... ultimate truth & source of freedom. It is this ultimate conclusion that gives to the Vedantic conception of Causality and Law of Nature an entirely different force and essential meaning from the vast generalisation of mechanical Energy popularised by modern Science. Law of Nature is to Science the tyranny of a self-existent habit in mechanical WorldForce which Intelligence, the indulged & brilliant... The Life Divine [Draft B] Isha Upanishad Chapter V: The Soul, Causality and Law of Nature. [word] - word(s) omitted by the author or lost through damage to the manuscript that are required by grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors What then of this causality that we see everywhere? What then of this law and fixed process in all... of all human activities? How can the supposed freedom of the soul be reconciled with the actual despotism in fact of an ordered Cosmic Energy? Vedanta does not deny either Law of Causality or Law of Nature nor their fixity nor their imperative control over individual activities; it rather affirms them categorically and, as we shall see, with an inexorable thoroughness far more unsparing than the ...
... being or substance, of something that that basic principle holds involved in itself or else admits from out side itself and modifies by the admission; for it must necessarily modify by its own law of nature all that enters into it and is not already part of its own nature. This must be so even if it is a creative evolution in the sense of manifesting always new powers of existence that are not native... has to be evolved, then, when it appears, it will still have to accept modification by the nature and law of the basic substance: but also it will modify that substance by its own power, its own law of nature. If, further, it is aided by a descent of its own principle already established in its own full force above the field of evolution and pressing down into that field to possess it, then the new power... Spirit, but this is not a free transference to a higher status. The law of action, the force of action of each grade or power in its emergence is determined, not by its own free, full and pure law of nature or vim of energy, but partly by the material organisation provided for it and partly by its own status, achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness which it has been able to impose upon ...
... which informs the whole action of material energy. It is that which determines what we call law of nature, maintains the action of each thing according to its own nature and harmonises and evolves the whole, which would otherwise be a fortuitous creation apt at any moment to collapse into chaos. All the law of nature is a thing precise in its necessities of process, but is yet in the cause of that necessity... energy producing result and event according to the force within it, of action bearing the fruit and event involved in its own character and intention which we call variously in its different aspects law of Nature, Karma, Necessity and Fate. These things are to mind the workings of a power outside or above it in which it is involved and intervenes only with a contributory personal effort which partly arrives ...
... that one's own nature, rule, Page 508 function should be observed and followed,—even if defective, it is better than the well-performed rule of another's nature. Death in one's own law of nature is better for a man than victory in an alien movement. To follow the law of another's nature is dangerous to the soul, 2 contradictory, as we may say, to the natural way of his evolution, a thing... Swabhava and Swadharma would have no permanent truth or value,—but the relation of Page 514 a man's outward life to his inward being, the evolution of his action from his soul and inner law of nature. And we see in fact that the Gita itself indicates very clearly its intention when it describes the work of the Brahmin and the Kshatriya not in terms of external function, not defined as... ; for certainly we bear a terrible weight of external necessity, rule and law and our need for self-expression, for the development of our true person, our real soul, our inmost characteristic law of nature in life is at every turn interfered with, thwarted, forced from its course, given a very poor chance and scope by environmental influences. Life, State, society, family, all surrounding powers seem ...
... perceived this truth occult, that the Child gives being to the Mothers by the workings of his nature? An offspring from the lap of many Waters, he comes forth from them a seer possessed of his whole law of nature. Manifested, he grows in the lap of their crookednesses and becomes high, beautiful and glorious. Rig Veda. (I. 95. 4, 5.) From the non-being to true being, from the darkness to... already potential or present in it: there is no such race, kind or type, at most there are only spiritualised mental beings who are seeking to escape out of the terrestrial creation. If by any occult law of Nature such a human development of the supramental being is intended, it could only be by a few in humanity detaching themselves from the race so as to become a first foundation for this new pattern of... supraphysical plane of being, does not seem to figure among the normal possibles or potentials of the material Energy. It could only happen there by an intervention of a supraphysical force or law of Nature or by a creator Mind acting with full power and directly on Matter. An action of a supraphysical Force and a creator may be conceded in every new appearance in Matter; each such appearance is at ...
... and knows nothing about rebirth, its practical application for man as for plant & stone & animal is, simply, the invariable working of material Force or, using a more popular language, mechanical Law of Nature. Even if the soul exists & rebirth be proved a fact, the Law of Rebirth can be to modern conceptions nothing but a particular working of Force, one, therefore, of the many subordinate Laws of Nature... Nature. As locomotion is the effect, electricity or steam the cause or motive force, so rebirth, continuity of personality in a material form, is the effect, past action is the cause; it is a law of Nature, Page 502 on a par in the psychological field with the law of gravitation in physical Nature, that the soul which acts shall be subjected to rebirth as the ineluctable result of its actions ...
... on the whole truth of Nature. And in fact the actual life of man is not at any time one Page 544 of these things alone, neither a mechanical routine execution of the first crude law of Nature, nor the struggle of a kinetic soul of action, nor a victorious emergence of conscious light and reason and good and knowledge. There is a mixture of all these dharmas out of which our will and... is the master of the universe, shapes each creature and determines its action according to the law of its own nature, Swabhava, shapes man too and determines his action according to the general law of nature of his kind, the law of a mental being emmeshed and ignorant in the life and the body, shapes too each man and determines his individual action according to the law of his own distinct type and ...
... warhorse, break like thick clouds the unfriendly people. (6) Thee, O Indra, thee men call in the battle, in the getting of the floods, in the streaming bounty of the sun-world. O lord of thy law of nature, let this increasing in thy plenties be the movement we shall get to through the clash of the battle. (7) Thou, thou, O Indra, Thunderer, warring brokest for Purukutsa the seven cities. When... thou slay? Whom shalt thou enthrone in riches of thy substance? O Indra, us shalt thou enthrone in riches of thy substance. (4) The Terrible, who is great by will of action according to his law of nature, 10 has increased his puissance. The swift One of the mighty jaws who drives his bright horses has taken in his hands his adamant thunderbolt to win the glory. (5) He has filled the earthly ...
... reason? Because human reason is higher than Nature. Nature is infrarational. The laws of Nature are infrarational laws. So when men come along and tell you, "But what do you want, it is the law of Nature", as for me, it makes me laugh. It is not worth being a man, it would be better for you to be a monkey or an elephant or a lion. The laws of Nature are infrarational. Page 177 This is... is the only superiority that man has, his having a reason, and when he doesn't make use of it he becomes absolutely an animal. That's the last excuse to give: "What do you want, it's the law of Nature!" It is late, otherwise I would tell you a few stories. We must stop. Page 178 ...
... followed. It even goes to the extent of saying that swadharma, one's own law of action, even if defective, is better than the well-performed rule of another's nature. It says that death in one's own law of nature is better for a man than victory in an alien movement. It concludes that to follow the law of another's nature is dangerous to the soul. 2 At a later stage, in the last chapter, the Gita explains... world-action, forces and energies that vibrate with the antaratman's own nature constituted by para prakriti, which transcends the mechanism of the three gunas of the lower prakriti. Beyond the law of Nature is the freedom of the soul, and this freedom can assert itself. Page 182 And because it can, there is in our inner being the sense of responsibility. This sense of responsibility is at ...
... mechanism and its movements are very definite and absolutely fixed admitting of no change or variation whatsoever. That was the idea which governed our earlier scientists when they spoke or the Law of Nature. Law of Nature was to them, in the great Sophoclean phrase, something indelible and inviolable, immemorially the same which no man or god dare alter or disobey. Laplace, one of the pioneers of the scientific ...
... as the body doesn't know, as long as it's in its state of ignorance, it is panic-stricken, it thinks it has a serious illness. But originally it's not that: it's the withdrawal of the ordinary law of Nature, and its replacement by the other. So there is a moment when it's neither this nor that, and that moment is critical. 69.164 The body is strangely fragile at the same time, that's the curious... that if you can master this whole mass of the physical mind, then you CAN, you are the master: it's not a Fatality, it's not something that totally escapes our control, it's not some sort of “Law of Nature” over which we have no power. For two years now I have been accumulating experiences in their minutest details, apparently quite futile things — you must consent to that, not have delusions of grandeur ...
... inevitably be in the Veda a large part of cosmology, the law of creation and of cosmos. Dayananda asserts the presence of such a cosmic element, he finds in the Veda the secrets of creation and law of Nature by which the Omniscient governs the world. Neither Western scholarship nor ritualistic learning has succeeded in eliminating the psychological and ethical value of the hymns, but they have both... whose relations we have to know if we would understand existence at all, God, Nature and the Soul. If, as Dayananda held on strong enough grounds, the Veda reveals to us God, reveals to us the law of Nature, reveals to us the relations of the Soul to God and Nature, what is it but a revelation of divine Truth? And if, as Dayananda held, it reveals them to us with a perfect truth, flawlessly, he might ...
... road to progress, opulence, and prosperity. There is a theory which affects to regard the races inhabiting the tropical and subtropical regions of the earth as disinherited by some mysterious law of Nature from all hope of originality, enterprise and leadership. These things belong to the temperate regions; the tropics are to be for ever no more than the field for the energies of the superior races... necessary modifications, we need not accept this interpretation of inherent inferiority. For my part I demur to any such hasty generalisation: yet however much of it be true be sure that there is no law of Nature which can prevent you from changing it. To suppose that any nation can be shut out from the operation of the law of Evolution is utterly unscientific, and, in the light of history, absurd. Granted ...
... heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of... covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem each to be following its own law of nature; in this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and does not work ...
... checked, modified, annulled or eluded. 126—The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature than in the Spirit. There is no law of Nature that cannot be overcome and changed, if we have the faith that ...
... heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of... is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem Page 591 each to be following its own law of nature; in this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and does not work ...
... phenomenon, this birth, life and reproduction of a tree, as a thing in itself and on that basis studies, classes and explains it. It explains the tree by the seed, the seed by the tree; it declares a law of Nature. But it has explained nothing; it has only analysed and recorded the process of a mystery. Supposing even that it comes to perceive a secret conscious force as the soul, the real being of this form... form and the rest as merely a settled operation and manifestation of that force, still it tends to regard the form as a separate existence with Page 147 its separate law of nature and process of development. In the animal and in man with his conscious mentality this separative tendency of the Mind induces it to regard itself also as a separate existence, the conscious subject, and other ...
... the idea they shadow forth and the vague twilight in which they are content to leave its ulterior significance. Modern Science has brought in an equally formless and arbitrary predestination of Law of Nature and Heredity to contradict the idea of responsibility in a free, willing and acting soul. Where there is no soul, there can be no freedom. Nature works out her original law in man; our fathers and... world. If my past actions determine my present, my immediate action also determines the moment that shall be and is not utterly put off by a tardy mechanism to belated effects in a far-off life. If Law of nature and heredity and environment are powerful, yet do they depend on the individual for the use to which they shall be turned. The fruit of my actions belongs not to me, but to God and the world; ...
... declares a law of Nature. But it has explained nothing; it has only analysed and recorded the process of a mystery. Supposing even that it comes to perceive a secret conscious force as the soul, the real being of this form and the rest as merely a settled operation and manifestation of that force, still it tends to regard the form as a separate existence with its separate law of nature and process ...
... heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence... Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem each to be following its own law of Page 212 nature; in this. vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and ...
... that takes away His power. The minute we are truly pure, that is, under His influence alone, there are no limits, no limits—nothing, nothing, there is nothing, no law of Nature that can resist, nothing, nothing. 32 No law of Nature. And indeed a whole series of physical, physiological consequences—incredible for our physical mind—begin to get through the mesh, as if we were dealing with another ...
... earth and she has not gone into an eternal eclipse. The over-shadowing influence cannot last for ever, it is a temporary obscuration from which the sun of her destiny is soon to emerge. This is the law of Nature and divine dispensation, and, amidst the noise and dust and smoke of that confused struggle of myriad opinions and misunderstandings which mark a revolution, the one thing essential which should ...
... be made into the statue which pleases the eye and gladdens the soul. If it could feel it certainly would say, "How dearly I have to pay for the beautiful transformation." This is the inexorable law of nature. Nature has not yet been known to relent in this respect. If you want to get anything grand and beautiful out of her you must go through the process through which a piece of stone passes before ...
... charlatans because they profess to be the pioneers of a new kind of Science. Neither, I hope, shall I be inclined to reject or criticise adversely because Theosophy has a foreign origin. There is no law of Nature by which spiritual knowledge is confined to the East or must bear the stamp of an Indian manufacture before it can receive the imprimatur of the All-Wise. He has made man in his own image everywhere ...
... and the conception of the gods is so little local or mythological, so entirely cosmic and philosophical that we can easily accept both as expressive of a practical fact of psychology and general law of Nature and so apply them to the modern conceptions of interchange between life and life and of ethical sacrifice and self-giving as to widen and deepen these and cast over them a more spiritual aspect ...
... But we do not perceive how this works in the tree, because we are accustomed to dissociate from the tree all idea of mind & even of life. We therefore talk vaguely of the Page 415 law of Nature that the tree shall produce according to its kind without understanding why such a law should exist. Vedanta tells us that the process in the tree is the same as in man, except that mind not being ...
... Earth, will be visible, livable and describable only much later. Sri Aurobindo has not gone ‘the way of all flesh’ like human beings before him have and still do; he did not die because of a law of nature deemed unbreakable. In the aforementioned words of the Mother: ‘He was not forced to leave his body, he has chosen to do so.’ When Satprem was writing his Sri Aurobindo, ou l’Aventure de la Conscience ...
... commentator calls it, “what is stronger must dominate and not mate with what is weaker, which would mean the sacrifice of its own higher nature”. This is “a fundamental law – one may call it an iron law of nature”. “The movement ought to educate its adherents to the principle that struggle must not be considered a necessary evil but something to be desired in itself.” 291 “War is what is most natural, most ...
... because history had little else to show. Just as the fittest individual won the upper hand over the weaker one, so the stronger group of individuals would and should conquer the weaker group. This “law of nature” was universally applicable; not to follow it, for instance by letting the weaker compassionately survive and even procreate, would mean tampering with the order of nature, whether or not created ...
... circumvent the difficulty. It is possible to erect a fainéant Deity, like the gods of Epicurus, blissful in himself, observing but indifferent to a world conducted or misconducted by a mechanical law of Nature. It is open to us to posit a Witness Self, a silent Soul in things, a Purusha who allows Nature to do what she will and is content to reflect all her order and all her disorders in his passive and ...
... salvation in superhuman worlds. Modern thought seeking to make a clear riddance of these past conceptions had to substitute something else in its place, and what it saw and put there was the material law of Nature and the biological law of life of which human reason was to be the faithful exponent and human science the productive utiliser and profiteer. But to apply the mechanical blindness of the rule of ...
... existence, but only minor rules meant to build up a material basis for the life of the Spirit in the body. On that has to be erected in the end, not a rule of material Law, but an immortal Liberty—not law of Nature, but freedom of the Spirit. The strife of forces which is regulated by these minor laws of Nature is only the battle through which man has to win the peace of Spirit. This is the sense. February ...
... method of faith in the cells can be likened to eating a slice of the moon. Nobody ever got a slice of the Page 99 moon, but the healing by faith in the cells is an actual fact and a law of Nature and has been demonstrated often enough even apart from Yoga. The way to get faith and everything else is to insist on having them and refuse to flag or despair or give up until one has them—it is ...
... must become the psychic and inner mental being master of his energies, no longer a slave of the movements of the lower Prakriti, in control of it, seated securely in a free harmony with a higher law of Nature. An increasing control of the individual over his own action of nature, a more and more conscious participation in the action of universal Nature, is a marked character, it is indeed a logical ...
... invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of ...
... as life grows and still more when mind emerges, the individual also arrives at a greater and more vital power of variation. He acquires the freedom to develop according, no doubt, to the general law of Nature and the general law of his type, but also according to the individual law of his being. Man, the mental being in Nature, is especially distinguished from her less developed creatures by a greater ...
... in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic Page 188 energy, that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis ...
... manifestation from the one in which we live; it would be confined to the higher worlds of the divine Existence or to a typal non-evolving cosmos where each being lived in the whole light of its own law of nature, and this obverse manifestation, this evolving cycle, would be impossible. What is here the goal would be then the eternal condition; what is here a stage would be the perpetuated type of existence ...
... back and rending or a rushing down of the walls that imprisoned our conscious being; there is a loss of all sense of individuality and personality, of all placement in Space or Time or action and law of Nature; there is no longer an ego, a person definite and definable, but only consciousness, only existence, only peace or bliss; one becomes immortality, becomes eternity, becomes infinity. All that is ...
... system of rewards and punishments to follow the path of good and shun the path of evil; virtue to him is its own reward, sin brings with it its own punishment in the suffering of a fall from his own law of nature: this is the true ethical standard. On the contrary, a system of rewards and punishments debases at once the ethical values of good, turns virtue into selfishness, a commercial bargain of self-interest ...
... that is the first thing we see before us, are not the whole self-expression of the universal Being here and therefore not the whole of Nature. Man comes into it to express and realise a higher law of Nature and therefore a higher system of the lines of Karma. The mental energy divides itself and runs in many directions, has an ascending scale of the levels of its action, a great variety and combination ...
... —but when thought begins again, the breath resumes its activity. But when the thought flows without the resumption of the inbreathing and outbreathing, then the Prana is truly conquered. This is a law of Nature. When we strive to act, the forces of Nature do their will with us; when we grow still, we become their master. But there are two kinds of stillness—the helpless stillness of Page 57 ...
... more largely and complexly, by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in less abstract language the law of Nature and especially of his own nature, the forces within him and around him and their right utilisation for his own greater perfection and happiness or for that and the greater perfection and happiness ...
... demanding at the pistol's point special messages for the 15th for themselves and I am supposed to stand and deliver. I won't. I regret that I must disappoint you, but self-preservation is a first law of Nature. 3 August 1949 Page 69 Writing Philosophy Look here! Do these people expect me to turn myself again into a machine for producing articles? The times of the Bande Mataram and ...
... had found the means of being happy, that everyone may be satisfied and men may love one another. So naturally people who did not agree with him, said to him, "But how does it happen that when the law of Nature alone reigns—as for example, without even going as far as the animal, in vegetable life—how does it happen that there are constant massacres between plants and the perpetual struggle for life? Is ...
... Mother’s Agenda 1967 March 4, 1967 ( Regarding Sri Aurobindo's Aphorism 126 : "The most binding law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to live less in Nature ...
... the lack of faith we mix into it that takes away His power. The minute we are truly pure, that is, under His influence alone, there are no limits, no limits—nothing, nothing, there is nothing, no law of Nature that can resist, nothing, nothing. Only, the whole thing is that the time must have come, there must be only That left—all the rest spoils, whatever it is, even the highest, purest, noblest, ...
... metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature." The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where infinity ...
... participation of the latter. But this confrontation of the higher and the lower has a reciprocal two-way consequence. While the higher seeks to transfigure the lower with its own power and its own law of nature, it is at the same time modified, its light obscured and its effectivity curtailed by the counteraction of the lower. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "A descent of consciousness into the ...
... squarely the new situation and make the best use of it. India, that claims a spiritual heritage and a high and hoary civilisation, can afford to be idealistic even and envisage a deeper and higher law of Nature, of universal harmony and solidarity, of conscious co-operation. Apart from that, if as practical men, we look to our self-interest, then also it will be wise for us to take up the same line of ...
... participation of the latter. But this meeting of the higher and the lower has a reciprocal two-way consequence. While the higher seeks to transfigure the lower with its own power and its own law of nature, svadharma, it is at the same time modified, its light obscured and its effectivity curtailed by the counteraction of the lower. To quote Sri Aurobindo again; "A descent of consciousness ...
... after physical immortality has to engage in is against this "suggestion that is collective, massive, overwhelming, compelling, a suggestion based upon thousands of years of experience, upon a law of Nature that does not seem yet to have had any exception. It translates itself into this stubborn assertion: 'It has been so always, it cannot be otherwise. Death is inevitable and it is madness to hope ...
... societies are demanding at the pistol's point special messages for themselves and I am supposed to stand and deliver. I won't. I regret that I must disappoint you, but self-preservation is a first law of nature. 14 III. From Nirodbaran's treasury (1) What a "woman" expects of a "man"; NB: I had been to the pier with Y. We were quietly resting on a bench with our feet up, when a Tamilian ...
... believed in or practised. It is a multisided Way that is still being traversed; it is open to any individual for his or her free choice to traverse in the way that is suitable to his or her own law of nature and development; it is also available to humanity as an indispensable aid to its advance towards the highest ideals of unity and harmony that have come to be envisaged at this initial junction of ...
... law is a pure deduction from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment. Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law and scientific discovery. Suppose you have a ...
... face, Janus like: violence and falsehood. In private life, in the political field, in the business world, in social dealings, it is now an established practice, it has gained almost the force of a law of nature that success can be achieved only with these two comrades on your either side. A gentle, honest, peace-loving man is inevitably pushed back, he has to go to the wall; a straightforward truthful ...
... Page 274 never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.¹ ¹ In this connection we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes it, (almost exactly as ...
... poignant pictures. "Verily, verily, the foxes have their holes, the birds their nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head." And this is bound to be so, for it is the inexorable law of nature: one who has identified himself with Nature, ignorant nature, of which the ignorant and suffering humanity is part and parcel, one whose body and soul are in unison and union with the body and soul ...
... new situation and make the best use of it. India, that claims a spiritual heritage and a high and hoary civilisation, can afford to be idealistic even and envisage a deeper and higher law of Page 71 Nature, of universal harmony and solidarity, of conscious co-operation. Apart from that, if as practical men, we look to our self-interest, then also it will be wise for us to take up the ...
... idea of taking up forces and pull them high up. Even the sexual act has to be done from a high consciousness. Upanishad also says it is possible. But to go back to the original point about the law of Nature. We have to understand that all this does not mean that there is no moral standard. Humanity requires a certain standard it helps profess. It is obvious from what Hitler is doing that he is not ...
... to human feeling and sight and sensation. This demand is the justification of their creation and action, and furnishes a clue to the mystery of the divine immanence in the world. And it is a law of Nature that when ever there is an insistent and legitimate demand for a particular experience and realisation in the being of man, there is always found a means to fulfil it. The human' mind is content ...
... to be the next evolutionary saltus; for, evolution is cyclic and not rectilinear, and the emergence of a new dawn out of the darkness of a passing night is not a freak, but the ineluctable law of Nature. A materialistic humanity, withered and warped by unbelief, and buried in the litter of its transitory gains, shall rise and turn at last to the pursuit of Yoga for the recovery of its- divine ...
... values and utilities of the reactions and make another thing of life than this automatic mechanism of fateful return or retribution to the half-blind embodied actor in a mute necessity of rigorous law of Nature. The relation of our consciousness and will to Karma is the thing upon which all the subtler lines of action and consequence must depend; that connexus must be the hinge of the whole significance ...
... Problem of Rebirth Essays in Philosophy and Yoga The Foundation The idea of Karma has behind it two ideas that are its constituent factors, a law of Nature, of the energy or action of Nature, and a soul that lives under that law, puts out action into that energy and gets from it a return in accordance and measure with the character of its own activities ...
... are cast; it is a deformation, an incapacity, a wrong or depressed value imposed on us by the mind and life in matter. When we grow into the spirit, this Page 467 Dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by the immortal dharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortal action, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, an unfathomable repose. But still there ...
... after such a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to govern us and not the rajasic and tamasic will. This is the meaning of all high reason in action as of all true ethical culture; it is the law of Nature in us striving to evolve from her lower and disorderly to her higher and orderly action, to act not in passion and ignorance with the result of grief and unquiet, but in knowledge and enlightened ...
... heaven by violence, as the saying of Christ would have men do. The attempt confuses and obscures her reason, is combated by her life instincts and leads to revolt, negation, a return to her own law of nature. But Asia or at any rate India lives naturally by a spiritual influx from above; that alone brings with it a spiritual evocation of her higher powers of mind and life. The two continents are two ...
... chair and almirah, books, chaddar etc. by bugs. He also fears that the conquering army, if not checked, will proceed to annex other rooms also. As bugs in a solignumed cot are a violation of the law of Nature, Mother proposes to send a Committee of Enquiry composed of Y (who is both scientifically and officially interested in the solignum-bug problem), yourself and Z for investigations. Page ...
... are among the most individualist, the most separatist people. For them the form is predominant, the form is attractive. It is suggestive too, it speaks of some deeper harmony or truth, of some law of nature or life. Each form, each act is symbolical, from the arrangement of the gardens and the houses to the famous tea ceremony. And sometimes in a very simple and usual thing you discover a symbol, deep ...
... supraphysical plane of being, does not seem to figure among the normal possibles or potentials of the material Energy. It could only happen there by an intervention of a supraphysical force or law of Nature or by a creator Mind acting with full power and directly on Matter. An action of a supraphysical Force and a creator may be conceded in every new appearance in Matter; each such appearance is at ...
... be fought is already formidable: it is the mental battle against a collective suggestion that is massive, overwhelming, compelling, a suggestion based on thousands of years of experience, on a law of Nature that does not yet seem to have had any exception. It translates itself into this stubborn assertion: it has always been so, it cannot be any different; death is inevitable and it is madness to hope ...
... very obvious fact; that diminution has been effected, it must be remembered, without public agitation, without any organisation or activity of the Nationalist party, by the mere operation of a law of Nature. The aspiration, however created, is there and it is a fire mounting out of the bowels of the earth, which no man's hand can extinguish. The political leaders know that they cannot quench it, if ...
... would begin in earnest and the people look round them for some way of deliverance. For that an absolute rule will one day begin to coerce and trample on the subject population is an inevitable law of nature which none can escape. The master with full power of life and death over his servant can only be gracious so long as he is either afraid of his slave or else sure that the slave will continue willing ...
... form or power of this knowledge has its own distinct nature and law, its own principle of order and arrangement, its logic proper to itself, and need not follow, still less be identical with the law of nature, order and arrangement which the intellectual reason would assign to it or itself follow if it had control of all these Page 103 movements. But the intellect has this advantage over ...
... nature. The saying of the Gita is always true; better is the law of one's own nature though ill-performed, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility. Neither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor self-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle ...
... deniable has been that of the individual. This predominance is so great that most modern historians and some Page 36 political thinkers have concluded that objective necessities are by law of Nature the only really determining forces, all else is result or superficial accidents of these forces. Scientific history has been conceived as if it must be a record and appreciation of the environmental ...
... foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their Page 345 own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature. But it does not immediately follow that the metrical application to poetry of the normal rhythm of the language, discoverable even in its ...
... for subsequent & subsidiary inquiry. In the first we note the roots of speech and inquire how vṛc came to mean to tear, dal to split or crush, whether arbitrarily or by the operation of some law of Nature; in the second we note the modifications and additions by which these roots grew into developed words, word-groups, word-families and word-clans and why those modifications & additions had the effect ...
... स्य नाम । याश्च माया मायिनां विश्वमिन्व त्वे पूर्वीः संदधुः पृष्टबन्धो ॥३॥ 3) Many are the names of thee, the Immortal, O Fire, O knower of the births, O god who bearest with thee the self-law of nature; all the manifold magic of the Lords of magic they have combined in thee, O all-ruler, O builder of the levels. अग्निर्नेता भग इव क्षितीनां दैवीनां देव ऋतुपा ऋतावा । स वृत्रहा सनयो विश्ववेदाः ...
... itself is God entirely, every group of souls is collectively God; the modalities of Nature's movement create their separation and outward differences. God transcends world and is not bound by any law of Nature. He uses laws, laws do not use Him. God transcends world and is not bound to any particular state of consciousness in the world. He is not unity-consciousness nor multiple consciousness, not ...
... that this conscious Will can impose absolute quietude on and detach itself from the animalcule republic which is erroneously supposed to originate and contain it and that it does, as a habitual law of Nature, survive the disintegration of the body. These two facts are fatal to the materialistic theory and, so long as the practice of Yoga subsists in India, the Hindu mind will never accept materialism ...
... that is of the world of Light" and to her her sons "cleave ever waking". They are "most straight" in their being, will, thought, delight, action, movement, they are "thinkers of the Truth whose law of nature is the law of the Truth", they are "seers and hearers of the Truth". They are "charioteers of the Truth, whose seat is in its mansions, purified in discernment, unconquerable, the Men wide-visioned" ...
... to the cutting and defining mind than true. The major part of the work done in the universe is accomplished without any interference of desire; it proceeds by the calm necessity and spontaneous law of Nature. Even man constantly does work of various kinds by a spontaneous impulse, intuition, instinct or acts in obedience to a natural necessity and law of forces without either mental planning or the ...
... giving it the shape it took. The situation in India as they envisaged it, resembled that of the patricians and plebeians in Rome; for they accepted the permanence of British control almost as a law of Nature though they were anxious to alter its conditions. A caste of white patricians arrogated the control of the State in all its functions and effected an inborn social superiority accompanied not only ...
... thing impossible to suppress. But then, if officialdom were to acquire a common sense, the laws of Nature would be sadly contravened and it is better to inflict loss on individuals than to upset a law of Nature. Soham Gita Every Bengali is familiar with the name of Shyamakanta Banerji the famous athlete and tiger-tamer but it may not be known to all that after leaving the worldly life and turning ...
... is produced by a combination in a fixed quantity of the two first elements, hydrogen and oxygen. We do not know or do not yet know why this should be so. All we can say is that [it] is a fixed law of Nature that when this formula is scrupulously followed without deviation something called water appears,—becomes a phenomenon of material Nature. There seems to be no reason in this miracle. We could partly ...
... soul in her fetters. 125) Every law, however embracing or tyrannous, meets somewhere a contrary law by which its operation can be checked, modified, annulled or eluded. 126) The most binding Law of Nature is only a fixed process which the Lord of Nature has framed and uses constantly; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but we must first open the doors of our prison-house and learn to ...
... metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature." The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation ay be held to be perfecdy in order, especially in a context where infinity ...
... we will never find out … Somewhere we have our place in the scale of the world … Somewhere everything results in an awareness of the helplessness of the human being in relation with the eternal law of Nature – that the whole redemption of the human being lies in the fact that he tries to understand the divine Providence and does not believe that he is capable of revolt against the Law. When man thus ...
... words which are gaining significance in the computer age. All human beings in East and West have a divine soul, therefore knowledge and wisdom are potentially present everywhere. ‘There is no law of Nature by which spiritual knowledge is confined to the East or must bear the stamp of an Indian manufacture before it can receive the imprimatur of the All-Wise,’ 31 said Sri Aurobindo crisply. But ...
... The events have to develop all the way up to the ultimate point if the sudden reversal, the sudden breakthrough of the ray of light in the night, has to become possible. This is a little known law of nature. Pregnancy reaches the point of impossibility for the body of the mother just before birth. The seed reaches the point of impossibility just before it bursts and makes new life grow. The caterpillar ...
... why I tell people (not that I expect them to do it, at least not now, but it's good they know) that it's NOT a matter of fate, NOT something that completely escapes our control, NOT some sort of 'Law of Nature' over which we have no power—it is not so. We are truly the masters of everything which has been brought together to create our transitory individuality; we have been given the power of control ...
... unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite _____________________ 1 Collected Poems, SABCL Vol. 5, pp. 368-69. Page 176 of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature." The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where ...
... convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in Page 214 spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature." 11 The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where ...
... do not see how the method of faith in the cells can be likened to eating a slice of the moon. Nobody ever got a slice of the moon, but the healing by faith in the cells is an actual fact and a law of Nature and has been demonstrated often enough even apart from Yoga. The way to get faith and Page 298 everything else is to insist on having them and refuse to flag or despair or give up ...
... d by the higher nature is briefly described by Sri Aurobindo in the language appropriate to the Gita's synthesis of yoga as follows: "When we grow into the spirit, this Dharma or inferior law of Nature is replaced by the immortal Dharma of the spirit; there is the experience of a free immortal action, a divine illimitable knowledge, a transcendent power, an unfathomable repose. ..." 67 In ...
... manifestation from the one in which we live; it would be confined to the higher worlds of the divine Existence or to a typal non evolving cosmos where each being lived in the whole light of its own law of nature, and this obverse manifestation, this evolving cycle, would be impossible. What is here the goal would be then the eternal condition; what is here a stage would be the perpetuated type of existence ...
... participation of the latter. But unavoidably this meeting of the higher and the lower has a reciprocal two-way consequence. While the higher tries to transfigure the lower with its own law of nature, svadhamza, it itself is at the same time modified and diluted, its light obscured and its effectivity curtailed by the counteraction of the lower. To quote Sri Aurobindo on this point: ...
... active, cannot be predetermined by any calculation, even if that is due to a definitely and precisely arranged bombardment. So we have come to posit a principle of uncertainty, as a very fundamental law of Nature. It practically declares that the ultimate particle is an autonomou unit, it is an' individual, almost a personality, and seems to have a will of its own. A material unit acts very much like a ...
... path of Tantra? SRI AUROBINDO: I don't know. It must have been prescribed with the idea of taking up the lower forces and pulling them high up. But to go back to our original point about the law of Nature, remember a young Sannyasi who came to Baroda. He had lons nails and used to sit under the trees. Deshpande and I went to see him. I asked him, "What is the standard of action?" He replied, "There ...
... back and rending or a rushing down of the walls that imprisoned our conscious being; there is a loss of all sense of individuality and personality, of all placement in Space or Time or action or law of Nature; there is no longer an ego, Page 146 a person definite and definable, but only consciousness, only existence, only peace and bliss; one becomes immortality, becomes eternity, becomes ...
... was published fifty years later in 1967 as "Talk to the Women of Japan". * Mirra's theme was the bringing up of children, and her audience was made up of mothers, or potential mothers. By a law of nature as it were, children are to women, and not least to Japanese women, their dearest and sacredest possession and preoccupation. Indeed, children are investments on faith, an insurance for the future ...
... the goal as well as the origin of all existence. They point to the Absolute in whom alone all the jarring discords will be harmonised; for, there can never be an ordered play of relativities, a law of Nature, a system of values, a rule of conduct or a rhythm of evolution in life without an Absolute embracing and leading them together in the steps of its own shadowless light. If the relativities are ...
... naturally looked up to her, yearning to find him in her. She assured them that he had cast off his material vesture only for a definite purpose, and not compelled by any ineluctable law of Nature; and that he was here still, in the earth atmosphere, toiling, as ever, for the fulfilment of the great work of his life— the descent of the Truth-Consciousness and the supramental ...
... body, they naturally looked up to her, yearning to find him in her. She assured them that he had cast off his material vesture only for a definite purpose, and not compelled by any ineluctable law of Nature; and that he was here still, in the earth atmosphere, toiling, as ever, for the fulfillment of the great work of his life—the descent of the Truth-Consciousness and the supramental transformation ...
... driven it underground, ready to burst out again in redoubled fury: Repression can never crush a force when it is once in operation, but to kill it is impossible. Conservation of energy is a law of nature, and she cannot be false to herself in the interests of the British bureaucracy. Energy changes for us, works in subtle and invisible ways, but is never destroyed. 33 In a notable article ...
... question. "Have you seen God?" He rushed to Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, "Have you seen God?" The Maharshi did not give him a plain answer. Nobody, really, ever gave him a plain answer. But it is a law of Nature that when a question burns within, a response is bound to come. A neighbour of the Duttas, Surendranath Mitra, was a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna. One day, the Guru came to the house of his disciple ...
... not conform to the laws of nature or what we think to be the laws of nature. A man standing in the air without any support or squatting on the water—feats familiar to the yogis—are termed veritable miracles. The famous rope trick is a legendary miracle. Some of these miracles done by yogis are authentic facts. They apparendy seem to violate the prevailing so-called laws of nature, but if we knew... abnormal way because a force has come down from the vital region and has influenced or taken control of the material object. So the material object instead of obeying the material law is obliged to obey a vital law which is of a much greater potency. Yogis who do miracles possess this vital power, they have acquired it through a regular discipline and training. Spirit-calling, table-turning, even... the very outset that the physical plane of existence is not the only reality, there are many other planes superimposed one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other ...
... conform to the laws of nature or what we think to be the laws of nature. A man standing in the air without any support or squatting on the water – feats familiar to the yogis – are termed veritable miracles. The famous rope trick is a legendary miracle. Some of these miracles done by yogis are authentic facts. They apparently seem to violate the prevailing so-called laws of nature, but if we knew... an abnormal way because a force has come down from the vital region and has influenced or taken control of the material object. So the material object instead of obeying the material law is obliged to obey a vital law which is of a much greater potency. Yogis who do miracles possess this vital power, they have acquired it through a regular discipline and training. Spirit-calling, table-turning, even... the very outset that the physical plane of existence is not the only reality, there are many other planes superimposed' one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the Page 218 life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force ...
... Exactly the same thing can be Page 106 done in a short time or a long time. Necessities have lost their authority. One can adapt oneself like this or like that. All the laws, these laws that were laws of Nature, have lost all their despotism, one might say; it is no longer as before. It is enough to be always, always supple, attentive and... "responsive" to the influence of the Consciousness—the... the discovery which is being made more and more. It is wonderful, is it not? It is a wonderful discovery. It is like a progressive victory over all the imperatives. Thus all laws of Nature, naturally, all the human laws, all the habits, all the rules, all that becomes supple and ends by being non-existent. And yet one can maintain a regular rhythm that facilitates action—it is not contrary to this... not as an absolute law, but as one of the procedures, when it is necessary. Above all, it is this: all that the Mind has brought of the rigid, the absolute, the almost invincible... will disappear. And simply that, by transferring the supreme power to the Supreme Consciousness. Perhaps it is that which the ancient seers meant when they spoke of transferring the power of Nature or the power of ...
... (1969-1970) On Thoughts and Aphorisms Aphorism - 127 127—Law is a process or a formula; but the soul is the user of processes and exceeds formulas. The laws of Nature are imperative for the physical nature only so long as this nature is not under the influence of the psychic being (the soul); for the psychic being is in possession of the ...
... divine Presence—the divine Consciousness, the divine Presence, the divine Power (all that wordlessly), the "something" we define as the absolute Master. It's a choice of EVERY SECOND between the old laws of Nature—with some mental influence and the whole life as it has been organized—the choice between that, the government by that, and the government by the supreme Consciousness, which is equally present... other thing is more habitual, and then there's the Presence. It's every second (it's infinitely interesting), and with illustrations: the nerves, for instance... if a nerve obeys all the various laws of Nature and mental conclusions and all that—the whole caboodle—then it starts aching; if it obeys the influence of the supreme Consciousness, then a strange phenomenon takes place... it's not like something ...
... (biography) Introductory Quotations The world unknowing, for the world she stood.. || 3.19 || \*\*\* One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature’s doom by the lone Spirit’s power. || 91.4 || A limitless Mind that can contain the world, A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms Moved by the passions of the gods shall come. || 91.5... be with her like a conqueror’s sword And from her eyes the Eternal’s bliss shall gaze. || 91.8 || A seed shall be sown in Death’s tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will.” || 91.9 || ...
... submit willy-nilly to any "laws of Nature". Sri Aurobindo has characterised all the planes of existence and consciousness up to what he calls the Overmind as aparardha, the lower hemisphere of manifestation, while the parardha, the higher hemisphere, starts from the Supermind. The "laws of Nature" hold, though in different degrees, for everything below the Supermind. Nature extends thus far and no... think of her as leaving her body because she who had striven so gallantly for the Supramental Transformation had yet perforce to grow old and weaken and die, give up her mission and submit to the "laws of Nature". Are those moments and moods genuine discrepancies? Did the Inevitable Hour that has awaited all living creatures form alike the terminus of one whom Sri Aurobindo had chosen and commanded... no further: the Supermind is Super-nature. With the Supermind we do not have the Cosmic but the Transcendent: there automatically the laws which we may designate cosmic habits come to an end. And when the Supramental Divine becomes incarnate, he or she brings a total freedom, and absolute power. Whatever diminution of freedom, whatever decrease of power there may be in their world-work is of their own ...
... between all the traditional yogas and the new yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. To a tantric, for example, it seems unthinkable that Mother, with a consciousness so powerful as to scoff at the laws of nature and command the elements (if she wishes), could be subjected to absurd head colds or an eye hemorrhage or even more serious disorders. For him, it is enough to simply lift a finger and emit a vibration ...
... will to know the laws of Nature and to master them sufficiently to be able to adapt them to his needs and change them to a certain extent, is something impossible, unthinkable for any animal. You may tell me that I don't usually speak very kindly about man ( laughter ), but that's because he usually thinks too kindly of himself! If we compare him with the other products of Nature, unquestionably... spontaneously without an educating will. And with this possibility of expressing intelligence, observation, comprehension, deduction—all the mental qualities—man has gradually learnt to understand the laws of Nature and tried not only to understand them but master them. If we compare what he is with the higher being living in the Truth which we want to become, we may obviously speak about man as he is at... of going to school or learning things, but purely physical education, a systematic development of the muscles. The animal is born and makes good use of what it has and it grows according to its own law, but it does not educate itself or does it in a very rudimentary way, in an extremely limited field; whereas by a normal and systematic development man can remedy his defects and shortcomings. Man is ...
... think and feel is for the spirit. Nature depends upon the Atman, all its movement, play, action is for the Atman. There is no Fate except insistent causality which is only another name for Law, and Law itself is only an instrument in the hands of Nature for the satisfaction of the spirit. Law is nothing but a mode or rule of action; it is called in our philosophy not Law but Dharma, holding together... and the definition of Dharma or Law is action as decided by the nature of the thing in which action takes place,— svabhāva-niyataṁ karma . Each separate existence, each individual has a swabhava or nature and acts according to it, each group, species or mass of individuals has a swabhava or nature and acts according to it, and the universe also has its swabhava or nature and acts according to it. Mankind... Mankind is a group of individuals and every man acts according to his human nature, that is his law of being as distinct from animals, trees or other groups of individuals. Each man has a distinct nature of his own and that is his law of being which ought to guide him as an individual. But beyond and above these minor laws is the great dharma of the universe which provides that certain previous karma ...
... remove them by coercion is an attempt to destroy the laws of nature, and the laws of nature refuse to be destroyed and conducted. We have no means to make the pressure of the people felt upon the Government. The only means which we have discovered, the only means which we can use without bringing on a violent conflict, without leading to breaches of the law on both sides and bringing things to the arbitrament ...
... miraculous and that he is not subject to the laws of Nature, then you have only the conventional notion about it. He is not miraculous in the methods he adopts. He also like others accepts the human limitations. If he did not then he ceases to have any meaning for man. But how is his Ādhāra prepared? It is a certain movement which takes place in his nature leaving his soul free, unaffected. If he... An Avatār is not subject to the laws of Karma as ordinary men are. The mind, life and body of the ordinary man are formed as a result of his past Karma. The Avatar having no such past how are his mind, life and body formed? The Avatar gets it as other men do. What has that to do with his being an Avatar? All that is only a certain movement in nature in his lower Prakriti. If your idea... thing from above then there is no such thing, one is not affected by birth and death. Then Buddha did not achieve perfection of his nature? He may have entered the higher ignorance. You see there are infinite movements of the higher consciousness in Nature. Human mind can occupy itself with certain mental absolutes, not all. It can confine itself to the absolute of the silent Brahman or the ...
... (Pavitra) The second postulate: "That it is possible to know the universe as it really is, to grasp its laws objectively." The kind of regularity which we observe in the universe and translate into what we call the laws of Nature—does it have an existence independent of us? Or is it that these so-called laws exist only in our mind? Is it not possible to know the universe in its reality as it is in... angle of ignorance—that it's because man doesn't have the knowledge that he can't be saved—it seems obvious. But what knowledge are we speaking about? The scientist will tell you: Study the laws of Nature, know all that it can teach you and it will give you the knowledge which will enable you to master life and become its possessor instead of being possessed by it. But here we see, according to... can't see well? We can switch on the light again. (Pavitra) No, no, it is all right, Mother. The scientist speaks of two postulates with which he has undertaken the research of the secrets of Nature and which would have dwindled gradually. "For me", he says, "ignorance was the primary if not the only evil..." Isn't it truly so? That is, put plainly the question is this: Isn't ignorance ...
... master; it can not only reject and control external stimuli, but can defy such apparently universal material laws as that of gravitation and ignore, put aside and make nought of what are called laws of nature and are really only the laws of material nature, inferior and subject to the psychical laws because matter is a product of mind and not mind a product of matter. This is the decisive discovery of Yoga... Vivekananda. It is still the orthodox view that the experiences of Yoga must not be revealed to the uninitiated. But a new era dawns upon us in which the old laws must be modified Already the West is beginning to discover the secrets of Yoga. Some of its laws have revealed themselves however dimly and imperfectly to the scientists of Europe while others through Spiritualism, Christian Science, clairvoyance... a certain preparatory fitness, inevitably bear the stamp to the outside world of occultism. In reality there is nothing intrinsically hidden, occult or mystic about Yoga. Yoga is based upon certain laws of human psychology, a certain knowledge about the power of the mind over the body and the inner spirit over the mind which are not generally realised and have hitherto been considered by those in the ...
... value): you can do exactly the same thing in very little time or in much time. Necessities have lost their authority: you can adapt yourself this way, adapt yourself that way. All the laws—those laws that were laws of Nature—have lost all their despotism, we may say: it no longer works that way. All you have to do is always, always be supple, attentive, and... responsive (if any such thing can be!) to... That is the discovery being made more and more. And it's wonderful, you know! A wonderful discovery. It's like a progressive victory over all constraints. So naturally, all the laws of Nature, all the human laws, all habits, all rules, they all become increasingly supple and finally nonexistent. Yet it is possible to keep a regular rhythm that facilitates action—it's not contrary to this suppleness... as an absolute law, but as ONE of the processes, when necessary. It's mainly that: all that the Mind has brought in terms of rigidity and absoluteness and near invincibility—that's what ... is going to disappear. And simply by ... handing the supreme power over to the Supreme Consciousness. That may be what the sages of old meant when they spoke of handing the power of Nature or the power of ...
... veritable step into the unknown? Indeed, many, in fact most of the scientific laws - the Laws of Nature - are they strictly the result of calculation and deduction from known and observed data or are they not rather "brilliant surmises", "sudden revelations" that overwhelm by their un-expected appearance? Newton did not arrive at his Law of Gravitation in the trail of a logical argument from given premises... premises towards unforeseen conclusions. Nor did Einstein discover his version of the Law in any syllogistic way either. The fact seems to be more often true that the unknown reveals itself all on a sudden and is not reached through a continuous series of known steps. Examples could be easily multiplied from the history of scientific discoveries. For the fact is that man, the being that knows, is composed ...
... it asserts its importance to Nature, its freedom and its universality. 204—Animal man is the obscure starting-point, the present natural man the varied and tangled mid-road, but supernatural man the luminous and transcendent goal of our human journey. Man finds his full power for progress when he no longer feels bound to Nature or limited by her laws. Nature is only a limited expression ...
... spirit. The Divine Mother now gives her wide consenting voice to expectant Aswapati: O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power... Beauty shall walk celestial on the earth, Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair And in her body as on his homing... played in the theatre of Time must still diet on suffering and pain. It is man's merit that he is awake, that he has memory and desire, that he cannot help aspiring "to change the cosmic dream". But the law of Chance and Death cannot be altered; man is condemned yet to be no more than "a link between the demigod and the beast"; he must veer between the pulls of darkness and light, and play endlessly this... conqueror's sword And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze. A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will. 155 The words cease, and the splendour fades away; only the echoes of the promise fill the chambers ...
... because that is its nature. But why is that its nature? Why should it not be its nature to produce some other form of existence, or some other kind of tree? That is the law, is the answer. But why is it the law? The only answer is that it is so because it is so; that it happens, why no man can say. In reality when we speak of Law, we speak of an idea; when we speak of the nature of a thing, we speak... a discernible momentum and say "Here is an entity called Law or Nature." The seed evolves a tree because tree is the idea involved in the seed; it is a process of manifestation in form, not a creation. If there were no insistent idea, we should have a world of chances and freaks, not a world of law—there would be no such idea as the nature of things, if there were not an originating and ordering ... the real hides behind the apparent, spirit behind matter. The apparent masquerades as real, the real is seen dimly as if it were an unsubstantial shadow. The grandeur of the visible universe and its laws enslaves men's imaginations. "This is a mighty machine," we cry, "but it moves of its own force and needs neither guide nor maker; for its motion is eternal." Blinded by a half truth we fail to see ...
... The play of 'blind'chance is controlled by the "fixed and immutable" laws of Nature. From this ordered material universe—the Kingdom of matter and energy—there wakes up at some auspicious moment "a dream of living"; thus life arrives on the cosmic scene. But life by its Page 92 very nature is no static divinity, for it hides in its pulse "a consciousness with mute... This minute elaborate orchestrated life For ever plays its motiveless symphonies. The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth; It studies surface laws by surface thought,... 68 The mind sees darkly, and gathers inconsequent crumbs of Truth in a rats-alley hunting-ground! But deep within "a puissance acts", there is a power working "concealed ...
... Prayag, the place of pilgrimage, where the Ganga and the Jamuna have met. Now, in the creation nothing can remain itself and unaltered for good. Difference and polarity are the inviolable laws of nature. Therefore it is not that we do not find glimpses of pure intuition here and there among the Bengalees. Chandidas, the pioneer poet of Bengal, represents an unalloyed, pure inspiration and Vidyapati... inspiration in another. Two kinds of beauty have sprung into existence from these two faculties. Why speak of the artist alone – all powerful creators, in fact all human beings, differ in their individual nature, but they may be broadly classified under these two heads. Knowledge is quite evidently the principle in one, life-energy in the other. Steadiness is the mark of the one, speed of the other. One... the creator's intuition, and the rhythm, the gesture of truth and beauty through his inspiration. "The thing in itself," the substance, shines clear and lucid in intuition, while its character or "nature" reveals itself poignant and intimate through inspiration. One is the formative force, the other the kinetic or executive. The following line of Kalidasa is an embodied figure of truth and beauty: ...
... not reported. The healing by Christ is not a miracle for that matter. Many people have done that. CHAMPAKLAL: What is a miracle then? SRI AUROBINDO: Something that happens contrary to any laws of nature. DR. MANILAL: If on the new moon day, the moon can be seen? SRI AUROBINDO: That is not miraculous—may be hypnotic? (Laughter) DR. MANILAL: If not hypnotic? SRI AUROBINDO: Then it ...
... another, one after another, but every single bodily function is changing... (what's the right word?), I have it, "changing government." Functions that worked naturally—that is, in accord with the laws of Nature—all of a sudden, brrm, finished! They stop. Then... something... which I call the Divine—perhaps Sri Aurobindo called it the Supramental, I don't know; it's something like that, something that ...
... that enables the body and mind to understand rhythm. Practicing Eurhythmics makes the personality rhythmical. And a rhythmical personality is beautiful and strong, conforming to and obeying the laws of nature." Totto-chan's classes began with training the body to understand rhythm. The headmaster would play the piano on the small stage in the Assembly Hall and the children, wherever they stood... being affected by too much adult interference. The headmaster deplored contemporary education, with its emphasis on the written word, which tended to atrophy a child's sensual perception of nature and intuitive receptiveness to the still small voice of God, which is inspiration. It was the poet Basho who wrote: Listen! a frog Jumping into the silence Of an ancient pond! ...
... "reactions" otherwise called the "Laws of Nature" (Because of dearth of space here we content ourselves with the bare mention of the names only without trying to speak more about them.): (a) Law of cause and effect; (b) Law of rebound or boomerang; (c) Law of action and reaction; (d) Law of reinforcement; (e) Law of return; (f) Law of imperfection inviting mishap; (g) Law of immoderation leading to... an act of absurdity to try to unravel the mystery of the operation of cosmic Nature by the sole application of the rigid formula of rewards and punishments invented by the mind of man. She does not work in this way at all. All that happens in the kingdom of universal Nature is governed by her intrinsic principles and laws, and the evolving soul of an individual man has to learn through them necessary... even if he commits a mistake or does a wrong deed? No, not so surely. He will suffer but not as an act of punishment but as a natural reaction of his action as the unavoidable operation of the Laws of Nature. Let us refer to some obvious examples. If you put your finger in a raging fire, it will surely get burnt and you will suffer pain, irrespective of whether you are a king or a beggar, a ...
... class and the labourer, and all the most significant movements of the day have for their purpose the abolition of this last superiority. In this persistent tendency, Europe has obeyed one great law of Nature's progressive march, her trend towards a final equality. Absolute equality is surely neither intended nor possible, just as absolute uniformity is both impossible and utterly undesirable; but a ... religious community, the nation within the nation. We may perhaps say that here Nature tried an experiment of unparalleled complexity and potential richness, accumulating all possible difficulties in order to arrive at the most opulent result. But in the end the problem proved insoluble or, at least, was not solved and Nature had to resort to her usual deus ex machina denouement, the instrumentality... is sufficiently organised,—the Page 286 largest unit yet successfully developed by Nature,—entire unity is not always achieved. If no other elements of discord remain, yet the conflict of classes is always possible. And the phenomenon leads us to another rule of this gradual development of Nature in human life which we shall find of very considerable importance when we come to the question ...
... psychology,—religion as an emotional delusion, philosophy, the pure essence of the mind, as a barren thought-weaving,—and resolved to devote the whole intellectual faculty of man to a study of the laws of material Nature and of man's bodily, social, economic and political existence and to build thereon a superior civilisation. That stupendous effort is over; it has not yet frankly declared its bankruptcy... truth the East already possesses; and it is an ancient knowledge. The East also is awaking to the message. The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has in its most inferior forms and the crudenesses which are invading her. The problem of thought therefore is... which the enlightenment of Europe has been governed is the passion for the discovery of the Truth and Law that constitutes existence and governs the process of the world, the attempt to develop the life and potentialities of man, his ideals, institutions, organisations by the knowledge of that Law and Truth and the confidence that along this line lies the road of human progress and perfection. The ...
... essential nature of things. Quite correct. Everything I see—clouds, leaves, flowers, walls, clothing, people, food, the cells of the body—all are silent, and in that silence they do their work according to the law of their nature. The effect of their movement—the rustling of leaves, the striking of hammer on steel—is something quite apart from this silence which is in the nature of the things ...
... nature of the possible universal combinations are about to change to such an extent that it will stagger all those who deal with life. Let us wait and see. I may add one word, a practical word, to what I have already said; it is an illustration of a detail, but it will be a kind of reply to some other questions put to me some time ago about the so-called laws of Nature, causes and effects... to satisfy these laws. But that is an appearance, and it does cut you off from the creative Power of the Spirit, cut you off from the true Power of Grace. You can understand that if, by your aspiration and your attitude, you bring down a higher element, a new element – which now we may call the Supramental – into the existing combinations, you can all on a sudden change their nature and then all these... you establish laws and what is the absolute truth of such laws? There is no such truth. For, if you are logical, that is to say, with a little higher logic, how can you say that a thing repeats itself, since there are no two things, no two combinations, no two universal manifestations that are the same? The "sameness" could be only an appearance, not a fact. The mind sets up rigid laws, and when it ...
... quantity and the nature of the possible universal combinations are about to change to such an extent that it will stagger all those who deal with life. Let us wait and see. I may add one word, a practical word, to what I have already said; it is an illustration of a detail, but it will be a kind of reply to some other questions put to me sometime ago about the so-called laws of Nature, causes and... attitude, you bring down a higher element, a new element —which now we may call the Supramental—into the existing combinations, you can all on a sudden change their nature and then all these so-called necessary and inexorable laws become absurdities. It is you, with your conception, your attitude, your acceptance of certain so-called principles, it is yourself who shut the door against the possibility... consequences. True. But if you look at the thing in the light of what I have told you—that there are no two universal combinations that are alike—then how can you establish laws and what is the absolute truth of such laws? Page 78 There is no such truth. For, if you are logical, that is to say, with a little higher logic, how can you say that a thing repeats itself, since there ...
... existence of a body with physical instruments and processes does not, as the 19 th century vainly imagined, disprove the existence of a soul which uses the body even if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God. The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments... circumstances are mere instruments." Nowadays even a layman will understand Sri Aurobindo's remark: "Nature is not so mechanical, she is a conscious being. If you try to circumvent her in one way she circumvents you in another." Let the medical science but come up with a new drug to combat a disease, Nature confounds it by confronting it with a more virulent, more resistant strain. Page 161 ...
... ² For the miracle does happen and man is waiting for that in spite of all the tragic interlude: If the leaves, branches, roots, trunk Had been granted a manual of freedom, The laws of nature would have intervened. But a miracle is a miracle, a miracle is God. When we are all confusion, That instant it finds us out.³ ¹ "Magdalene" (II). ²"Earth". ³ "Miracle". ... individual and the collective-the private and the public sector in modern jargon – is not of today. It is as old as Sophocles, as old as Valmiki. Antigone upheld the honour of the individual against the law of the State and sacrificed herself for that ideal. Sri Rama on the contrary sacrificed his personal individual claims to the demand of his people, the collective godhead. Pasternak's tragedy runs... of it. That is perhaps the stage of happy innocence of which many of the first great Romantics dreamed, e.g., Rousseau and Wordsworth. Viewed as such, placed as a natural phenomenon in the midst of Nature, in its totality, mankind still appears as a harmonious entity fitting into a harmonious whole. But that is a global bird's-eye view. There is a near view that isolates the human phenomenon, and then ...
... the miracle does happen and man is waiting for that in spite of all the tragic interlude: If the leaves, branches, roots, trunk Had been granted a manual of freedom, The laws of nature would have intervened. Page 45 But a miracle is a miracle, a miracle is God. When we are all confusion, That instant it finds us out. Yes, the captive... individual and the collective—the private and the public sector in modem jargon—is not of today. It is as old as Sophocles, as old as Valmiki. Antigone upheld the honour of the individual against the law of the State and sacrificed Page 40 herself for that ideal. Sri Rama on the contrary sacrificed his personal individual claims to the demand of his people, the collective godhead... it. That is perhaps the stage of happy innocence of which many of the first great Romantics dreamed, e.g., Rousseau and Wordsworth. Viewed as such, placed as a natural phenomenon in the midst of Nature, in its totality, mankind still appears as a harmonious entity fitting into a harmonious whole. But that is a global bird's-eye view. There is a near view that isolates the human phenomenon; and ...
... truth by your own personal experience. Science deals with laws of physical nature. But we have a vital nature, a mental nature. Psychology is an effort at the study of our vital and mental nature, but this is a very imperfect and perfunctory way to learn because it studies only the surface and does not go into the roots of our nature. For that yoga, the practical philosophy is needed. There are ...
... he wants to do. But this requires a great self-mastery and the realisation of what Sri Aurobindo says in this last paragraph, that is, instead of remaining below, subject to the laws of Nature, dominated by these laws and compelled to submit to them, failing which one is completely unbalanced, one becomes the master, one looks at these things from above, knows the truth of these things and imposes... Speak!... The question is not very well put, for if you ask how he speaks, well, he speaks as everybody does, with his voice, his tongue, his mouth and with words! If you were to ask what is the nature of what he says... obviously, if he expresses the state of consciousness in which he lives, he expresses a universal state of consciousness, and seeing things in a different way from ordinary men, ...
... may try, from the nature of the world we cannot escape from bondage. There is a knowledge, by attaining which we can become free. In the Gita we find that Srikrishna unites the Vedanta philosophy with the philosophy of Sankhya. Modern science denies that man has a soul. Science considers only the laws of nature. It regards nature as material, and man as merely a product of nature. It says man is a... that of the Shudra is not equal to that of the Kshatriya. If a Shudra adopts the dharma Page 49 of a Brahmin, he brings about the confusion of all laws and leads to the destruction and not to the betterment of mankind. It is nature which teaches you your own dharma . This is your dharma . If you shrink from upholding the cause of virtue, truth and justice, out of a feeling which is in... and outward. He is only that through which Vasudeva carries on his lila . He is not anxious to know what will happen tomorrow, because the action is not guided by laws. The man who has communion with God has no reason to be guided by laws, because he knows God is alone and all. He is not troubled by the fruits of his action. "You have the right to action, to work, but not to the fruit. Work and leave ...
... have not shattered it, we will continue to turn in vain in our golden circles or our iron circles of our mental prison. "These laws of Nature," says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute... merely mean an equilibrium established by Nature... it is merely a groove in which Nature is accustomed to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is bound... to the moon but we know nothing of our own hearts. "It is a question," says Sri Aurobindo, "of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution." 2 For, indeed, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit." 3 Beyond mental man, which is what we are, there opens... marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution." 5 Everywhere about us we see this paroxysmal exploding of all the old forms : our frontiers, our churches, our laws. Our morals crumble on all sides. They do not crumble because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, nor because we are not sufficiently rational, scientific, human, but precisely because we have come to ...
... not a disease originate from our breaking the laws of nature ? Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by the laws of nature ? What are these laws ? Disciple : When a man acts from desire he may do things which he is not compelled to do by need ; e.g. overeating lust etc. Sri Aurobindo : There are no such universal laws of nature. If you ask people who have lived a long life... the laws of nature, that he is not smoking or taking wine etc. While another will say that he has been able to live long because he had always a peg ! And so on. So there are no such universal laws. Disciple : But it is a fact that observance of hygienic Laws diminishes mortality. Sri Aurobindo : What you can at the most say is that if one keeps what you call the hygienic laws – one... to them. When you are on the other side of mind you can look at it from beyond and see how this works below here ; but so long as we are here – in the mind – we have to proceed from the law of our present nature. Disciple : I wanted to ask whether the nation that would emerge in India today would have the same characteristics as the nations in Europe or would it have something different ? ...
... develops a spirit in its being, a special soul-form of the human all-soul and a law of its nature which determines the lines and turns of its evolution. All that it takes from its environment it naturally attempts to assimilate to this spirit, transmute into stuff of this soul-form, make apt to and governable by this law of its nature. All its self-expression is in conformity with them. And its poetry, art... to be heard. For we are all of us souls developing our unfinished nature in a constant endeavour to get into unity with the spirit in life through its many forms of manifestation and on many different lines. And as there is in Indian Yoga a principle of varying capacity, adhikāra , something in the immediate power of a man's nature that determines by its characteristics his right to this or that way... of great poetry. The poet, we must always remember, creates out of himself and has the indefeasible right to follow freely the breath of the spirit within him, provided he satisfies in his work the law of poetic beauty. The external forms of his age and his nation only give him his starting-point and some of his materials and determine to some extent, by education, by a subconscious and automatic ...
... science, and since the assumptions of induction in regard to the law of uniformity of nature and the law of causation now are seen to be inconsistent with the freak and fantasy of the world-phenomena, various theories have been developed to explain induction empirically without the need to acknowledge non-empirical belief in the laws of universality and causality. As a result, philosophers of science... considered to be a necessary requirement of rational understanding. At one time, there seemed to be in the world an iron insistence on order, on a law basing on the possibilities. But today even while granting some apparent operations of laws of nature, what is predominantly emphasized is the unaccountability and freak and fantasy and random action. It is increasingly being recognized that the theory... combined with a good deal of order, there is a trend to explain the world by pointing to a self-organizing dynamic Chance or to give up the idea altogether of explanation in terms of any universal law of causation. It has even been argued that one should not aim at explanation of the phenomena of the world, but one should remain content with their descriptions. 4 It is true that science still ...
... The so-called universal truths or laws of Nature that the scientist discovers by virtue Page 293 of his keen intellect have their chief advantage in enabling one to deal with the external world with considerable ease. That is why the scientist is blind to any other mystery than that of Matter. This is a defect pertaining to and inherent in his nature. Be that as it may, we have still... him. On the basis of the wealth of sense-perceptions and by their analysis and synthesis and by observation and experimentation, to arrive at a universal law as wide as possible marks the special genius of the scientist. The mysteries of Nature that have been discovered by scientific methods are not the last word or the whole of her truth. However, it may be said: “There is no other means of arriving... type of theism proper to the scientific mind are different in nature and orientation and are independent of each other. From the standpoint of norms and. ultimate values that science brings forward, reasoning does not occupy the most important place. Science presumes to arrive at a logical conclusion from observation of facts of Nature. The advantages and benefits that we get from science are its ...
... what I thought, to what I felt. "We are not strong enough to fight by force, for we are not united enough, not organised enough. We must develop our intelligence to understand better the deeper laws of Nature, and to learn better how to act in an orderly way, to co-ordinate our efforts. We must teach the people around us, we must train them to think for themselves and to reflect so that they can become ...
... shows a complete inability to appreciate the nature of sacrifice and the laws of politics. If we had acted in this Bania spirit, we should never have got beyond the point at which we stood four years ago. It is by unhesitating, wholehearted and princely sacrifices that nations effect their liberty. It has always been so in the past and the laws of nature have not altered and will not alter to suit the... contemporary's philosophy. An unconscious analysis is a contradiction in terms. There may be a vague and ill-expressed weighing of things in the rough, but that is not analysis. Analysis is in its nature a deliberate intellectual process; the other is merely a perception of things separately or together but without analysis. And analysis is not inconsistent with faith, but must accompany it unless ...
... The conservative mind is unwilling to recognise this law though it is observable throughout human history and we can easily cull examples with full hands from all ages and all climes; and it is protected in its refusal to see by the comparative rarity of rapid revolutions and great cataclysmal changes; it is blinded by the disguise which Nature so often throws over her processes of mutation. If we... the social history of mankind and still awaits intelligent study. Our minds are apt to seize things in the rough and to appreciate only what stands out in bold external relief; we miss the law of Nature's subtleties and disguises. We can see and fathom to some extent the motives, necessities, process of great revolutions and marked changes and we can consider and put in their right place the brief... There has also been this result that while the European conservative has learned the law of change in human society, knows that he must move and quarrels with the progressist only over the right pace and the exact direction, the Eastern or rather the Indian conservative still imagines that stability may be the true law of mortal being, practises a sort of Yogic āsana on the flood of Time and because ...
... motion of Nature as representative of or nearest to that unity governs the multiple individual products of the movement. To each motion its law and to each inhabitant of that motion subjection to the law. Therefore Man, being human in Nature, is bound first by Nature, then by his humanity. But because God is also the transcendence of Nature & Nature moves towards God, therefore, even in Nature itself... nor are its processes the laws of God's being; for Spirit is absolute and has no fixed or binding nature, God is supreme & transcendent and is not bound by state, law or process,—so free is He, rather, that He is not bound even to His own freedom. The laws of Nature, as we have seen, cannot be laws of being at all, since Nature itself is a becoming; they are processes which regulate the harmonies of becoming... sempiternal fetters on Existence. Even the most fundamental laws are only modes of activity conceived & chosen by Spirit in the universe. We arrive then at this farther all-important truth:— Nature is a divine motion of becoming of which Spirit is the origin, substance and control as well as the inhabitant and enjoyer. Laws of Nature are themselves general movements & developments of becoming and ...
... धर्म प्र यजा चिकित्वोऽथा नो धा अध्वरं देववीतौ ॥५॥ 5) O Fire, he who was before thee 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... SUKTA 17 समिध्यमानः प्रथमानु धर्मा समक्तुभिरज्यते विश्ववारः । शोचिष्केशो घृतनिर्णिक् पावकः सुयज्ञो अग्निर्यजथाय देवान् ॥१॥ 1) He is kindled and blazes out according to the first and supreme laws and is united with the Rays, he in whom are all desirable things. Fire with his tresses of flame and his raiment of light, the purifier, perfect in sacrifice, for sacrifice to the gods. यथायजो ...
... and he replied: Page 259 "Alas! I am only like a little child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth." You will understand that the ocean of truth means the laws of Nature which even the most learned men hardly know at all. A little child collects pebbles on the sea-shore, but how much vaster is the sea than the child thinks! And how much vaster still is the universe... of his long life he studied Nature; the universal force of attraction called gravitation, the effect of the sun and the moon on the tides; the light of the sun and how its white ray is broken up into the seven colours of the rainbow; and many other things besides. Everyone marvelled at the wisdom of this man who was so skilled in reading the works and wonders of Nature. One day a lady spoke to Newton ...
... original, dark cellular Prison which we must break open; for as long as we have not broken it, we will continue to turn vainly in the golden or iron circles of our mental prison. "These laws of Nature," says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute... merely mean an equilibrium established to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is... the moon, but we know nothing of our own hearts. It is a question, says Sri Aurobindo, "of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution." 3 For, in actuality, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit." 4 Beyond the mental man we are, there exists the p... usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution." 6 Everywhere about us we see this paroxysmal shattering of all the old forms: our borders, our churches, our laws, our morals are collapsing on all sides. They are not collapsing because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, or because we are not sufficiently rational, scientific or human, but because we have come ...
... live according to the inner law, the truth of your being. I have explained this at some length in "The Science of Living", I have said that this truth of the being is precisely the particularity of every one. But it differs with every one, doesn't it? The law of each being is different, yes, otherwise how would a distinction be made?—From top to bottom, the nature, appearance, actions, all would... Himself. A civilisation prepares an instrument so that the Divine may manifest in that instrument. The more slowly, carefully, minutely the civilisation is worked out, and succeeds in conquering the laws of Nature, the more favourable is the instrument to the manifestation of the Divine. That is why we also have this idea of the prolongation of life, it is to be able to perfect the instrument so as to manifest... the work, all the accumulated effort to become conscious is lost. If, for instance, this civilisation we have built, which in a way has so considerably mastered the forces of Nature, which has succeeded in understanding laws of an altogether unique order and has accumulated so many experiences of all kinds to reach self-understanding and self-expression, if all this disappeared, it would be necessary ...
... belong to Nature. They are personified natural forces obedient to the laws of Nature. In other words, they originate from below, not from the vital but the physical world. They are vital forces in the physical, but not of vital origin. The other day, didn't I tell you the story of those entities working for me?... (It wasn't you? I'd had a vision.) In fact, I very often see entities like Nature spirits... different world). Most of the time these Nature forces are very willing to help—at any rate, they are wonderfully obliging with me! But they are limited beings, with their own ideas and laws, their own volition, and when vexed they can do unpleasant things. Yet they are not hostile beings, nor are they vital beings: they are personified forces of physical Nature, in the subtle physical. A world of ...
... "staticle." This particle is inherently devoid of factors which would allow us to apply the law of causality to physical phenomena, and there is, within specified limits, an inherent indefiniteness in nature. The probability law must be accepted as primary: it cannot be superseded by a more fundamental law of a deterministic kind. To quote Whittaker again: "Kant said, quite justly, that regularity... macrophysical experiments confirm determinism. But Hans Reichenbach has a very pertinent passage on this point. "It is not at all true," he says, "that we ever find strict laws in nature. For all that we observe, each time, is that a law has been approximately fulfilled; a hurled stone, a flowing electrical current, a deflected ray of light, when exactly measured, will never show the course prescribed by... probably occasion but a slight disturbance - but that is already a statement containing the concept of probability. Thus the idea of probability unavoidably enters the formulation of all laws of nature, if these laws are to be stated with complete conceptual rigour." Science tried to raise probability to certainty by two means. If we pass to a large number of cases we change the low probability of ...
... subjection to a law of communal self-development rather than by aggressive self-affirmation, but that actually what Nature seeks to preserve is not the individual but the type and that in her scale of values the pack, herd, hive or swarm takes precedence over the individual Page 56 animal or insect and the human group over the individual human being. Therefore in the true law and nature of things... right to fulfil himself except in his relations to the collectivity. These alone then are to determine his thought, action and existence and the claim of the individual to have a law of his own being, a law of his own nature which he has a right to fulfil and his demand for freedom of thought involving necessarily the freedom to err and for freedom of action involving necessarily the freedom to stumble... first appear to make any difference in its factors. Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the collectivity, the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind, life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony. But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and mechanical view Page 57 of the ...
... flexibility! And that's what will give it the capacity to prolong its life.... Necessities have lost their authority: you can adapt yourself this way, adapt yourself that way. All the laws—those laws that were laws of Nature—have lost all their despotism, if I may say so. All you have to do is constantly and always to be supple, attentive, and responsive to the influence of the Consciousness—the Consciousness... suppleness. That is the discovery being made more and more. And it's wonderful, you know! A wonderful discovery. It's like a progressive victory over all constraints. So naturally, all the laws of Nature, all the human laws, all habits, all rules, all that grows increasingly supple and finally becomes nonexistent. And then, you see: as the process grows more and more perfect —"perfect" means integral, total... the old world of the cage and the laws of the cage—it is a certain way of breathing, a little silvery vibration that runs through the cells, and which sometimes may even seize an entire crowd of people: The intervention or manifestation of the true Vibration doesn't depend on egos or individualities (human or national individualities, or even individualities of Nature: animals, plants and so on), it ...
... him. He recounted many incidents in which he had done daring acts at the risk of death to himself to prove that the yogi by virtue of this superconscient knowledge is not bound by the laws of physical nature. For example, he had on more than one occasion swallowed big lumps of opium and held deadly cobras captive in his hand only to let them off unscathed afterwards. There were also nocturnal ...
... ego,— that is only the disguise of iron armour which masks and encumbers the national Purusha,—but a great communal soul and life that has appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a Swabhava and Swadharma, and embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. And equally then our cultural conception of humanity... ought to be at the very root of our education and the one thing that will give it its truly national character. Man has not been seen by the thought of India as a living body developed by physical Nature which has evolved certain vital propensities, an ego, a mind and a reason, an animal of the genus and in our case of the species homo indicus, whose whole life and education must be turned towards... the turn of her mind to regard man pre-eminently as a reasoning animal, or let us say, widening the familiar definition, a thinking, feeling and willing natural existence, a mental son of physical Nature, and his education as a culture of the mental capacities, or to define him as a political, social and economic being and his education as a training that will fit him to be an efficient, productive ...
... lost its value, its fixed value, one can do in a short space of time or a longer space, exactly the same thing. "Necessities" have lost their authority: one can adapt this way or that. All laws, the laws of Nature, have lost their despotism, if we can call it that: it is Page 58 not like that any more. It is enough to be always supple, attentive and... "responsive" to the influence of... flexibility. That is a discovery which is being made more and more. It is wonderful, a wonderful discovery. It is like a gradual victory over all the imperatives. Thus, all the laws of Nature, and naturally all human laws, habits, rules - all that is losing its rigidity and will end up by becoming non-existent. And yet one can maintain a regular rhythm. that makes action easy — it is not contrary... as an absolute law, but merely as one of the procedures, when it was required. Above all, it is that: all that the Mind has made as rigid and absolute and almost invincible... all that will disappear. And simply that, by passing the supreme power over to the Supreme Consciousness. Perhaps that is what the ancient sages meant when they spoke of transferring the power of Nature (Prakriti) to ...
... an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who Page 442 strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature. He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limitations. He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated... knowledge of all things and charity and reverence for all things, even the most apparently mean, ugly or dark, for the sake of the universal Deity who chooses to dwell equally in all. But, also, the law of right action is a choice, the preference of that which expresses the godhead to that which conceals it. And the choice entails a battle, a struggle. It is not easily made, it is not easily enforced... accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration. The Aryan gods were the supraphysical powers who assisted the mortal in his struggle towards the nature of the godhead. All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable. In later times ...
... indwelling Lord of all Nature and turn to Him with one's whole being, — with the life and body and sense and mind and heart and understanding, — with one's whole dedicated knowledge and will and action, sarvabhāvena, in every way of conscious self and instrumental nature. For all other Dharmas or norms of action are only a preparation for that highest Dharma which is the law of divine nature and divine action... That is the path that leads to the state of immortality, the state of union with the divine Being, identity with the Self and oneness with the supreme dynamic divine Nature, and the state of transcendence of the three gunas of lower nature, — the state of trigunātita, and the state of sādharmyam. In the last six chapters (XIII—XVIII), the entire synthesis of yoga of the Gita is reviewed from a special... surrender, culminating in in tenser and completer self-surrender. In the next six chapters there is insistence on knowledge, and the states and contents of self-realization, and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world are described, not only in terms of essence but also in terms of fullness of essential details (Jñānam and vijñānam). 4 But the sacrifice of the works continues and the ...
... of birth and world and Nature or [. . .] & hope to get [out] of it into some other supraterrestrial state of existence. Human life on earth can then never grow into anything fundamentally other, better or more perfect than it is now. The hope that by using our reason and observing or utilising the laws of Nature we can arrive at a perfect life here is futile, for our nature here being itself ignorant... there by which we can know ourselves and this Alpha and X and Omega of things or if not absolutely It at any rate its status and its dynamis, the law of its being and the law of its nature quite as deeply and more deeply than Science can show us the law and process of the physical universe. For the moment let us affirm only this result that this spiritual search and knowledge leads us beyond the... in it and govern by its Truth all our being, consciousness, nature, will, action would then be the law of a perfect life. If human life is imperfect, it is because its consciousness moves seeking, groping, experimenting in a fundamental ignorance of the real truth of its own being and is therefore unable to know or to effectuate the true law of its life. It is only if man can overcome this ignorance ...
... Principle In his long years of reflection, it had become patent to Charles Darwin that the human being was a product of nature just like any other organism, an animal among animals, even if possibly a special one. If so, Homo sapiens had to obey the same laws of nature, the chief one being the general competition for survival, as an individual within the species and as part of a species among... other words collective homicide, ‘was in agreement with the order of things established by God’, because this ‘order established by God’ corresponded to perfection with the formulation of the ‘laws of nature’ as used by the positivists and Darwinians.” 16 Breeding a Superman Looking back on the amazing story of discoveries, controversies, search, dedication, endurance, obstinacy, intelligence... classification. These facts of life, in their turn, matched with the general experience of the law of life which was the law of the strongest, “the survival of the fittest,” effective among all organisms and among the humans as far as memory could look back. The law of the strongest was ostensibly also the law of the best, of positive physical and mental characteristics running in families and races, ...
... the laws of evolution have come to be utilized, even though not consciously. But, as Sri Aurobindo points out, nature's laws of evolution are, in fact, laws of Nature's yoga, and when Nature reaches the point of. the development of conscious will, Nature becomes conscious of its own yogic process through the human instruments which build up yogic processes and methods. Unconscious yoga of Nature begins... unconvincing, when we find that there is too much of an iron insistence on order, on a law basing the possibilities. The theory of self-organizing dynamic chance may therefore come to be replaced by the theory of a mechanical necessity in things, its workings recognizable by us as so many mechanical laws of Nature. But the theory of Mechanical Necessity does not elucidate the free play of the endless... ignorant in his mentality, so as to arrive at a free and wide harmony and luminosity of knowledge and will and feeling and action and character.29 Man and Evolutionary Law of Ascent and Integration The evolutionary law of ascent and integration can be seen more clearly when we compare the higher animal with man. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the higher animal is not the somnambulist, but it ...
... may even result in an illness. But originally it's not that: it's a withdrawal, the withdrawal of Nature's ordinary law with its adjunct of personal vital and mental law (but Nature's law in the body is generally much stronger than the mind's and the vital's law); well, it's the withdrawal of that law and its replacement by the other. So there is a moment when it's neither this nor that, and that moment... slowly, that gets cured. Page 45 Each experience—and now it's going fast—each experience points to a great step forward. ( silence ) Every time the rule or domination of Nature's ordinary laws is, on one point or another, replaced (or must be or is going to be replaced on any point) by the authority of the Divine Consciousness, that creates a state of transition with all the appearances... would happen. So this need to get a grip on oneself occurs until one is entirely ready—when one is ready, one can let oneself go. And as soon as the fusion is done... (what can I call it?) not the "law" but what we might call the raison d'être [of individualization] comes back, and without the ego's limitations. I had that experience in the vital and in the mind; now I see that it's the same in ...
... from a dream into a possibility,—by the willed evolution in man of his higher nature, by a steady self-purification and a development in the light of this divine knowledge towards the fulfilment of his own supra-material, supra-intellectual nature. For that purpose he must know God and not only the physical laws of Nature. He must know his soul and not only the open or secret machinery of his body.... "Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression. Therefore all attempts to deny and slaughter the reason are reprehensible and should be strongly opposed & discouraged. The revolt of Rationalism against the tyranny of the creeds & the Churches is justified by God's law and truth. And not only the Page 346 Churches & creeds, but Veda... thinkers to speculate in the void, using great words & high ideas as if these were ornaments of a bright lustre & great costliness but of no living utility. The Vedanta is above all a rule of life, a law of being and a determination of relation and conduct; for its ideas are sovereign, potent, insistent to remould a man's whole outlook upon existence; it is at once a philosophy & a religion and it owes ...
... of you has awakened to the knowledge of this secret thing, that it is the Child who gives birth to his own mothers by the right workings of the law of his nature? Born in the womb of many waters, he comes forth from their lap a vast Seer, possessed of the law of his being. आविष्टयो वर्धते चारुरासु जिह्मानामूर्ध्वः स्वयशा उपस्थे । उभे त्वष्टुर्बिभ्यतुर्जायमानात् प्रतीची सिंहं प्रति जोषयेते ॥५॥... सुवर्चाः ॥१॥ 1) Day and Night have different forms, but are travellers to one perfect goal; they suckle alternately the divine Child. In our day he becomes the brilliant Sun and is master of the law of his nature; through our night he is visible in the purity of his brightness and the energy of his lustres. Page 145 दशेमं त्वष्टुर्जनयन्त गर्भमतन्द्रासो युवतयो विभृत्रम् । तिरमानीकं स्वयशसं... Kutsa Angirasa SUKTA 94 इमं स्तोममर्हते जातवेदसे रथमिव सं महेमा मनीषया । भद्रा हि नः प्रमतिरस्य संसद्यग्ने सख्ये मा रिषामा वयं तव ॥१॥ 1) This is the omniscient who knows the law of our being and is sufficient to his works; let us build the song of his truth by our thought and make it as if a chariot on which he shall mount. When he dwells with us, then a happy wisdom becomes ...
... springs of the machine do not insist on the product that shall be turned out from its labour. These things are settled by the intention and working of Nature and the more the conscious instrument learns to feel and obey the pure and essential law of its nature, the sooner shall the work turned out become perfect and flawless. Self-choice by the nervous motive-power, revolt of the physical and mental tool... because they are in thy unfinished nature. For Nature is the worker and what is it that she works at? She shapes out of her crude mind and life and matter a fully conscious being Know thyself next as the Worker. Understand thy nature to be the worker and thy own nature and All-Nature to be thyself. This nature-self is not proper to thee nor limited. Thy nature has made the sun and the systems... 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 nature and an individual energy. Follow that like a widening river till it leads thee to its infinite source and origin. Know therefore thy body to be a knot in Matter and thy mind to be a whirl in universal ...
... of justice—it will dash itself against the laws of nature which are the laws of God, and be broken to pieces. This then is our object and by what means do we seek it? We seek it by feeling our separateness and pushing forward our individual self-fulfilment by what we call Swadeshi—Swadeshi in commerce and manufacture, in politics, in education, in law and administration, in every branch of national... Legislative Council, it would be in Lord Morley's sense of the word as good a law as any upon the Statute Book. But would it be a good law in the true sense or a travesty of law and justice? Lord Morley says it is a good law. We say it is a lawless law,—a dishonest law,—a law that is, in any real sense of the word, no law at all. For what is its substance and purpose? It provides that when you cannot... attorney. "The law," he said, "is as good a law as any on the Statute Book." What is meant—what does Lord Morley mean—by a "good law"? In a certain sense every law is a good law which is passed by an established authority. If there were a law which made Swadeshi illegal, by which to buy a Swadeshi cloth would become a criminal action punishable by a legal tribunal—there have been such laws in the past—and ...
... sound corresponding to Sanskrit ए or that corresponding to Sanskrit ओ is made short or long at pleasure; but to the Sanskrit, Greek or Latin ear it would have sounded like a defiance of the laws of Nature. Bengali is a modern language, so there this kind of stylisation is possible, for there ए can be long, short or doubtful. All this, not to write more about stylisation, but only as a protest... to learn Page 145 the new principle. If you are imposing a principle not only of rhythm but of scansion to which the ear in spite of past attempts is not trained so as to seize the basic law of the movement in all its variations, a fair amount of incomprehension, some difficulty in knowing how to read the verse is very probable. Easier forms of a new rhythm may be caught in their movement... stylisation is permissible and a recognised form of art—I mean professed and overt stylisation and not that which hides itself under a contrary profession of naturalness or faithful following of external nature. The only question is how much of it Bengali poetry can bear. I do not think the distinction between song and poem goes at all to the root of the matter. The question is whether it is possible to have ...
... add a practical word to what I have just told you; it is only an illustration of a detail, but it will be an indirect answer to other questions which were asked some time ago about the so-called laws of Nature, causes and effects, "inevitable" consequences in the material field, and more particularly from the point of view of health; for example, that if one doesn't take certain precautions, if one doesn't... at we may now call a supramental element—into the existing combinations, you can suddenly change their nature, and all these so-called necessary and ineluctable laws become absurdities. That is to say that you yourself, with your conception, with your attitude and your acceptance of certain alleged principles, you yourself close the door upon the possibility of the miracle—they are not miracles when... combinations are alike, how can laws be established and what is the absolute truth of these laws?... It does not exist. For, if you are logical, of course with a little higher logic, since no two things, two combinations, two universal manifestations are ever the same, how can anything repeat itself? It can only be an appearance but is not a fact. And to fix rigid laws in this way—not that you cut ...
... stuff of the cells, was constantly being told, "Don't you forget, now you see that miracles CAN happen." In other words, the way things work out in physical substance may not at all conform to the laws of Nature. "Don't forget, now!" It kept coming back like a refrain: "Don't forget, now! This is how it is." And I saw how necessary this repetition was for the cells: they forget right away and try to find ...
... Yogis usually do? The answer that I have found is that Sri Aurobindo's life has respected the rules and laws of Nature, what he has called the conditions of the game. But even these conditions are adapted to a new direction of which Nature, though not pursuing it, is secretly capable. Thus Nature is put to a supernatural use. Whenever any directly miraculous or special intervention has been made either... rules and laws, a freakish and ultimately inconsequential movement. A process is still followed. Sri Aurobindo sums up the several sides of the Divine's action thus: "The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions, to act by a series of miracles." In following this course of Nature, he probably... birth and the dreams he cherished and worked for are on their way to realisation. He did not come for a few individuals only, or for a single nation or race; he came for the transformation of earth-nature which had been abandoned to herself by God and man. God-men came to give some relief to the suffering humanity or to show it a door of escape from suffering, but none before Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental ...
... Chapter IX Civilisation and Culture Nature starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a great mental effort to understand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers... but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether... is not supposed to have these advantages. In a certain sense the Red Indian, the Basuto, the Fiji islander had their civilisation; they possessed a rigorously, if simply organised society, a social law, some ethical ideas, a religion, a kind of training, a good many virtues in some of which, it is said, civilisation is sadly lacking; but we are agreed to call them savages and barbarians, mainly it ...
... scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive ... make the ordinary reason the judge of what is beyond it." Because, he explained in his precise way, "the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain and go according to a Page 193 law of their own, have their own method of perception, criteria and all the rest of it which are neither those of the domain of the physical senses nor of the domain of rational or scientific enquiry. Just... the subconscious material," he wrote cautioning a disciple, "that feels an artificial need created by the past and does not care whether it is harmful or disturbing to the nerves or not. That is the nature of all intoxicants (wine, tobacco, cocaine etc.), people go on even after the deleterious effects have shown themselves and even after all real pleasure in it has ceased because of this artificial ...
... remarkable things about the primal world and the sagas of humanity, about humanity’s capacity of dream-vision in olden times, about a way of knowledge and a to us supernatural power over the rational laws of nature. There had been the eye of the Cyclops, the eye in the middle of the forehead, which was the organ of a magical perception of the All that had degenerated into the pineal gland. Such ideas fascinated... scheming promoters of materialism were the Jews. The latter had no idea of true spirituality, or of a soul, or of another world. Voltaire had written it long ago: “What is very singular is that in all the laws of god’s people there is not a word about the spirituality and the immortality of the soul … It is quite certain, it is indubitable that Moses nowhere promised the Jews rewards and punishments in another... fulfil their destiny which consists in the salvation of the world … The German power and strength and magnificence are needed to cure the world!” 1002 And then follows an odd syllogism: “The soul is by nature Christian”; only the German people have a soul; therefore to be German and to be Christian is one and the same. And from this follows: “God-like – Christian – German” is the antithesis of “devilish ...
... existence of a body with physical instruments and processes does not, as the 19th century wrongly imagined, disprove the existence of a soul which uses the body even if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God. The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments... planes. Nature-forces are conscious forces—they can very well combine all that is necessary for an action or a purpose and when one means fails, take another. They [ general forces and impulses in the atmosphere ] are able to act with a greater force if they can make a special formation Page 559 than by a general psychological action common to all human nature. The forces... circumstances, conditions etc. as if they were fundamental things. One can not only receive a force, but an impulse, thought or sensation. One may receive it from others, from beings in Nature or from Nature herself if she chooses to give her Force a ready-made form of that kind. The force "created" is not yours—it is Prakriti's—your will sets it in motion, it does not really create it; but ...
... new era, in which magic, mystical vision and world-power would be restored to all true-born Germans.” 504 While to its practitioners occultism was a method, based on wisdom, to find out the laws of nature and to use them to certain ends, the pagan rites of power were almost exclusively put at the service of the barbarian urges of self-aggrandizement and the physical force to dominate others, gain... for the tragic side of life and the necessity of evil in the world”, wrote Thomas Mann, the author of Doktor Faustus . 511 As the völkisch protest movement against the modern world turned towards nature and the old gods, it was inevitable that the darker, vitalistic forces of life would seek an outlet through this youth. The youth associations were almost exclusively close bondings of groups of men; ...
... Human nature is always full of impurities and imperfections and of itself cannot reach the Divine. It is by the descent of the higher consciousness from above that all that can change; but you must not expect the change to take place in a few days. It is not my working, but your moods that are queer. You get something 1 no reasonable being would expect under the ordinary laws of Nature and... progress, yet remains and sustains the outer nature. The second cause is some resistance, something in the human nature that has not felt the former descents, is not ready, is perhaps unwilling to change,—often it is some strong habitual formation of the mind or the vital or some temporary inertia of the physical consciousness and not exactly a part of the nature—and this, whether showing or concealing... This struggle is inevitable in human nature and no sadhak escapes it; everyone has to deal with that obscurity and resistance and its obstinacy and constant Page 663 recurrence; for the lower nature is not only persistent in its repetitions and returns, but even when it is on the point of changing, the general Powers of that plane in universal Nature try to keep up the resistance by bringing ...
... case to have always occurred till now), and that we have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident and overcome it. But it is so terrible, so formidable a battle against all the laws of Nature, against all collective suggestions, all earthly habits, that unless, as I have said, you are a first-rate warrior whom nothing frightens, it is better not to begin the battle. You must be an ... an accident to begin with.... If you look at the thing from a philosophical point of view, it is evident that the universe in which we live is a movement among many others and this movement follows a law which is its own (and which is perhaps not the same in the others), and if the Will was for the world to be built on the principle of choice, of the freedom of choice, then one cannot prevent disorderly... , who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them 'Formateurs' and not 'Creators'; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many, and some have formed things harmonious and benignant and some have shaped things mischievous and evil. And some too have been distorters rather than builders, for they ...
... fact there will be no aggregates at all, the individual will be the sole, the first and the last unit. The individual, it is said, will have so developed and perfected its self-nature that by following the law of that nature, it will automatically and spontaneously live and move harmoniously with all the rest; each will be a self-contained unit and there will be a kind of pre-established harmony among... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 The Ideals of Human Unity THE unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and... firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels for its fulfilment. On three different lines a greater and larger unification of mankind ...
... fact there will be no aggregates at all, the individual will be the sole, the first and the last unit. The individual, it is said, will have so developed and perfected its self-nature that by following the law of that nature, it will automatically and spontaneously five and move harmoniously with all the rest; each will be a self-contained unit and there will be Page 98 a kind of p... PART II TOWARDS A NEW SOCIETY The Ideals Of Human Unity The unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and... firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels for its fulfilment. On three different lines a greater and larger unification of mankind ...
... Contemplating the glories of nature, and the human in nature, has caused delight everywhere and in all climes, and is at the heart of natural philosophy. The anthropic principle, however, is the result of modern, in fact quite recent macro- and microphysical findings. “The anthropic principle is essentially the idea that our very existence puts constraints on what physical laws are possible. These must... energy prevents the neutrons from decaying. Without neutrons we would not have the heavier elements needed for building complex systems such as life.” 4 A physicist is of the opinion that the laws of nature seem specially tailored to our own existence; a biologist reflects that if the history of life had been even slightly different, the makeup of the world’s species today would be completely different... of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming,” concedes Freeman Dyson. And even Steven Weinberg enunciates his amazement that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly ...
... rigid value): you can do the same thing in very little time or in much time. Necessities have lost their authority: you can adapt yourself this way, adapt yourself that way. All the laws—those laws that were laws of Nature—have lost all their despotism, if I may say so: it no longer works that way. All you have to do is constantly and always to be supple, attentive, and... responsive to the influence... That is the discovery being made more and more. And it's wonderful, you know! A wonderful discovery. It's like a progressive victory over all constraints. So naturally, all the laws of Nature, all the human laws, all habits, all rules, all that grows increasingly supple and finally becomes nonexistent. Yet it is possible to keep a regular rhythm that makes action easier—it's not contrary to this... not as an absolute law, but as ONE of the processes, when necessary. It's mainly all that the Mind has brought in terms of rigidity and absoluteness and near invincibility—that's what... is going to disappear. And simply by... handing the supreme power over to the Supreme Consciousness. That may be what the sages of old meant when they spoke of handing the power of Nature or the power of the ...
... fears, how many combinations, how many... would crumble away, would lose all meaning!" It was... what we see as "laws of Nature," "ineluctable" things, it all was absurd, an absurdity! Yes, and I felt it as something flimsy, like a thin film, something without... Those awesome laws were something very flimsy. Yes, yes! You could almost have blown them away. Yes, that's right. Yes. With... it myself, that is to say, with the full knowledge. And they know nothing! It's quite astounding, oh!... Yes. And then, when you are in that subtle physical consciousness, the laws change—you can change the material law if you are in that consciousness. Yes, it doesn't at all work in the same way. I mean that... Mon petit, great care has been taken not to mentalize this thing. And that's... vision of Sri Aurobindo, but I had the sensation of his presence (that often happens: at times I'll see him and he won't speak; at other times I won't see him but I'll hear him, he'll speak to me—the laws are no longer the same), and he made me notice, or rather I noted that although the body was suffering a lot (the situation was critical, you know), there wasn't the shadow of a fear in the body. Then ...
... so much their ultimate nature and relations as their actual workings and the rule and law of these workings. 15 The investigation of the workings of consciousness and the laws governing these workings calls for special processes and instruments which can be discovered only by yogic practice. This definition [of psychology as an examination of the nature and movements of con... and supply it but to which it has no visible access. All that is our self, our being, — what we see at the top is only our ego and its visible nature. Even the movements of this little surface nature cannot be understood nor its true law discovered until we know all that is below or behind and supplies it — and know too all that is around it and above. 9 The yogic view that... which will drive large wide roads into the psychological Unknown and not only obscure and narrow tunnels.... It is through consciousness, by an instrumentation of consciousness only that the nature and laws and movements of consciousness can be discovered — and this is the method of Yoga. 17 Yoga, by which one discovers the processes and develops the instruments required for the study ...
... of the law of the action of evolutionary Nature and that in terms of that law, the self exceeding and transformation of the mental being cannot be expected until the mental being has sufficiently developed up to its utmost capacity, and unless there has been sufficient integration of the powers of the mind with the powers of the lower phenomena of evolution. The action of evolution in Nature in a type... or yoga. He has also pointed out that the very law of the human type manifests the impulse towards self-exceeding, and that the means for a conscious transition has been provided for among the spiritual powers of man. Sri Aurobindo concedes that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending;... race-history. It may be conceded that man has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature. But it many be argued that despite the developments of science, man is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilization: he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities ...
... one finds in Scientific American of November 2010: “Physics, the book states, can now explain where the universe came from and why the laws of nature are what they are. The universe arose ‘from nothing’ courtesy of the force of gravity, and the laws of nature are an accident of the particular slice of universe we happen to inhabit. ‘God may exist’, Hawking told Larry King, adding, ‘but science can... exception been proven to be partial or provisional. The Second Law of Thermodynamics A third, less often noted argument in the negative view propagated by Scientism is the second law of thermodynamics, the study of the transformations of energy. The first law of thermodynamics is the law of conservation of energy. Its second law is the law of increase of entropy or molecular disorder, which states... increase … Every physical process in the universe follows the second law of thermodynamics … We face a continuous downward spiral of no return.” Entropy is unforgiving. “Many scientists look worried these days … To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.” 17 (William Calvin) However, the consequences of the second law are valid and verifiable only in case of the evolution of a system ...
... moral code or of a religious ethic; and there is, above all, the divine law inherent in Nature though obscured and held in check by. the perversions of human egoism. For mankind the ultimate aim should be the realisation of the dream of Satya Yuga, an order of divine dispensation: ...the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works... the ego which is the ultimate resistant to individual and collective liberation, and thereby release the spiritual Agni that holds the key to all other sources of energy and all the so-called "laws of Nature"? Modern science knows that Matter and Energy are convertible in terms of the equation E=mc 2 , but Yoga might be able, by wresting the secret of the fundamental Agni itself, to effect a radical... be our being's impulsion, its spiritual choice. But in the Way of Works another prospect opens; for travelling on that path, we can enter into liberation and perfection by becoming of one law and power of nature with the Eternal; we are identified with him in our will and dynamic self as much as in our spiritual status; a divine way of works is the natural outcome of this union.... In the Integral ...
... the Conscious Force that builds the worlds; a universal Energy that is the power of the Cosmic Spirit working out the cosmic and individual truth of things. Dharma — law; the deepest law of one's nature; the right law of individual and social life; literally, that which one lays hold of and which holds things together. Higher Mind — see under spiritualised mind. inner mind... Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Nature — the outer or executive side of the Conscious Force which forms and moves the worlds. The higher, divine Nature (Para Prakriti) is free from Ignorance and its consequences; the lower Nature (Apara Prakriti) is a mechanism of active Force put forth for the working of the evolutionary Ignorance. The lower nature of an individual — mind, life and body —... not the body alone, but the whole physical mind, vital, material nature, physical mind — see under mind. Prakriti — Nature; Nature-Force. "Existence is composed of Prakriti and Purusha, the consciousness that sees and the consciousness that executes and formalises what we see. The one we call Soul, the other Nature." (Sri Aurobindo) see also Purusha. psyche — the soul; spark ...
... is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility ? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature. We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Consciousness... individual souls being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars which, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature Page 140 never collide... was a blind obedience—obedience to the chief, the patriarch or pater familias —obedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty, it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation; in reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice ...
... is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature. We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Con... The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or halt – na methate na tasthatuh... obe dience to the chief – the patriarch or pater familias –obedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty; it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation. In reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate ...
... second calls for a commentary. The role originally set for Sri Aurobindo's body as well as for the Mother's was entire divinisation so that it might not be subject in any mode to the so-called laws of Nature and would mark the beginning of a new, a supramental race. With the passing of Sri Aurobindo we saw a momentous shift in the plan: Sri Aurobindo admitted into his physical frame what we may term... certainly the Supramental Transformation includes as its crown and climax a supramentalised physical body. Sri Aurobindo looked upon his "Integral Yoga" as the swift-moving concentration of the Yoga which Nature has been doing over the aeons, and he clearly laid down in the very first chapter of The Life Divine that the Supermind is "involved" in Matter along with the principles of Mind and Life and must... as we learn from her attendants, there was infirm old age but also an ever-resisting youthfulness of attitude, both of which were linked with her stance as an Evolutionary Avatar representing all Nature's upward travail. It was the Evolutionary Avatar who suffered an advancing weakness of limbs, a gradual deterioration of bodily powers—the exhaustion of a corporeal frame that had packed into itself ...
... you know, in the clouds, the wind, there are little entities. These entities belong to the vital domain; they are not all wicked, they are often very mischievous. Most of the time they obey the laws of Nature of a much vaster and more general order, but some of these entities are half-independent and bring about local rain, e. Perhaps (we said that they like prayers, these small entities), perhaps if... the supraphysical planes is part of the Yoga. "Q: What is the meaning of occult endeavour and power? "A: It depends on the context. Usually it would mean power to use the secret forces of Nature and an endeavour by means of these forces. But 'occult' may mean something else in another context. "Q: Has every Yogi to pass through occult endeavour? "A: No, everyone has not the capacity ...
... heard thunder. It seemed to him that some divine spirit was revealing to him a new philosophy. At the core of this revelation was the intuition that there was a fundamental accord between the laws of nature and those of the science of mathematics. To carry on this work he wished to be left undisturbed. He did not think it would be possible to be so in France for several reasons. He thus enlisted... from corporeal nature, I considered that composition is an evidence of dependency and that dependency is manifestly a defect. From this I judged that it could not be a perfection in God to be composed of these two natures, and that consequently he was not so composed. But if there were in the world bodies, or even intelligences or other natures that were not wholly perfect, their being must depend on... myself, and it appeared evident that it must have been from some nature which was in fact more perfect. As for my ideas about many other things outside of me, as the sky, earth, light, heat, and thousands of other things, I was not so much troubled to discover where they came from, because I found nothing in them superior to my own nature. If they really existed, I could believe that whatever perfection ...
... earth still he has not yet adequate power to change the whole cosmos and nature. Being subject to darkness, he is "A nomad of the far mysterious Life, In the wide ways a little spark of God." In his present state in the world man is subjected to darkness and opposed by hostile forces. He is subject to the law of division and duality on which he depends for his working and progress... All heaven's beauty crowd in earthly limbs!" He appealed to her to unlock the doors of Fato by one great act And he heard in reply One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power." She promised the descent of a limitless mind, "a sweet and violent heart of ardent calms" moved by the passion of the gods, embodying all mights... first entrance into the realm of timelessness which would be a beginning of his discovery .of :God. "There is a zero sign of the Supreme; Nature left nude and still uncovers God." This zero is not a void without content nor is the Nature an illusive manifestation without a mystery behind it. This silence of the Divine is not without power. For "in absolute silence sleeps an absolute ...
... flexibility to the impulsion of the divine Will in it. Page 445 There are many other possible achievements of the body which the human mind in its inveterate bondage to the so-called laws of Nature is hardly capable of considering as within the province of concrete reality. There is a tradition of spiritual culture that testifies to the development of the subtle senses and the assumption... potentialities of his nature. His Page 441 spiritual, mental, emotional, volitional and physical parts must all attain to their utmost perfection, if they are meant to be instruments of the divine manifestation in the material world. Perfection really means a growth into the nature of the Divine Being. It is to be one with the Divine in His divine Nature, sārūpya or sādharmya... Oneness in consciousness with the Divine, sāyujya, or closeness to the divine Presence, sāmīpya, has always been the usual object of spiritual seeking; but oneness in nature, the assumption of the dynamic divine nature, Parā-prakrti, is an achievement rarely aspired for, and never yet fully realised. And if some such perfection has been at all aimed at, it was confined to the mind, the ...
... will is entirely opposed to the normal feelings of the nature and cannot be "true" and right. There is nobody who asks you to pretend—what we ask you is to reject false perversions and wrong feelings and ignorance and not to go on supporting them as they want you to do. It is not courage and nobility to accept these things as the law of your nature, nor is it meanness and cowardice to aspire to a higher... higher Truth and try to act according to it and make that the law of your nature. In the indolence of the will which does not want to make a sustained effort for a long period [ lies the difficulty ]. It is like a person who moves slightly half a leg for a second and then wonders why he is not already a hundred miles away at the goal after making such a gigantic effort. That [ the idea that... the less conscious parts of the nature. These have to become conscious by receiving the Light and Force until finally they refuse response to the calls of the lower nature. This is quite right. If you keep this condition [ of trust and devotion ], not allowing it to be entirely obscured or long clouded, you can move rapidly towards a new birth of your nature and the foundation of your life and ...
... but made like animals and subject to the laws of animal Nature. You have been taught surely that one peculiarity of the mammal is that the female conceives the child, carries it and builds it up within herself until the moment when the young one, fully formed, comes out of the body of its mother and lives independently. In view of this function Nature has provided the woman with an additional... muscular like a muscular man's and make her look ugly if she practises vigorous exercises? Weakness and fragility may look attractive in the view of a perverted mind, but it is not the truth of Nature nor the truth of the Spirit. If you have ever looked at the photos of the women gymnasts you will know what perfectly beautiful bodies they have; and nobody can deny that they are muscular! ...
... like the levitation with which we are familiar, when the whole body remains suspended in the air unmindful of the law of gravitation. What a delightful feeling of rest and lightness that gives! even if it occurs in our dreams. But Sri Aurobindo was out to conquer all laws of physical nature. He therefore went about it in his own way. He would keep an arm or a leg suspended in the air for more than two... deduces the laws. Exactly what our Scientist of the Spirit was doing; putting everything to the test of hard physical experience. In his Journal of Yoga, under the date of July 1 st 1912, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "August, 1912, will complete the seventh year of my practice of Yoga. It has taken so long to complete a long record of wanderings, stumbles, groupings, experiments,— for Nature beginning... Sri Aurobindo wishing: "Just as people are Page 306 advancing in physical science and trying to explore every possible secret of Nature, so also if they went into the inner being and tapped the powers from the unusual ranges of Nature then there could be no limit to possibilities." Oh, how astonishing it is that those two worlds, both available to our eye, yet remain hidden each ...
... at a successful reproduction of Europe in India, forgetting the deep saying of the Gita—"Better the law of one's own being though it be badly done than an alien dharma well-followed; death in one's dharma is better, it is a dangerous Page 61 thing to follow the law of another's nature." For death in one's own dharma brings new birth, success in an alien path means only successful suicide... game of life; and the joy which He sees is the joy of various self-expression. For this reason it is that no two men are alike, no two nations are alike. Each has its own separate nature over and above the common nature of humanity and it is not only the common human impulses and activities but the satisfaction and development of its own separate character and capacities that a nation demands. Denied ...
... lots of people on the ship? Yes, a lot. Was it a big ship? Yes, it was a big liner. Then ( laughing ) it's surely that! It's collective evolution, as it is according to the laws of ordinary nature, and what you represented there was the higher knowledge wanting to change the pace, change the course of the ship. It's very clear. And of course ( laughing ), you know the ways of the world:... consciousness remain conscious the whole night. But it takes a very long time. Do you do a concentration before going to sleep? Oh, always. That's the surprising thing, in fact. What's the nature of it? Vital or mental? I feel it's vital.... Last night, for instance, there was a huge ship on which I was a stowaway, or ticketless, and I spent I don't Page 419 know how many hours ...
... that the collectivistic idealism and higher forms of altruism, too, have their own roots in human nature. The law of competition, which is rooted in the egoistic psychology, is not the only possible law for organizing the life of the individual and of society; cooperation, too, is rooted in human nature, and co-operation is not necessarily an offshoot of egoism. It is true that in the early phases of... standards of human conduct that make an ascending scale. The first is personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic; the last page - 77 is the highest and divine ideal and the divine law of the nature. (i) Standard of conduct which is prescribed by psychological and ethical but egoistic hedonism, falls into the first... of battle between competition and co-operation, the former page - 78 wins the race; — not because co-operation, as a principle, is weak in human nature or lower in value but only because the law of competition is primitive and has the force of early primacy; that which is morally superior, that which is more civilized, gets defeated, as history has repeatedly shown, by what is primitive and ...
... but made like animals and subject to the laws of animal Nature. You have been taught surely that one peculiarity of the mammal is that the female conceives the child, carries it and builds it up within herself until the moment when the young one, fully formed comes out of the body of its mother and lives independently. In view of this function Nature has provided the woman with an additional... muscular like a muscular man’s and make her look ugly if she practises vigorous exercises? Weakness and fragility may look attractive in the view of a perverted mind, but it is not the truth of Nature nor the truth of the Spirit. If you have ever looked at the photos of the women gymnasts you will know what perfectly beautiful bodies they have; and nobody can deny that they are muscular! ...
... things are not done—so we say they are impossible, can't be done. If the conditions are changed, then the same things are done or at least become licit—allowable, legal, according to the so-called laws of Nature,—and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed while maintaining the conditions... put forth the instrumental personality in Nature, under the conditions of Nature, and it uses it according to the rules of the game Page 472 -though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatarhood is only a flashing miracle, then I have no use for it. If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipresent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it. ... to realise it. If the difference is so great that the humanity by its very nature prevents all possibility of following the way opened by the Avatar, it merely means that there is no divinity in man that can respond to the Divinity in the Avatar. I repeat, the Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretence. If ...
... interpretation; but the doubt is not justified by its cause. For throughout the fourteen Manwantaras, variations, permutations & combinations of the same type are bound to appear. This is the law of Nature's development in clay, plant & animal & applies equally to man, his manners, ideas, appurtenances & institutions. Given the truth of the Manwantara theory any other feature than this varied repetition... incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal Ape, but man with the Ape nature. His satya yuga is the first Paradise, for man Page 1324 begins with the Satya Yuga, begins with a perfected type, not a rudimentary type. The animal forms a perfect type for the human... will be remembered that there are fourteen Manus and ten gavas of the Dashagava. How are these divided among the Manus? In this Kalpa or rather Pratikalpa the type Pashu is the Vanara, but as in all Nature's movements, even in manifesting the Vanara, the others first make their appearance rapidly before the type "arrives"; those most germane to the matter are the lion, tiger, elephant, dog, wolf, cat ...
... the Valmiki Ramayana: Trishanku, a king of the Solar Dynasty, wished to ascend to heaven in his mortal body. His Guru, Vasishta, refused to perform the needful rites as it would be against the laws of nature. Cursed by Vasishta's sons, forced to leave his country and wander the lands, Trishanku met sage Viswamitra, a rival of Guru Vasishta, who promised to help him instead. The yagnas (rituals) began... the talks about Mother and Sri Aurobindo and a little bit about me. That gives me encouragement, that gives me impetus, and I feel that, whatever my dear niece may say, I had better stick to my own nature and way of doing things. The second pleasure is on a different plane - it is a poetic plane, a sensuous plane. Every day, when I get up in the morning, when I go up, the first thing that I do... have much time to spend over these small, beautiful, natural scenes. Perhaps you enjoy your own scenes - I don't mean 'sins'! [Spelling the word] (Laughter) - that are better than these scenes of nature. So there are these two pleasures; as long as I can have them, I'd like to cling to them. Then after this frivolous introduction, I'll come to the serious part, otherwise I'll be like the priest ...
... O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power... A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will. 180 Page... may have a perennial human significance. The symbols employed in the poem may likewise hark back to the glorious childhood of the human race, the Age of the Veda, when the rishis looked out upon Nature with wonder and wild surmise and created the great myths of the race. The race, the milieu, the moment may all create a favourable context for the poet who would sing of man and his... Page 452 Numerous are such audacious hyphenated combinations: 'sun-herds and moon-flocks', 'thought-food', 'sleet-drift', 'world-kindergarten', 'sea-heart', 'sun-laugh', 'soul-nature and mind-sense', 'star-field space', 'dense-maned monsoon', 'flower-mouth', 'Sun-word', 'heaven-bliss', etc. Even as the Anglo-Saxon poet had somehow to convey in the most vivid or picturesque way ...
... eror (the root ar means to plow, to strive): The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature 27 —the question is actually to conquer something very difficult in our own matter, against millennia of evolutionary habits. It is a yoga for conquerors and heroes. The magnitude of the problem... appears to have always occurred till now), and we have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident and overcome it. Yet it is such a terrible, such a formidable battle, against all the laws of Nature, all collective suggestions, all terrestrial habits, that unless you are a first-rate warrior whom nothing frightens, it’s better not to begin the battle. You must be an absolutely intrepid hero... when spiritual pygmies reign. No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu [the god of love] cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra [the god of destruction] is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not ...
... first she must accept. Moving on a more metaphysical level, Death tries to explain to Savitri that the laws of Nature are immutable and that there is no agency which can change them. No one has succeeded and Savitri should not attempt the futile. Restoration of Satyavan's life is against the laws of the established creation and he cannot return now to earth. Instead, Savitri can have, by Death's boon... 8 Remove that rock, knock off that base and the entire superstructure will fall like a house of cards. Without respecting Matter, without knowing its laws, its modes of functioning 8 Ibid., p. 616. Page 101 and the nature of its deep reality, without recognising the foundational aspects which sustain this massive machinery, how can Savitri hope for her love to abide and... And built from chemic plasm the living man. 9 Savitri better understand the principle of this world and not chase the will-o'-the-wisp. She must lend herself to see and recognise the laws of nature operating here, respect them in the tight earthly framework of things. There is actually no room for God in this brute immensity. It is by the process of Death's Sankhya that the inconscient world ...
... The sattwic principle of renunciation is to withdraw not from action, but from the personal demand, the ego factor behind it. It is to do works not dictated by desire but by the law of right living or by the essential nature, its knowledge, its ideal, its faith in itself and the Truth it sees, its śraddhā . Or else, on a higher spiritual plane, they are dictated by the will of the Master and done with... He follows in the light of the full sattwic mind and with the power of an inner renunciation lifting the soul to impersonality, towards God, towards the universal and eternal the highest ideal law of his nature or the will of the Master of works in his secret spirit. He will not do action for the sake of any personal result or for any reward in this life or with any attachment to success, profit or ... natural, right for the embodied soul,—action is part of the divine law of living, it is the high dynamics of the spirit. The essence of renunciation, the true Tyaga, the true Sannyasa is not any rule of thumb of inaction but a disinterested soul, a selfless mind, the transition from ego to the free impersonal and spiritual nature. The spirit of this inner renunciation is the first mental condition ...
... Universe as it really is, to grasp its laws objectively. This seemed so obvious that it was never questioned. The Universe and I—we both exist, the function of the one being to understand the other. Undoubtedly, I am part of the Universe, but in the process of knowing it, I stand apart from it and view it objectively. I admit that what I call the laws of Nature exist independently of me, of my mind;... happened to the second postulate of my youth? Can I at least have the joy of pure knowledge, can I be certain that I have grasped something of the hidden mechanism of Nature? Can I hope to enjoy the understanding of the true laws that govern Nature? Alas! I fear that here too my ideal has failed me. We men of science have long ago given up the idea that a theory must be either true or false. We now say only... yearnings of the heart, in man or in nature, what things cry for, what their tears are for. On a larger canvas, through legends and parables, I portrayed the various facets of life's moods and urges, its rare wisdoms and common foolishnesses, gave a pulsating accent and a meaningful concreteness to episodes that constitute history, the history of man's and nature's consciousness. The tragedies and comedies ...
... it most. For the other a stage must come in the work before he goes. Everything is fixed by the law of his nature & the law which governs that law. What do you mean by the reason? Again a doubtful expression; everything is rational from one point of view, absurd & arbitrary from another. The ultimate Law is beyond expression by the mind. Imperfectly & from a limited point of view. For man's convenience ...
... over." 2 But this dynamic interchange, this mutual yajña , is not confined to our body constituents alone; it governs our vital and mental sheaths too. The extent to which this law reigns in Nature has not yet been fully recognised by men of our time, — who take their stand on the supposed substratum of Matter, — and indeed cannot be recognized, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "until... energies of other beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dissolution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements." 1 The whole process of the universe is thus seen to be in its very nature a sacrifice, a process of interchange... aliments from outside but which would prevent by all means any outward flow. But the false hopes of the ego founder at every moment, and when sacrifice is not voluntarily offered, Nature exacts it by force; for the law has been imposed from above and, even from those who do not consciously recognise its validity, the universal World-Force invariably exacts and takes the sacrifice. Only in this ...
... forward-moving demands of the Time-Spirit. There is this permanent spirit in things and there is this persistent swadharma or law of our nature; but there is too a less binding system of laws of successive formulation,—rhythms of the spirit, forms, turns, habits of the nature, and these endure the mutations of the ages, yugadharma . The race must obey this double principle of persistence and mutation... void. A feeling of its illusion and unreality because that which is greatest in man and raises him beyond himself had been neglected, would oppress them at every step. The discovery of the laws of physical Nature would not compensate in their eyes for the comparative decline—for a long time it was the almost absolute cessation—of a greater seeking and finding, the discovery of the freedom of the spirit... all that was great, essential, elevating, vitalising, illuminating, victorious, effective. And in that again we must distinguish what was close to the permanent, essential spirit and the persistent law of our cultural being and separate from it what was temporary and transiently formulative. For all that was great in the past cannot be preserved as it was or repeated for ever; there are new needs, ...
... miraculous and that he is not subject to the laws of Nature, then you have only the conventional notion about it. He is not miraculous in the methods he adopts. He also like others accepts the human limitations. If he did not then he ceases to have any meaning for man. But how is his Adhāra prepared? It is a certain movement which takes place in his nature leaving his soul free unaffected. If he... 1925 An Avatār is not subject to the laws of Karma as ordinary men are. The mind, life and body of the ordinary man are formed as a result of his past Karma. The Avatar having no such past how are his mind, life and body formed? The Avatar gets it as other men do. What has that to do with his being an Avatar ? All that is only a certain movement in nature in his lower Prakriti. If your idea is... It is possible to know the physical nature of outside things by means of our physical nature, their vital nature by our vital nature, and their mental nature by our mental nature and their supramental nature by our supramental nature. It is possible also to know the inner nature of all things directly. Is it possible to purify, liberate and per feet our nature i.e. to make an inner change without ...
... three days, or transformed your nature, it is a very poor consolation for us. Then again, when you state that you developed something that was not originally there in your nature, can it not be said that it was already there in your divya aṁśa? I do not know what the devil you mean. My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and... things are not done—so we say they are impossible, can't be done. If the conditions are changed, then the same things are done or at least become licit—allowable, legal, according to the so-called laws of Nature,—and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed while maintaining the conditions... but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature, under the conditions of Nature, and it uses it according to the rules of the game—though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatarhood is only a flashing miracle, then I have no use for it. If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it. As for the Muthu ...
... There is a straight road or road of naturally increasing light and truth, ṛjuḥ panthāḥ, ṛtasya panthāḥ , leading over infinite levels and towards infinite vistas, vītāni pṛṣṭhāni , by which the law of our nature should normally take us towards our fulfilment. Sin compels it instead to travel with stumblings amid uneven and limited tracts and along crooked windings ( duritāni, vṛjināni ). ... described as the Truth, the Law, the Vast. He is the Fosterer or Increaser, for he enlarges and opens man's dark and limited being into a luminous and infinite consciousness. He is the sole Seer, Seer of Oneness and Knower of the Self, and leads him to the highest Sight. He is Yama, Controller or Ordainer, for he governs man's action and manifested being by the direct Law of the Truth, satyadharma... हिरण्मयेन पात्रेण सत्यस्यापिहितं मुखम् । तत् त्वं पूषन्नपावृणु सत्यधर्माय दृष्टये ॥१५॥ 15) The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O Fosterer, 10 for the law of the Truth, for sight. पूषन्नेकर्षे यम सूर्य प्राजापत्य व्यूह रश्मीन् समूह । तेजो यत् ते रुपं कल्याणतमं तत् ते पश्यामि योऽसावसौ पुरुषः सोऽहमस्मि ॥१६॥ 16) O Fosterer, O sole Seer, O Ordainer ...
... idealism and true altruism have their own roots in human nature, which are independent of that aspect of human nature which, in the words of Hobbes, is nasty and brutish. The law of competition, which is rooted in the egoistic psychology is not the only possible law for organising human society; cooperation, too, is rooted in human nature, and cooperation is not necessarily an offshoot of egoism... four main standards of human conduct that make an ascending scale. The first is personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic, the last is the highest and divine ideal and law of the nature. Standard of conduct, which is pre scribed by psychological and ethical but egoistic hedonism, falls into the first category; its argument... ism is valid, the individual in its true nature is not an egocentric entity subject to appetites and desires, but an entity capable of uplifting himself to a state of intrinsic and universal values. Consequently, it came to be advocated that the needs and desires of individuals are to be surpassed in obedience to the moral law, and even the social law has no claims upon him if it is opposed to ...
... we are subject to the lower Nature we cannot expect any freedom (of action): the Mother's order is our law. Since she did not give me any definite reply I gave up my desire to see the festival. She meant that it was of no importance one way or the other. It is when you are free from the lower Nature that her will is the Law. The lower Nature is constantly disobeying the... to the lower Nature what does the Mother actually intend by leaving the responsibility to us by saying, "Comme vous voulez"? Only if one is a little advanced, one can make the best use of such a freedom. When one is advanced one does not ask for freedom, but to obey the Divine Will. In order to reach the higher Nature, have we not to prevent the lower Nature from disobeying... influence than the Divine. What is meant by "vital consecration"? Consecration means offering and making sacred to the Mother so that the whole vital nature may belong to her and not to the lower nature. You said yesterday: "It is only after you become conscious that the surrender can be complete." Which consciousness was spoken of here? How am I to receive ...
... smile upon a virgin's lips Young moonlight dallies with a sleepy rose, Then come and call me gently twice and thrice, And I will answer you. Observe this well In that the harsh and beldam Law excludes Nature's sweet rites and Paphian marriage Unless her bleared eyes be privy too. MELANDER O love, have you forgot the long elapse And weary pomp of hours ere the sun That follows now a path... Abstained from brabbles, women, verses, wine, And now you see me bask in hale old age, Mid Autumn's gilded ruin one green leaf. Life's palate dulls with much intemperance, And whoso breaks the law, the law shall break. Love is a specious angler— MELANDER Dotard, off! Confide thy heavy rumours to the grave Where thou shouldst now be rotting. Exit. Page 767 Act III Scene... you forgotten then, my sister, how Since war's ensanguined dice have thrown a cast So fatal to our peace, the sweet confines Of Ilni and her primitive content Are hedged and meted by the savage Law? ALACIEL Child, I have not forgotten; but first love Poseidon-like submerges with his sea All barriers, and the checks that men oppose But make him fret and spume against the sky. Who shall ...
... senses was regarded by her as the nature of the Asura and Rakshasa. It is the Titanic, gigantic or demoniac type of spirit, permitted in its own plane, but not the proper law for a human life. Another power claims man and overtops desire and self-interest and self-will, the power of the Dharma. The Dharma, at once religious law of action and deepest law of our nature, is not, as in the Western idea... creed, cult or ideal inspiring an ethical and social rule; it is the right law of functioning of our life in all its parts. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth and its justification in the Dharma. Every thing indeed has its dharma, its law of life imposed on it by its nature; but for man the dharma is the conscious imposition of a rule of ideal living... and has its stages; there are gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension in the search for the highest law of our nature. All men cannot follow in all things one common and invariable rule. Life is too complex to admit of the arbitrary ideal simplicity which the moralising theorist loves. Natures differ; the position, the work we have to do has its own claims and standards; the aim and bent, the call ...
... chiefly egoism and ignorance; because, from the Buddhist standpoint, the greatest of all taints is ignorance, not ignorance of external things, of the laws of Nature and of all that you learn at school, but the ignorance of the deepest truth of things, of the law of the being, of the Dharma. It is noteworthy that the two defects insisted upon here are lack of self-control and lack of loyalty. Loyalty means... time, and ignorance means ignoring the inner law, the truth of the being. And loyalty means not to take the illusion for the reality, the changing and fluctuating appearances for the inner and real permanence of the being. We can say then that self-control and self-mastery, measure, absence of desire, the search for the inner truth of the being and the law of its self-manifestation are very necessary... and this will be the subject of our meditation tonight. 20 September 1957 For, in truth, in this world hatred is not appeased by hatred; hatred is appeased by love alone. This is the eternal law. This is one of the most celebrated verses of the Dhammapada, one of those most often cited—I would have liked to be able to say, "one of the most obeyed in the world"; unfortunately that would not ...
... realm of philosophy where the independent mind is free to speculate about unanswered, open questions. Is the world divided into mind and matter? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature? Or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on the surface of an unimportant planet? Or is he the humanised... an attitude of worship, an attitude very similar to that of the mystic. Even if the world is not rooted in some absolute and omniscient reality, even if the world is not governed by inexorable moral laws, even then it is possible to formulate and develop a noble attitude towards life. A Free Man's Worship was first published in December 1903, when Russell was only thirty-one, and is considered a basic... unhappy. In the life of his emotions and of his intellect he felt obliged to preserve an impenetrable secrecy. Although in later life Russell was very active on the public scene, he was solitary by nature. He tells us that his grandmother once gave him a Bible in which she had written on the fly-leaf: "Thou shall not follow a multitude to do evil." Her emphasis on this precept, he says, helped him never ...
... God or Nature The existence of God, from unquestioned, became ever more problematic and was already denied by many atheists. In his writings Lamarck still professed to be a deist – “a vague deist” – in the way Voltaire had been: recognizing the existence of God as creator, but removing him outside the works of his creation. God was “the Supreme Being” who had created nature with its laws, and who... than those of the other organs of an individual. I can only see, in that fictitious something without any counterpart in nature, a means of the imagination to solve the difficulties which one has been unable to eliminate for lack of having sufficiently studied the laws of nature.” 22 What is here translated as ‘mind’ is esprit in the French language, which can mean ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ (and even... have borrowed from Lamarck.) Lamarck called the modification of the organs, because of the changes in the needs and the habits necessitated by the environment, his first law. He formulated his second law thus: “All what nature has caused the individual [plant or organism] to gain or to loose because of the influence of the circumstances to which its species has been exposed for a long time, and ...
... definite end; thirdly, liberation, that is to say, the release of our being from the narrow and painful knots of the individualised energy in a false and limited play, which at present are the law of our nature. The enjoyment of our liberated being which brings us into unity or union with the Supreme, is the consummation; it is that for which Yoga is done. Three indispensable steps and the high, open... strange to those who associate the idea of science only with the superficial phenomena of the physical universe apart from all that is behind them; but they are equally based on definite experience of laws and their workings and give, when rightly practised, their well-tested results. In fact, Hathayoga is, in its own way, a system of knowledge; but while the proper Yoga of knowledge is a philosophy of... itself, in which alone it can be completely possessed and enjoyed while we are in the body, that certain disciplines of Yoga look as if they were only ways of arriving at Samadhi. All Yoga is in its nature an attempt and an arriving at unity with the Supreme,—unity with the being of the Supreme, unity with the consciousness of the Supreme, unity with the bliss of the Supreme,—or, if we repudiate the ...
... their perceivings of knowledge; may our words increase thee. अदब्धस्य स्वधावतो दूतस्य रेभतः सदा । अग्नेः सख्यं वृणीमहे ॥२०॥ 20) We choose the comradeship of the Fire inviolate in the law of his nature, the ever-chanting messenger. अग्निः शुचिव्रततमः शुचिर्विप्रः शुचिः कविः । शुची रोचत आहुतः ॥२१॥ 21) Most pure in his workings is the Fire, he is the pure illumined sage, the pure seer... thousandfold wealth and the hero-force. अग्ने भ्रातः सहस्कृत रोहिदश्व शुचिव्रत । इमं स्तोमं जुषस्व मे ॥१६॥ 16) O Fire, my brother, created by my force, drawn by thy red horses, pure in the law of thy workings, take pleasure in this laud of mine. उत त्वाग्ने मम स्तुतो वाश्राय प्रतिहर्यते । गोष्ठं गाव इवाशत ॥१७॥ 17) My lauds reach thee, O Fire, as to the calf lowing in glad response... hears our cry and smites away from us the foe. विशां राजानमद्भुतमध्यक्षं धर्मणामिमम् । अग्निमीळे स उ श्रवत् ॥२४॥ 24) I pray this Fire, the marvellous king of the peoples who presides over the laws of their action, may he hear. अग्निं विश्वायुवेपसं मर्यं न वाजिनं हितम् । सप्तिं न वाजयामसि ॥२५॥ 25) Fire who illumines the universal life like a male horse urged to its gallop, we speed ...
... Inconscient operates by the law of heredity and, left to itself, works faultlessly to ensure the survival of good and healthy types. Man misuses heredity in the false conditions of his social life to transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We must study the law of heredity, develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely and remorselessly—with the remorseless wisdom of Nature—so as to ensure by intelligence... the real reality of his being, must necessarily seek to enter into it, to become conscious in it, to make there his centre instead of dwelling on the surface, to win and apply its diviner law and supreme nature and capacity, to make himself one with it so that he shall become the Real instead of the Apparent Man. And the sole debate that remains is whether this great conquest can be achieved and enjoyed... surface psychological functionings, will, mind, senses, reason, conscience, etc., were arranged in a dry and sterile classification; their real nature and relation to each other were not fathomed nor any use made of them which went beyond the limited action Nature had found sufficient for a very superficial mental and psychic life and for very superficial and ordinary workings. Because we do not know ourselves ...
... further research. As his researches led Sri Aurobindo nearer to the hidden 'Foetus' of language, he discovered that language proceeds in a Page 370 regular natural law, almost paralleling Nature as she "proceeds in the physical world to form a vegetable or an animal genus and its species." The debate will doubtless continue, but here we are presenting some food for thought:... the history of the Celts—Ellis quotes a number of them—are struck by the commonality between the social systems, law systems of the Celts and those of the Hindus. "The extraordinary parallels and similarities between the Celtic and Hindu cultures, occurring in the areas of language, law, religious attitudes 2 and mythology, music and caste." How come? I was reminded of the Battle of Ten Kings... suggested the connection, but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And," he avowed, "it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues." That perception was the key to the discovery of the real connections of the ancient languages. He uncovered "a common mother-root, common ...
... body; or the possibility of retaining the Supramental power in the cells leading to a prolonging of life with a constant and infinite renewal. With this, the body has lost the sense of time. The laws of Nature have lost their meaning for this body. The inexhaustible Force pouring perpetually, ceaselessly, or without diminution of the Supramental energy which gives the capacity to prolong life, — this... possibility before me, then I began the work, and it was really a challenge against Nature who did not want to change, who did not want to be transformed. So She began to revolt, to resist in hundreds of ways — to block here, to remove something there, to oppose me in such a way that I would abandon this movement against Her. Nature is formidable in Her own domain. And She began to send all sorts of discomforts... to a new process of consciousness, — of acting, of adjusting, of conducting, or of behaving, — by the infusion of the New Consciousness into the knee. All the past habits, the atavism, the essential nature of the cells, the mental formations, the ideas, the ways of conduct, the physical actions and reactions, the vital attractions and repulsions, all, all that constitutes the mode of action, the fear ...
... teaching them how to choose the divine Presence—the divine Consciousness, the divine Presence, the divine Power (all that wordlessly), the "something".... It's a choice of every second between the old laws of Nature—and the government by the supreme Consciousness. 12 The government of the open air versus the government of the aquarium, we could say. A "choice"; it is easier said than done, for how does... operations in store for them—in fact, what takes place is one and the same operation: a transfer of power. It is the transition from thousands of years of habits crystallized into laws to the great Law, which is rather a non-law or an invention at every second. Can we conceive of a body that must relearn how to live every second, or, we could say, rediscover life every second—a constant rebirth of the... (Rig-Veda 1.62.7). A living body goes to investigate the state where one is supposedly dead, over there in the "other world," as they say, and discovers another physical life operating under other laws, which is not in "another world" but separated from us only by a certain cellular barrier: an opaque periphery. The beyond of the fish is not the realm of the dead, but simply another physical form ...
... days, or transformed your nature, it is very poor consolation for us. Then again, when you state that you developed something that was not originally there in your nature, can-it not be said that it was already there in your divya amsa? 53 I don't know what the devil you mean. My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life... × sādrishyamukti; mama sādharmyam āgatāḥ: Identity of the soul's liberated nature with the divine nature; they have attained to one law of being with Me (the Divine). ( Bhagavat Gita 14.2) × In Latin: Easy... physical world directly. One has to train the instrument to be a channel of this force; it works also according to a certain law and under certain conditions. The Divine does not work arbitrarily or as a thaumaturge; He acts upon the world along the lines that have been fixed by the nature and purpose of the world we live in—by an increasing action of the thing that has to manifest, not by a sudden change ...
... done, – so we say they are impossible, can’t be done. If the conditions are changed then the same things are done or at least become licit – allowable, legal according to the so-called laws of Nature, and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions... but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the game – though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatarhood is only a flashing miracle, then I have no use for it. If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it.” 5 “An... growth of a true and divine consciousness within you. If the Divine were to unveil and reveal itself in all its glory, the mind might feel a Presence, but it would not understand its action or its nature. It is in the measure of your own realisation and by the birth and growth of the greater consciousness in yourself that you will see the Divine and understand its action even behind its terrestrial ...
... is boundless consciousness, Perfect in knowledge, pure and therefore luminously right in Page 27 its discernment of things, perfectly harmonious and happy in its concordance of the law and nature; it is Mitra who brings us this light, harmony, right distinction and relation and friendly concord. The Divine is in its own being pure and perfect power and in us the eternal upward tendency... obey the law of relations of cosmic forces by which harmony can constantly be maintained. Vastness and harmony accompany each other, and therefore we find in the Veda, Varuna always associated with Mitra, who is the lord of harmony. We may take for instance, one of the many hymns in which Mitra and Varuna are addressed together: 1. Guardians of the Truth, you ascend your car and the law of the... by the knowledge you rain down Heaven ruddy-shinning and sinless. 7. O Mitra and Varuna, you who are illumined in consciousness, by the Law, by the knowledge of the Mighty One, you guard the workings or divine rhythms of work determined by the divine law of the Truth; by the Truth you govern widely all the world of our becoming; you set the Sun in heaven, a chariot of various splendour 20 ...
... bhagavān ,—the bhāgavata , which is the law of the Vaishnava dispensation of adoration and love, the bhakta representing the fellowship of those in whom that law is manifest, bhagavān , the divine Lover and Beloved in whose being and nature the divine law of love is founded and fulfils itself. The Avatar represents this third element, the divine personality, nature and being who is the soul of the Dharma... divine Page 171 principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, forms of the inner and the outer life, orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dharma 1 is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our inner and outer activities. In its primary sense it means a fundamental law of our nature which secretly conditions all our activities, and in this sense each... each being, type, species, individual, group has its own dharma. Secondly, there is the divine nature which has to develop and manifest in us, and in this sense dharma is the law of the inner workings by which that grows in our being. Thirdly, there is the law by which we govern our outgoing thought and action and our relations with each other so as to help best both our own growth and that of the ...
... surface soul which expresses itself in our cravings, impulses, feelings, emotions, ambitions, etc.; it is distinguished from the true soul in us—the psychic being. Dharma —law; the deepest law of one's nature; the right law of individual and social life; literally, that which one lays hold of and which holds things together. Divine, the —the Supreme Truth, the Supreme Being from whom all have... between mind and supermind . Nature, Nature Force —the outer or executive side of the Conscious Force which forms and moves the worlds. The higher, divine Nature (Para Prakriti) is free from Ignorance and its consequences; the lower Nature (Apara Prakriti) is a mechanism of active Force put forth for the working of the evolutionary Ignorance. The lower nature of an individual—mind, life and body—are... itself it is represented by the evolving psychic being which supports all the rest of the nature. life-nature (the life) —see the Vital . manomaya puruṣa (Manomaya Purusha) —mental Person, the mental being. mechanical mind —a part of the mind closely connected with the physical mind; its nature is to go on repeating without use whatever has happened—recent events, impressions, old ...
... awareness; the utilitarian standard gives way to the aspiration towards self-consciousness and self-realisation; the rule of living according to the manifest laws of physical Nature is replaced by the effort towards living according to the veiled Law and Will and Power active in the life of the world and in the inner and outer life of humanity. All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and i... him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new... necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers. The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original ...
... a hard-headed scientist in his moments of enlightened analysis: "The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest... Spirit immortal. Yes, the thinking mind is not in itself an enemy of the poetic. As Sri Aurobindo tells us, we, while rising above Nature, must not reject Nature, since there is the Divine's intention of self-unfoldment in it, and surely Nature includes the thinking part of man. From its poise beyond, our art also must lay hands on the natural world and lay bare its true meaning as a p... not the primitive identification but a superior one. To adopt Aurobindonian nomenclature, we have not the soul's blind absorption into Nature but the bright fusing of the inner with the outer, the golden descent of the higher into the lower, a transformation of Nature by the soul and Spirit. Once more we have "sensation" or "emotion", but it is filled with nuances beyond the crude touch, the raw appeal ...
... sacrosanct and absolute about the so-called laws of nature purported to be discovered by the Experimental Sciences, and that there may equally be other possible 'rules of the game' implying a different type of universe 24. Savitri, Bk. X, Canto 4, p. 656. 25. The Life Divine, p. 267. Page 91 with a different set of laws, does not appear strange to a mathematician;... remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is only my own luminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature with this divine; then you will know yourself, discover the highest and widest law of your being, become the. possessors or at least the receivers and instruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine and lay hold at last on the true secret... always seeks for hidden connexions and an underlying unity in all things. "If it were possible to weld together the whole of knowledge into two general laws, a mathematician would not be satisfied. He would not be happy until he had shown that these two laws were rooted in a single principle." 22 The classical example of conic sections reveals in an ample way how mathematicians proceed step by step ...
... of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up all this physical and vital life and perfect it by the sole power of rationalism, by Page 164 a knowledge of the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology and biology and health, by collectivism, by State education, by a new psychological education and a number of other kindred means. All this is well in its own way and... are the arena. The ideal and practical reason of man labours to find amidst all this the right law of life and action; it strives by a rule of moderation and accommodation, by selection and rejection or by the dominance of some chosen ideas or powers to reduce things to harmony, to do consciously what Nature through natural selection and instinct has achieved in her animal kinds, an automatically ordered... his self-manifesting Energy. But the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult emergence. Life and consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance the law of fragmentation. Life organises itself physically round the plasm, the cell, psychologically round the small separative fragmentary ego. Consciousness ...
... later, Sri Aurobindo maintained that his Sadhana was not "a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on earth. " 45 It was merely the attempt to quicken and realise certain potentialities that were there in Nature already. If he could do it, if the Mother could do it, so should others be able to do it in course of time. Gradually... portioned out to each, the glances filled with quietude, the form of the shadow projected by the tree [the Service Tree in the Ashram courtyard], everything proclaims obedience to law. Happy the one who can find the divine law beautiful.. .. 1 Although it is not easy to get entry into the world invisible yet omnipresent of the Spirit, his new-found faith was such that he apostrophised the Mother... disease. There is a conflict within, between the sadhak's sattwic nature aspiring towards the Light and his tamasic which pulls him downward to the Night; in Shakespeare's words: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom suffers then The nature of an insurrection. 20 The sadhak has first to know what ...
... by the thousand forces that deny. And then the divine Mother gives a reply to his entreaty: "O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend, and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power. A limitless Mind that can contain the world, A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms Moved by the passions of the gods shall come. ... to mankind; human nature as well as human consciousness is capable of liberation and perfection, and that perfection consists in a transformation of nature, not a rejection of nature but a transformation, not a control only, not a type of behaviour according to ethics and morality, but a free expression of the Divine in man with the divine nature. The Divine has the divine nature which man can also... imperfect, she brings the perfect divine consciousness into the nature of man in order to realize immortality for him. Immortality is another word for divine consciousness. Then she overcomes death? Yes, death on earth. This possibility of change of the whole human nature from its present condition into a more perfect divine nature has not been visualized by any seer before. That is the special ...
... call the natural state, the state of the world of Nature, and yet which belonged to the physical world. Perhaps a new physical Nature? It is obvious that the physical Nature that controls the fish and that which controls man are very different, and yet they are the same. All the functions that worked naturally—that is, in accord with the laws of Nature—all of a sudden, brrm, finished! They stop. Then... the last rampart undergoing its own transmutation. And on the other side, a physical universal consciousness, another state, a different way of being … unspeakable, but which no longer obeyed the laws of the tomb, no longer needed eyes, ears, a memory and even a body to move with, and for which the body’s very pain was a kind of unreality⎯yes, perhaps a different time, a “moving eternity” in the... physical way of breathing that makes for a certain death or decrepitude, and another way that makes for life without death and decrepitude? If the latter way or breathing environment settles in physical Nature (I really mean another mode of breathing, made of something other than oxygen and nitrogen), there is truly no problem of transformation anymore, it is a “secondary consequence,” as Mother says; it ...
... द् द्यावापृथिवी पर्यपश्यत् ॥८॥ 8) He has purified through the three filters the Ray, following the thought with the heart he has reached knowledge of the light; he has created by the self-laws of his nature the supreme ecstasy and his sight has embraced earth and heaven. Page 204 शतधारमुत्समक्षीयमाणं विपश्चितं पितरं वक्त्वानाम् । मेळिं मदन्तं पित्रोरुपस्थे तं रोदसी पिपृतं सत्यवाचम् ...
... better to choose one or two items and give a very good demonstration in these rather than do several in a mediocre way? Each one does according to his or her nature and if he (or she) follows courageously and sincerely the law of the nature, he or she acts according to truth. Thus it is impossible to judge and decide for others. One can know only for oneself, and even then one has to be very sincere... no matter what it is, interesting. 26 September 1963 Sri Aurobindo writes in one of his Aphorisms: "Those who are deficient in the free, full and intelligent observation of a self-imposed law, must be placed in subjection to the will of others." 2 I Mother, I am one of those. Will You take me and discipline me? My child, it is exactly what I have been trying to do for quite a long... Playground, the band, studies, etc., and devote all my time to the work. But my logic does not accept this. From where does this idea come and why? In this case your logic is right. In the outer nature there is often a tamasic tendency to simplify the conditions of life in order to avoid the effort of organising more complicated circumstances. But when one desires to progress in the integrality of ...
... assured there need be no apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another law than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of this sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it not this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and... into that higher nature beyond mind which is the status of the Divine. He has at the same time to give him that for which he asks and for which he is inspired to seek by the guidance within him, a new Law of life and action high above the insufficient rule of the ordinary human existence with its endless conflicts and oppositions, perplexities and illusory certainties, a higher Law by which the soul... being so far pure and sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and impulses and habitually control his lower nature by the noblest Law which he knows. He is not of a violent Asuric disposition, not the slave of his passions, but has been trained to a high calm and self-control, to an unswerving performance of his duties Page 22 and firm obedience to the best principles of the time ...
... substances. He is capable of an enormous strength, but it is Titanic or Asuric in its Nature. He is ever-greedy in his strength, ever-absorbing, ever-devouring, mightily, fiercely, cunningly, forcefully, whatever he gets from whatsoever source. That which he annexes to his kingdom turns into the law and nature of this presiding deity — this great Titan. He is the Lord of the three kingdoms. He... nature, is a shell-covered seed which under proper climate and favourable weather breaks, comes out of the shell, grows, awakens out of the earth as a plant, buds, blossoms and finally falls as seed on the same earth out of which it came, as though getting involved again into inconscience only to come out again on a newer round and in newer forms. The Truth-Soul obeys its own law, its own... sense-mind continues. The plant world is more in consonance with the laws of its parent, the matter-world, and therefore the royal representatives of the plant-world, the huge trees in their forests of majestic symphonies enjoy a longer life than the animals which are the direct manifestation of a pronounced rebellion against the laws of the world of matter. Under the pressure of the upward aspiration ...
... For both heaven and earth, there has been a time of beginning and there will be a time of destruction. Even the holy divinity cannot prolong the bounds of fate or struggle against the fixed laws of nature. How were the earth, the sky and the sea created? It's sure that atoms did not take up posts, Each at its purposed station, wittingly, Or skilfully coordinate their moves. ... Lead me from darkness to light From death to immortality. Attempting to discourse on the nature of things, Lucretius promises to open up the first beginnings of things, out of which nature gives birth to all things and increase and gives them nourishment and into which nature dissolves them back after their destruction. If the fear of the unknown is to be dispelled, we must grasp... Rejecting the theory of the divine nature of cosmic order, Lucretius ventures to affirm and maintain that to believe that for the sake of men the glorious nature of the world has been set in order and that it will be eternal and immortal is sheer folly. In no way is the universe arranged For us by gods—it has so many flaws! 7 Why does nature give food and increase the frightful ...
... slowly, slowly the cells woke up to their new receptivity and opened to the Divine Influence directly.” 12 “The necessities” were bit by bit losing their authority. “All the laws, those laws that were the laws of Nature, have lost what one could call their despotism: it is no longer as it was”, 13 the Mother said in 1967. Yet, she was still far from the complete realisation. Every part of... disappear. “For when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future.” 9 Here now the Mother was studying the laws and forces of the... 35 Another relevant reference in this connection is found in one of the very last Entretiens which is dated fourteen years earlier: “All those who make an effort to overcome their ordinary nature, all those who try to realise materially the profound experience that has brought them into contact with the divine Truth, all those who, instead of turning to the Hereafter or the On-high, try to ...
... expectant Bhaaratvarsha, our India, felt something like the promise of the Divine Mother, in Sri Aurobindo's epic, King Aswapathy, the father of Savitri: One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. ... And in her body as on his homing tree Immortal Love shall beat his glorious wings .... She shall bear Wisdom in her voiceless bosom, Strength... proved a sanctuary and phoenix-hour for the whole tapasya of a Mahasaraswati: Page 201 The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasarawati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker.... the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of: the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flaw. less .... Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and ...
... of that manifestation vibrating in the earth-nature and the soul of that manifestation presiding over its upward endeavour. It is to give a spiritual mould of divine manhood into which the seeking soul of the human being can cast itself. It is to give a dharma, a religion,—not a mere creed, but a method of inner and outer living,—a way, a rule and law of self-moulding by which he can grow towards... assist the human march, to hold it together in its great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitation when they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the great dharma of the Godward law in man's nature, to prepare even, however far off, the kingdom of God, the victory of the seekers of light and perfection, sādhūnām , and the overthrow of those Page 159 who fight for the continuance... he governs all nature, the human included; from within also he governs all nature, always, but hidden; the difference here is that he is manifest, that the nature is conscious of the divine Presence as the Lord, the Inhabitant, and it is not by his secret will from above, "the will of the Father which is in heaven," but by his quite direct and apparent will that he moves the nature. And here there ...
... he pushed aside his tools. There was a sheet of accounts in front of him. —You have arrived at the appointed time. One cannot blame you; you have followed the law of your nature. But now the time has come when you can change that law if you so will. Because there is a time when one can. —But why... —Be quiet, listen. I want you to see clearly; only Truth can save you; it alone has the Power ...
... If a zealot humanitarian placed him on a higher status and trained him for a different vocation, he would be transplanting him from his swadharma to a paradharma, from the self-law of his nature to an alien law, and creating in him a psychological confusion, varṇśankara. The ancient order was not rigid, nor had it Page 269 anything to do with birth, as it is commonly supposed... The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo CHAPTER XV THE PHYSICAL NATURE AND ITS PURIFICATION PART I BY physical nature Sri Aurobindo means the physical mind, the physical part of life, called the physical-vital or nervous being, and the body. Before we enter upon the process of their purification, we had better be clear about what these terms... effect upon our consciousness, and consequently upon our life and nature. This is a truth which the seekers of perfection should never lose sight of. But there is another complementary truth which has also to be borne in mind, that it is our consciousness that determines our thought, feeling and action. Everything in our life and nature is an instrumental working of our consciousness. If we take into ...
... ego,—that is only the disguise of iron armour which masks and encumbers the national Purusha,—but a great communal soul and life that has appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a Swabhava and Swadharma, and embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. And equally then our cultural Page 426 ... possibility of the Indian mentality working freely in its own nature discovering new methods or even giving a new turn to physical science—we shall relate it to other powers of the human mind and scientific knowledge, to other knowledge more intimate to other and not less light-giving and power-giving parts of our intelligence and nature. And there the peculiar cast of the Indian mind, its psychological... living and vital issue that we have to do with, and there the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future. It is not a return to the fifth century but an initiation of the centuries to come, not a reversion but a break forward ...
... disguise of iron armour which masks and encumbers the national Purusha, — but a great communal soul and life that has appeared in the whole Page 15 and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a Swabhava and Swadharma, and embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. And equally then our cultural conception of humanity... possibility of the Indian mentality working freely in its own nature discovering new methods or even giving a new turn to physical science — we shall relate it to other powers of the human mind and scientific knowledge to other knowledge more intimate to other and not less light-giving and powergiving parts of our intelligence and nature. And there the peculiar cast of the Indian mind, its psychological... living and vital issue that we have to do with, and there the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future. It is not a return to the fifth century but an initiation of the centuries to come, not a reversion but a break forward ...
... obliged to consent to dissolution. Its constituents are broken up so that the elements of one life can be used to enter into the elemental formation of other lives. The extent to which this law reigns in Nature has not yet been fully recognised and indeed cannot be until we have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter... —hunger and desire, the first seed of conscious mind. The growth into the third status of life by the principle of association, the growth of love, does not abolish the law of desire, but rather transforms and fulfils it. Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange; it is a commerce between being and being. Physical life does not desire to give itself, it... or in any world; but it is compelled, not willing, it obeys the subconscious impulse of Nature rather than consciously shares in it. Even when love intervenes, the self-giving at first still preserves to a large extent the mechanical character of the subconscious will in the atom. Love itself at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving ...
... A passage from Sri Aurobindo sums up the whole position: Page 118 'India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of every thing new that comes to us in the stream of time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed... religious community, the nation within the nation. We may perhaps say that here Nature tried an experiment of unparalleled complexity and potential richness, accumulating all possible difficulties in order to arrive at the most opulent result. But in the end the problem proved insoluble or, at least, was not solved and Nature had to resort to her usual deus ex machina denouement, the instrumentality of... organised common life; it has only an inchoate organization determined much more by circumstances than by human intelligence and will. And yet the idea and the fact of our common human existence, nature, destiny has always exercised its strong influence on human thought and action. One of the chief preoccupations of ethics and religion has been the obligations of man to mankind. The pressure of the ...
... large lines of the universal action. She governs the multitudinous movements of the world by the rigour and rectitude of Her Laws. The mechanical Nature with which we are all familiar, the aspect of Prakriti, is only the lower executive form of this cosmic Mahâshakti. Above the nature of the three gunas or essential modes of terrestrial existence. She moves in the freedom of Her spiritual infinitudes and... lower into the higher nature, bestowing upon man the double freedom of self-expression—the freedom of the soul and the freedom of the converted and divinised .nature? THE INDIVIDUAL POISE The most immediately effective and mysteriously transfiguring poise of the Mother is in Her incarnate individuality. In Her universal poise. She acts according to the cosmic Law of Her own creation;—She... of a certain truth which will be apparent to us as we proceed in our consideration of the objectification and individualisation of the Mother's Presence for a radical transformation of our active nature. The Mother, whom Sri Râmakrishna adored and called Kâli, is the supreme Shakti, at once transcendent and universal, who, as the Consciousness-Force of Brahman, creates, constitutes and upholds ...
... Ruling earth-nature by Eternity's law... 74 When Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts, Light shall invade the darkness of its base, 75 because When superman is bom as Nature's king His presence shall transfigure Matter's world: He shall light up Truth's fire in Nature's night, He shall lay upon the earth Troth's greater law; Man... Then at long last, his Divine Interlocutor answers assuring him that she, Savitri, will be bom: O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. A limitless Mind that can contain the world, A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms Moved by the passions of the gods shall come. ... And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love. 40 40 Ibid., p. 687. Page 136 His first answer comes almost as an admonition: How shall earth-nature and man's nature rise To the celestial levels, yet the earth abide? 41 Then after telling her that the gulf between Heaven and Earth cannot be bridged here and now (because Earth is still too ...
... research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also ... scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive... appropriate to the order of the truths into which we are empowered to enter; their validity and significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by a consciousness which can enter into them and not according to the law of another domain or by a consciousness which is capable only of truths of another order; so alone can we be sure of our steps and enlarge firmly our sphere ...
... during his race-history; 3 at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature. But otherwise he is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilisation; he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements... him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new... “It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, – there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make a more and more complex and plastic use of his capacities ...
... had undergone a “change of authority,” that is, the passage from the old, automatic functioning of Nature to the conscious functioning of the great Consciousness, the supramental functioning, that which Sri Aurobindo and Mother called the “conscious automatism.” The uncoupling from the old laws of Nature and the coupling to the other rhythm. And one morning, visibly shaken, Mother simply said: My nervous... nervous system is being transferred to the Supramental.... It feels like ... it's worse than dying. 20 It was the last transfer. Which meant that nothing in her body obeyed the old law anymore. Perhaps the last thread or the ultimate transition to the other state. And we can well understand that it was becoming quite unbearable to suffer that alive, while speaking to people, signing checks and ... l way and I felt that it was something other than a small operation more; each time, one came up against the whole world, there, in that absurd symbol, as if to infringe that was to break the human law, the path from which there was no return⎯and they struggled around her to make her eat: if She did not eat, “She was going to die,” mind you, it was obvious, and She yielded to their hypnotism, sometimes ...
... constant peace and serenity as well as the resulting power. Finally, crowning all comes the physical liberation or liberation from the law of material causation. Because you are completely master of yourself, you are no longer the slave of the laws of nature that make you act through subconscious and semiconscious impulsions and keep you in the rut of ordinary life. Because of this liberation you... Nevertheless, even the Divine when he incarnates upon earth is subject to the same law of progress. The instrument for his manifestation, the physical being with which he clothes himself, should be in a state of constant progress and the law governing his personal self-expression is in a way linked with the general law of earth's progress, Thus even the embodied God cannot be perfect upon earth unless... low in human nature. The most ignoble instincts, the most depraved taste find in this recognition a good excuse to display and impose themselves as inevitable necessities. However it is not so; one can relax oneself without being dissolute, one can be at rest without being vulgar, one can become slack without Page 148 allowing any of the grosser elements in one's nature to come up. ...
... which is the assured future definitively to come. Of Laws and Miracles Science tells us that the universe functions according to laws which the human mind can find out and formulate. “The scientific culture that arose in Western Europe, of which we are the inheritors, was dominated by adherence to the absolute invariance of laws of Nature, which thereby underwrote the meaningfulness of the scientific... Barrow) In recent times, however, the laws of physics, “once regarded as cast in tablets of stone,” began to look less definitive. What was once the domain of a few “eccentric” scientists like David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake or Ilya Prigogine, is now more and more accepted by scientific orthodoxy and may soon be integrated into the standard paradigm. “As soon as the laws are confined to some abstract realm... realm of ideal mathematical forms, there is no problem,” writes Paul Davies, “but if the laws are considered to inhabit, not a transcendent Platonic realm, but the real universe, then it’s a very different story.” And a French scientist states squarely: “The fundamental laws [of physics] are now about possibilities and no longer about certitudes.” Sri Aurobindo did not only rely on his yogic insight ...
... the time, perhaps, to rethink their ends and means, and in fact he had already done some fresh thinking along those lines: We must develop our intelligence to understand better the deeper laws of Nature, and to learn better how to act in an orderly way, to co-ordinate our efforts.... .. .for a nation to win its freedom, it must first of all deserve it, make itself worthy of it, prepare itself... have a miniature description of the progress of the soul from the dark night of sorrow to the bright ambrosial dawn of new light and life. This sequence of spiritual phenomena is as real as Nature's physical laws, and concerns us as intimately. In 1911 Mirra first met Abdul Baha31, the son and successor of Baha Ullah founder of the Bahai religion. Page 40 Abdul Baha had spent ... disappear gradually as we gain increasing mastery of the Truth in the waking state. The way will then be made clear for the purer dreams that give us intimations of the secrets of our nature and of other-nature. In one of his letters, Sri Aurobindo makes reference to the recent medical theory of different phases of sleep culminating in about ten minutes of absolute rest and silence, and points ...
... things, which the real reality of his life and his nature, whither the attraction of his destiny and where the sphere of his perfection. Matter and life are his actual basis, the thing from which he starts and on which he stands and whose requirement and law he has to satisfy if he would exist at all on earth and in the body. The material and vital law is a rule of survival, of struggle, of desire and... gradual advance, to be wisely effected by following out faithfully with more and more of intelligence and moral purpose and with a final turn to Page 568 spirituality the law of their nature. Its message touches the other smaller solutions but, even when it accepts them partly, it is to point them beyond themselves to a higher and more integral secret into which as yet only the few... figures the Self and the Divine veiled in a disguising Maya, and to pursue the lower life for its own sake is to persist in a stumbling path and to enthrone our nature's obscure ignorance and not at all to find the true truth and complete law of existence. A gospel of the will to live, the will to power, of the satisfaction of desire, of the glorification of mere force and strength, of the worship of ...
... ideas. Art may make use of these things as elements, Page 229 but it has its own svadharma , essential law, and it will rise to the widest spirituality by following out its own natural lines with no other yoke than the intimate law of its own being. Even with the lower nature of man, though here we are naturally led to suppose that compulsion is the only remedy, the spiritual aim will seek... preparation for a solitary salvation or release from the burden of life. Human society itself never seized on the discovery of the soul as a means for the discovery of the law of its own being or on a knowledge of the soul's true nature and need and its fulfilment as the right way of terrestrial perfection. If we look at the old religions in their social as apart from their individual aspect, we see that... for a higher freedom. Not that man has not to wear many a yoke in his progress upward; but only the yoke which he accepts because it represents, the more perfectly the better, the highest inner law of his nature and its aspiration, will be entirely helpful to him. The rest buy their good results at a heavy cost and may retard as much as or even more than they accelerate his progress. The spiritual ...
... help to influence but which he cannot determine. They constitute the national dharma,—we must use the Indian word which alone is capable of expressing the whole idea; for our dharma means the law of our nature and it means also its formulated expression. Only the society itself can determine the development of its own dharma or can formulate its expression; and if this is to be done not in the old way... sovereign. A similar unity of jurisdiction, power to constitute tribunals administering the civil law and the right to modify the laws relating to property, marriage and other social matters which concern the public order of society, comprise its civil side. But the unity and uniformity of the civil law is of less pressing and immediate importance to the State when it is substituting itself for the... often a religious sense in the community which attaches as in most countries of the East a sacrosanct character to its laws and customs and tends to keep the king or State in bounds; the ruler is accepted as the administrator of justice, but he is supposed to be strictly bound by the law of which he is not the fountain but the channel. Sometimes this religious sense develops a theocratical element in the ...
... saying is true that the body is the instrument provided for the fulfilment of the right law of our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a turning away from the completeness of the divine Wisdom and a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. Such a refusal may be, owing to some secret law of their development, the right attitude for certain individuals, but never the aim... The Conditions of the Synthesis The Synthesis of Yoga Chapter II The Three Steps of Nature We recognise then, in the past developments of Yoga, a specialising and separative tendency which, like all things in Nature, had its justifying and even imperative utility and we seek a synthesis of the specialised aims and methods which have, in consequence,... individuals and as if there were great numbers and even the majority in whom it is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active. Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust ...
... those substances of certain primary & secondary, general & particular properties and working as a result by certain invariable tendencies & fixed processes which we call by a human figure Nature's Laws. This is Nature. When searchingly analysed she is found to be a play of two entities, Force & Matter; but these two, if the unitarian view of the universe is correct, will some day be proved to be only... , put so as to bring out its logical consequences & implications, but still effectively the modern account of the universe. In that account the nature of a thing consists of its composition, the properties contained in that composition and the laws of working determined by those properties; as for [example] iron is composed of certain elementary substances, possesses as a consequence of its composition... the course of a century into a larger synthesis, there is still something to be said about the presence or absence of intelligence Page 123 in Nature. In what after all does intelligence consist, what are its composition, properties, laws? What in its circumstances is human intelligence, the only kind of intelligence which we are in a position to study from within & therefore understand? It ...
... be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or the fulfilment of man's nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is the Eternal in the universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man's nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his... the Universe as more important than man and seeks to study its laws for their own sake. But still it remains true that humanity persists in its claim and that only those discoveries of the physicist, the zoologist and the chemist have been really fruitful which have helped man practically to master physical nature or to understand the laws of his own life and progress. Whatever moralist or philosopher... related if He exists. For nothing is more certain than this that if a universal & eternal Consciousness exists, the life and development of the human soul must be towards It and governed by the law of Its nature; and a philosophy which cannot determine these relations so as to bring light and help to humanity in its long road is merely an intellectual plaything and might just as well have been kept as ...
... would acquire a divine nature and be free from disease, ageing and death. What he as well as the Mother would achieve was intended to be repeated in their disciples. Not that one would be eternally bound to one physical frame: one could leave the body if one wanted but one would not be obliged to do so by any defect in it, any subjection to the so-called "laws of physical nature" which have obtained... possible. But, considering the old superabundance, it was enough for the Mother to base herself on it for the continuation of her work towards the goal she had set for each of her disciples. The nature of the goal is spotlighted by a short talk I had with her in the very early years of my Ashram-stay. I was despondent about myself and said: "I can see that I am not fit for this Yoga and will never... 1956, the evolution of the New World in the future by the Supermind's entrance into the gross-material is certain. But evolution is a slow, zigzag, back-and-forth, up-and-down process, and human nature is difficult to change without the Incarnate Divine's pioneering Page 87 sadhana concretely proceeding amidst us and gathering us up into its own movement with its constant ...
... upholder of Nature and her action and the giver of the sanction by which alone her law becomes imperative and her force and its ways operative. That Spirit within her is the Knower who illuminates her and makes her conscient in us; his is the immanent and superconscient Will that inspires and motives her workings. The soul in man, a portion of this Divinity, shares his nature. Our nature is our soul's... has preoccupied the modern scientific mind and made for it its whole view of Nature, and so much so that science still hopes and labours with a very small amount of success to explain all phenomena of life by laws of matter and all phenomena of mind by law of living matter. Here soul or spirit has no place and nature cannot be regarded as power of spirit. Since the whole of our existence is mechanical... what we call Nature or Prakriti, a Force that operates as the whole law and mechanism of being, creates the world which is the object of our mind and senses and creates too the mind and senses as a means of relation between the creature and the objective world in which he lives. In this outer appearance man in his soul, his mind, his life, his body seems to be a creature of Nature differentiated ...
... cease to be limited within their specific boundaries. It replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. No more in this operation is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the individual nature. The spiritual law respects the individual nature, modifies it and perfects it, and in this sense, it is unique for each individual... possible perfection of the individual and the society and the perfection of the relationship between the individual and the society. Self-exceeding or self-transcendence is the fundamental law of the nature of the human being, and if humankind comes to the paralyzing situation where the urge to exceed the limits of the mental Page 15 human being is buried under the heavy weight of the... the guidance and supervening inspiration of a standard of conduct formulated in consideration of man's station and duties in the society or in consideration of any discovered or prescribed intrinsic law of an ideal. Morality is often conceived as a preparation for spirituality. Spirituality, on the other hand, begins when one seeks whatever one conceives to be the ultimate and absolute for its own ...
... than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future. 201 Savitri is herself the manifestation of the Divine Grace, and it— becomes her duty—the law of her nature—to defy fate and fight the battle for Satyavan and for mankind. She is the avatar, the world-redeemer... these, and the action of Nature in us is an attempt, we might say, to work out under the difficult conditions of a natural and egoistic ignorance what is foreseen in full supramental light by the inner Will and Knowledge. 200 When fate seems to bar one's path, there is one recourse possible: appeal to spiritual force. All is possible then. The law itself may be exceeded, and... the past Karma..." 198 The cosmos is not a mere machine, all a Law and an unalterable Process; there is a Spirit behind it all, which is the Process as well as the Power that regulates it. "The destiny which binds our physical being", writes Sri Aurobindo, "binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene. Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical ...
... the law of the workings of the gods. दैव्या होतारा प्रथमा न्यृञ्जे सप्त पृक्षासः स्वधया मदन्ति । ऋतं शंसन्त ऋतमित् त आहुरनु व्रतं व्रतपा दीघ्यानाः ॥८॥ 8) I crown the two supreme Priests of the invocation. The seven pleasures take their rapture by the self-law of their nature; the Truth they express, the Truth only they speak, guardians of the law of its action according to that law they... आहुरनु व्रतं व्रतपा दीध्यानाः ॥७॥ 7) I crown the two supreme Priests of the invocation. The seven pleasures take their rapture by the self-law of their nature; the Truth they express, the Truth only they speak, guardians of the law of its action according to that law they shine. आ भारती भारतीभिः सजोषा इळा देवैर्मनुष्येभिरग्निः । सरस्वती सारस्वतेभिरर्वाक् तिस्त्रो देवीर्बर्हिरेदं सदन्तु ॥८॥ ... and the guest of the peoples. कत्वा दक्षस्य तरुषो विघर्मणि देवासो अग्निं जनयन्त चित्तिभिः । रुरुचानं भानुना ज्योतिषा महामत्यं न वाजं सनिष्यन्नुप ब्रुवे ॥३॥ 3) By the will, in the order and law of a delivering discernment, the gods brought the Fire into being by their perceptions of the Knowledge. In his greatness shining forth with his blazing light I invoke him as the Horse so that I may ...
... Life Divine, p. 650. 27.Prof. Robert Lenoble. Page 72 experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature." 28 Subjective experiences and supraphysical realities must, by their very nature, be investigated and verified by other than the physical or sense mind, by a method of scrutiny and affirmation applicable to their own domain. And there... Indian Wisdom, pur āṇ i praj ñā , lies the harmonising light and law. And the supposed antinomy between Science and Spirituality is at least resolved from the latter's side. But what about the former? Is Science ready to clasp the hand of co-operation stretched by such a dynamic spirituality? Or will it rather by its very nature remain estranged from all spirituality of whatever sort that may be... our inner being with the Reality behind the appearances and see from there the workings of Nature, while Science endeavours to make us aware of the detailed workings and through them get some indirect glimpse of the Reality. Thus the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain, go according to a law of their own and have their own standards of judgment and verification other than those that ...
... scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive d... universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes unformed and then they are given shape somewhere in us. The principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or refusal to these thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or this giving a personal-mental form to Page 243 thought-stuff (or vital movements) from the environing Nature-Force. It... surrender as I had shown to the human channel. I give this example to show how these things work; it is not in the calculated way the human reason wants to lay down, but by a more mysterious and greater law. 23 March 1932 To reject doubts means control of one's thoughts—very certainly Page 242 so. But the control of one's thoughts is as necessary as the control of one's vital desires and ...
... this very moment ‘No Law is absolute,’ 41 Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine. ‘ What Nature does, is really done by the Spirit.’ 42 And the Mother said: ‘Down here, there are no fixed laws … Not two cases are the same.’ 43 ‘If there are not two combinations in the universe who are the same, how can one establish laws and what is the absolute verity of those laws?’ 44 She even said... people up to then had answered this question in the negative. Who might be so demented to cross swords with the laws of nature? Is not even God bound by what He once ordained? ‘Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law …’ 40 But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had come to change the Law. Every Avatar incarnates to establish a new Order which of necessity has to come into conflict with the existing... g all these negative factors. Therefore the supramental yoga had to take up the confrontation with the ‘laws’ of life, with habits millions of years old, to change the structures built by them or to make these structures susceptible to change. ‘We do not want to obey the orders of Nature, even if those orders are supported by billions of years of habits,’ 39 said the Mother. Good, but once ...
... efforting, labouring and perspiring! Oh it will come, it will come!" It is not my working, but your moods that are queer. You get something no reasonable being would expect under the ordinary laws of Nature and then you fancy you haven't got it and wail because everything is not absolutely, continuously, faultlessly, increasingly, illimitably miraculous through and through and always and for ever ...
... the animal, everywhere around us in Nature; it is that power which guides the birds flight toward its infallible goal, the movement of a little beast toward its precise need, the motion of the atom in its regular gravitation—everything is exact to the electron and the millionth of a meridian. It is perfect exactitude. We speak of “instinct” or of “the laws of Nature,” because we label everything and... pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her very structures it had itself erected, shatters Intelligence, shatters the Spirit, shatters even Desire, whenever they tie... pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her dance of Fire even as we are sure we have grasped wisdom. She breaks every Wisdom as one day she will break our machines ...
... , how many would crumble away, would lose all meaning!” It was ... what we see as “laws of Nature,” “ineluctable” things, it all was absurd, an absurdity! With the true consciousness, it crumbles away. And Mother concluded: Several times like that, when people tell me they feel as if in front of an ineluctable law (“There is this + this, and therefore that is inevitable”), the answer is always the... circle around this question of time, and the only way to approach it is to follow the chronological order of the experiences without trying to gather them together in groups of the same nature (groups of what? what nature?). In what way does this last Mystery link itself to our evolution?... If we knew it exactly, a great rent would be made in the veil. A Mystery that perhaps outmaneuvers all other mysteries... the same: if you want it so! YOU are the ones who decide it’s ineluctable! 19 But this “functioning” that reverses the ineluctable laws, what was it, this something that forces the physical fact to change? And one would have said that Mother had heard our silent question: It’s probably a ... there’s a POSITION to be changed, a position of the consciousness to be changed. 20 A position ...
... mechanical laws of Nature;—the necessity, we might say, of some such secret inherent Truth of things as we have supposed, governing automatically the processes we observe in action in the universe. But a theory of mechanical Necessity by itself does not elucidate the free play of the endless unaccountable variations which are visible in the evolution: there must be behind the Necessity or in it a law of unity... not be a difficulty, since there would be no contradiction of the basic nature of things in its appearance; an omnipotent Mind could easily infuse something of itself into its creatures. One difficulty remains; it is the arbitrary nature of the creation, the incomprehensibility of its purpose, the crude meaninglessness of its law of unnecessary ignorance, strife and suffering, its ending without a denouement... chapter. Throughout there is the constant rule of a general sameness in the original determinate and, subject to this substantial sameness of basic substance and nature, a profuse variation in the generic and individual determinates; an identical law obtains of sameness or similarity in the genus or species with numerous variations often meticulously minute in the individual. But we do not find anything ...
... being and consciousness, but as worlds; for the experiences there are organised as they are in our own world, but on a different plan, with a different process and law of action and in a substance which belongs to a supraphysical Nature. This organisation includes, as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, manifest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance... any such untoward developments of the limitation of being and consciousness: for this descent is in its nature a limitation of knowledge; existence and cognition and delight of being confine themselves in a lesser truth and good and beauty and its inferior harmony, and move according to that law of a narrower light, but in such a movement darkness and suffering and evil are not obligatory phenomena... in the end arrive to a limited extent at its natural domination; it might make its basis of physical matter a more elastic instrument not altogether prohibitive of the action of its own highest law and nature or opposed to that action, as it now is in its inelastic resistance. But Spirit would always be dependent upon Matter for its field and its manifestation; it could have no other field: it could ...
... incarnation. The Avatar comes as the manifestation of the divine nature in the human nature, the apocalypse of its Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood, in order that the human nature may by moulding its principle, thought, feeling, action, being on the lines of that Christhood, Krishnahood, Buddhahood transfigure itself into the divine. The law, the Dharma which the Avatar establishes Page 148 ... plane of existence and they are less easily grasped. Men therefore have to follow the fourfold law of their nature and works and on this plane of mundane action they seek the Godhead through his various qualities. But, says Krishna, though I am the doer of the fourfold works and creator of its fourfold law, yet I must be known also as the non-doer, the imperishable, the immutable Self. "Works affect... the divine nature, it sounds like a blasphemy. The rationalist objects that if God exists, he is extracosmic or supracosmic and does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows them to be governed by a fixed machinery of law,—he is, in fact, a sort of far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log, at the best an indifferent inactive Spirit behind the activity of Nature, like some ...
... e of Nature over the soul; "even the man of knowledge acts according to his own nature." And on this it founds the injunction to follow faithfully in our action the law of our nature. "Better is one's own law of works, svadharma , though in itself faulty than an alien Page 217 law well wrought out; death in one's own law of being is better, perilous is it to follow an alien law." What... "I am acting according to my nature", and he cannot do it, because he has not the nature and not, therefore, the law of action, svadharma , of the tiger, storm or fire. He has a conscious intelligent will, Page 220 a buddhi , and to that he must refer his actions. If he does not do so, if he acts blindly according to his impulses and passions, then the law of his being is not rightly... claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his own nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He knows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasic and tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his normal ...
... spiritual motive. The leading idea was the government of human interest and desire by the social and ethical law, the Dharma, so that it might be made,—all vital, economic, aesthetic, hedonistic, intellectual and other needs being satisfied duly and according to the right law of the nature,—a preparation for the spiritual existence. Here too we have as an initial form the aphoristic method of the Vedic... consistent and organised system of individual and communal life and that endeavour resulted in the authoritative social treatises or Shastras of which the greatest and the most authoritative is the famous Laws of Manu. The work of the philosophers was to systematise and justify to the reasoning intelligence the truths of the self and man and the world already discovered by intuition, revelation and spiritual... aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa. All shade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single purity ...
... assent to Nature, an acquiescence; and for good reason. For I start with the action of the universal Energy which the Spirit has set in motion and as I rise from the ignorance towards knowledge, the first thing demanded from me is to gather experience of its law and of my relations to the law and partly therefore to acquiesce, to allow myself to be moved, to see and to come to know the nature of the motions... impression of freedom are an orientation and an atmosphere which cling about the action of mind, and they grow in Nature as she rises towards mentality. The world of Matter seems to know nothing about freedom; everything there appears as if written in sibyllic laws upon tablets of stone, laws which have a process, but no initial reason, serve a harmony of purposes or at Page 343 least produce... somewhere there is in our being and action, and we have only to see how and why it is limited in our outward nature, why here I am at all under any dominion of Karma. I appear to be bound by the law of an outward and imposed energy only because there is separation between my outward nature and my inmost spiritual self and I do not live in that outwardness with my whole being, but with a shape, turn ...
... human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment. At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti... the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has... the continued impulse of past nature but only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous, vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation ...
... animals on earth can by habit of the adaptation live only in a certain range of atmosphere and need oxygen, but they could adapt themselves to other conditions—it is a law of habit of Nature, not a law of inevitable necessity of Nature. It is therefore quite possible for life to exist on other planets in our and other systems, though the beings there may not be quite like earthly humanity or life quite... scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive d... amount of ordinary reasoning can get rid of that necessity of surmounting the lower in order that the higher may be there. Science and the Supernormal Scientific laws only give a schematic account of material processes of Nature—as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself. Water Page ...
... watched over the action of those laws [of nature], so directing and so determining their accumulation as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature”? The conclusion seems to be that he, less prejudiced than doctrinaire scientific materialists, saw everything as Nature, as a form of manifested matter... life left their mark. And then Chambers made a scandalizing claim: if people could accept [since Newton] that God assembled the heavenly bodies by natural laws, ‘what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner expressed by his will?’ That would make more sense than God stepping in to create every species of shrimp or skunk.” (Carl Zimmer... which he calls “the law of continuity.” “The incapacity of the modern cultivated mind to realize the existence of any higher intelligence between itself and Deity, angels and archangels, spirits and demons, have been so long banished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as actual existences, and nothing in modern philosophy takes their place. Yet the grand law of ‘continuity’, the ...
... primary law of all becoming and of each Jiva; it constitutes the essence and develops the movement of the nature. It is a principle in each creature that derives from and is immediately related to a transcendent divine Becoming, that of the Ishwara, madbhāvaḥ . In this relation of the divine bhāva to the svabhāva and of the svabhāva to the superficial bhāvāḥ , of the divine Nature to the individual... in accordance with the law of the swabhava. But what again is meant by saying that the Divine is not in the becomings, the forms and affections of the lower nature, even the sattwic, though they all are in his being? In a sense he must evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist. But Page 275 what is meant is that the true and supreme spiritual nature of the Divine is not imprisoned... of becoming which are of the nature of the gunas, this whole world is bewildered and does not recognise Me supreme beyond them and imperishable." If we could see that that Divine is the real truth of our existence, all else also would change to our vision, assume its true character and our life and action acquire the divine values and move in the law of the divine nature. But why then, since the ...
... that something better was possible by means of an inner development. ‘We are not strong enough to wage the struggle by force … We should develop our intelligence more to understand the profound laws of nature, and to better learn how to act with order, how to coordinate our efforts … I have succeeded in making my friends understand all that.’ And, he said, he had come to ask the help of the Cosmic Movement... formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organize and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic – for there is and can be no other magic than the utilization of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even... perceive with whom they were dealing, and they invited Mirra, already an experienced occultist in her own right, to their mountain-encircled abode in Tlemcen, a place apparently outside the rule of the laws as known to science. Tlemcen – The First Visit (1906) When you yourselves are inwardly developed, are capable of having a direct and inner contact with these [occult] things, then you know ...
... commonly say in French, and that one can rely only on one's physical eyes Page 40 for seeing and observing, on one's physical-mental knowledge for judging and deciding, and that the laws of Nature are laws —in other words, any exception to them is a miracle. This is false. This is what is at the root of all the misunderstandings and reservations. You already know, and I mention it only to... I never said that you should be the judge. I agree to be the judge in all cases, because I recognise that it is very difficult to know whether a thing is right and good, unless one can see the law of Truth behind things. If You had said to me, "Removing the nails is nothing, is it?", I would have replied, "Nothing much." And if You had said, "What! Removing the nails for nothing and damaging... belongs to the world and not to yoga. By his way of thinking, feeling, acting, each one emanates vibrations which constitute his own atmosphere and quite naturally attract vibrations of similar nature and quality. So long as you are capable of beating somebody, you open the door to the possibility of being beaten yourself. You are expecting those who are working with you to be geniuses ...
... humour whose beauty will vanish if we try to explain it. So, we stop with merely reproducing it. "There was a famous canon who had said to his brother: 'Brother, you and I are exceptions to the laws of Nature. You have risen by your gravity and I have sunk by my levity.' " 7 As in all other fields of his literary creativity - philosophy, sociology, history, poetry, drama, criticism - Sri Aurobindo... and walk about with them - or should it be the rope in their nose? Supermen cannot be made like that - the long rope is needed. 81 2.NB: The laws of its [of the glimpse of the Presence etc.] coming and going are as unknown to me as Einstein's law of Relativity. It comes of its own sweet will, at its own sweet hour.... The tragedy is that I know nothing of its reason of arrival and departure.... and some day perhaps after jack-in-the-boxing like that sufficiently, one day it will sit down and say "Here I am for good. Send for the priest and let us be married." With these things that is the law and the rule Page 107 and the resson and rhyme of it and everything. 82 3.NB: I am thrown out of joint at two miracles, Sir: (i) R's treatment or yours; (ii) NK's English poetry ...
... Prakriti. Thus the soul's own law of action becomes identified with the law of action of the Supreme. The method of liberation in the Gita is to rise above the inferior nature of existence, to discover its identity with Immutable, akśara, which is above the three gunas, but also the method of rising above the lower nature in which the operations of the higher nature are manifested in the form of... the law of their being and in the law of their work and nature, bh ā v ā yopapadyate. ¹³² The Gita thus envelopes all the three states of liberation in its catholic integrality and fuses them all in one greatest and richest Divine freedom and perfection. In that state of perfection, the soul is not only liberated from the workings of Apara Page 113 Prakriti, the lower nature of the... between the two natures, Apara Prakriti and Para Prakriti, the lower nature and higher nature?. And how are our action and our soul's status affected by the liberation, and what exactly is the secret-most method of attainment of the integral liberation and perfect-ion, namely, the largest, fullest self-giving of the human soul to the Divine Spirit that permits the identity of Soul's law of action with ...
... to the higher law of the soul, but to an outward moral law, a code of conduct. For then in place of a lifting enthusiasm we have the rigidity of the Pharisee, a puritan fierceness or narrowness or the life-killing tyranny of a single insufficient side of the nature. This is not yet that higher mental movement, but a straining towards it, an attempt to rise above the transitional law and the vitalistic... beauty and delight in itself and spontaneous irrefragable order. Meanwhile this third movement of mind discovers a law of the return of mental energies, pure in its kind and as certain as the vital and the physical, as faithful to itself, to the self of mind and to mind nature, a law not of vital returns to mental dynamis, but of progression of the soul in the being and force of good and beauty and... necessity of its moral nature, a truly categorical imperative, a call that in the total more complex nature of man may be dulled or suppressed or excluded by the claim of its other parts and their needs, but to the ethical mind is binding and absolute. The virtue that demands a reward for acting well and needs a penalty to keep it walking in the straight way, is no real portion, no true law of the ethical ...
... l form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation. Meanwhile certain general... representative word is only taken as a sort of excuse for the inner power to awaken and manifest; it is, as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature. Thus it is said in the Upanishads of Krishna, son of Devaki, that he received a word of the Rishi Ghora and had the knowledge. So Ramakrishna, having attained by his own internal effort the... zeal of the whole nature for its divine results, vyākulatā , the heart's eagerness for the attainment of the Divine,—that devours the ego and breaks up the limitations of its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature. But this is only ...
... this achievement is not new and some yogis have achieved it, I believe — but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by yoga-siddhi — not a dharma [= inherent law] of the nature." The Aurobindonian supra-mentalisation has to be an intrinsic permanent state of the body by the junction of the descending free Supermind from above the mental plane with the Supermind evoked... documents, simply speaks of Jesus as having been "made of a woman, made under the law" (Galatians 4:4) or, as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible phrases it, "born of a woman, born a subject of the Law". 2 The second part refers, of course, to the common unredeemed world with its constituents ruled by an established universal Law. The first part alludes to another facet of the same condition, as is obvious... basic divergence even where an apparent similarity may be discerned. He 22 speaks of "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature — not by imposing siddhis [= abnormal faculties] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution." And he continues: "I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic ...
... own standard of satisfaction and sets up as a canon and law its own manner of response; there is a multitude of counsels, and each has this common characteristic that it overstresses one side of the norm of poetic creation. For the spirit of poetry is many-sided and flexible in its processes, but firm and invariable in the central law of its nature. The poetic Truth of which I am speaking has nothing... a thing impossible to our normal nature, a law honoured with the consent of the lips and universally ignored in the observance. A few only seeking perfection in spiritual experience discover in it the natural rule of our real and our highest being, quite possible if we can only get some abiding realisation of that secret oneness which is the foundation of the law of universal love. Then, not seeking... true to her nature, her soul's will under the shadow of a cruel death, "Not to join in hate, but to join in love was I born!" The Athenian poet intended no moral instruction, calls up no religious emotion into his line, is concerned only with a crucial situation in life, the revolt of natural affection against the rigid claim of the law, nation, State. It is a simple cry of the voice of nature and life ...
... assured there need be no apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another law than his own, he is troubled. The nature! But what of this sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? Is it not this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and... into that higher nature beyond mind which is the status of the Divine. He has at the same time to give him that for which he asks and for which he is inspired to seek by the guidance within him, a new Law of life and action high above the insufficient rule of the ordinary human existence with its endless conflicts and oppositions, perplexities and illusory certainties, a higher Law by which the soul... Like Arjuna, we are all subject to the rule of the three modes of the nature-force, or gunas, to use the language of the Gita. Sattwa, rajas and tamas are the three chains which bind us and, like Arjuna, most of our being is rajasic and pragmatic, with a degree of purer sattwa in respect to our attitude towards moral law, society and the claims of others upon Page 63 us.' To study ...
... the truth and law of his or of all being. The Shastra is something impersonal to the individual, and that gives it its authority over the narrow personal law of his members; but at the same time it is personal to the collectivity and is the outcome of its experience, its culture or its nature. It is not in all its form and spirit the ideal rule of fulfilment of the Self or the eternal law of the Master... and will to believe and realise, may be called by the name which the Gita gives to it, his faith, śraddhā . The religion, the philosophy, the ethical law, the social idea, the cultural idea in which I put my faith, gives me a law for my nature and its works, an idea of relative right or an idea of relative or absolute perfection and in proportion as I have a sincerity and completeness of faith in... had rejected or breaks forward to some new truth and power, but is always in search of the same thing, the law of its perfection, its rule of right living, its complete, highest and essential self and nature. This movement begins with the individual, who is no longer satisfied with the law because he finds that it no longer corresponds to his idea and largest or intensest experience of himself and ...
... this achievement is not new and some yogis have achieved it, I believe - but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by yogasiddhi - not a dharma [=inherent law] of the nature." The Aurobindonian supramentalisation has to be an intrinsic permanent state of the body by the junction of the descending free Supermind from above the mental plane with the Supermind evoked... Actually, St. Paul, whose Epistles are the earliest Christian documents, simply speaks of Jesus as having been "made of a woman, made under the law" (Galatians 4:4) or, as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible phrases it, "born of a woman, born a subject of the Law". 2 St. Paul's two expressions are invariably associated everywhere else in the Bible with natural humanity. To him the birth of Jesus was like... basic divergence even where an apparent similarity may be discerned. He 22 speaks of "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature - not by imposing siddhis [=abnormal faculties] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supra-mental being in a new evolution". And he continues: "I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic ...
... would rather not believe in supernatural events personally. Although I obviously can’t prove that they never happen, I see no reason to suppose that they do. My inclination is to assume that the laws of nature are obeyed at all times. But even if one rules out supernatural events, it is still not clear that science could in principle explain everything in the physical universe. … The ‘ultimate’ questions... curses which are written within the law. “Cursed be he by day and cursed by night. Cursed be he in sleeping and cursed be he in waking, cursed in going out and cursed in coming in. The Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of the Lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses which are written in the book of the law. The Lord shall destroy his name... to be denied in the name of immutable universal laws. They have rid themselves of a fascination with a rationality taken as closed and a knowledge seen as nearly achieved. They are now open to the unexpected, which they no longer define as the result of imperfect knowledge or insufficient control.” 26 In another essay he writes: “The fundamental laws are now the expression of possibilities and no ...
... own manner of existence. The black magic of the habit of centuries had everybody believe that what was happening to the Mother was exactly what should happen, deterioration and death being the laws of Nature. Nobody can be prevented from imagining great things like the cancellation of death, a divine life upon Earth, an end to suffering, and what not — but, you see, Sri Aurobindo too had succumbed... humanity. ‘This new body of hers, prepared behind the material curtain, she sought to infuse into the material form, even press into it or force into it this new element; but Matter and man’s physical nature were not ready: Earth still considered it as an intrusion, as something foreign. The material casing broke down in consequence — perhaps not broke down, rather broke through; but that must be another... this cocoon the pupation takes place, a wonderful transformation resulting into a wholly different being: a butterfly. The process of pupation is one of the numerous inexplicable miracles invented by Nature millions of years ago. Can one say that the caterpillar dies in the cocoon? Can one say that the caterpillar has died when becoming a butterfly? The butterfly has originated in the body of the caterpillar ...
... is with us. Nature is with us. The law of God which is higher than any human, justifies our action; youth is for us, the future is ours. On that moral strength we must rely for our survival and eventual success. 30 The ground being so strong, there was no occasion for "rash impatience". There was no virtue in defying the law for its own sake; on the contrary, "a respect for law is a necessary... shall not perish as a nation, but live as a nation. Any authority that goes against this object will dash itself against the eternal throne of justice - it will dash itself against the laws of Nature which are the laws of God, and be broken to pieces. 21 IV Sri Aurobindo's life, divided mainly between his uncle Krishna Kumar Mitra's house and the premises of the Karmayogin office,... Dharma was to propagate Sanatana Dharma, the "Eternal Religion". Not "religion" exactly, for dharma really means much more; it is nearer to the essential and unchanging Law of Life, or the Law Divine - for only the Law Divine can both include the essence of all religions while firmly surpassing their temporal limitations. As used by Sri Aurobindo, Sanatana Dharma was an inclusive yet timeless ...
... some remarkable speculations to the contrary,—the ethical nature of man and the ethical law of the world. It considered that man was justified in satisfying his desires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the dictates of desire as the law of his being; for in all things there is a greater law, each has not only its side of interest and desire, but its... subordinate himself to the communal self, though by no means bound altogether to efface himself in it as the extremists of the communal idea imagine. He must live according to the law of his nature harmonised with the law of his social type and class, for the nation and in a higher reach of his being—this was greatly stressed by the Buddhists—for humanity. Thus living and acting he could learn to transcend... fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the Self and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being, a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence. But distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in the infinite complexity of man's nature and there was no sharp and unbridgeable division, only a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of the three ...
... "The transformation has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes." This means that he held the Supermind embodied in his subtle sharira and that he was under no occult necessity, no law of subtle Nature, to give up the latter for the purpose of returning to some plane of the soul's rest before being reborn with a new subtle body as well as a new gross one. Sri Aurobindo, at the hour of his... process and a progression of the evolutionary method: it aimed not at a bewildering superimposition of divine qualities which still left the grain of human nature unchanged, but at a spiritually organic luminous growth, an assimilation by nature of supernature, a marvellous and yet no freakish transfiguration, an intense working out within a life-time of what is not foreign to the purpose of terrestrial... the large and tranquil acceptance. That is why we have said that Sri Aurobindo has gone down fighting. Never to acquiesce in any shortcoming of earth-nature was his motto, for he saw the very secret of evolution to be the manifestation in earth-nature of what superficially looks impossible - the quivering forth of vitality and sensation in seemingly lifeless Matter, the glimmering out of mind and reason ...
... transformation has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes." This means that he held the Supermind embodied in his subtle sharira and that he was under no occult necessity, no law of subtle Nature, to give up the latter for the purpose of returning to some plane of the soul's rest before beingreborn with a new subtle body as well as a new gross one. Sri Aurobindo, at the hour of his physical... process and a progression of the evolutionary method: it aimed not at a bewildering superimposition of divine qualities which still left the gram of human nature unchanged, but at a spiritually organic luminous growth, an assimilation by nature of supernature, a marvellous and yet no freakish transfiguration, an intense working out within a life-time of what is not foreign to the purpose of terrestrial... the large and tranquil acceptance. That is why we have said that Sri Aurobindo has gone down fighting. Never to acquiesce in any shortcoming of earth-nature was his motto, for he saw the very secret of evolution to be the manifestation in earth-nature of what superficially looks impossible - the quivering forth of vitality and sensation in seemingly lifeless Matter, the glimmering out of mind and reason ...
... everything is the Divine – the world he has manifested and also the laws of this world, the evolutionary process of it. The Divine in the Avatar has to submit to the conditions imposed by Himself. Sri Aurobindo has insisted on this point again and again: ‘My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on Earth.’ And: ‘Certain... and difficult for them. We find this confirmed by Sri Aurobindo: ‘The Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the Sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties of the universal Earth-Nature, including the possibility of death and disease in order to fight them out. If she had not... themselves of human or terrestrial nature and its limitations and how much they have to bear of the difficulties of transformation …’ All the same, many months later he clarified some of this. ‘The Mother by the very nature of her work had to identify herself with the Sadhaks, to support all their difficulties, to receive into herself all the poison in their nature, to take up besides all the difficulties ...
... existence of a body with physical instruments and processes does not, as the 19th century vainly imagined, disprove the existence of a soul which uses the body even if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God. The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments... idea-script which represents an imperfect human observation of a line of processes that Nature follows or can follow; another theory is a different idea-script of other processes that also she follows or can follow. Allopathy, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, kaviraji, hakimi have all caught hold of Nature and subjected her to certain processes; each has its successes and failures. Let each do... intend to do sadhana, to stop feeling, living, acting according to the ordinary nature." I don't know if your "pressure" includes in its action my precious self. If it does, I would be glad; if it doesn't, I would pray to be included. Even if I don't feel the pressure, it matters little; let it act surreptitiously and my nature break, what? The pressure is general, but necessarily it is felt or received ...
... of her flowering womanhood, subsequent access to a received Shastra or an external Guru could be, "as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature". 4 This was how Mirra began reading Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga and later, more important still, poring over the Bhagavad Gita. She found Vivekananda's lectures illuminating, and it... are the result of human mental formations .... There are hells, there are paradises, there are purgatories .... 22 Such being the nature of the interlinked occult worlds Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried kingdoms of the graded Law Plunged from the Everlasting into Time, Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind And rich with life's adventure and delight... apart, she prized her privacy. Her steady schooling in the outside world of Man and Nature was not, however, quite as important as the sadhana in the infinitudes of the inner realms of the Spirit: A shore less sweep was lent to the mortal's acts, And art and beauty sprang from the human depths; Nature and soul vied in nobility .... Leaving earth's safety daring wings of Mind ...
... e expansion is the self-expression of the Brahman, and to deny Life is to diminish the Godhead within us … The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has in its most inferior forms and the crudenesses which are invading her.’ 23 And he warned the West: ‘The safety... Night And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance. || 64.39 || 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 shape. || 64.40 || Annulled were the tables of the law of pain.. || 64.41 || ..He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass The diamond script of the Imperishable... projection has in the meantime taken a concrete shape or is in the process of doing so. In a letter to the Mother during the First World War, Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘The whole world is now under one law.’ If today this is a fact for all to see and experience, it was far from apparent when that letter was written. Has not every race or people throughout the history of humanity held itself to be the ‘navel ...
... uprising and overcoming. The Arya n is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Page 108 Self-conquest is the first law of his nature .... For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom. Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not destroy... forms, the forms by the progress of life, life by the progress of forms, this Love is now at work in the human being. After having drawn him forth out of the divine possibilities of Nature, it would now draw out of his nature the possibilities of the Divine. This supreme aspiration of Love explains and justifies the universal desire and transfigures it; therein the being discovers the secret of... immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. 8 The same issue carried the first instalments of ...
... this material world man seems to be only a pawn in Nature's game, the cosmos appears like a vast prison wherein Ignorance rules with the karmic laws and pain and joy seem to be the inevitable results of its working. Death seems an inevitability and life seems to be under its sway. Thus we see in the world the working of an iron law. This law equally restrains "the Titan in us and the God". Savitri... draws nearer to God. "An hour comes when fail all Nature's means" and man's soul is thrown upon the help of God. Savitri was now passing through such an hour. She knew that only the power of the Spirit "can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time' and that her Nature's means comprising of the mind and the vital were impotent against the inexorable law of Death and Fate. Page 147 She had... liberated from the yoke of the laws of Nature's ignorance,—from the limitations of the intellect. Before him "there gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day". After this spiritual awakening "Humanity framed his movements less and less". It was no longer possible for him to allow the human elements in him to govern his life, and to accept as final the limitations of human nature. He awoke in himself latent ...
... utility of work that it tests the nature and puts the sadhak in front of the defects of his outer being which might otherwise escape him. It will be better to do the work as a sadhana for getting rid of the defects rather than accept the defects as a reason for not doing the work. Instead of accepting these reactions as if they were an unchangeable law of your nature, you should make up your mind... psychic being and a part of the mind that have drawn you to the Yoga and were predisposed to it, but the vital nature or at least a large part of it has not yet put itself into line with the psychic movement. There is not as yet the full and undivided consecration of the active vital nature. The signs of the consecration of the vital in action are these among others: The feeling (not merely the... attachment and offering them to Him as a sacrifice. He may also try or aspire to feel the presence of the Divine Shakti behind the world and its forces, distinguish between the lower nature of the Ignorance and the higher divine nature whose character is absolute calm, peace, power, Light and Bliss and aspire to be raised and led gradually from the lower to the higher. If he can do this, he will become fit ...
... self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things selfarranged; Brihat is full content & fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being & law of action. For, as the Vedanta... towards truth, trees grow according to their seed, animals act according to their species & nature, & man walk in the paths which God has prescribed for him. It is that in the Akasha—the Akasha where Varuna is lord—which develops arrangement & order, it is the element of law in Nature. But not only in material Nature, not only in Page 54 the moral akasha even,the akasha of the heart of which... combined in order to be equivalent to ritam. Well, then Varuna is represented to us as increasing in his nature by this Truth & Law, attaining to it or possessing it; Law & Truth are the source of his strength, the means by which he has arrived at his present force & mightiness. But he is more than that; he is tuvijata, urukshaya. Uru, we shall find in other hymns, the Vast, is a word used as equivalent ...
... her consenting voice: O Strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power... A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will. 35 Thus Savitri comes into... helpless claim And vindicate her right to be and love... Love in her was wider than the universe, The whole world could take refuge in her single heart... She matched with the iron law her sovereign right: Her single will opposed the cosmic rule. 12 Armed with the power of her love, she will face any threat, any adverse force, whatsoever: she will defy and defeat Death... the same time to two apparently incompatible and contrary worlds and possesses a dual character. Within, it harbours the Divine, is the Divine, fully conscious of its sovereign potency above the laws of a mortal life of ignorance; without, it embraces this world too, this play of inconscience and limitation. The two confront each other in the Incarnation with equal potency and in magic interaction ...
... personal need, preference and desire; Page 192 the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law of the nature. Man starts on the long career of his evolution with only the first two of these four to enlighten and lead him; for they constitute the law of his animal and vital existence, and it is as the vital and physical animal... threefold ascent of Nature. His needs and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light of purpose and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional desire begin to predominate over the demand of the physical and vital nature. The natural law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equilibrium of forces, impulsions and desires; the higher ethical law Page 197 ... moving towards its own concealed perfection, must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature. Again, as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence and nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great ...
... well prepared for the struggle of life and putting all at the service of the national ego, but a great collective soul and life that has appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a svabhāva and a svadharma, and has embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. Sri Aurobindo sees in humanity... its own sake is to persist in a stumbling path and to enthrone our nature's obscure ignorance and not at all find the true truth and complete law of existence. (Vide, SABCL, Vol. 13, pp. 549-50) (2)"...the pursuit of intellectual, ethical and social standards, the mind that insists on salvation by the observance of... moral law, social duty and function or the solutions of the liberated intelligence... very. The partial consciousness already evolved upon earth is a portent for further evolution and must surely develop in the very nature of things into complete consciousness with all its attendant accomplishments. A perfected and divinised life is what the earth-nature has always been seeking. In its progressive evolutionary development, consciousness appearing upon earth has been at first ...
... material and mental nature, and he follows in it a progressive law of his development determined by an inner law of his being; his cast of spirit makes out his cast of mind and life, his swabhava. Each man has a swadharma, a law of his inner being which he must observe, find out and follow. The action determined by his inner nature, that is his real Dharma. To follow it is the true law of his development;... upholder of Nature and her action and the giver of the sanction by which alone her law becomes imperative and her force and its ways operative. That Spirit within her is the Knower who illuminates her and makes her conscient in us; his is the immanent and superconscient Will that inspires and motives her workings. The soul in man, a portion of this Divinity, shares his nature. Our nature is our soul's... and failure, joy and sorrow, exultation or despair. But in all, whatever law it may seem to admit, it follows really only the law of the lower self and ego, the restless, untired, self-devouring and all-devouring mind of the Asuric and Rakshasic nature. The sattwic intelligence surmounts partly this state, sees that a better law than that of desire and ego must be followed and erects and imposes on itself ...
... and receptive, at once in all things, in eve being"? 36 Like Truth, like Love, which are laws of universal Nature, Beauty is another universal law: In the world of forms a violation of Beauty is as great a fault as a violation of Truth in the world of ideas. For Beauty is the worship Nature offers to the supreme Master of the universe; Beauty is the divine language in forms. And... Knowledge governing the action of his divine Power. The rest is the full opening up of the different planes of his world-play and the subjection of Matter and the body and the material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth: 6 The main object of the Power which moves him, of course, is to "possess securely the Light and the Force of the supramental being"; but progress in that... unfathomable than that of the Eternal Cause .... And also to thy eyes I have shown thy heart so that thou canst thus see what the supreme Truth had willed for it, so that thou mayst discover in it the law of thy being. Mirra had always heard in her heart the command to "turn to the earth and men". And in Sri Aurobindo's great epic, when Savitri is in the ultimate realm of Everlasting Day, the ...
... divya karma the liberated soul is enjoined to perform in the Will of the Master of the Works. Arjuna has been asked to abide by this fact of spirituality and do the works according to the innate law of his nature. Only such desirable actions issuing from the inborn character of his soul will prove rewarding to him. But then who are those who actually take this Path of the immortalising Dharma, the bright... brahma (that Eternal), adhyatma (the soul’s abiding in the conduct and law of the Spirit), karma (active and creative dynamism in the working of the world), adhibhuta (the manner of the mutable becoming and its thousand operations), adhidaiva (the consent for and the enjoyment of the activities of Prakriti or Nature by Purusha who is the enjoyer of all her works), adhiyajna (the offering... qualities enhance further its sweetness and its charm. These are such that diverse shades and hues spread by it in the sky easily inspirit more and more of the difficult subjects, subjects such as the nature of the oneness of the Self everywhere. Knowledge shines in it with soft and pleasing whiteness of moonlight. A cool and soothing esoteric sacredness is present in its living idiomatic expression. With ...
... no virtue or merit, no sin or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of right will be there, not as a law mentally constructed but as the very substance and constitution of the nature and, by the integration of the being, necessarily also the very stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is the liberation... spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic self expression of that truth and there can be nothing else. In the imperfection and conflict of our members there is an effort to arrive at a right standard of conduct and to observe it; that is ethics, virtue, merit, puṇya , to do otherwise is sin, demerit, pāpa . Ethical mind declares a law of love, a law of justice, a law of truth, laws without... truth is already the essence of the realised spiritual nature, there is no need of a law of truth or of love,—the law, the standard has to be imposed on us now because there is in our natural being an opposite force of separateness, a possibility of antagonism, a force of discord, ill-will, strife. All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature which has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness ...
... mistaken idea. *Value education is considered to curtail the freedom of choice to the pupil. Therefore it was suggested and experimented that the 'laws of Nature' as applicable for the subjective world of man should be taught just as 'the laws of Science' are taught to pupils through experiments. *Values should permeate all the subjects appropriately. The role of the teacher is significant... towards child-centered education, and the basic idea is that the individual is not merely a social unit, but a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence. * The UNESCO's Reports: 'Learning to Be' brought out in 1971 and 'Learning: Treasure Within' brought out in 1996 have underlined education... of education of Macaulay is still continuing in some form or other. *Social and moral values are considerably eroded in India leading to an era of corruption and disruption of the rule of law. *In free India, the ancient roots of Indian culture and educational system need/ to be re-vitalized. *Every Indian must be good and patriotic citizen apart from being a good man of character ...
... consenting voice: O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry. One shall descend and break the iron Law, Change Nature's doom by the lone Spirit's power. ... A seed shall be sown in Death's tremendous hour, A branch of heaven transplant to human soil; Nature shall overleap her mortal step; Fate shall be changed by an unchanging will. 43 Thus Savitri comes... claim And vindicate her right to be and love. ... Love in her was wider than the universe, The whole world could take refuge in her single heart. ... She matched with the iron law her sovereign right: Her single will opposed the cosmic rule. 19 Armed with the power of her love, she will face any threat, any adverse force, whatsoever: she will defy and defeat Death... the same time to two apparently incompatible and contrary worlds and possesses a dual character. Within, it harbours the Divine, is the Divine, fully conscious of its sovereign potency above the laws of a mortal life of ignorance; without, it embraces this world too, this play of inconscience and limitation. The two confront each other in the Incarnation with equal potency and in magic interaction ...
... Mahomedan world; the political subjugation of India has been followed by a pervasive invasion of European intellectualism which is striving hard to substitute itself progressively for the ancient law & nature of our Indian temperament and being. But these manifestations, however overwhelming in appearance, however conclusive they seem of approaching victory, conceal the seeds of a profound revolution... leads up by this purificatory process to his own deeper knowledge. Harmony, synthesis is the law of the Veda, not discord & a disjection of the members of truth in order to replace the manysided reality of existence by a narrower logical symmetry. But the metaphysical philosophies are compelled by the law of their being to effect precisely this disjection. Veda can admit two propositions that Page... necessity are the inexorable results of the very nature of Veda. It is ordinarily assumed by the rationalistic modern mind, itself accustomed to arrive at its intellectual results either by speculation or observation, the metaphysical method or the scientific, that the sublime general ideas of the Upanishads, which are apparently of a metaphysical nature, must have been the result of active metaphysical ...
... the swabhava or nature of a man which decides the way he shall take. If a born Jnani becomes the disciple of a great Bhakta, however submissively he may accept his Master's teachings, however largely he may infuse his Jnana with Bhakti, yet eventually it is the way of Jnana he must take and no other. For that is his swabhava or nature, his Page 200 dharma or the law of his being. If... which put us at the mercy of new and equally implacable claimants. Nature, the great judge and gaoler, is ever giving fresh decrees against us, for her law is inexorable and will not admit of remission or indulgence. We can obtain our release only by escaping from her jurisdiction into the divine sanctuary where the slave of Nature, by his very entry, becomes free and her master. Page 203 ... live thy hundred years, for thus to thee and there is no other way than this, action cleaveth not to a man." A hundred years is the full span of a man's natural life when he observes all the laws of his nature and keeps his body and mind pure by the use of pure food, by pure ways of living, by purity of thought and by self-restraint in the satisfaction of his desires. The term is ordinarily diminished ...
... Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature.' The word was later corrupted by Hitler who made it a symbol of racial superiority and arrogance, the Aryan representing the blond Nordic race who would be masters of the world. It was as if... great fortitude and steadfast devotion to her husband. There is a letter dated February 19, 1919 from Sri Aurobindo to his father-in-law, Bhupal Chandra Bose, which allows us a glimpse of the depths of Sri Aurobindo's feelings. It reads: ‘My dear father-in-law, I have not written to you with regard to this fatal event in both our lives; words are useless in face of the feelings it has caused... has to grow in knowledge till they cease to be disguises and grow in spiritual power and quality till they become in him its perfect instruments. To grow into the fullness of the divine is the true law of human life and to shape his earthly existence into its image is the meaning of his evolution. This is the fundamental tenet of the philosophy of the Arya. Sri Aurobindo then explained how this ...
... human conduct that make an ascending scale. The first is Page 214 the personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic, the last is the highest and divine ideal and law of the nature. Standard of conduct, which is prescribed by psychological and ethical but egoistic hedonism, falls into the first category; its argument... ism is valid, the individual in its true nature is not an egocentric entity subject to appetites and desires, but an entity capable of uplifting himself to a state of intrinsic and universal values. Consequently, it came to be advocated that the needs and desires of individuals are to be surpassed in obedience to the moral law, and even the social law has no claims upon him if it is opposed to... fact is that the categorical imperative of ideal law does not signify the end of human search of the truth that harmonises and delivers. We discover that the moral nature of the human being is not the last and the highest component; there is, in us, it will be found, a divine being that is spiritual and supra-mental. In that component of our complex nature, it is claimed, is the integrating power; in it ...
... supramental it is a law of the nature; in a supramentalised body immunity from illness would be automatic, inherent in its new nature. There is a difference between Yogic Force on the mental and inferior planes and Supramental Nature. What is acquired and held by the Yoga Force in the mind and body consciousness is in the supramental inherent and exists not by achievement but by nature—it is self-existent... obviously due to the imperfect nature of the body and the physical nature. The body can be immune only when it is open to the higher consciousness and the latter can descend into it. Till then what he writes is the remedy—if he can also call in the force to throw out the illness, that is the most powerful help possible. It is only by the conquest of the material nature that illness can cease altogether... force is sent is for cure. Increase of illness or physical suffering is not the result of the force. The Lower Nature, the Hostile Forces and Illness Attacks of illness are attacks of the lower nature or of adverse forces taking advantage of some weakness, opening or response in the nature,—like all other things that come and have got to be thrown away, they come from outside. If one can feel them ...
... y it is inevitable that officials should be masters and be able to inflict inconvenience and loss on the citizen without any means of redress If officialdom were to acquire a common sense, the laws of Nature would be sadly contravened. * * * September 4, 1909 Every action for instance which may be objectionable to a number of Mahomedans is now liable to be forbidden because it... disconcerts the wisdom of the diplomat. 6 The Nationalist never loses sight of the truth that law was made for man and not man for the law. Its chief function and reason for existence is to safeguard and foster the growth and happy flowering into strength and health of national life and a law which does not sub serve this end or which opposes and contradicts this end, however rigidly it may enforce... ourselves and not Europe. We have sought to regain life by following the law of another being than our own. We must return and seek the sources of life and strength within ourselves. We must know our past and recover it for the purpose of our future. Our business is to realise ourselves first and to mould everything to the law of India's eternal life and nature____" We say to the individual and ...
... grace for the artistic consciousness and is limited within the field of his art. In the overhead consciousness, especially in the Overmind, these things become more and more the law of the vision and the law of the nature. Wherever the overmind spiritual man turns he sees a universal beauty touching and uplifting all things, expressing itself through them, moulding them into a field or objects of its... judge and here too it must judge; but it can judge and appreciate rightly here only if it first learns to see and sense inwardly and interpret. But it is dangerous for it to lay down its own laws or even laws and rules which it thinks it can deduce from some observed practice of the overhead inspiration and use that to wall in the inspiration; for it runs the risk of seeing the overhead inspiration... down wholly into life and lift life wholly into itself and transform it. But what happens at present is that something comes down and accepts to work under the law of the mind and with a mixture of the mind and it must be judged by the laws and standards of the mind. It brings in new tones, new colours, new elements, but it does not change radically as yet the stuff of the consciousness with which ...
... none of them had a complete mastery over the laws of physical nature, e.g. age, decay, illness, etc. You are mistaken in two respects. First, the endeavour towards this achievement is not new and some Yogis have achieved it, I believe—but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by Yoga-siddhi—not a. dharma of the nature. Secondly, the supramental transformation is... they visit us now and then, and keep us going? They can if you keep the doors open. And if you have to wait for absolute purity of nature before the Supramental can come down, I should say that you will have to go on waiting and waiting! Whose nature? It is I who have to bring it down. Do you mean to insinuate that I am impure? Sir, I raise my blameless head in dignified remonstrance. ... But why should you have any latent medico in you to diagnose diseases? Why not? I can begin to write poetry only if I have a poet either latent or suddenly introduced into me. I can lay down the law to Einstein only if I have a scientist similarly lodged inside. I thought your Yogic vision is something like X-ray, which when applied, gets the condition on the plate; or the vision directly p ...
... another. To say this is to say that measuring instruments like clocks and rods can never give a reading that would be invariant from all standpoints. But physics always aims at invariants. The laws of nature must be so formulated that they hold for all standpoints. It is not sufficient to find a "transformation" rule by which we may make the requisite adjustments in calculation as we pass from standpoint... way and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realisation of the simplest Page 73 conceivable mathematical ideas.' I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena... in the faultiness of Newton's law of gravitation in small isolated cases; for, the law assumed space to be Euclidean, with the straight line as the shortest and therefore most natural path for an object in motion to pursue. But everything else was overwhelmingly on Euclid's side. When the special theory of relativity dethroned Newton's absolutes and, with them, his law of gravitation, it became possible ...
... only when the supramental becomes the law of the nature. It is therefore on the accomplishment of this ascent and on the possibility of a full dynamism from these highest levels descending into earth-consciousness that is dependent the justification of Life, its salvation, its transformation into a Divine Life in a transfigured terrestrial Nature. The nature of the integral Yoga so conceived... greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified... or the spiritual and the vital or a mere sublimation from within of Life outwardly unchanged cannot be the law or the aim of the Yoga. All life must be taken up but all life must be transformed; all must become a part, a form, an adequate expression of a spiritual being in the supramental nature. This is the height and crowning movement of a spiritual evolution in the material world, and as the change ...
... but the general nature of things has certain tendencies or laws in it which oppose the development of the Yoga as well as certain tendencies which help the development of the Page 1376 Yoga. There are three laws which oppose—the law of persistence, the law of resistance and the law of recurrence: there are three laws which assist—the law of gradual processes, the law of concentrated processes... the laws of physical nature. But the Will is omnipotent and if patiently, calmly and heroically exercised, will prevail. For the Will, I repeat, is—Kali herself. Therefore in the end it establishes by its action new rules, habits or tendencies which fight with and gradually overcome the old. What then happens is that the old, though put down, weakened and no longer a real part of the nature, resist... processes and the law of involved processes. The law of persistence is this, that a rule, habit or tendency once established has a right to survive, a natural unwillingness to be changed or annulled. The longer it has been established, the longer it takes to root out. If a man has been yielding to the shadripus for many lives without any serious effort to dominate them or purify himself, then he ...
... Disciple : If the laws of Matter change, will not Matter cease to be Matter ? Sri Aurobindo : Why ? Disciple : Because certain laws define the nature of Matter. Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by laws ? What you call laws are mere habits. If you change your habits you still remain yourself. Disciple : Can a few persons by their Sadhana change the laws of the material world... and observe all that is going on in the Nature, not even the smallest movement, the most external act must remain unnoticed. This process is comparatively easy in the mental and vital planes. But in the physico-vital and the physical plane the powers of ignorance hold their sway and reign in full force, persisting in what they believe to be the eternal laws. They obstruct the passage of the Higher... The material is dull, inconscient. It does not want to change. It does not want to establish anything. It is the same under all the material conditions, obeying the laws of matter. Even up till now in the process of evolution nature has taken thousands and thousands of years to effect this little change in matter. And even then it has been effected always by some pressure from above, i.e. from the ...
... Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature.... For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom.... Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers he does not... be constantly conscious with the Divine Consciousness, so that we know "at every moment, spontaneously, without any reflection being necessary, exactly what should be done to best express" the Divine Law. 8 And the very next day she wrote that such perfect identification with the Divine Consciousness was one of the things she expected from her journey to India. We may rightly surmise that she had learned... constantly keep this communion with Thee.... 14 Page 399 On 4 June, she recorded that the two supreme obstacles to realisation, the two impediments to the action of the Divine Law, were "the darkness of ignorance and the black smoke of egoistic ill-will". 15 People were ignorant: and people were selfish and perverse, which was even worse. The light of knowledge and the warmth ...
... movement of God in nature is too vast & swift for the mind to grasp. It catches at & seizes petty surrounding eddies or even great masses of movement at a little distance; it seizes, arranges to itself in its own terms of vision & classes them triumphantly as ultimate laws of Nature. But who has sailed all these waters or can tell where, if at all, they end? Who shall say that those laws are not byelaws... takes these two great terms, God, one, stable & eternal, the world shifting, multitudinous, transient. For this great flux of Nature, by which we mean a great cosmic motion & activity, shows us nowhere a centre of knowledge & intelligent control, yet its every movement, denoting law, pointing Page 377 to harmony, speaks of a centre somewhere of knowledge & intelligent control. It shows nowhere... defect of or a falling from our divine fullness. Only if identity with all existences has become our whole nature & being of our being, is the divine state perfected, is its permanent and unbroken enjoyment assured. And so complete & exacting is the oneness of Brahman, so absolute is the law of this Adwaita that if even the name & form & the play & the movement are regarded as Brahman's & not themselves ...
... self-forgetful, artificial'. It aimed, he added, 'at a successful reproduction of Europe in India', forgetting that 'death in one's own dharma is better; it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature'. Such a death brings new birth, 'success in an alien path means only successful suicide'. Savitri is a great Pyrrhic victory." It is not easy to make out Mr. Lai's meaning. One... Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature. _______________ 1 First published in Mother India, September 3, 1949, except for the change of a few quotations in order to avoid repeating some matter used elsewhere in my book. Page 121 "Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence... fugitive experience to which the brain opens itself as it pauses at times between an unknown above and an unknown below and feels Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores - [p. 347] or in that phrase about the divinised consciousness's vivid play of self-disclosure within its universal oneness: Idea rotated symphonies ...
... aimed at a successful reproduction of Europe in India, forgetting the deep saying of the Gita, "Better the law of one's own being though it be badly done than an alien dharma well-followed; death in one's own dharma is better, it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature." For death in one's own dharma brings new birth, success in an alien path means only successful suicide... and the breath of king-perfume v Have made each musical sentence with the noise Of women's ornaments and sweet household joys... All nature in a page, no pleasing show But men more real than the friends we know.... His nature kingly was and as a god In large serenity and light he trod His daily way, yet beauty, like soft flowers Wreathing a hero's sword, ruled... something is seen, a profound Page 64 change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon a mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there comes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself in the spiritual, one bears the ...
... mean "absolutely" for all time. The absoluteness can only come with the supramental change. For below the supramental it is an action of a Force among many forces—in the supramental it becomes a law of the nature. Can the supramental really make immortal a tottering old man, with all his anatomy and physiology pathological? Well, don't you know that old men sometimes get a new or third set of teeth... Yogic Force can do? There is a difference between Yogic Force on the mental and inferior planes and the Supramental Nature. What is acquired and held by the Yoga-Force in the mind-and-body consciousness is in the supramental inherent and exists not by achievement but by nature—it is self-existent and absolute. 82 Not now. I am too busy trying to get things done to spend time in getting them... changes were probably made by Sri Aurobindo, but no written record of his revision remains. There is a difference between Yogic Force and Supramental Nature. What is acquired and held by Force in the one, becomes inherent in the supramental and exists by nature—it becomes self-existent and absolute. × Would-be ...
... that is only the disguise of iron armour which masks and encumbers the national Purusha, - but a great communal soul and life that has appeared in the whole and has manifested a nature of its own and a law of that nature, a Swabhāva and Swadhārma, and embodied it in its intellectual, aesthetic, Page 47 ethical, dynamic, social and political forms and culture. And equally then... aim of Art is to find the Divine through beauty. But this discovery has its own laws and the first endeavour is "to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them... We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality ...... In ancient India ...
... to grow and develop in order to qualify for the spiritual life. Svabhava is one's essential nature & svadharma is the law of that nature. Later, when the psychic being experiences its universality and transcendence and becomes a divine child of the Divine Mother, it transcends the law of its individual nature, and lives and moves and acts, a free being, at once individual, universal and transcendent... life. Sri Krishna led him, step by step, to a comprehension of the dharma Page 35 or essential law of his soul, which is supra-ethical and spiritual. The word Dharma is used in both the senses. The one is Svadharma or the essential law of one's spiritual nature which is never affected by heredity, environment or any other external agency, and the other is the Dharma of the evolved... "essential nature" of man. This essential nature or Svabhava is the nature of the psychic being which evolves by means of the inner mind, inner life and subtle or inner physical and seeks to express itself in the outer nature of the mind, life & body of man. It is not the nature of the ego. Arjun was not aware of his essential nature, he was being led by his sattwic rajasic nature the norms of ...
... own valuation and strives to find out an intellectual basis, an idea of law or principle, rational or cosmic, a law of Karma perhaps or an ethical system founded on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional or hedonistic basis. Religion brings in her sanctions; there is a word or law of God that enjoins righteousness even though Nature permits or stimulates its opposite,—or perhaps Truth and Righteousness... receive the activities of Nature is either a neutral indifference or an equal acceptance or, intellectually, an admission of all that she may do as a divine or a natural law in which everything is impartially admissible. That is indeed one side of the truth: there is an infrarational truth of Life and Matter which is impartial and neutral and admits all things as facts of Nature and serviceable for the... a certain type of experience and use of experience which must, for the mind and life at least, govern nature; that for the moment is its law of being, its dharma. This limitation of mind-consciousness by personality and of truth by mental temperament and preference must be the rule of our nature so long as the individual has not reached universality, is not yet preparing for mind-transcendence. But ...
... self-forgetful, artificial'. It aimed, he added, 'at a successful reproduction of Europe in India', forgetting that 'death in one's own dharma is better; it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature'. Such a death brings new birth; 'success in an alien path means only successful suicide'. Savitri is a great Pyrrhic victory." Page 434 It is not easy to make out Mr. Lal's... verse, e.g.: Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper, Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature. "Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian... should be nineteenth-century in certain respects was inevitable, since it belonged to that period; but this in itself is no fault at all. And to say that it has "many pleasant lines of a derivative nature" is both to be patronising out of turn and to be deficient in close and keen scrutiny. To Page 409 characterise as merely pleasant the poetic intensity that is Sri Aurobindo's is to ...
... of our nature. A total change of consciousness, a radical change of nature is the one remedy and the sole issue.” 18 As he wrote to Nirodbaran, all efforts of the mind and the overmind can yield nothing but partial results. “The absoluteness can only come with a supramental change. For below the supramental it is an action of a Force among many forces – in the supramental it becomes a law of the... the nature.” 19 Nature is being made anew. “Evolution itself is evolving.” The problem, however, is that the substance of Supermind is so different from the kind of substance we are made of and are used to. Beings like us can live in gross matter, on a planet consisting of gross matter, but to live in the Supermind means no less than to live in the Sun, metaphorically speaking. This explains the... surviving the worst catastrophes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of Nature and it must be so if there is any meaning in its existence, if its long history and continuous survival is not the accident of a fortuitously self-organising Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the world. If man is intended to survive and carry forward the evolution of which ...
... Kalidasa at fault in his knowledge of the world and of human nature? Such a solution would be inconsistent with all we know of the poet's genius as shown in his other work. The truth is that Kalidasa simply gives us the other side of the shield. It is not an invariable law of human nature that the poetic temperament should be by its nature absolutely unfitted for practical action & regal power. Nero... from his ken. Then must his soul wander through all Nature seeking her, imagining her or hints & tokens of her in everything he meets, but never grasping unless by some good chance he accept the Jewel Union born from the crimson on the marvellous feet of Himaloy's Child, Uma, daughter of the mountains, the Mighty Mother, She who is the Soul behind Nature. Then he is again united with her and their child... the harmonising atmosphere of his poetic temperament; under his touch the grotesque becomes strange, wild & romantic; the trivial refines into a dainty & gracious slightness; the sublime yields to the law of romance, acquires a mighty grace, a strong sweetness; and what was merely lovely attains power, energy & brilliant colour. His creations in fact live in a peculiar light, which is not the light that ...
... theory that the laws of the physical universe are related to the law of numbers and as this law seems absolute to our mind, the laws of the physical world are also absolute. They cannot be otherwise. If the law of number is different in another universe, or on another plane, then the laws of that world would be different. It was thought once that laws are restrictions placed by Nature upon infinite... to the law of numbers' it merely states the organisation of the physical part of the universe and even there it gives knowledge of only a part. But, there is not merely the quantitative law of formation, but also a qualitative law which is more important than the quantitative. These laws of Nature you call absolute. But suppose I bring the yogic force into play and am able to overcome the law of gravitation... have to find out the right Dharma, the right way of functioning, of movement of forces. Not merely the law which is mechanical, but the Dharma of the movement of forces. An ordinary law merely means an equilibrium established by Nature; it means a balance of forces. It is merely a groove in which Nature is accustomed to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then ...
... grace for the artistic consciousness and is limited within the field of his art. In the Overhead consciousness, especially in the Overmind, these things become more and more the law of the vision and the law of the nature. Wherever the Overmind spiritual man turns he sees a universal beauty touching and uplifting all things, expressing itself through them, moulding them into a field or objects of... down wholly into life and lift life wholly into itself and transform it. But what happens at present is that something comes down and accepts to work under the law of the mind and with a mixture of the mind and it must be judged by the laws and standards of the mind. It brings in new tones, new colours, new elements, but it does not change radically as yet the stuff of the consciousness with which... It may be rather long; for if such things are done, they may as well be clearly and thoroughly done. I may also have something to say about the nature and intention of my poem and the technique necessitated by the novelty of the intention and nature. Let me deal first with some of the details he stresses so as to get them out of the way. His detailed intellectual reasons for his judgments ...
... questioned. But all that cannot be for the sadhak as it is for the materialistic sceptic founded on a fixed pre-judgment that only what is normal, in consonance with the known (so-called) laws of physical nature is true and that all which is abnormal or supernormal must a priori be condemned as false. The abnormal abounds in this physical world; the supernormal is there also. In these matters, apart... as one predicts material things that obey a rigid law. The plasticity increases with the growth of Mind, so that man can have at least a sense of free-will, of a choice of his action, of a self-movement which at least helps to determine circumstances. But this freedom is dubious because it can be declared to be an illusion, a device of Nature, part of its machinery of determination, only a seeming... scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive ...
... dharmas that the human mind can conceive, and to discover a new dharma, the law of divine action, divyam karma, by the attainment of divine freedom in which the nature of the individual transcends its limitations, the limitations of the nature subject to three gunas, — tamas, rajas, and sattva, — and attains to the divine nature (s ā dharmyam). Gita's view of Duty for Duty's sake Often this... indwelling Lord of all Nature and turn to Him with one's whole being,— with the life and body and sense and mind and heart and understanding, — with one's whole dedicated knowledge and will and action, sarvabhāvena, in every way of conscious self and instrumental nature. For all other Dharmas or norms of action are only a preparation for that highest Dharma which is the law of divine nature and divine action... prayer is a call to Indra and Varuna and others who manifest the waters and the law of the flow of waters which are inherent in the divine nature of bliss, the essential character of Aditi (or Para Prakriti, to use the term of the Gita). According to the Vedic parable of Shunahshepa, Varuna, the mighty lord of divine law and harmony, comes down in the aid of Shunahshepa, the symbolic individual soul ...
... from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that supernature,—for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality... existence and over Nature must come when a still greater consciousness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental Energy in our too individualised and restricted force of existence. A certain fundamental subjection of mind to life and matter and an acceptance of this subjection, an inability to make the law of Mind directly dominant and modify by its powers the blinder law and operations... Matter, of the spirit to a lesser law of life is not what it at first appears to be, a fundamental condition of things, an inviolable and unalterable rule of Nature. The greatest, most momentous natural discovery that man can make is this that mind, and still more the force of the spirit, can in many tried and yet untried ways and in all directions—by its own nature and direct power and not only by ...
... better to choose one or two items and give a very good demonstration in them, rather than to do several in a mediocre way? Each one acts according to his nature and if he (or she) courageously and sincerely follows the law of that nature, he or she acts according to truth. Thus, it is impossible to judge and decide for others. One can know only for oneself, and even then one has to be very sincere... feeling I have only a reflection of my own nature! Here is the best answer to your questions, written by Sri Aurobindo: Each one carries in himself the seeds of this disharmony, and his most urgent work is to purify himself of it by a constant aspiration. 1 September 1965 Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo writes in His Essays on the Gita: "The law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt... Page 289 Sweet Mother, In Aphorism 172, Sri Aurobindo has said: "Law released into freedom is the liberator." 12 What does that mean? How can law be released into freedom? By law we understand something determined and fixed. Or is it a flexibility that is required, as opposed to rigidity: law that will be free to mould itself according to circumstances? I regret to have to ...
... each duly as it should be & must be because of its own nature, for the nature of a thing is its origin, its law, its destiny, its end; and harmony with its nature is its perfection. All this mighty universe where various things acting according to their various natures harmonise & melt into a perfect unity, all this wonderful Kingdom of a single Law in its manifold aspects He has ordered, व्यदघात्, he... own overmastering & inexorable nature. All this He has done from years eternal, not in time, not at a particular date & season, but eternally, before Time was. The Law did not spring into being, but was, is & for ever shall be. The forms of objects, it is true, vary in Time, but the law of their nature is of eternal origin. In the act you do today, you are obeying a Law which has existed during the whole... without distrust or fear of stumbling; but whenever it tries to theorize from what it has observed about human nature, human affairs & spiritual development, Science is always tumbling into the pits of the lower selves; in attempting to range things above the material level under the law of the material self, it is trying to walk upon water, to float upon air; it is doing something essentially unscientific ...
... not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the Law of the world as it is, but a full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. The Divine Grace is there, ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the law of the Ignorance into the Law of Light and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice... Sanskrit e (great hate) or that corresponding to Sanskrit o (old road) is made short or long at pleasure; but to the Sanskrit, Greek or Latin ear it would have sounded like a defiance of the laws of Nature. Bengali is a modern language, so there this kind of stylisation is possible, for there e can be long, short or doubtful. All this, not to write more about stylisation, but only as a protest... radically Page 232 altered in this respect—and that is why my main effort is directed towards that object—for then the sanction would not be rare! For the Law of the Truth would be at work, not constantly balanced by the law of the Ignorance. Still the Yoga-force is always tangible and concrete in the way I have described and has tangible results. But it is invisible—not like a blow ...
... in the graphic English phrase, with the narrow hearts and commercial habit of mind peculiar to that sort of people. It is something like folly to quarrel with them for not transgressing the law of their own nature. If we were not dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige, we should at once acknowledge that these men are really not worth being angry with: and if it is idle to be angry with... World. Page 136 impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive... free to follow the self-law of his being and develop according to it. This was the chief characteristic of his leadership, and, understandably enough, a constant source of bewilderment to his associates and followers. For, his serene yogic detachment, his perfect unconcern in the midst of various action, and his different ways of dealing with and leading different natures baffled them. Try as they ...
... Arya means an effort or an uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature. He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limitations. He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated... acquainting him with the situation. The Secretary of State wired to the Viceroy: "...If so, under what law has the warrant been issued? Does the article contain inducement to violence or assassination? Do you know where Arabindo is...?" To which the flustered Viceroy replied, "Law officers considered the article clearly seditious. Whereabouts of Aravinda Ghose unknown to Government of... satisfaction and growing rapture of the Unity. It is this to which our nature is most recalcitrant. It persists in the division, in the dualities, in the sorrow and unsatisfied passion and labour, it finds it difficult to accustom itself to the divine largeness, joy and equipoise - especially the vital and material parts of our nature; it is they that pull down the mind which has accepted and even when ...
... with us, Nature is with us. The law of God which is higher than any human, justifies our action, youth is for us, the future is ours. On that moral strength we must rely for our survival and eventual success. We must not be tempted by any rash impatience into abandoning the ground on which we are strong and venturing on the ground on which we are weak. Our ideal is an ideal which no law can condemn:... the animal to the divine and struggling against their lower natures, but beings already fulfilled and satisfied with themselves. Even the holiest of them have a contempt for the ordinary law and custom and break them easily and without remorse, as Christ did on more than one occasion, drinking wine, breaking the sabbath, consorting with publicans and harlots; as Buddha did when he abandoned his... overmastering sway of the body.... However much we may accuse the West of materialism, in point of fact, all men are materialists. The body is only a means of fulfilling the inherent, spiritual law of our nature, our chariot drawn by many horses, the chariot we ride in order to drive through the world. But we submit to the illegitimate dominance of the body and give so much indulgence to our sense of ...
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