle, Second Chapter, Verses 4-5). In the Isha Upanishad, it is laid down that that man of knowledge should also have the knowledge of ignorance, for then only one can cross over the ocean of ignorance and the consequences of ignorance and attain to the supreme knowledge by which immortality is attained. The aim of the Vedic education was to prepare the pupil to pursue the paths... that in spite of his having knowledge of a number of sciences and texts related to vedas, vedangas, upavedas and several other systems of knowledge, he was still not free from sorrow and that he was in search of that knowledge by which sorrow can be removed. In the Upanishadic literature, we find a distinction made between knowledge and Page 99 ignorance (vidyā and avidyā). In the Katha ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXV The Triple Transformation A conscious being is in the centre of the self, who rules past and future; he is like a fire without smoke.... That, one must disengage with... in an original Ignorance, something supernormal to Page 923 earth-life that must always be acquired as an individual achievement by a difficult endeavour. It must become the normal nature of a new type of being; as mind is established here on a basis of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its... the whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct action in earth-existence. This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the soul through the Page 951 Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form ...
... knowing is a jumble of sections of knowledge, often inconsistent knowledge, put forcefully together by the mind in order to make some kind of pathway through the confusion of our half-knowledge and half-ignorance. Or else it is a restless kinetic multiple action with no firm governing higher ideal and self-possessed law of true light and power within it. The sattwic knowledge on the contrary sees existence... is clear then that the work is not the sole thing that matters; the knowledge in which we do works makes an immense spiritual difference. There are three things, says the Gita, which go to constitute the mental impulsion to works, and they are the knowledge in our will, the object of knowledge and the knower; and into the knowledge there comes always the working of the three gunas. It is this element... law and upholds it as the law, persists in the thing which ought not to be done and holds it up to us as the one right thing to be done. Its ignorance is invincible and its persistence of will is a persistence in the satisfaction and dull pride of its ignorance. That is on its side of blind action; but it is pursued also by a heavy stress of inertia and impotence, a persistence in dullness and sleep ...
... on and becomes in the mind a power for inaction and ignorance? This tamas is an obscurity which mistranslates, we may say, into inaction of power and inaction of knowledge the Spirit's eternal principle of calm and repose—the repose which the Divine never loses even while he acts, the eternal repose which supports his integral action of knowledge and the force of his creative will both there in its... incapacity of knowledge until its ignorance disappears in illumination and its torpid incapacity is lost in the light and force of the omnipotent divine will of repose. Then only can we have the supreme calm. Therefore Tamas must be dominated by Sattwa. The principle of rajas for the same reason must remain always a restless, troubled, feverish or unhappy working because it has not right knowledge; its native... native movement is a wrong and perverse action, perverse through ignorance. Our will must purify itself by knowledge; it must get more and more to a right and luminously informed action before it can be converted into the divine kinetic will. That again means Page 468 the necessity of the intervention of Sattwa. The sattwic quality is a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature ...
... the different names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme experience. To the Indian religious mentality, these names and forms are not merely symbols; they are world-realities. For, between the highest unimaginable Existence and our material way of being, the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not fix a gulf as between... 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 the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (drasta) of an eternal truth and impersonal knowledge. One very important point to note ...
... the one self-existent Delight; strength and weakness, success and failure turn into powers of the one self-effective Force and Will; truth and error, knowledge and ignorance change into light of the one infinite self-awareness and universal knowledge; increase of being and diminution of being, limitation and the overcoming of limitation are transfigured into waves of the one self-realising conscious... integral knowledge and of the integral Yoga. To know Sachchidananda one in Himself and one in all His manifestation is the basis of knowledge; to make that vision of oneness real to the consciousness in its status and in its action and to become that by merging the sense of separate individuality in the sense of unity with the Being and with all beings is its effectuation in Yoga of knowledge; to live... existence. All our life as well as all our essential being is transformed into the possession of Sachchidananda. By way of this integral knowledge we arrive at the unity of the aims set before themselves by the three paths of knowledge, works and devotion. Knowledge aims at the realisation of true self-existence; works are directed to the realisation of the divine Conscious-Will which secretly governs ...
... Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance, Death and Immortality, then that is the real sense of the whole Veda. We have concluded that the Angiras Rishis are bringers of the Dawn, rescuers of the Sun out of the darkness, but that this Dawn, Sun, Darkness are figures used with a spiritual significance. The central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the... result. Usha is the divine Dawn, for the Sun that arises by her coming is the Sun of the superconscient Truth; the day he brings is the day of the true life in the true knowledge, the night he dispels is the night of the ignorance which yet conceals the dawn in its bosom. Usha herself is the Truth, sūnṛtā , and the mother of Truths. These truths of the divine Dawn are called her cows, her shining... existences but robs and withholds his wealth from the Aryan. He is the thief, the enemy, the wolf, the devourer, the divider, the obstructor, the confiner. The Dasyus are powers of darkness and ignorance who oppose the seeker of truth and immortality. The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human ...
... capable. There is above it a Supermind or eternal Truth-consciousness which is in its nature the self-aware and self-determining light and power of a Divine Knowledge. Mind is an ignorance seeking after Truth, but this is a self-existent Knowledge harmoniously manifesting the play of its forms and forces. It is only by the descent of this supermind that the perfection dreamed of by all that is highest... redescend with its gains bringing the light and power and bliss of the Spirit into life to transform it. Man's present existence in the material world is in this view or vision of things a life in the Ignorance with the Inconscient at its base, but even in its darkness and nescience there are involved the presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a mistake or a vanity and illusion... form, the Isha Upanishad, the Essays on the Gita, and others not yet published, the Life Divine, the Synthesis of Yoga, 5 appeared serially in the Arya . These works embodied much of the inner knowledge that had come to him in his practice of Yoga. Others were concerned with the spirit and significance of Indian civilisation and culture, the true meaning of the Vedas, the progress of human society ...
... supermind or gnosis. For mind is or can be a truth seeker, but not truth-conscious in its inherent nature; its original stuff is made not of knowledge, but of ignorance. 158 All Yoga has one supreme object; a permanent liberation from the ignorance and weakness of this limited and suffering human and earthly consciousness is its purpose and either an escape or a growth and swift flowering... being and of every part of the nature. Our being is a nexus of the human mental-vital-physical nature of Ignorance, it is transmuted into a spiritual and supramental consciousness: it becomes a divine unity in a harmony of the infinite and universal and integrated will, love, bliss and knowledge. Page 358 The Infinite Reality presents itself to our limited consciousness in an infinity of... some ineffable featurelessness is its object, but to renounce ego for our true divine person one with the universal and infinite; not to abolish consciousness, but to exchange ignorance for a supreme and all-containing Knowledge, not to blot out joy but to renounce human pleasure for a divine griefless beatitude, not to give up but to transform all world-nature and world-existence into a power of the ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXII Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality He passes in his departure from this world to the physical Self; he passes to the Self of life; he passes... soul—in this view or for this purpose supposed to have a real individual existence—is on earth as a result of desire and ignorance; it has to remain on earth or return to it always so long as it has not wearied of desire and awakened to the fact of its ignorance and to the true knowledge. This desire compels it to return always to a new body; it must follow always the revolving wheel of birth till it is... moral Page 836 education; if it enters into the Ignorance, it must be because there is some larger principle or possibility of its being that has to be worked out through the Ignorance. If, on the other hand, it is a being from the Infinite plunged for some cosmic purpose into the obscurity of Matter and growing to self-knowledge within it, its life here and the significance of that life ...
... van, would not be exclusively or altogether the worlds of Divine Knowledge and human ignorance. Nor would they constitute simply a twilight mid-world, with a griffin-guarded portal, across which one passes from the lower hemisphere of existence to the higher. Besides being, in an ultimate sense, the material inconscience or ignorance on the one hand and the Supreme Light on the other, they would be... Sri Aurobindo's comments go: "Night and Dawn are the two unlike mothers who jointly give birth to Agni, Night, the avyakta, unmanifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Avidya, Dawn, the vyakta, manifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Vidya. They are the two Dawns, the two agencies which prepare the manifestation of God in us, Night fostering Agni in secret on the... in which the narration of the experiences begun in our passage is prolonged and completed - we have the statement: His march now soared into an eagle's flight. Out of apprenticeship to ignorance Wisdom upraised him to her master craft And made him an arch-mason of the soul... [pp. 25-26] It is certain that "his" and "him" here refer to the same agent who is "him" in ...
... mere mental abstractions or move on the illusory surface of things. These do not pertain to real knowledge; they are a deformation of knowledge, their very substance is of the ignorance. Certainly the supramental knowledge may give an answer, its own answer, to the problems set by the mind's ignorance; but it is likely that it would not be at all satisfactory or perhaps even intelligible to those who... who ask from the mental level. You must not expect the supramental to work in the way of the mind or demand that the knowledge in truth should be capable of being pieced together with the half-knowledge in ignorance. The scheme of the mind is one thing, but Supermind is quite another and it would no longer be supramental if it adapted itself to the exigencies of the mental scheme. The two are inco... certain intensity of interest which comes from ignorance and is bound up with illusion, and that must disappear when you are out of the ignorance. The interest that human beings take in things founds itself on the illusion; if that were removed, they would have no interest at all in the play; they would find it dry and dull. That is why all this ignorance, all this illusion has lasted so long; it is ...
... normally need several lives. The other characteristic result is that when the Supermind establishes itself, there is no more ignorance, it is all light and knowledge. Till the mental range, even at its highest heights, it is a mixture of light and darkness, of knowledge and ignorance: there is always an element of doubt, uncertainty or partial perception: there is a groping, a trial and one moves at best... said, up to man it is a natural spontaneous unreflecting unconscious evolution: with man it is conscious, deliberate, wilful evolution. What was being done behind the veil in ignorance will now be done openly in full knowledge. The very first result will be the shortening of the time factor. The conscious process increases the tempo, telescopes into decades or years a process or development that would... organon of complete knowledge: knowledge here is not the result of the deductive and inductive process of reason, it does not balance pros and cons and out of uncertain possibilities strike out an average probability: it is direct, straight, immediate, certain and absolute. Knowledge here comes by identity—the knower and the known are one and what is known is therefore self-knowledge. Secondly, the will ...
... an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge", writes 7 : "In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which... be like. Mind in its established human workings is a profound ignorance trying to acquire knowledge and the very knowledge it acquires is of appearances, of nature's surface activity, objective or subjective, rather than of nature's depth and of the under-lying ultimate reality. Further, both in its practical knowledge and in the theoretical constructs it makes to correlate observations... function of the supramental knowledge or at the least serve for a minor work of differentiation in the consensus of that knowledge: in the lower Page 127 degree below Supermind it might be a mental gnosis, a spiritual or spiritualised perception, feeling, activity, sense which could do the works of knowledge and not of ignorance. Even at a still lower level ...
... of distant happenings, even to look into the future. It is true that this knowledge proper to the subliminal being is not complete; for it is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception. Sri Aurobindo The Life Divine - I: Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge …they move in masses, waves, currents constantly constituting and r... growth and domination, their self-fulfilment or their prolongation of being in its victory or survival. As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and support it and work for its... an unconscious world out of a seed of inconscient Matter and moving about in an obscure self-ignorance, but an embodied soul through whose action cosmic Nature is seeking to fulfil itself, the living ground of a vast debate between a darkness of Ignorance out of which it emerges here and a light of Knowledge which is growing upwards towards an unforeseen culmination. The Forces which seek to move him ...
... everybody's knowledge. ("This message of the Mother has been written in answer to a question relating to certificates which one of the teachers had placed before her.") "Truly speaking, I have no opinion. According to the truth-vision, everything is still terribly mixed, a more or less fortunate combination of light and darkness, of truth and falsehood, of knowledge and ignorance, and so... them study has no other purpose, no other interest. To learn for the sake of knowledge, to study in order to know the secrets of Nature and life, to educate oneself in order to grow in consciousness, to discipline oneself in order to become master of oneself, to overcome one's weaknesses, incapacities and ignorance, to prepare oneself to advance in life towards a goal that is nobler and vaster,... examination or competition and do not give them any diplomas or titles which they can use in the outside world. We want here only those who aspire for a higher and better life, who thirst for knowledge and perfection, who look forward eagerly to a future that will be more totally true. There is plenty of room in the world for all the others." (CWM, Vol. 12, pp. 353-54) So this was ...
... only the supramental that is all Knowledge. All below that from Overmind to Matter is Ignorance—an Ignorance growing at each level nearer to the full Knowledge. Below Supermind there may be Knowledge but it is not all Knowledge. I have not said that everything is falsehood except the supramental Truth. I said that there was no complete Truth below the supramental. In the Overmind the Truth of... being the Ignorance, has to annul itself in order to enter into the supreme Truth—or, at least, so it thinks. But the supermind being the Truth-Consciousness and the Divine Knowledge has no need to annul itself for the purpose. The Will of Sachchidananda can act under different conditions in the Knowledge or the Ignorance. The Supermind is the Truth Consciousness, the Knowledge, and the will... Vāsudevaḥ sarvam etc. Mind is an instrument of the Ignorance trying to know—Supermind is the Knower possessing knowledge because one with it and the known, therefore seeing all things in the Light of His own Truth, the light of their true Self which is He. It is a dynamic and not only a static Power, not only a Knowledge, but a Will according to Knowledge—there is a supramental Power or Shakti which can ...
... consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind groping towards Truth, is itself an evolute from the basic Inconscience. If the Transcendent Knowledge is the Reality of which the symbol is the dawn of the last day in Satyavan's life, this basic Inconscience... of that Darkness into phenomenal existence." First of all, laya is not Darkness: it is simply non-manifestation. Secondly the emergence of Ignorance from the Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one... unthought Idea Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim, Something that wished but knew not how to be, Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance. In other words, the symbolised Inconscience shades off into the less stark symbolised Ignorance — a state comparatively closer to the hesitating hue's "long lone line". So much for the initial clue of the Canto's title. It has led us ...
... consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind groping towards Truth, is itself an evolute from the basic Inconscience. If the Transcendent Knowledge is the Reality of which the symbol is the dawn of the last day in Satyavan's life, this basic Inconscience... of that Darkness into phenomenal existence." First of all, laya is not Darkness: it is simply non-manifestation. Secondly the emergence of Ignorance from the Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one... Idea Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim, Something that wished but knew not how to be, Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance. [pp. 1-2] In other words, the symbolised Inconscience shades off into the less stark symbolised Ignorance - a state comparatively closer to the hesitating hue's "long lone line". So much for the initial clue of the Canto's title. It has ...
... achieving nought." Life has played long "with Fate and Chance and Time" and has assured Page 351 itself of the game's vanity, it is "crushed by its load of ignorance and doubt". As knowledge increases so do ignorance and doubt. The earth-mind therefore sinks in despair. But could one say that nothing has been done? Some great thing has been done, some Light, some Power "delivered from... His play and ''yet no play but the deep scheme of a transcendent Wisdom finding "ways to meet her Lord Page 345 in the shadow and the Night." In the world "His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance, His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed, Made error a door by which Truth could enter in, His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears." Through all the vicissitudes... and spoiled the harmony. Mind that is "seeking ignorance" wants to find soul, a god. "But where is room for soul or place for God In the brute immensity of a machine?" . Your consciousness, interposed between the upper and the lower Void "reflects the world around". "In the distorting mirror of Ignorance", you are asking for immortality but for imperfect ...
... of knowledge and ignorance, and it is capable of erroneous as well as true perception. It may also be noted that the Page 39 knowledge proper to the subliminal being is not complete. According to Sri Aurobindo, knowledge, in order to be true and complete must be a knowledge by identity and must arrive at oneness and unity in diversity. Therefore, a deeper and higher consciousness is needed... needed to cure the deficiencies and mixtures of ignorance and knowledge that we obtain at the level of subliminal consciousness. Page 40 ... wider vistas of knowledge and actions, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness is centered on multiplicity and divisions and not on unity, which is the characteristic of what can spiritually be called true Knowledge. As in our external consciousness, so also in subliminal consciousness, knowledge is a mixture of ...
... I started listing out all the different planes. With eager enthusiasm I declared: “Mother, You need to work now only on the Inconscient!” The Mother listened quietly to my display of knowledge and ignorance, then laughed: “No, no. Don’t think it to be that simple. The realm of the Inconscient is so dense in obscurity, so full of dangers, that no one has so far dared to touch it, let alone transform... dense Darkness besides the Mother? Who else could dare? Sri Aurobindo has written in The Mother : …she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she ...
... enjoy that oneness of God with itself in its own individuality and with its other selves in the universality. Its relations of knowledge will be the play of the divine omniscience, for God is Knowledge, and what is ignorance with us will be there only the holding back of knowledge in the repose of conscious self-awareness so that certain forms of that self-awareness may be brought forward into activity... sensuous hearing but their corresponding supramental faculties of revelation and inspiration. Whereas the human mentality gropes for knowledge, supermind is possessed of knowledge; revelation and inspiration are, according to the Vedic seers, direct operations of inherent Knowledge describable as truth-vision and truth-audition. Truth-consciousness or supramental consciousness is an intermediate formulation... status of comprehensiveness in which all the differentiations are united by the predominant power of unity; there is differentiation of forms and lines of knowledge and will, which are united, too, and Knowledge is Action and Action is Knowledge; this status is, however, that of comprehensiveness. The second poise modifies that unity so as to support the manifestation of the Many in the One and the ...
... the planes of Mind, Life and Matter. For at the level of Mind, Life and Matter, the cosmic force acts as the lower Nature, Apara Prakriti, and, although the Divine Knowledge, Light, Power are concealed there and at work in the ignorance and can break partly its veil and manifest something of the true character or descend from above and uplift these inferior workings, yet, imperfection remains in the... feel that in a sense even in the nature of the Ignorance, but it is the divine Power and Presence in a disguise, a diminution, an inferior figure. Ours is a greater demand, that our nature shall be a power of the Divine in the Truth of the Divine, in the Light, in the force of the eternal self-conscient Will, in the wideness of the sempiternal Knowledge." 39 The supreme Master of the Work can... feelings and emotions, the life-impulses, the action of sense and sensation, the very workings of the body-consciousness; it recasts them in the light and power of truth and illumines their knowledge and their ignorance." 49 But even then, the total integration is hampered, and the intuitive mind cannot sufficiently take up the subconscient and penetrate the fundamental Inconscience. As Sri Aurobindo ...
... strain of knowledge and ignorance. When you speak of the Universal Consciousness it is not as if you were dealing with highest spiritual Consciousness: You are dealing with the universal consciousness of which mind is the dominating Page 203 instrument. But in that case, universal consciouness itself is not perfect. It has the double movement, vidy ā and avidy ā—knowledge and ignorance... and a subliminal consciousness. Life is two-fold, body is two-fold and this being also when it comes here forgets one part in the ignorance and one part is kept behind. In case of the psychic being what comes to the front is the desire-soul,—the psychic being in ignorance becomes the desire-soul. This desire-soul is the projection of the psychic being in ignorant nature. Then it is not able to act in... is the guide; it is an inner life; it is a divine voice imperishable. It is not the unborn self, because the psychic being accepts to work in ignorance and therefore the psychic being is not the unborn self but the self that has accepted to work in ignorance and embody delight, manifest the delight. At first the psychic being has to act through the instruments of ignorant nature-mind, life and ...
... yet seems charged with knowledge and will,—with a kind of omnipotence. At the highest rung in the evolutionary ladder of the Spirit, the Supermind is the plane of definite determination working out the Divine will and knowledge. Overmind is a delegate of the Supramental consciousness, —it is delegate of the Supermind to the Ignorance,—to Mind and a delegate of Ignorance to the Higher Consciousness... Each would be necessary to the whole, in the Overmind. Overmind can be said therefore to be a play of all possibilities of knowledge and power that makes ignorance possible, because among the possibilities there are those that tend towards ignorance. In one sense it makes ignorance possible and, when it goes further and further from the central truth, it leads to the fragmentation in the Inconscient and... matter. Because mind is not completely ignorant, it becomes possible in mind to organize some kind of right relations between elements and things. Mind has limited knowledge which one can call ignorance but it is not totally false knowledge or complete error. There is no basis for affirming that mind is a power that deals with complete falsehood, that it is to be rejected in spirutal life. Sri Aurobindo ...
... enjoy that oneness of God with itself in its own individuality and with its other selves in the universality. Its relations of knowledge will be the play of the divine omniscience, for God is Knowledge, and what is ignorance with us will be there only the holding back of knowledge in the repose of conscious self-awareness so that certain forms of that self-awareness may be brought forward into activity... discords of our divided consciousness, divided by ignorance and a separatist egoism; all these selves and their relations will play consciously into each other's hands; they will part and melt into each other as the numberless notes of an eternal harmony. And the same rule will apply to the relations of its being, knowledge, will with the being, knowledge and will of others. For all its experience and... immortal life uninvaded by death and birth and change of body because unclouded by ignorance and not involved in the darkness of our material being. It would be a pure and unlimited consciousness in its energy, poised in an eternal and luminous tranquillity as its foundation, yet able to play freely with forms of knowledge and forms of conscious power, tranquil, unaffected by the stumblings of mental error ...
... the Upanishads. intuition is the main instrument of knowledge, but there is also recognition and affirmation, of the reconciliation by means of supramental consciousness. In the Isha Upanishad, for example, which is a great document of synthesis; presents some riddles on account of intuitions in regard to the distinction between knowledge and ignorance and in regard to birth and non-birth, a higher r... there are higher levels of knowledge. Sri Aurobindo points out that between the intuition, the highest faculty of knowledge there is an intermediate power of knowledge, which Sri Aurobindo calls overmind. The main distinction between intuition and overmind is that the field of intuition can be limited, and it can be compared to torchlight so that the field of knowledge is focused on the limited field... other; hence, there has been in the history of knowledge, conflicts of intuitions, even though these conflicts can be more easily harmonized, and they need not be as rigid as the conflict among mental Page 103 opinion or as rigid as mental cognitions of intuitions can be. In the overmind, on account of its cosmicity, the sweep of knowledge is cosmic and global, but since it is still not ...
... two different godheads; but in truth they are the one infinite Deity in different figures. 2 One may Page 194 approach the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme experience. One thing however has to be noted that while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of an... that is intimately one or at least intimately related with the one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so growing and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance which veils this self-knowledge from our mind and life and become aware of the Divinity within us. These three things put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed... of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. India recognised authority of spiritual experience and knowledge, but she recognised still more the need of variety of spiritual experience and knowledge. Even in the days of decline when the claim of authority became in too many directions rigorous and excessive, she still kept the saving perception that ...
... Page 292 at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact... depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle. And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its... remains to be cleared which we have till now left in obscurity, the process of the lapse into the Ignorance; for we have seen that nothing in the original nature of Mind, Life or Matter necessitates a fall from Knowledge. It has been shown indeed that division of consciousness is the basis of the Ignorance, a division of individual consciousness from the cosmic and the transcendent of which yet it is ...
... by an inner enlightening and transformation of the mind of ignorance; it is that in which the mind seeks for its source of knowledge rather within than without and becomes to its own feeling and self-experience, by whatever means, a mind, not of original ignorance, but of self-forgetful knowledge. This mind is conscious that the knowledge of all things is hidden within it or at least somewhere in the... many changes and various dispositions of the powers and possibilities of its time consciousness and time knowledge. At first man in the mind of ignorance can neither live in the infinite time consciousness nor command any direct and real power of the triple time knowledge. The mind of ignorance lives, not in the indivisible continuity of time, but successively in each moment. It has a vague sense of... intuitivising of all the parts of the mental being that the mind of ignorance can be, more successfully, if not as yet wholly, replaced by the mind of self-contained knowledge. But,—and especially for this kind of knowledge,—what is needed is the cessation of mental constructions built on the foundation of the mind of ignorance. The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter II Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti It is there in beings indivisible and as if divided. Gita. (XIII. 17.) Brahman, the Truth, the... parts is a knowledge, but also at the same time an ignorance; to see the totality alone and ignore the parts is also a knowledge and at the same time an ignorance, for a part may be greater than the whole because it belongs to the transcendence; to see the essence alone because it takes us back straight towards the transcendence and negate the totality and the parts is a penultimate knowledge, but here... limited or constructed consciousness like ours, a status of ignorance, and the infinite self-knowledge and all-knowledge. A second possibility of the Infinite Consciousness that must be admitted is its power of self-limitation or secondary self-formation into a subordinate movement within the integral illimitable consciousness and knowledge; for that is a necessary consequence of the power of self ...
... complete it.... This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge.... So must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit... Principles; the trenchant duality is fictitious, they represent in fact, the Two-in-One or rather the One-in-Two. Thus, "There are two who are One and play in many worlds: In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met And light and darkness are their eye's interchange. ⁂ Thus have they made their play with us for roles: Author and actor with himself... force of Nature cannot act, executing and controlling the knowledge and the will and knowing and controlling the determinations of the knowledge-force and will-force, ministering to the enjoyment and enjoying, — the Soul possessor, observor, knower, lord of Nature, Nature expressing the being, executing the will, satisfying the self-knowledge, ministering to the delight of being of the soul. There ...
... obscuring subjection to the chain of birth and death, that supreme object of so many Indian disciplines; by the second realisation added to the first we are able to possess freely, with right knowledge, without ignorance, without bondage by the chain of our actions, the experiences of the spirit in its successions of time-eternity.... In either realisation truly envisaged as side and other side of one... cogitated evidence at all. The awareness of soul immortality comes from a domain of knowledge beyond the ken of our mind. As a matter of fact, in the course of the heightening and deepening of our consciousness brought about by the pursuit of spiritual Sadhana, there arises spontaneously a trans-mental knowledge of our true being which is then realised as a consciousness altogether independent of... life, from world to world after the dissolution of the physical body. "The realisation of timeless immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the Non-birth and Non-becoming and of the changeless spirit within us: the realisation of time-immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the birth and Becoming and is translated into a sense of the persistent identity of the soul through all changes ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXIV The Evolution of the Spiritual Man Even as men come to Me, so I accept them. It is my path that men follow from all sides.... Whatever form the worshipper chooses... integral knowledge. For each of these means or approaches corresponds to some thing in our total being and therefore to something necessary to the total aim of her evolution. There are four necessities of man's self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of the surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and collecting and systematising fragments and sections of knowledge, the... and her great and indispensable utility and service,—the holding up of this growing light of guidance on our way through the mind's ignorance towards the Spirit's complete consciousness and self-knowledge. Occultism is in its essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical limits of being, an attempt ...
... more than our ideals the real force in our action. That self-ignorance constitutes the whole vanity of human reason and self-righteousness; it is the dark secret lining behind the spotless white outsides of human sainthood and alone makes possible the specious egoisms of knowledge and virtue. The best human knowledge is a half knowledge and the highest human virtue a thing of mixed quality and, even... power at work, our best knowledge a partial light of his knowledge, the highest most potent will of our spirit a projection and delegation of the will of this Spirit in all things who is the Master and Soul of the universe. It is the Lord seated in the heart Page 554 of every creature who has been turning us in all our inner and outer action during the ignorance as if mounted on a machine... machine on the wheel of this Maya of the lower Nature. And whether obscure in the Ignorance or luminous in the Knowledge, it is for him in us and him in the world that we have our existence. To live consciously and integrally in this knowledge and this truth is to escape from ego and break out of Maya. All other highest dharmas are only a preparation for this Dharma, and all Yoga is only a means by which ...
... within thee and never stagger with their inrush or break under their burden. 288) Mankind have wearied of strength and joy and called sorrow and weakness virtue, wearied of knowledge and called Page 461 ignorance holiness, wearied of love and called heartlessness enlightenment and wisdom. 289) There are many kinds of forbearance. I saw a coward hold out his cheek to the smiter; I saw... stronger than both together; from fear and hope take refuge in the grandiose calm and careless mastery of the spirit. 377) God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these... good for thyself first that thou mayst distribute it entirely to thy fellow-beings. 208) He who acquires for himself alone, acquires ill though he may call it heaven and virtue. 209) In my ignorance I thought anger could be noble and vengeance grandiose; but now when I watch Achilles in his epic fury, I see a very fine baby in a very fine rage and I am pleased and amused. 210) Power is noble ...
... supported, guided and governed by a veiled Truth-Consciousness. To the mind the universe appears as a chance world or a world of accident or a world of inconscience only. But mind is half-knowledge and half-ignorance; it is a movement projected for effecting the division of the Infinite into the finite. It is a movement necessitated by keeping the ego of form into which the souls have cast themselves... The fourth will be the stage in which the coming down of the Higher Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, will operate. Now, Truth-Consciousness holds within itself the principle of knowledge. It is Being with knowledge,—it is consciousness and power, or consciousness and energy, and delight. These will be the terms towards which life must now make a move. But two principles have emerged in this study... merely against something, it is not merely a negative working, because even in them the supermind is working as the law compelling the divided life and mind to continue working under the conditions of ignorance; otherwise, the evolving organism would not make an effort to overleap, overreach, go beyond the formula of mind. The necessity is that the spirit that is manifested in life with mind, that ...
... creative force of His eternal consciousness. All this action is only His power and knowledge and self-delight going abroad in His infinite being to do the works of His eternal wisdom and will. We shall realise the Divine, the eternal Self of all, first, as the source of all action and inaction, of all knowledge and ignorance, of all delight and suffering, of all good and evil, perfection and imperfection... cosmic consciousness we begin to participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particularising action of divine knowledge; strength and weakness and incapacity change into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force; joy and grief, pleasure... dwelling in this cosmic consciousness our whole experience and valuation of everything in the universe will be radically changed. As individual egos we dwell in the Ignorance and judge everything by a broken, partial and personal standard of knowledge; we experience everything according to the capacity of a limited consciousness and force and are therefore unable to give a divine response or set the true value ...
... and one begins to suspect one's ignorance and one's state of bondage, accompanied by a growing aspiration to remove ignorance and to attain to liberation and perfection. It has been rightly observed that a special characteristic of ignorance is that it does not suspect itself. To discover that one is ignorant is itself a sign of a certain growth of knowledge. It is only at that stage that one... they appear to it as an illusion, a scheme of names and figures and movements falsely imposed on the sole reality of the Self-Existent, or even the sense of Self becomes inadequate. Both knowledge and ignorance disappear into sheer consciousness and consciousness is plunged into a trance of pure superconscient existence. Or even existence ends by becoming too limiting a name for that which abides... systems consider the state of bondage to be the result of Ignorance, which causes the confusion between the real and the unreal, super-imposition of the unreal on the real, or super-imposition of the not-self on the self, or else perception of fleeting impressions which are extinguishable but are not yet extinguished. The question as to how ignorance can be removed, has been answered differently by different ...
... and one begins to suspect one's ignorance and one's state of bondage, accompanied with a growing aspiration to remove ignorance and to attain to liberation and perfection. It has been rightly observed that a special characteristic of ignorance is that it does not suspect itself. To discover that one is ignorant is itself a sign of a certain growth of knowledge. It is only at that stage that one... they appear to it to be an illusion, a scheme of names and figures and movements falsely imposed on the sole reality of the Self-Existent, or even the sense of Self becomes inadequate, both knowledge and ignorance disappear into sheer consciousness and consciousness is plunged into a trance of pure superconscient existence. Or even existence ends by becoming too limiting a name for that which abides... systems consider the state of bondage to be the result of Ignorance, which causes the confusion between the real and the unreal, superimposition of the unreal on the real, or superimposition of the not-self on the self, or else perception of fleeting impressions which are extinguishable but are not yet extinguished. The question as to how ignorance can be removed, has been answered differently by different ...
... atmabodha prasannata . In its excellence, and in its serenity, will come to you the knowledge of the Eternal. All ignorance will disappear in it and you will not see anything but that alone. Though you may be living in the state of waking or that of dream, and you may still be possessed by inferior knowledge, not too long from this moment afterwards shall everything get dissolved in that which... in the transcendent Spirit. ( Essays on the Gita , SABCL, Vol. 13, pp. 537-38) The supreme Mantra is given to the seeker soul: An omniscient consciousness will take up our knowledge and our ignorance, our truth and our error, cast away their forms of insufficiency, sarva-dharman parityajya , and transform all into infinite light. An almighty Power will take up our virtue and sin, our... through Bhakti Yoga, does the true Karma Yoga lead the doer of the works to the knowledge of the Eternal in whom is complete liberation. This is the most ancient and cherished primordial knowledge proclaimed by the Gita. Indeed it is this knowledge which we call the Gita, the Knowledge of the Spirit, of the Self, the Knowledge of the Eternal. It is actually the Song of the supreme Lord, bhagavadgita ...
... and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. According to Sri Aurobindo, Supermind transmutes to Overmind all its realities but leaves it to formulate them in a movement. But this formulation is done by the Overmind by an awareness of things which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. Comparing the action... This overmind is not a mind as we know it, but, in the words of Sri Aurobindo: "... an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth- Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood... capable of the formation of multitude aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becomings, and in all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. Its special character, its activity of consciousness is dominated by Thought; it is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a luminous Thought-Mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge. It can freely express itself in single ideas ...
... and original intensity determinant of all mental energies,—not Mind as we know but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of not some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of" knowledge-ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our' sight, intervening with its flood of... infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality." It " connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance."¹ "The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness that epithet would more accurately apply to the supramental and the Sachchidanand Consciousness though it looks up to... circling suns She loves her fall and no Omnipotence Her mortal imperfection can erase Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's Straight Line Or colonise a world of death with Gods." "All is too little that the world can give; Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time And cannot fill the spirits sacred thirst."12 "Intense, one pointed, monumental, lone Patient ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVIII The Divine Life O seeing Flame, thou carriest man of the crooked ways into the abiding truth and the knowledge. Rig Veda. (I. 31. 6.) I purify... what is meant by spiritual knowledge: the essence of spiritual knowledge is an intrinsic self-existent consciousness; all its action of knowledge, indeed all its action of any kind, must be that consciousness formulating itself. All other knowledge is consciousness oblivious of itself and striving to return to its own awareness of itself and its contents; it is self-ignorance labouring to transform itself... would not be founded on a mutuality of self-knowledge and a sense of one being and common consciousness; it would be a relation of action of knowledge to action of ignorance. But this difficulty need not be so great as it seems now to us; for the gnostic knowledge would carry in it a perfect understanding of the consciousness Page 1082 of the Ignorance, and it would not be impossible, therefore ...
... त्वविद्या ह्यमृतं तु विद्या विद्याविद्ये ईशते यस्तु सोऽन्यः ॥१॥ 1) Both of these in the Transcendent, the Knowledge & the Ignorance, yea both have their hidden being in the Eternal & Infinite Who dwelleth beyond Brahman of the Veda, & are set in it for ever. But of these Ignorance dieth and Knowledge liveth for ever; and He who is master of both is other than they. यो योनिं योनिमधितिष्ठत्येको विश्वानि... ज्ञानैर्बिभर्ति जायमानं च पश्येत् ॥२॥ 2) He being One entereth upon womb & womb, yea upon all forms of being and upon all wombs of creatures. This was He that of old filled with many sorts of Knowledge Kapila, the seer, after his mother bore him; yea He saw Kapila shaping. एकैकं जालं बहुधा विकुर्वन्नस्मिन्क्षेत्रे संहरत्येष देवः । भूयः सृष्ट्वा यतयस्तथेशः सर्वाधिपत्यं कुरुते महात्मा ॥३॥ ... we see any that is His equal—for His power is far over all, only men hear of it under a thousand names & various fashions. Lo the strength of Him and the works of Him and Page 245 His Knowledge, they are self-efficient & their own cause & nature. न तस्य कश्चित् पतिरस्ति लोके न चेशिता नैव च तस्य लिङ्गम् । स कारणं करणाधिपाधिपो न चास्य कश्चिज्जनिता न चाधिपः ॥९॥ 9) He hath no master ...
... Scripture, it is with the large being that happiness comes. The ego is by its nature a smallness of being; it brings contraction of the consciousness and with the contraction limitation of knowledge, disabling ignorance,—confinement and a diminution of power and by that diminution incapacity and weakness,—scission of oneness and by that scission disharmony and failure of sympathy and love and understanding... philosophies and religions, not in that of any earth-bound materialistic doctrine, that the seeker of the highest knowledge has to walk, even if with enriched aims and a more comprehensive spiritual purpose. But how far has he to proceed in the elimination of the ego? In the ancient way of knowledge we arrive at the elimination of the ego-sense which attaches itself to the body, to the life, to the mind and... company, all agreeing that this is the supreme object of knowledge, of works and of devotion, all agreeing that if it is to be attained, the Jiva must release himself from the ego-sense which belongs to the lower Nature or Maya. But here they part company and each goes his own way. The Monist fixes his feet on the path of an exclusive Knowledge and sets for us as sole ideal an entire return, loss, immersion ...
... will no longer let us escape from the Presence or refuse to see the intervening Will or Grace. This world is a world of Ignorance and by Ignorance a world of strife, seeking, error and suffering. We start by knowing nothing and have to learn everything; because our knowledge is a mixture of truth and falsehood and our will constantly Page 167 mistaken when not perverted, we stumble at... 176 must be leading towards that higher state of things. It is leading the individual, certainly, and the world, presumably, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be... The guidance can become evident only if we go behind appearances and begin to understand the forces at work and the way of their working and their secret significance. After all, real knowledge—even scientific knowledge—comes by going behind the surface phenomena to their hidden process and causes. It is quite obvious that this world is full of suffering and afflicted with transience to a degree that ...
... subliminal being is not complete. According to Sri Aurobindo, knowledge, in order to be true and complete, must be a knowledge by identity. The subliminal knowledge is a knowledge by direct contact but not knowledge by identity. Therefore, a deeper and higher consciousness is needed to cure the deficiencies and mixtures of ignorance and knowledge that we obtain at the level of subliminal consciousness. ... to us wider vistas of knowledge and action, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness, no less than our external consciousness, is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception. It may also be noted Page 62 that the knowledge proper to the subliminal... the identity knowledge. At the source of the intuitive mind, there is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supermind. This cosmic Mind is not a mind as we know it, but, in the words of Sri Aurobindo: '... an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with ...
... equal thought-mind will look on knowledge and ignorance and on truth and error, those dualities created by our limited nature of consciousness and the partiality of our intellect and its little stock of reasonings and intuitions, accept them both without being bound to either twine of the skein and await a luminous transcendence. In ignorance it will see a knowledge which is imprisoned and seeks or... phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution—to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction—from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our... individual who seeks to be one in will with the Divine and make his nature an instrument of the divine purpose, must enlarge himself out of the egoistic and partial views and motives of the human ignorance and mould himself into an image of this supreme equality. This equal poise in action is especially necessary for the sadhaka of the integral Yoga. First, he must acquire that equal assent and ...
... towards an accord of the Here and the Beyond, is left uncompleted. At the same time he recognises that the means adopted so far for changing the earth from a mêlée of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, beauty and ugliness, Page 2 strength and weakness, into a mould for the Divine's manifestation have been inadequate. The Yoga of God's enrapturing love... being's growth into the Divine we must have the instrumental nature's completion if we are to appease the urge that has always found voice in human history - the mind's search for flawless knowledge of the world's dynamics, the life-force's cry for happiness and co-operative abundance and triumphant activity, the body's passion for health, stability, continuance. Transformation must signify... Supermind is not an entirely new discovery. As early as the Vedas, there was the vision of it as Satyam Ritam Brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast - and it was symbolised as the Sun of Knowledge in the highest heaven. But either it was experienced in deep trance from which its whole import could not be transmitted or what was seized was its reflection in the several grades between it ...
... limitation or modification of its self-manifesting activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it [in the Mind of Light] an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place.’ 9 The Mind of Light is the undiminished, authentic, golden Unity-Consciousness, secretly present in the lower levels of the body: those of the mental... Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, being the double-poled supramental Avatar, have ‘seen’ this river and its destination from the beginning of their integral yoga; they have all along had a profound knowledge of it, but its bed had to be scoured, delved and hewn in the stony terrain of Matter (this was their sadhana) — an effort doomed to failure according to all who had thought of it or even tried it ...
... relevant to evolution. An involution of the spirit in the inconscience is Page 1 the beginning; evolution in the ignorance with its play of possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle; a consummation in a deployment of the spirit's self knowledge and self-power of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination. It may be argued that the two stages that have already... inherited the achievements of his forerunners. In any case, it may be argued that nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge, half- ignorance which is the stamp of his kind or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle. 4 Page 4 Sri Aurobindo has examined this argument and even formulated... of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man's achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavour, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ...
... their principle and power; for even at the first we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and....In themselves these grades are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit... they are 1 Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI, p. 549. (Italics... lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance; it links the latter with that supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, "...while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight...This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance." 2 With... our normal mentality is into a Higher Mind of automatic and spontaneous Knowledge, where knowledge assumes the nature of Truth-Thought. Its most characteristic movement is "a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view;...this thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired Knowledge." 2 Beyond the Higher Mind of Truth-Thought is the Illumined ...
... on the highest source of knowledge that supramental faculties come to be developed such as those of revelations, symbolized by Ila, inspiration or Saraswati, Page 58 intuition or Sarama, and discrimination between truth and falsehood, between knowledge and ignorance and between good and evil — the faculty symbolized by Dakshina. The Vedic yoga of knowledge is seen to be the process of... light gets concealed that darkness is born, but concealment does not annul the light. It is by the process of yoga that the light that is concealed is recovered. From inconscience to Ignorance and from ignorance to Knowledge is the process of reversal, the process of self-finding, the finding of That and all that That contains, That which eternally is and which has become concealed but which is then recovered... to acquire knowledge. Thou art most heroic amongst the heroes. O Mightiest, O sindestroyer Page 71 Thou art the Lord of all disciplines of knowledge and forces. Thou controlest thy subjects for their betterment. 5. He is the most charitable amongst all who possess possession. He is pure like the Sun .O Omniscient and Glorious God, lead us on for acquiring knowledge and strength ...
... normally need several lives. The other characteristic result is that when the Supermind establishes itself, there is no more ignorance, it is all light and knowledge. Till the mental range, even at its highest heights it is a mixture of light and darkness, of knowledge and ignorance: there is always an element of doubt, uncertainty or partial perception: there is a groping, a trial and one moves at best... said, up to man it is a natural spontaneous unreflecting unconscious evolution: with man it is conscious, deliberate, wilful evolution. What was being done behind the veil in ignorance will now be done openly in full knowledge. The very first result will be the shortening of the time factor. The conscious process increases the tempo, telescopes into decades or years a process or development that ... this Page 360 that will serve as the basis of the new creation and give it its law and constitution. A new world built out of knowledge and vision and luminous power is destined to come, for man is no longer in love with his ignorance, but a divine afflatus is possessing him. The new world has to be based on new foundations. The old world was built from outside with superficial ...
... aspect in this universal working. When it works in the universe it puts on a double aspect, Ignorance and Knowledge. So it is possible from here to transform this Nature. The divine Nature is working in the universe; the one power that is divine divides into two - Ignorance and Knowledge - and from Ignorance it is possible to transform the Nature, to make it divine. Sri Aurobindo, for the first... conquer the ferment of ignorance and death. How far can the present formula of Nature or the determinism of Nature be changed? How far can it be changed and by what process? Here Aswapathy makes an inward turn. The knowledge that he acquires is gained by partaking in an inward turn of consciousness. By an inward turn Aswapathy is able to go through and acquire this knowledge. It is by an inward turn... natural flow of ignorance and would correspondingly undergo a change. What he found was a double aspect, and in this double aspect, when the Purusha knows his true self and remembers his true being, Nature also changes and reveals her powers that are lying dormant in her own constitution. Nature also shows: I am not dull, I am not always bound to be ignorant, I have also treasures of knowledge and power ...
... consciousness in its activities, and thus there are created those phenomena of creation, conservation, dissolution, birth and life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge and ignorance, action and inaction, happiness and suffering which the Purusha under the influence of Prakriti attributes to itself although they belong not at all to itself but to the action... practical system of Yoga that it teaches and it brings in metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of its practical system; nor does it merely declare Vedantic knowledge, but it founds knowledge and devotion upon works, even as it uplifts works to knowledge, their culmination, and informs them with devotion as their very heart and kernel of their spirit. Again its Yoga is founded upon the analytical philosophy... its synthesis of knowledge, works and devotion. By the pure Sankhya alone the combining of works and liberation is contradictory and impossible. By pure Monism alone the permanent continuation of works as a part of Yoga and the indulgence of devotion after perfect knowledge and liberation and union are attained, become impossible or at least irrational and otiose. The Sankhya knowledge of the Gita dissipates ...
... indifferent and dull, That he watched the sun and snow and rain Into sleep himself to lull. He breathed the least even when awake, And sorrow and sacrifice Never knew, nor knowledge nor ignorance, That death is love's price. Even when he was put on the cross of pain Beyond suffering he seemed, Never was a division mid time and timelessness That it be redeemed. ...
... normally need several lives. The other characteristic result is that when the Supermind establishes itself, there is no more ignorance, it is all light and knowledge. Till the mental range, even at its highest heights, it is a mixture of light and darkness, of knowledge and ignorance: there is always an element of doubt, uncertainty or partial perception: there is a groping, a trial and one moves at best... said, up to man it is a natural spontaneous unreflecting unconscious evolution: with man it is conscious, deliberate, wilful evolution. What was being done behind the veil in ignorance will now be done openly in full knowledge. The very first result will be the shortening of the time factor. The conscious process increases the tempo, telescopes into decades or years a process or development that ... it is this Page 12 that will serve as the basis of the new creation and give it its law and constitution. A new world built out of knowledge and vision and luminous power is destined to come, for man is no longer in love with his ignorance, but a divine afflatus is possessing him. The new world has to be based on new foundations. The old world was built from outside with superficial ...
... higher power of awareness and knowledge or any ground to suppose that there are beings greater than man who possess it? Is not this world and must it not be always a world of Ignorance, knowledge partial at the best, all knowledge here relative, pragmatic, indirect and no knowledge either here or anywhere that can be called supreme, direct or absolute? If absolute knowledge there is it must be the sheer... need of endeavour or labour. Mind even though it seeks after knowledge and can sometimes grasp its figure or touch its shadow, is a product of the cosmic Inconscient or of a Half-Conscience-Ignorance; supermind is an eternal Truth-consciousness, a divine Knowledge self-maintained for ever and luminous in its own right beyond all Ignorance. The Emergence of the Superman 76 A god has veiled... of our destiny is already known to us; we have to grow from what we are into a more luminous existence, from pleasure and pain into a purer and vaster and deeper bliss, from our struggling knowledge and ignorance into a spontaneous and boundless light of consciousness, from our fumbling strength and weakness into a sure and all-understanding Power, from division and ego into universality and unity. ...
... cessation leaves behind it. Knowledge and Ignorance Knowledge is always better than ignorance. It makes things possible hereafter if not at the moment, while ignorance actively obstructs and misleads. Who comes into the path of Yoga with full knowledge or even any knowledge? All are ignorant, it is only by Yoga itself that they get the knowledge. Neither knowledge nor anything else is constant... can do the getting of knowledge by its own greatness. The mind in its higher part is aware of being one with the Divine, in all ways, in all things—having that supreme knowledge, it is not disturbed by its own ignorance and impotence in its lower instrumental parts; it looks on all that with a smile and remains happy and luminous with the light of the supreme knowledge. The consciousness... get disturbed. All the values of the mind are constructions of ignorance—it is only when your psychic being comes forward that you have the true knowledge—for your psychic being knows. Knowledge and Mental Silence That [ incessant activity ] is always the difficulty with the mind. It must learn to be silent and let the knowledge come without trying to catch hold of it for its own play. ...
... to experience Ignorance, Ignorance is inescapable. In fact, the experience of Ignorance is itself a sign of awakening to knowledge. What the monistic explanation,—though in fact it is dualism,—wants to say is that there is no Ignorance or no place for Ignorance in the ultimate Reality. Ignorance is operating in the human consciousness. It is man who feels the infliction of Ignorance on himself and... let us see how this Ignorance operates in the universe we know. Imagine the whole cosmos stretched on a vast canvas moving from the Inconscient to Mind in humanity, and let us go back to the beginning,—to the Inconscient. Do we see Ignorance there ? No, we see neither Ignorance nor Knowledge. The first organised element to come out of this Inconscient is Matter. Do we find Ignorance in Matter ? No, because... it is neither conscient nor inconscient. It is, perhaps, negation of both Ignorance and Knowledge. It is like the absence of morality in the animal consciousness which is called amoral. So, the vast stretch of material universe is not subject to the operation of Ignorance, it has no experience or active sense of Ignorance. Next in the vegetable kingdom and the insect-world we find the working ...
... with triple cords of a priori irrational disbelief) must not cry out at once, "Humbug! falsehood!", but suspend judgment until he has the necessary experience and knowledge. To deny in ignorance is no better than to affirm in ignorance. As for the faith-doubt question you evidently give to the word faith a sense and a scope I do not attach to it. I will have to Page 346 write not... all gives something to hold on to amidst the contradictions of an enigmatic universe? If one can get at a knowledge that knows, it is another matter; but so long as we have only an ignorance that argues, well, there is a place still left for faith—even, faith may be a glint from the knowledge that knows, however far off, and meanwhile there is not the slightest doubt that it helps to get things done... self-assertive, but as a part of a hunger for knowledge can be answered, but the "spirit of doubt" is insatiable and unappeasable. I have started writing about Doubt, but even in doing so I am afflicted by the "doubt" whether any amount of writing or of anything else can ever persuade the eternal doubt in man which is the penalty of his native ignorance. In the first place, to write adequately would ...
... necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere. 2 There is no doubt an increasing divergence between the tendencies of the East and the West, the former laying more emphasis on the truth of the Spirit, the ...
... from or at any rate greater and more far-reaching than its own intention. The will of man works in the ignorance by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead as much as they illuminate. His mind is an ignorance striving to erect standards of knowledge, his will an ignorance striving to erect standards of right, and his whole mentality as a result very much a house divided against... mental is but a partial, a modified, a suppressed or half-suppressed figure of the supramental truth, a deformation or a derived and imperfect figure of its greater knowledge. The mind begins with ignorance and proceeds towards knowledge. As an actual fact, in the material universe, it appears out of an initial and universal inconscience which is really an involution of the all-conscient spirit in its... indications and logical or other steps from the known to the unknown like the mind which is a power of the Ignorance. The supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its Page 788 lower, limited or individualised forms has only to bring the latent truth out of itself,—the perception which the old thinkers tried ...
... created. He entering in became the Is here and the May Be there; He became that which is defined and that which has no feature; He became this housed thing and that houseless; He became Knowledge and He became Ignorance; He became Truth and He became false hood. Yea, He became all truth, even whatsoever here exists. Therefore they say of Him that He is Truth. Whereof this is the Scripture. Chapter... of his brooding ____________________ ¹ Or, concentration of force Page 67 Chapter Five He knew Knowledge for the Eternal. For from Knowledge alone, it appears, are these creatures born and being born they live by Knowledge and to Knowledge they go hence and return. And when he had known this, he came again to Varuna his father and said, "Lord, teach me the Eternal."... linking; electricity is the joint of the linking. Thus far concerning the Shining Fires. Next concerning the Knowledge. The Master is the first form, the disciple is the latter form. Knowledge is the linking. Exposition is the joint of the linking. Thus far concerning the Knowledge. Next concerning Progeny. The mother is the first form; the father is the latter form. Progeny is the linking ...
... is the Divineʼs; compared to Godʼs, man's knowledge is mere ignorance. When the oracle of Apollo and Delphi48 called Socrates the wisest of living men, Socrates set out to disprove that statement, convinced that he really knew nothing. In the end, Socrates discovered that his so-called "wisdomˮ lay in the simple fact that he was conscious of his own ignorance: to know that you do not know is the first... opinions and prevent free discussion in science, art and politics. In his life-long search for wisdom, Socrates had always exposed those who, without knowledge, claimed to have found the truth; in his eyes, ignorance disguised as knowledge is mere arrogance and the epitome of falsehood. Even when it became evident that he would be sentenced to death, he did not surrender to his accusers. As Socrates... criticizes this theory of knowledge as recollection, by pointing out that even though the knowledge of logic and mathematics could perhaps be demonstrated as knowledge by recollection, the Socratic argument is wholly inapplicable to empirical knowledge. Russell is an empiricist and considers that all knowledge is derived from the experience of the senses, except the knowledge of logic and mathematics ...
... Such are the four austerities; and, as for the liberations, they must follow as a necessary consequence. The tapasya of Love must compel the elimination of suffering, that of Knowledge the eclipse of ignorance, that of Power the extinction of desire, and that of Beauty the arrest of bodily deformations. To put it all in positive terms, the four austerities must lead to the apprehension of... consciousness. Such austerity is the true Page 540 tapasya, and this can take the fourfold forms of Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. The gradation is from Love above to Beauty below, and accordingly we may look upon the ascent from Beauty - through Power and Knowledge - to Love as the progress from the root, through the plant's foliage and flowers, to the fruit as the culminating ... its infinite shades of significance, and this can be achieved only if the speaker acquires, through the tapasya of Knowledge, the power of the Word: Be silent in mind and remain unwavering in the true attitude of constant aspiration towards the All-Wisdom, the All-Knowledge, the All-Consciousness. Then, if your aspiration is sincere, if it is not a veil for your ambition to do well and to ...
... Avesta and the Bible, and in the utterances of the mystics, is a supra-intellectual knowledge, not born of reason and reflection, but self-revealed to the silent and surrendered mind, and it is this knowledge that is instinct with Truth, and not what we call knowledge in the pretentious ignorance of our struggling mind. In the Integral Yoga, the surrender of the mind as, indeed, of every other part... always on the basis of a separative ignorance; and if is, therefore, constitutionally incapable of arriving at the truth of existence "which is a truth of unity and totality. In life it is an agent of organisation and action, but a lame and limited Agent, organising and acting in the shadow of its seeking ignorance, and not in the self-existent light of knowledge. I propose to go into greater details... e, and his first decisive step towards knowledge. Page 103 THE TRIPLE SURRENDER Man is composed of body, life, soul and mind. Of these four components, the soul, which is made of the Love and Delight of the Supreme, is eternally surrendered to Him. Nothing can wean it from Him, nothing can seduce it into the devious ways of ignorance. It has no desire and no ego; and it does ...
... past intimations, 426; founding the Life Divine upon earth, 427; world-existence as Shiva's dance, 427; origin of ignorance, 428; lila, tapas, 429ff; Ignorance & Nescience, 430; origin and nature of error, 430; good and evil, 432; the turn towards Knowledge, 433; from Ignorance to Knowledge, 434; Karma and rebirth, 434; dynamics of spirituality, 434; ascent towards Supermind, 436ff; steps of ascent,... the essential message, 464; Arjuna-Krishna, Nara-Narayana, 464; existential situation, 464; three arches, works-knowledge-love, 464; wide range of comprehension, 465; central argument, 465; the idea of sacrifice, 466; Krishna as friend and avatar, 466; dual role of avatar, 466; King-Knowledge, King-science, 467; visvarupa and after, 467; the supreme exhortation, 468; message of the Gita, 468... 572ff; move under Aliens Act, 382; "seat of sadhana", 383; higher planes of consciousness, 388; clue from Vivekananda, 389; exploration of Inconscience, 391-2; synthesis of experience and knowledge, 393-4; the coming "golden age", 393; Paul Richard's tribute, 395; Alexandra David-Neel's visit, 395; Mirra Richard's visit, 395; assurance to her, 398,410; decision to launch Arya and Revue, ...
... turning-point of the whole movement.” 21 And: “A many-sided ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of the consciousness of man the mental being … Truth is relative to us because our knowledge is surrounded by ignorance … On the surface we are still an ego figuring self, an ignorance turning into knowledge, a will labouring towards true force, a desire seeking for the... of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes. And one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface; only then can one have knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem.” 9 Sri Aurobindo’s... the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” 1 “Scientific explanations flounder and possibilities multiply when we ask how the first cell arose on earth. Competing theories abound – which seems always the case when we know very little ...
... struggle and must be leading towards that higher state of things. It is leading the individual, certainly, and the world, presumably, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot... guidance can become evident only if we go behind appearances and begin to understand the forces at work and the way of their working and their secret significance. After all, real knowledge – even scientific knowledge – comes by going behind the surface phenomena to their hidden process and causes. It is quite obvious that this world is full of suffering, and afflicted with transience to a degree... Mayavadis a very powerful one when they hold (with Gita which says that this world is “anitya” and “asukha” [transient and unhappy]) that this world is doomed to falsehood and suffering because true knowledge or bliss cannot flower in such a barren soil under the condition terrestrial life had formulated? So why not pronounce a swift exit out of it as “a consummation devoutly to be wished?” ...
... defect of will and knowledge unable to master its world, must fall into incapacity of possessive delight and therefore into suffering. Self-ignorance is therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence, and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance." 45 Sevenfold Ignorance If this ignorance is analyzed fully... which is the field of evolutionary Ignorance groping towards the recovery of all that is involved in it or recovering all the Knowledge which is at work within, behind and above it. In the light of this conception, ignorance cannot be regarded as the creator of differentiations but only as a creator of the sense of separateness and the sense of division. Ignorance is the parent of the error and illusion... Truth- Page 54 Consciousness." 44 The conclusion at which we arrive is that the Ignorance is the Mind separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge, which gives a false rigidity in a mistaken appearance of a position. Hence, there is an element of error in all human knowledge, and as Sri Aurobindo states: "Similarly our will, ignorant of the rest of the all-will, must ...
... domains of knowledge like the physical domains of knowledge stress the phenomena of multiplicity rather than those of unity. The subliminal consciousness is, indeed, a vaster field of knowledge than the field of the knowledge of Matter, but still it is a domain of mixed Ignorance and Know ledge, considering that by knowledge is meant primarily the knowledge of unity or oneness, and by ignorance is meant... great mixtures of knowledge and ignorance that are found in the domains in which occultism normally dwells. Occultism provides a very large field of self-knowledge and world-knowledge; it enables the individual to go behind his own surface consciousness and also penetrate behind the appearances of the physical world; occultism provides an entry and even mastery of the knowledge and powers of the inner... discrimination. As pointed out above, subliminal consciousness is the domain of Knowledge — Ignorance, since even though it opens up vaster ranges of cognition and action, it still belongs to the domain of multiplicity and therefore subject to the ignorance of the underlying unity and of the essential knowledge of the true relationship between the individual consciousness, universal consciousness ...
... connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. According to Sri Aurobindo, Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities but leaves it to formulate them in a movement. But this formulation is done by the Overmind by an awareness of things which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the ignorance. Overmind and Supermind... true intuitions differ from these effective but insufficient counterfeits in their substance of light, their operation, their method of knowledge. As Sri Aurobindo points out: "The intellectual rapidities are dependent on awakenings of the basic mental ignorance to mental figures and representations of truth that may be quite valid in their own field and for their own purpose but are not necessarily... Supermind. This cosmic Mind is not a mind as we know it, but, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, "an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite ...
... an original intensity determinant of all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Over- mind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of knowledge-ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of... infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality." It "connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance." Page 90 Such an ascent of consciousness, it is often feared, would mean renunciation of, or at least indifference to, life. That such an ascent to a higher consciousness... law. The claim of science is (or rather was) that the knowledge of the external world which it obtains by using the sense and by experiments is the only valid knowledge : it is real in opposition to the perception of the world by poetry, ar etc.. which it characterised as " unreal, " "imaginative, "impractical". In fact, the knowledge of the world which science gives is only one side of Reality ...
... of Providence, this self-knowledge was denied to the self and an effort was imposed upon the instruments of nature to acquire the knowledge of the Self. There "A doubt corroded even the means to think". Distrust of the power of mind arose and all knowledge acquired by it turned out to be undependable frauds "Or assets valueless in Truth's treasury". This state of ignorance which reigned in the cosmos... " The knowledge that man has to acquire is not to be acquired from outside. It is already there within us "hid behind our minds". It has in fact fallen asleep and "To evoke, to give it form is Nature's task". This cannot be done hastily because the whole world-ignorance is to be liquidated and "Only a slow advance the earth can bear". At the beginning, this mind considers its ignorance as the measuring... investiture of intuitive light". Page 212 One day, in the wake of this higher intuitive knowledge will come "On lustrous seas from the still rapt Alone To illumine the deep heart of self and things. A timeless knowledge it shall bring to Mind, Its aim to life, to Ignorance its close". He saw that above this human mind there was a region of bright Light from where two ...
... guidance there is must be given under these conditions of opposition and struggle... It is leading the individual, certainly,... towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot... burden of his worry-racked life to the omnipotent omnipresent Divine Consciousness? Is it not foolish on his part not to do so? Yes, it is indeed an absurd folly and it arises out of obscuring ignorance and disabling lack of faith and trust in the Divine. It is worth recalling in this connection the luminous words the Mother addressed to the students of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the year 1958:... the Divine. Sri Aurobindo has made this point clear in a significant paragraph of his Synthesis of Yoga: "The work itself is at first determined by the best light we cancommand in our ignorance. It is that which we conceive as the thing that should be don e. And whether it be shaped by our sense of duty , by our feeling for our fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others ...
... skirted, surrounded by a half-lit ignorance. It is only half-lighted, that is why it is ignorance. If it were fully lit there would not be ignorance, there would be only knowledge. Ignorance is incomplete knowledge; ignorance is not to be confused as something opposed or contrary to knowledge. What is contrary to knowledge is falsehood. Ignorance is knowledge in the making. This is by the way... urged by this insistent movement to wake Ignorance. Sri Aurobindo explains that this is not to be taken merely as a metaphor; for him the Inconscient is very real, as concrete as anything else. This Inconscient has to be disturbed, goaded, prodded into action, into some awareness. There has to emerge some consciousness before there can be Ignorance, maybe a partial consciousness, a semi-consciousness... travelled back, Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate, Back to the labour and stress of mortal days, Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep. As she wakes up, the body calls up other faculties. Her spirit which had travelled far elsewhere during the sleep of the night returns and takes up the burden of life, its ignorance and its fate, ready for the ...
... Immortal within and in the world, to dwell in unity with the Soul of the universe, to rise in consciousness, knowledge, will, love, spiritual delight to oneness with the supreme Godhead, to live in the highest spiritual nature with the individual and natural being delivered from shortcoming and ignorance and made a conscious instrument for the works of the divine Shakti is the perfection of which humanity... forms, endless imperfections, perversions, self-losings, self-findings, seekings after norm and rule before it arrives at self-discovery and perfection. Our nature here is a mixed weft of knowledge and ignorance, of truth and falsehood, of success and failure, of right and wrong, of finding and losing, of sin and virtue. It is always the Swabhava that is looking for self-expression and self-finding... is true that in this birth men fall very largely into one of four types, the man of knowledge, the man of power, the productive vital man, the man of rude labour and service. These are not fundamental divisions, but stages of self-development in our manhood. The human being starts with a sufficient load of ignorance and inertia; his first state is one of rude toil enforced on his animal indolence by ...
... is seen in Book I Canto 4 (The Secret Knowledge) where Sri Aurobindo describes the play of the Two in One, of Purusha and Prakriti, Being and Becoming. Here the difficulty is not one of language, but of the thought itself which is paradoxical and subtly metaphysical: There are Two who are One and play in many worlds; In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met And light... printing trade: Then in Illusion's occult factory And in the Inconscient's magic printing house Tom were the formats of the primal Night And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance. Alive, breathing a deep spiritual breath, Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code And the articles of the bound soul's contract, Falsehood gave back to Truth her tortured... And in their place grew luminous characters. 3 Sri Aurobindo's verse touches occasionally the polar opposite of poetic words in lines like the following: Imposing schemes of knowledge on the Vast They clamped to syllogisms of finite thought The free logic of an infinite consciousness, Grammared the hidden rhythms of Nature's dance, Critiqued the plot of the ...
... intimate necessity to each other, we come to understand existence itself and all that in the appearances of the world now puzzles our ignorance. Our self-knowledge abolishes none of these things, it abolishes only our ignorance and those circumstances proper to the ignorance which made us bound and subject to the egoistic determinations of our nature. When we get back to our true being, the ego falls... Scripture, it is with the large being that happiness comes. The ego is by its nature a smallness of being; it brings contraction of the consciousness and with the contraction limitation of knowledge, disabling ignorance, — confinement and a diminution of power and by that diminution incapacity and weakness, — scission of oneness and by that scission disharmony and failure of sympathy and love and un... individual being of ours is that by which ignorance is possible to self-conscious mind, but it is also that by which liberation into the spiritual being is possible and the enjoyment of divine immortality. It is not the Eternal in His transcendence or in His cosmic being who arrives at this immortality; it is the individual who rises into self-knowledge, in him it is possessed and by him it is ...
... is the Divine's; compared to God's, man's knowledge is mere ignorance. When the oracle of Apollo at Delphi 1 called Socrates the wisest of living men, Socrates set out to disprove that statement, convinced that he really knew nothing. In the end, Socrates discovered that his so-called "wisdom " lay in the simple fact that he was conscious of his own ignorance: to know that you do not know is the first... diverse opinions and prevent free discussion in science, art and politics. In his life-long search for wisdom, Socrates had always exposed those who, without knowledge, claimed to have found the truth; in his eyes, ignorance disguised as knowledge is mere arrogance and the epitome of falsehood. Even when it became evident that he would be sentenced to death, he did not surrender to his accusers. As Socrates... that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable. This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree, and this the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also ...
... ...............] the stress is not yet a bondage. There is a limited working of being, knowledge & power, which may ignore for the time being Page 723 the wider being, knowledge & action & thus generate ignorance, but is not fatally ignorant of it & is not therefore bound by its self-chosen ignorance. The gods know themselves as one, as Purushas of the universal Deva even when they act... Dawn & Night, or from our point of view, Knowledge&Ignorance, Chittam&Achittam,Vidya & Avidya, consciousness illumined in the form it has taken as in the seer, consciousness dark & involved in the form it has taken as in the clod & less rigidly in the tree. For it is evident that in the highest principles of Sat, Chit, Ananda, there is universal knowledge, unlimited, inherent in the self-luminous... every action is a right knowledge of that action. This knowledge he seeks to bring out, to make conscious in his mind. But mortal knowledge is sense knowledge, a deduction from forms of things; divine knowledge is self-existent knowledge, spontaneously manifested by the identity in consciousness of the knower with the thing known. Mortal knowledge is derived in nature, deferred in time, indirect in means; ...
... abundance, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge, half-ignorance which is the stamp of his kind, or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the boundary of the mental circle” 4 : Nonetheless, in The Life Divine he also writes: “It may be conceded that what... on, in a letter to a disciple. In the Arya he had already written: “Emerging from the periods of eclipse and the nights of ignorance which overtake humanity, we assume always that we are instituting new knowledge. In reality, we are continually rediscovering the knowledge and repeating the achievement of the ages that have gone before us, – receiving again out of the ‘Inconscient’ the light that... evolution, of our planet Earth and its evolution, and therefore of the universe, can one begin to grasp what the present transition from “the lower hemisphere” of Ignorance, Falsehood and Darkness to “the higher hemisphere” of Knowledge, Truth and Light actually means. It is often thought that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s view of evolution was straightforwardly linear. But simple linearity, like ...
... 'darkness', the realised soul employs his inner power of vision (dṛk-śakti) which has no dependance upon outer light, and discovers a new ineffable luminosity to which light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, vidyā and avidyā are both outer veils or coverings. This plunge signifies a new way of dying which has no kindredness to ordinary death. It is the 'vaivasvata mṛtyu ', the 'solar death'... goal set before the terrestrial being called "man" is to establish a divine life in a human body on the terrestrial plane itself. And that surely necessitates the perfect manifestation of divine knowledge-power-bliss here upon earth itself and not elsewhere in some supraphysical world. But surely this is not possible in the short span of a single human life. And it is for this reason that our... constituted of five "Koshas" or sheaths and envelopes, such as, "Annamaya Kosha" (material envelope), "Prạnamaya Kosha" (vital envelope), "Manomaya Kosha" (mental envelope), "Vijnanamaya Kosha" (Knowledge sheath), and "Anandamaya Kosha" (Bliss sheath). He possesses also for his self-expression and manifestation many instruments and vehicles; such as, his body, his life, his mind, etc. And these ...
... widening of the world. Then, sometimes, we pause for one second, the mirror turns over and we glimpse the whole other side— the dark half of truth, 35 as Sri Aurobindo called it. “He became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and the falsehood," 36 say the Upanishads—And we realize that everything is a single Truth in motion down to the most microscopic detail, a single Good being fulfilled... plot, a laboratory. The things I work out in it, are then extended outside. 14 And all this took place in complete silence, we could almost say with the complete ignorance of the “laboratory subjects," and that very ignorance was Sri Aurobindo s best asset and the best condition for the effectiveness of his work. The “disciples” did not think of themselves as disciples, and as they did not know... overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions. ...He overcomes the mind and its habits; he does not live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions. 29 That is a tall order! In a country that had been dedicated to ecstatic contemplation for twenty-five hundred years, Sri Aurobindo ...
... of half-truth that becomes creative error, this emergent Knowledge that is converted by its plunge into the inconscience of Matter and its slow partial return towards itself into an effective Ignorance. For here in the world, though the Gnosis is there secretly behind existence, what acts is not the Gnosis but a magic of Knowledge-Ignorance, an incalculable yet apparently mechanical Overmind Maya... the embodiment of the Transcendence. In the cosmic consciousness there remains at the end a hiatus, an unequal equation of a highest Knowledge that can liberate but not effectuate with a Power seeming to use a limited Knowledge or masking itself with a surface Ignorance that can create but creates imperfection or a perfection transient, limited and in fetters. On one side there is a free undynamic Witness... ignorant manifestation. The eternal Truth can manifest its truths in Time; it can create in Knowledge and not only in Inconscience and Ignorance. A divine Descent no less than an ascent to the Divine is possible; there is a prospect of the bringing down of a future perfection and a present deliverance. As his knowledge widens, it becomes for him more and more evident that it was this for which the Master ...
... determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Over- soul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite... infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality". It "connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance". — Life Divine. "The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness— that epithet would more accurately apply to the supramental and the Sachchidananda Consciousness—though... the Divine, to seek his intervention and to create a possibility for the power of the Divine to act in life. As to the origin of pain Narad says that it is the inevitable consequence of Ignorance: "Where Ignorance is, suffering too must come". Pain results from an incapacity to bear outer contacts but there can be a change, in or a development of this capacity. The answer to the question whether pain ...
... the smoke of human passion and self-will, so Surya the divine Knowledge lies concealed and unattainable in the night and darkness, is enveloped and contained in the ignorance and error of the ordinary human existence. The Seers by the power of truth in their thoughts discover this Sun lying in the darkness, they liberate this knowledge, this power of undivided and all-embracing vision, this eye of... increasing wideness of his existence so that even with our incomplete knowledge we shall grow in our being towards the gods. By the godheads he will foster our knowledge and lead us towards the universal formation of them in the undivided consciousness of the infinite Aditi which we have chosen as our goal. All that we have done in our ignorance, in our divided and oppressed discernment of things, in our mere... its luminous world." In this upward movement they cleave away from us the evil and the ignorance. These are they who "cross beyond into the sinlessness and the undivided existence". Therefore they are "the gods who deliver". For the enemy, the assailant, the doer of Page 494 harm their knowledge becomes as if snares widespread, for to him light is a cause of blindness, the divine movement ...
... must be that consciousness formulating itself. All other knowledge is consciousness oblivious of itself and striving to return to its own awareness of itself and its contents; it is self-ignorance labouring to transform itself back into self-knowledge." 38 We thus see that spiritual knowledge, as distinguished from mental knowledge, is not made up of conceptual thoughts or adroitly formulated... indeed a secondary and by no means an indispensable process. And in its form of verbal thought, it can almost be considered, as Sri Aurobindo has put it, "a concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance, because that Ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent and manifold implications except through the clarifying precision of significant sounds;... things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge." 80 The Overmind links the lower hemisphere of knowledge-Ignorance with the supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, but at the same time veils from our sight the greater Truth of the 77. The Life Divine, pp. 946-47 ...
... evolution proceeds the Creator wishes man, his highest creation, to take a greater and greater initiative and not be a child eternally spoon-fed by the mother. She says: His knowledge he disguised as Ignorance, His Good he sowed in Evil's monstrous bed, Made error a door by which Truth could enter in, His plant of bliss watered with Sorrow's tears. 6 The Creator expressed... of infinity, Knowledge is with thee, Truth speaks through thy words The light of things beyond shines in thy eyes. But where is thy strength to conquer Time and Death? 58 56 Ibid., pp. 656-57. 57 Ibid.,p.663. 58 Ibid. Page 462 There is a challenge to Savitri in these words of Death. He says to her that while she has knowledge and light, where... where is her strength to conquer Death and Time? Without such strength of what use are Knowledge and Light? Death throws out a more powerful challenge when he addresses her thus: Hast thou God's force to build heaven's values here? For truth and knowledge are an idle gleam... If Might comes not to give to Truth her right.... O human claimant to immortality, Reveal thy power, ...
... imperfect mind of man a consciousness that passes out of the mind's ignorance and possesses truth as its inherent right and nature. There is a Truth-Consciousness as it is called in the Veda, a Supermind, as I have termed it, possessing Knowledge, not having to seek after it and constantly miss it. In one of the Upanishads a being of knowledge is stated to be the next step above the mental being; into that... necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere. But what shall be that ideal and that goal? That depends on our conception of the realities of life and the supreme Reality. ... record for any people. Your University can take its high position as a centre of light and learning, knowledge and culture which can train the youth of Andhra to be worthy of their forefathers: the great past should lead to a future as great or even greater. Not only Science but Art, not only book-knowledge and information but growth in culture and character are parts of a true education; to help the individual ...
... state of Knowledge Page 85 and the state of Ignorance, (chittim achittim chinavad vividvan), and discovers the means by which ignorance can be overcome. Upholding of the thought of the truth in all the principles of our being, the diffusion of Truth in all parts of our being, and the birth of activity of all the godheads, — this is the quintessence of the means of attaining Knowledge, which... the individual and universe. There is also the idea of one god who presents to us various forms, names, powers, personalities of his godhead. There is, thirdly, the distinction between the Knowledge and Ignorance, the greater truth of an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood and mortal existence. Fourthly, there is the conception of the discipline of an inward growth of man from the physical through... Yaska has spoken of several schools of interpretation of the Vedas. He has declared that there is a triple knowledge and therefore a triple meaning of the Vedic hymns, a sacrificial Page 81 or ritualistic knowledge, knowledge of the gods and finally a spiritual knowledge. He has also said that the last is the true sense and when one gets it the others drop or are cut away. According ...
... a separative- consciousness which becomes what we as individuals. experience as Ignorance. This Ignorance is due to exclusive concentration : that is,. concentration which puts forward a part of self and holds back the rest of the self-knowledge behind. Thus a self— imitation takes place which gives rise to Ignorance; the true Being is not clouded but kept behind by the exclusive concentration.... subconscient level which ends in the Inconscient, a waking outward-turned consciousness which is capable of partial knowledge and a superconscient level which is the attainable potentiality. The infinite Brahman holds all of these in its integral being—it holds both knowledge and Ignorance, Vidya and Avidya. At one pole of its being the Alone, the Timeless Self, the One immutable, is present with its... must be the result of the will of .the Supreme. In fact, the Upanishad speaks of the Divine will as the creator of the world—and therefore of ignorance. The character of this Ignorance in man is the separation of the knower from the object of knowledge—separation of the many from the One of whom they are only variations based on fundamental unity. This division of the subjective consciousness has ...
... created, He entering in became the Is here and the May Be there; He became that which is defined and that which hath no feature; He became this housèd thing and that houseless; He became Knowledge and He became Ignorance; He became Truth and He became falsehood. Yea He Page 220 became all truth, even whatsoever here existeth. Therefore they say of Him that He is Truth. Whereof this is the Scripture... तदप्येष श्लोको भवति ॥ Knowledge spreadeth the feast of sacrifice and knowledge spreadeth also the feast of works; all the gods offer adoration to him as to Brahman and the Elder of the Universe. For if one worship Brahman as the knowledge and if one swerve not from it neither falter, then he casteth sin from him in this body and tasteth all desire. And this Self of Knowledge is the soul in the body... पितरमुपससार । अधीहि भगवो ब्रह्मेति । तं होवाच । तपसा ब्रह्म विजिज्ञासस्व । तपो ब्रह्मेति । स तपोऽतप्यत । स तपस्तप्त्वा ॥ He knew Knowledge for the Eternal. For from Knowledge alone, it appeareth, are these creatures born and being born they live by Knowledge and to Knowledge they go hence and return. And when he had known this, he came again to Varouna his father and said "Lord, teach me the Eternal ...
... away from this shore of ignorance and craving and death, does not do the return trip; consequently, whatever gets left behind remains in the same state of suffering. In fact, this ‘behind’ remains totally dismissed—as in the Vedantic argument in which we cannot know ignorance while we are in ignorance and no more there exists ignorance, and its world, when we have the knowledge of Reality. Everything... is a projection of Page 52 our ignorance on the unseverable reality of the One. This separateness or this division is an appearance and it has really no foundation to stand upon. In knowledge distinctions totally disappear. It is only by the power of Maya that prevail these manynesses which have no substantiality of their own. When knowledge gets limited only to the bodily existence, then... not get, like a silent witness, entangled in knowledge or ignorance. Like the moon devoid of phases on the Amavasya or no-moon night, is he unknown or unseen. His condition is that of a dried-up sea without a wave, without shape or form. Wakefulness has gone out but the dream-condition has not yet arrived; illusory perception has declined but the knowledge of the Self is still far away. In such unknowingness ...
... Truly speaking, I have no opinion . According to a vision of truth, everything is still terribly mixed, a more or less favourable combination of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, and so long as decisions are made and action is undertaken according to opinions, it will always be like that. We want to give the example of an action that is undertaken in accordance... because it will be necessary for your ultimate good that you feel the wrath of God; He will be Kali for the worshippers of Kali and Beatitude for the Bhakta. And He will be the All-knowledge of the seeker of Knowledge, the transcendent Impersonal of the illusionist; He will be atheist with the atheist and the love of the lover. He will be brotherly and close, a friend always faithful, always ready... My way of seeing is somewhat different. For my consciousness the whole life upon earth, including the human life and all its mentality, is a mass of vibrations, mostly vibrations of falsehood, ignorance and disorder, in which are more and more at work vibrations of Truth and Harmony coming from the higher regions and pushing their way through the resistance. In this vision the ego-sense and the ...
... progress there has been, it is in a circle, at most perhaps in a widening circle. … Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ignorance which is the stamp of his kind, or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle. ” (LD 831-32) “We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position... only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance.” (LY 212) “Earth is the foundation and all the [typal] worlds are on the earth, and to imagine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some other... spiritual genius, of which modern science has no knowledge. In the introduction to Le Passage de la matière à la vie selon le Bouddha Gauthama (the transition from matter to life according to the Buddha Gauthama) by Emmy Guittès, the publisher writes: “This little book is a real revelation, for it changes everything one thought one knew about the ignorance of the past centuries! The composition of the ...
... Vaishwamitra (IV: 18:2): Wholly consume our inner foe, consume the self-expression of the enemy who would war against us, O lord of the riches, consume, conscious in knowledge, the powers of ignorance; let them range wide thy ageless marching fires. 26 Or Virupa Angirasa (VIII:43:26): Smiting away the foes and things that hurt, burning the Rakshasas, on... He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree. Even in this labour and dolour of Ignorance, On the hard perilous ground of difficult earth, In spite of death and evil circumstance A will to live persists, a joy to be. 13 Death remains unconvinced. He tells Savitri that... constantly being performed in the heart of each one of us, and in the heart of the cosmos, this Yajna of Savitri is unique in its triple dimension of the Supreme. If her Yajna is meant for dissolving ignorance and death, that in the evolutionary manifestation divinity may inhabit itself in this house of Matter, ours is to grow in the sun-bright splendour of that divinity itself. Hers is the transcendental ...
... mind”, writes Sri Aurobindo. “Civilisation can never be safe so long as, confining the cultured mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom a tremendous mass of ignorance, a multitude, a proletariat. Either knowledge must enlarge itself from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant night from below. Still more must it be unsafe if it allows enormous numbers of men to exist... a vast domain of possible knowledge. It is of supreme importance for the human spirit to be free to sound the depths of inner or subliminal reality, of spiritual and of what is still superconscient reality, and not to immure itself in the physical mind and its narrow domain of objective external solidities; for in that way alone can there come liberation from the Ignorance in which our mentality dwells... necessary for the pursuit and realisation of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginning obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.” 56 Sri Aurobindo was asked for a message to be broadcast by the Trichinopoly station of All India Radio on 15 August 1947, the day of India’s independence ...
... A million faces wears her knowledge here And every face is turbaned with a doubt. 148 Our world's comparison to a gaol is beautifully given in the following lines: A gaol is this immense material world. Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law, At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace. A grey tribunal of the Ignorance, An Inquisition of the priests... silver-grey expanse, Where Day and Night had wedded and were one... A coalition of uncertainties... On a ground reserved for doubt and reasoned guess, A rendezvous of Knowledge with Ignorance. 151 Quite different is the picture given of Aswapati when he reaches the final part of his Sadhana and feels the presence of the Divine Mother. Intoxicated as with nectarous... Savitri, especially while dealing with Aswapati's Yoga and his travelling in the other worlds, is as yet unfathomable for the average human mind of today. The knowledge he has utilised as the basis of that poetry is the Yogic knowledge which has yet not become the common possession of human consciousness. That poetry will be appreciated better when, some time in future, humanity — or at least ...
... struggle and must be leading towards that higher state of things. It is leading the individual certainly, and the world presumably, towards the higher state but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be... inclined to believe in or at least to attach any importance to this knowledge. People, now-a-days, seek the explanation for everything in their ignorant reason, their surface experience and in outside happenings. They do not see the hidden forces and inner causes which were well-known and visualised in the traditional Indian and Yogic knowledge. Of course, these forces find their point d' appui in the ... despondency and struggle. Even in the mind and vital of the men of the strongest mental and vital faith there are periods when the knowledge in the psychic gets covered up — but it persists behind the veil. In you, in spite of your difficulties there is always the knowledge or intuition in the soul that started you on the way. I have been pressing on you the need of faith because the assent has again ...
... necessary for the pursuit and realization of a common ideal, the destined goal, the fulfilment towards which Nature in her beginnings obscurely set out and must in an increasing light of knowledge replacing her first ignorance constantly persevere.’ In the same message he also wrote: ‘There has been a tendency in some minds to dwell on the spirituality or mysticism of the East and the materialism of the... achievement or man the head or leader … A new humanity would then be a race of mental beings on the Earth and in the earthly body but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light which could even be a subordinate action of the supermind or Truth-Consciousness and in any case capable of the full possibilities of... Supramental which he called the Mind of Light – probably because pure consciousness is also pure light, something we do not see or experience because we are living literally in the darkness of the Ignorance. The next step in the avataric yoga we will see soon. In November 1949 the Mother met her son André, who had come to Pondicherry on his first visit; their last meeting dated from 1916, when André ...
... appearance of ignorance there is the Divine Presence that works in silence. And yet evolution is not really a process that denies the Light or that intends to perpetuate ignorance. It is a gradual growth towards a supreme knowledge. It is because of this fact that evolution leads, as it is intended to lead, man towards self-transcendence. Aswapathy arrived at the frontiers of knowledge and saw vast... remains confined to ignorance. But if he can take his stand on the Spirit, he can have the knowledge of the Reality and the Spirit's working in Time. It is possible for man to become a Prophet and a Seer. It is when man is so confined in his shell of ignorance that Divine begins to descend or gods come down from above and press upon the human consciousness with their full knowledge of world-purpose and... All the suppressed powers of the subconscient and the ignorant instruments of Nature began to blossom into manifestation in him. Thus, was he released from ignorance. Knowledge of the Divine poured upon him from above and world-knowledge welled out from within "Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's." All his actions sprang out of Light and all his thoughts referred to the True ...
... sense that it is the highest knowledge to which the Ignorance can attain, but the knowledge is still divided and so can be a knowledge of parts and aspects of the Truth, not the integral knowledge. As such it can be misused and turned into falsehood by the Mind. When can one make an attempt at the Supermind? One has to go by stages and to reach and be conscious on the... if any knowledge comes, it must be from above or as a part of the ascending movement. When you get the true intuitive plane, there will be no need for instructions or questions as to how to do sadhana. The sadhana will do itself under the light of the intuition. It is only the supramental that is all Knowledge. All below that from Overmind to Matter is Ignorance - an Ignorance... physical mind. This mind, since it is still undeveloped, is moved by the ordinary nature and its ignorance. Page 198 Is there no way to prevent my mind from being removed or falling neutral? It can come only by farther development and the activity of another kind of knowledge communicating itself to the physical and taking up gradually the functions of the mind in ...
... offerings to the gods & to do all this as soul powers expressing the thing desired Page 428 in the knowledge, not in the ignorance. The Aswins are the gods of vital Strength & Joy. Veridical Rupa Rupa of the ear—(karna = Sruti); interpreted, Sruti, inspirational knowledge has to act so as to lead back the environmental nature to drishti in the trikaldrishti. This very soon began to... God. So long as there is ignorance, the tapas may be exercised in the confidence that it is a means of God's workings even when the event is to be the opposite of the result attempted; but in the present stage this rule no longer satisfies as a rule of action. It is evident that there is a movement towards the renunciation of preferential Tapas not in accordance with knowledge. It is not likely however... time vijnana will be progressively & finally perfected. N.B. It is a curious fact that the physical knowledge received by the body through the annamaya Atman & the pranakosha is often truer, if at all illumined, than the mental knowledge; on the other hand the responses of the prana to knowledge are more erratic than those of the mind. Page 396 Other sortileges confirming the sense of ...
... finite & fleeting? Does not the charm of phenomena disappear with the advent of this supreme knowledge & is it possible to busy ourselves with the phenomenal when its attraction & apparent necessity are removed? Is not persistence in life caused by ignorance and possible only if there is persistence in ignorance? Must we not abandon the world, if we would possess God? forsake Maya if we would become one... meaning of the words has been therefore the first rule of my exegesis. Vidya & Avidya are plain words, with a well-ascertained sense; I cannot turn aside from it to interpret them as knowledge of the gods & ignorance. Sambhuti, asambhuti, vinasha are words with fixed meanings; my interpretation must arise directly & simply from those meanings. The rhythm and metre of the Upanishads, the balance of... bhuya iva te tamo ya u vidyayam ratah. Both these sentences of gloom have weighed upon us; we have divided ourselves into the exclusive seekers after the unconditioned knowledge & the exclusive lingerers in the phenomenal ignorance. We have made the life divine well nigh impossible in the world, possible only in remote hermitage, desolate forest or lonely mountain. We have not known the harmony which ...
... sufficient yogic knowledge to put it in its place. Finally, how without inner knowledge or experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of others ? I have often said that discrimination is not only perfectly admissible but indispensable in spiritual experience. But it must be a discrimination founded on knowledge, not a reasoning founded on ignorance. Otherwise you tie... point with triple cords of a priori irrational disbelief) must not cry out at once "Hum bug! falsehood!" but suspend judgment until he has the necessary experience and knowledge. To deny in ignorance is no better than to affirm in ignorance. If your method h saved you from quack gurus, that shows that everything this world has its uses, doubt and denial also, but it does prove that doubt and denial are... Page 59 answers must be such as Ramakrishna gave and such as I try to give, answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to co-ordinate its ignorance; still less can there be a placing of the Divine or the Divine Truth before the judgment of the intellect to be condemned or acquitted by that authority—for ...
... corrupted and misused, as Love and Knowledge too are corrupted and misused, Power is divine and put here for a divine use. Shakti, will, Power is the driver of the worlds and whether it be Knowledge-Force or Love-Force or Life-Force or Action-Force or Body-Force, is always spiritual in its origin and divine in its character. It is the use made of it in the Ignorance by brute, man or Titan that has to... in all men and overrule their actions and their works." 133 Indeed God is not outside His world, He did not "create" the world – He became the world, as the Upanishad says: "He became knowledge and ignorance, He became the truth and the falsehood.... He became all this whatsoever that is." ( Taittiriya Upanishad II.6) "This whole world is filled with beings who are Page 140 His members... Force, without Her we are prisoners of a dazzling Void – we must integrate both within a fulfilled world. "Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone," says the Isha Upanishad (9). The Supramental is, above all, a power – a stupendous power. It is the direct power of the Spirit in Matter. All consciousness ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.