... characteristically is, but in the inconscience of material Nature. This inconscience is no more real than the ignorance of exclusive concentration in our temporary being which limits the waking consciousness of man; for as in us, so in the atom, the metal, the plant, in every form of material Page 609 Nature, in every energy of material Nature, there is, we know, a secret soul, a secret will... of the superficial and the real man where there is also a similar though lesser inability, the difference is phenomenal only. Essentially, in the universal order of things, the inconscience of material Nature is the same exclusive concentration, the same absorption in the work and the energy as in the self-limitation Page 610 of the waking human mind, or the concentration of the self-forgetting... but of which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature. Page 614 It must be remembered, however, that when we speak of a partial movement of Consciousness-Force absorbed in its forms and actions, in a limited field of its working, this ...
... necessary to shape and determine the progression of the mental and vital forms which our evolution takes in material nature; for these progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or sufficiently develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though occult resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This... evolution, in a temporary second home of the spirit which would be its natural place of sojourn between life and life,—unless indeed it is its original world from which it does not return into material Nature. Where then would the temporary dwelling in the supraphysical take place? what would be the soul's other habitat? It might seem that it ought to be on a mental plane, in mental worlds, both... invariable absolute Law or the whole cosmic rule of action of a supreme Being is not valid; they belong to a middle region between the inmost or supreme Truth of things and the impartiality of material Nature. In any case the reactions of Nature are not in essence meant as reward or punishment; that is not their fundamental value, which is rather an inherent value of natural relations and, in so ...
... far as it affects the theory of evolution and rebirth in material Nature. The descent of the Soul into the Ignorance can be thought of as an abrupt precipitation or immediate lapse of a pure spiritual being out of the superconscient spiritual Reality into the first inconscience and the subsequent evolving phenomenal life of material Nature. If that were so, there might be the Absolute above and the... for us is by their effective presence or pressure on the earth-consciousness to liberate the involved principles of life and mind and spirit and enable them to manifest and assert their reign in material Nature. But it would be in the highest degree improbable that the connection and intervention should cease there; there is likely to be a sustained, if veiled, commerce between material life and the life... will towards the life of the Ignorance or an assent to it in the individual Purusha must indeed be part of the operative movement of Consciousness in the involutionary descent of the Spirit into material Nature. But the world cannot be a creation of the individual mind or a theatre erected by it for its own play of consciousness; nor can it have been created solely for Page 798 the play and ...
... conquer material Nature and use it for its purposes may break something in the passivity and inertia, but it is done for material ends, in a rajasic spirit, with a denial of spirituality as its mental basis. Such an attempt may end, seems to be ending indeed in chaos and a disintegration, while the new attempts at creation and reintegration seem to combine the obscure rigidity of material Nature with... Mind developing afterwards in the later philosophy and science. But in fact the mass of men at the time, it is quite evident, lived entirely on the material plane, worshipped the Godheads of material nature, sought from them entirely material objects. The effort of the Vedic mystics revealed to them the things behind through a power of inner sight and hearing and experience which was confined to a... spirits of the Wind and Fire. You are assuming that the manifestation from the Inconscient must be what it is now and here and that no other kind of world of Matter was possible, but the harmony of material Nature in itself shows that it need not necessarily be a discordant, evil, furiously perturbed and painful creation—the psychic being, if allowed to manifest from the first in Life and lead the evolution ...
... adherence—to the mode of the lower nature. Then there was laughter, tears, a whole revolution, and afterwards all was fine. But nobody on earth will be able to convince me it isn't because this material nature chooses to be that way that it is that way. And the Lord looks on, smiles, waits... ( laughing ) for the body Page 90 to be cured of its idiocy. He does all that is needed, but... difficult. But what to people is unconscious, what they don't understand or call "illness," is to me as clear as daylight; and it's always a CHOICE, there is always a choice every minute (for the material nature), and if the will isn't unshakable, if you aren't holding on to the higher Will with desperate and unrelenting eagerness, you let yourself go; and then the body becomes stupid: it faints, it has... stop. That's all. I've made myself late again! You know what's called self-pity ? ( Mother caresses her cheek ) "Poor little thing, how you suffer! How you are to be pitied!" Well, the material nature is like that, it says, "I want to be like You, Lord; but then why do You leave me in this condition?"—a good slap and march! × ...
... therefore "physical" tells us what kind of "real" is here. This "real'"s physicality has to be absolutely literal and involve material nature. What else can it be and do if Teilhard's Christology "takes more account of physics", the science of the domain of material nature, than does the Christology of his fellow-Catholics? So, finally, we need not be surprised when Christ's "gestation, his... means his being the universal process of material nature in the basic truth of all its aspects: the evolutive form, the evolver drive, the evolutionary goal - though his being this does not prevent him from being also something "new" in nature and from being hyper-physical and hyper-cosmic. * What is different from and in excess of material nature with its universal process and constitutes... existence which confronts us in the world of nature, the universe in which we live and of which our bodies, with their souls, are a part. The unseverable linking of the word's content to material nature is fully supported by Teilhard himself when we read the phrase: 37 "...the resurrection of the flesh - taken in its literal, physical sense." And the sentences coming fairly close on the heels ...
... consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit. This new relation of the spirit and the body assumes—and makes possible—a free acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no... over Nature. But, this redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and force can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated and sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed, only if there is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a control, a reversal of the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit... of mind, nerve and organism. It would bring into the body a higher spiritual power and a greater life-force unified with the universal life-force and able to draw on it, a luminous harmony with material Nature and the vast and calm touch of the eternal repose which can give Page 1023 to it its diviner strength and ease. Above all,—for this is the most needed and fundamental change,—it will ...
... the giant names of the Indian Trinity, disengaging itself from sacrifice, moving towards asceticism. The Vedas are naturalistic, realistic, ritualistic, semi-barbarous, a sacrificial worship of material Nature-powers, henotheistic at their highest, Pagan, joyous and self-indulgent. Brahma & Shiva do not exist for the Veda; Vishnu & Rudra are minor, younger & unimportant deities. Many more discoveries... solely as this deity of speech & knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of Page 123 her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests... sense of Soma-offerings poured out, which are mixed with other liquid and for which the strewn grasses where they have been placed, are deprived of their roots. If these interpretations stand, the material nature of the sacrifice is established. But can they stand? And if they can, are they imperative? The word isho, in the first place, is not bound to this sense of foods; for it cannot in all the passages ...
... these is the old religious myth and dogmatic mystery of a God who creates constantly immortal souls out of his own being or else by his "breath" or life-power entering, it is to be presumed, into material Nature or rather into the bodies he creates in it and vivifying them internally with a spiritual principle. As a mystery of faith this can hold and need not be examined, for the mysteries of faith are... presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepared his emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity. And let us not say that this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into the form so created: there is a certain truth behind this idea, but not the truth which ...
... universal and transcendent Self and source of existence. It is on this foundation that we have to base our conception of a truth in our terrestrial being and the possibility of a divine Life in material Nature. There our chief need is to discover the origin and nature of the Ignorance Page 380 which we see emerging out of the inconscience of matter or disclosing itself within a body of matter... pleasure: go farther still and master that which all material things are in their essence and we may arrive even at the power of transmutation which would give the greatest possible control of material Nature. Thus the knowledge of distinctions arrives at its greatest truth and effective use when we arrive at the deeper knowledge of that which reconciles distinctions in the unity behind all variations ...
... if they do not exactly denote, the physical transformation. The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature—not by imposing siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any ... not inevitable; if one could have the necessary consciousness Page 310 and force, decay and death is not inevitable. But to bring that consciousness and force into the whole of the material nature is the most difficult thing of all—at any rate in such a way as to annul the decay principle. Immunity from death by anything but one's own will to leave the body, immunity from illness ...
... as is the consciousness of Sachchidananda, so will be the Force, infinite in its scope, one in its works, transcendent in its power and self-knowledge. Where the Consciousness is like that of material Nature, submerged, self-oblivious, driving along in the drift of its own Force without seeming to know it, even though by the very nature of the eternal relation between the two terms it really determines... ess is similarly luminous Force of being eternally aware of itself and of its own Delight and never ceasing to be this power of utter light and self-possession. The second relation is that of material Nature; it is the poise of being in the material universe which is the great denial of Sachchidananda by Himself: for here there is the utter apparent separation of Force from Consciousness, the specious ...
... are all at first conscious, a self which seems to have hardly any existence apart from the body and no action vital or even mental independent of it. This physical soul is present everywhere in material Nature; it pervades the body, actuates obscurely its movements and is the whole basis of its experiences; it informs all things even that are not mentally conscious. But in man this physical being has... worlds, but have to return from the confines of a series of physical planes to increase their development in the next earthly existence. For the undeveloped physical soul is entirely dominated by material nature and its impressions and has to work them out to a better advantage before it can rise in the scale of being. A more developed humanity allows us to make a better and Page 461 freer ...
... follow as best they can the movement of the universal forces, and the stream of the world's inner transformation and evolution carries them a certain way; but the body bound to the law of the most material nature, moves very slowly. After some years, seventy or eighty, a hundred or two hundred,—and that is perhaps the maximum, the—dislocation is so serious that the outer being falls to pieces. The divergence... Narmada. Offered by a disciple medicine for a toothache, he observed, in refusing, that one tooth had given him trouble for the last two hundred years. This Yogi had secured so much control over material nature as to live two hundred years, but in all that time he had not been able to conquer a toothache. Some of the diseases which are considered most dangerous are the easiest to cure; some that are ...
... the past to his ideal. But he is explicit about the 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... the following "some yogis have achieved it, I believe". His meaning is not quite clear. What "this achievement" signifies is most probably "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature" spoken of in the other letter, as a result of "siddhis" imposed by "mental or vital occult power". The term "transformation" can cover many Yogic changes. A supramental transformation by means ...
... I don't know, ageless. And an extraordinary power in the face. ( silence ) It's the MATERIAL Nature, the physical Nature, the material physical Nature, and she said, "I've put on the dress, I've put on YOUR dress—I've put on your dress to tell you that I've adopted it." It means that material Nature has adopted the new creation. Page 187 ...
... the past to his ideal. But he is explicit about the 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... the following "some yogis have achieved it, I believe". His meaning is not quite clear. What "this achievement" signifies is most probably "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature" spoken of in the other letter, as a result of "siddhis" imposed by "mental or vital occult power". The term "transformation" can cover many Yogic changes. A supramental transformation by means ...
... material – exactly at the critical temperature, as it were – is dematerialised. How does the miracle happen? In fact, we are forced to the conclusion that the picture of a solid massive material nature is only a mask of the reality; the reality is,that matter is a charge of electricity and the charge of electricity is potentially a mode of light. The ancient distinction between matter and energy... as "perpetual movement" in the field of matter. Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws ...
... normal. Either the higher must come down and mingle totally with the lower or the lower has to rise and merge altogether into the higher, or both meet and unite midway somewhere. Earth or material nature does not easily tolerate any thing unknown and foreign to it. Even if it is for its own well-being, a foreign touch makes it shrink and turn on itself. It is even painful for it to bear. In the... here before. At present it is simply the question of manifestation of the thing that is with us and among us. At one time Mother was asking for, even pleading for collaboration from the material nature. It was accorded in principle but in act it was found wanting. Now the tables are turned. The earth-consciousness has now to ask for, pray for collaboration from the Divine. The material consciousness ...
... Buddhists. Now the return journey. The Shakti cannot be for long away from her Lord, that cannot be the final stance. She is to come back to her Lord. This is the story of the redemption of material nature and her gradual transmutation into the higher Nature, regaining her status by the side of her Lord. The process or the series of steps described by the Veda remains always the same, for human beings... possibility, the inevitability of fusing her reality and the reality of Brahman into Matter. The Divine Bride dropped down on earth and dived into Matter and became one with it. She became Matter, material Nature, dense, dark, heavy with all its weight. She became as the Veda names her, "Bhimajaya" – the mighty, the terrible spouse – in fact our Mahakali. She was originally the fair spouse – Saumyajaya ...
... is not, or cannot be, the goal of life. To a strictly rationalistic, that is, scientific, outlook Truth is unknowable. Page 4 What is urgently needed is not only mastery of material Nature but also self-mastery. The application of scientific advance to collective life has put into man's hand such a tremendous reservoir of material power that without a corresponding inner transformation... At the same time it is not inevitable; if one could have the necessary consciousness and force, decay and death is not inevitable. But to bring that consciousness and force into whole of the material nature is the most difficult thing of all—at any rate, in such a way as to annul the decay principle. " (On Yoga II, Tome 2, P. 334 ( 5,) " Immortality is one of the possible results of s ...
... separation of the soul from its Divine Mother-Consciousness and its descent into Matter, (the Greek "hyle"), into Hades. Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, called also "the Nether Zeus", is the entire material Nature which imprisons the soul until the Divine Consciousness descends and redeems it, and all Nature with it. The ancients certainly knew these deeper significances. Plotinus, for instance, says, "the... in which "the One devised innumerably to be." He is also called "Zeus of the Underworld." Demeter, the Divine Consciousness has to come into the mortal world to redeem the soul and change all material Nature. The ancient seers seem to have had a sufficiently clear intuition of these fundamental primal truths which are true for all time, for they are eternal. The "Mysteries" are both mysterious and ...
... ." 5 Yes, he is veiled by the consciousness of material Nature. There is the consciousness in its origin which does not veil the Divine but expresses him. There is the consciousness in its outer form which veils him. Some say this is willed, that it is to allow the game to be played; that the Divine hides himself behind material Nature to compel all conscious beings to find Him. That is an... more difficult. And some of these theories make the understanding of things very difficult—while if you recognize and study and become aware of the different intermediary states between the most material Nature and the Supreme Origin, if you recognise and become conscious of all the intermediary regions, of all the inner states of being and all the outer regions, that can explain many problems. We have ...
... elevation the mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of body, the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and Nescience, the control of an inconscient material Nature over his conscious evolution, its power for limitation, its law of difficult development, its immense force for retardation and frustration. This control by the original Inconscience over the ... not irrational to admit it: for the conscious or even the inconscient nisus arises from a truth of conscious being that has become dynamic and set out to fulfil itself in an automatic process of material Nature; the teleology, the element of purpose in the nisus is the translation of self-operative Truth of Being into terms of self-effective Will-Power of that Being, and, if consciousness is there, such... there was an opening of some existing body to a supraphysical influx so that it was transformed into a new body; but no such event can lightly be assumed to have taken place in the past history of material Nature: in order to happen it would seem to need either the conscious intervention of an invisible mental being to form the body he intended to inhabit or else a previous development of a mental being ...
... living that develops higher instruments of world-knowledge and world-action for the dynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world of material Nature. But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses... higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level, as a life of spiritual and supramental superman hood. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood;... life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle. If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the goal of development ...
... 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 understand if oxygen and hydrogen by their very nature tended to produce in any combination water or something like water, but only... although consciousness is there, it is involved, inorganic, mechanical in its action; it supports the works of Force by its inherent presence, but not by its light of active intelligence. This is why material Nature does the works of a supreme and miraculous intelligence and yet there seems to be no intervention of any indwelling Seer or Thinker. 68 Because man is a mental being, he naturally imagines... all knowledge, a mighty inertia in which all cosmic force strives helplessly, an insensibility which conceals the pain and strain of all ecstasy present, but held back, this is the outer face of material Nature and our starting point. The Spirit awakening out of this veil gradually and with difficulty but inevitably is the secret sense of life. The power to accomplish the perfect awakening against ...
... of consciousness and life as distinguished from form-evolution - that is the real significance of the whole affair; for all this evolution is in its essential truth a growing of the Self in material Nature to the conscious possession of its spiritual being. But evolution carries with it, in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root, the necessity of a previous involution. For the spiritual... p. 25. 23.Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth (1969 ed.), p. 75. 24.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p, 42. Page 197 case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. "Matter could not have become animate if the principle of life had not been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of life-in-matter; life-in'matter could not have begun to... elevation the mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of body, the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and Nescience, the control of an inconscient material nature over his conscious evolution, its power for limitation, its law of difficult development, its immense force for retardation and frustration. This control by the original Inconscience over the ...
... getting worse and worse", it will remain a long time. Is it our own material being's resistance that comes up or the resistance of the whole material Nature? One's own material being responding to material Nature. It is the inability to react that you must get rid of. You once said about the physical, "It was at that time something quite below. Since... habituated to obey, but not acting on their own initiative. When there is a strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible. Mind and vital nature are Page 20 on the contrary all for will and initiative and so when one is in mind or vital or acting under their influence ...
... creature of mental, vital and physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature and are under its influence, but we have come there from the supreme spiritual nature: this inferior imperfect status is our apparent, but that our real being. The Eternal puts all this movement... action of Force. It is otherwise if we regard consciousness and force as twin terms of the one Existence, always coexistent in the reality of being, however in the primal outward phenomenon of material Nature light of consciousness may seem to disappear in a vast action of nescient unillumined energy, while at an opposite pole of spiritual quiescence action of force may seem to disappear in the stillness ...
... necessary to shape and determine the progression of the mental and vital forms which our evolution takes in material nature; for these progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or sufficiently develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though occult resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This ...
... These material energies are obscure and half unconscious; they encourage animality in man, but, at the same time, they establish a kind of harmonious relationship between the human being and material Nature. Those who know how to receive and use these energies are usually successful in life and succeed in everything they undertake. But they are still largely dependent on their living conditions and... their state of bodily health. The harmony created in them is not immune from all attack; it usually vanishes when circumstances become adverse. The child spontaneously receives this energy from material Nature as he expends all his energies without calculating, joyfully and freely. But in most human beings, as they grow up, this faculty is blunted by the worries of life, as a result of the predominant ...
... to that latent value of the idea. We are bound then to suppose that all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. The Spirit which manifests itself here in a body, must be involved from the beginning in the whole of matter and in every knot, formation and particle of matter; life, mind and whatever is above... all that it held in its own nature and reveals its own utmost significance. The complete soul possesses all its self and all Nature. Therefore all this evolution is a growing of the Self in material nature to the conscious possession of its own spiritual being. It begins with form—apparently a form of Force—in which a spirit is housed and hidden; it ends in a spirit which consciously directs its ...
... determined by the relation of the Force to the Consciousness which drives it. Accordingly we have, besides the Infinite Existence, first the life of material Nature ruled by the infallible Inconscient; secondly the life of conscious being in material Nature emerging out of the Inconscient, fallible, bewildered, only half-potent, which is our own; and thirdly the life of the real Man to which we are moving ...
... repeating the old movement in the old groove at the least touch from the old habitual forces. It is a question of faith, patience and persistence. One must be more obstinate than the obstinate material nature and persevere until the light and truth can take permanent hold of the parts which are still responsive to the old movements. There can be no doubt that with this perseverance the Truth will in... the full confidence that these are mechanical recurrences and in substance nothing more—however strong they may seem in appearance. The principle of mechanical repetition is very strong in the material nature, so strong that it makes one easily think that it is incurable. That however is only a trick of the forces of this material inconscience; it is by creating this impression that they try to endure ...
... response and gets the impression of their inevitability and the impossibility of ever getting free. This automatic compulsory character of the obstruction is the whole power of the difficulty in the material nature. (1) The first thing is to reject the idea of helplessness, of impossibility of a successful reaction. The central will must Page 388 assert itself, not violently in a constant struggle... habituated to obey, but not acting on their own initiative. When there is a strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible. Mind and vital nature are on the contrary all for will and initiative and so when one is in mind or vital or acting under their influence will feels itself always ...
... wine of the infinite beatitude. It is true that here the light is concealed. Agni, like other gods, figures here as a child of the universal parents, Heaven and Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and material Nature. This earth holds him concealed in her own materiality and does not release him for the conscious works of the Father. She hides him in all her growths, her plants, herbs, trees—the forms full... which describe the many births of the divine Flame. They are recounted with an extraordinary variety. Sometimes he is the child of Heaven, the Father—Mind or Soul—and of Earth the Mother—Body or material Nature; sometimes he is the flame born from these two tinders; sometimes Heaven and Earth are called his two mothers, when the figure is more explicitly symbolic of the pure mental and psychical and the ...
... descent of the Divine is to man a stage in an ascension; each veil that hides the unknown God becomes for the God-lover and God-seeker an instrument of His unveiling. Out of the rhythmic slumber of material Nature unconscious of the Soul and the Idea that maintain the ordered activities of her energy even in her dumb and mighty material trance, the world struggles into the more quick, varied and disordered... But where then is the kingdom of their self-fulfilling? It comes to them by the exceeding of themselves. Beyond life and mind we recover consciously in its divine truth that which the balance of material Nature grossly represented,—a tranquillity which is neither inertia nor a sealed trance of consciousness but the concentration of an absolute force and an absolute self-awareness, and an action of im ...
... never been plenarily envisaged. On 11.9.1936 he wrote to a disciple: "The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature - not by imposing Siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any... rming Supramental Light and Love. I feel it is no accident but a profoundly significant sign that the feast of the Assumption of Mary which to Sri Aurobindo is a symbol of the divinisation of Material Nature, the historical womb of all evolution, should fall on August 15, the date of Sri Aurobindo's birth, and flash out the essence, as it were, of the work undertaken by him. Christianity does ...
... May 18, 1963 ( Mother asks for a box of paints to demonstrate practically the gradation of colors of the levels of consciousness, from the most material Nature to the Supreme. The point is to illustrate the symbol of Infinity, the figure 8, which Mother explained in the conversation of May 11 : the infinite play of the Supreme reaching down to Nature... illustrations for "Savitri". ) Of course, all these things are lights, so you can't reproduce them. But still, it must be a violet that is not dull and not dark ( Mother starts from the most material Nature ). What she has put is too red, but if it's too blue, it won't be good either—you understand the difficulty? Then after violet there is blue, which must be truly blue, not too light, but it must ...
... gradually come back to itself and recover its full and superficially conscious waking and working. Otherwise, "as in us, so in the atom, the metal, the plant, in every form of material Nature, in every energy of material Nature, there is...a secret soul, a secret will, a secret intelligence at work, other than the mute self-oblivious form, the Conscient — conscient even in unconscious things—of the ...
... Sublime Reality. Page 24 How and why does this pressure come? If you mean the pressure of inert passivity, it comes from the resistance of the lower vital and the obscurity of the material nature. It can be overcome by an untiring will and aspiration. 12 February 1934 Mother, may I know something about this depression—how did it come? The depression was in the general atmosphere... become ignorant and unconscious? I suppose that by "we" you mean human beings. Human beings have not become ignorant and obscure. They have always been Page 105 that way, because material nature was unconscious and obscure long before man appeared. Can silence bring all the force needed for purification and transformation? Not exactly bring , but in silence one can receive it ...
... from the work Thou hast given me. Wherever Thou placest my consciousness, it will remain without any attempt to rise to the blissful heights. Even if Thou wiliest it to be in the mud of the most material nature, it will stay there peaceful and at rest. But wherever it is, it cannot be without aspiring towards Thee, opening to Thy influence and calling Thee down into itself as the sole reality of its existence... sorrow, my pleasure or my pain; whatever you do with me, whatever comes to me from you will lead me to the Divine Rapture. 9.3.1932 Greed, greed, always greed... is the response of material nature. In whatever way the Divine manifests there, it becomes at once an object of covetousness. A rush to appropriate, an endeavour to rob, exploit, squeeze, swallow and in the end crush down the Divine ...
... material— exactly at the critical temperature, as it were—is dematerialised. How does the miracle happen? In fact, we are forced to the conclusion that the picture of a solid massive material nature is only a mask of the reality; the reality is that matter is a charge of electricity and the charge of electricity is potentially a mode of light. The ancient distinction between matter and energy... as "perpetual movement" in the field of matter. Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws ...
... normal. Either the higher must come down and mingle totally with the lower, or the lower has to rise and merge altogether into the higher, or both meet and unite midway somewhere. Earth or material nature does not easily tolerate anything unknown and foreign to it. Even if it is for its own well-being, a foreign touch makes it shrink and turn in on itself. It is even painful for it to bear. In the... before. At present it is simply the question of the manifestation of the thing that is with us and among us. At one time Mother was asking for, even pleading for collaboration from the material nature. It was accorded in principle, but in act it was found wanting. Now the tables are turned. The earth-consciousness has now to ask for, pray for collaboration from the Divine. The material consciousness ...
... Rising, this eclipse was for a supreme Revelation. It is for a sovereign Fulfilment, a mighty Enjoyment (urjam prthivya bhaktvaya) of earth, upon earth. The Rishi speaks of how the ignorant dark material nature is raised, transmuted step by step into the supreme nature and unified with the Supreme Reality, Brahman. The agents, the powers that help and operate the process are the high Gods who belong... division is a play through which a higher union is effected – a panorama of gradual manifestation of the infinite riches that Brahman enshrines in his bosom. The creation of inconscient earth and material nature has to be accepted so that nature is purified and recreated and a divine race of beings is established upon earth for a richer and a glorious fulfilment here below. Page 25 ...
... presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepare his emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity. And let us not say that this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into the form so created... for that supposes a gulf between soul and body, between soul... transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments of the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature. 364 This work is so minute that it is hard to describe. The only way of working is not to go into deep meditations, which affect only the summits of our being, or to attain an extraordinary ...
... ble source. These material energies are obscure and half inconscient; they encourage animality in man, but at the same time establish a kind of harmonious relation between the human body and material Nature. Those who know how to receive and use these energies generally meet with success in life and achieve whatever they undertake. But still they depend largely upon the conditions of their life and... state of their bodily health. The harmony created in them is not safe from all attack, it generally vanishes when circumstances become ad- verse. The child spontaneously receives this energy from material Nature when it throws out all its forces without measuring, gladly and freely. But in most human beings, as they grow up, this faculty is deadened because of the cares of life and the predominant place ...
... able to do work of the highest attractiveness, vigour or artistic beauty. In all these kinds the European binds himself by the necessity of reproducing the actual outward form imposed by material Nature. He is a bondsman to form and such do not attain to that spiritual freedom which is the first condition of the sight spiritual. When he tries to interpret the thing in itself, he degenerates usually ...
... as they shape themselves in the soul of a nation, the phrase will not seem one whit too excessive. It is the soul within us that decides, that makes our history, that determines Fate, and the material nature, material events only shape themselves under the limitations of Space and Time to give an outward body and realisation to the decisions of the soul. The day of a nation's independence is not the ...
... triumphant good turns into an organised evil. The Christian doctrine of the fall, the Indian idea of the wandering of the Soul in a cosmic illusion or the sceptic affirmation of an inconscient material Nature producing the freak of consciousness seems often to be the kernel of the whole matter. And yet if we go deep enough into ourselves, we strike against something valid that proves to be a veiled ...
... of being superior to them, a power of Supermind as much above our incomplete mental nature as that is above the nature of animal life and animated Matter, as it is immeasurably above the mere material nature. The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from ...
... which constitute its action and are necessary to its totality; there is hidden in the involution of Nature the secret power and principle of being which lies concealed under the veil cast on it by material Nature and there is carried in that Nature itself the inevitable force of the principle compelling the process of emergence of its inherent powers and characters, the essential features which constitute ...
... psychology. Asserting the existence of worlds & beings other than those that live within the compass of our waking senses, they have their cosmogony, theogony, philosophy of Nature & of mental & material nature powers. The relations of mind to matter & soul to mind, of men to the gods & the illimitable Master Soul to the souls apparently limited in bodies, have all their authority in the Upanishads. The ...
... supremacy of the universal Will. We are not here in this universe as independent existences. It is evident that we are limited beings clashing with other limited beings, clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the senses but by the mind. The Upanishad takes for granted that we are souls, not merely life-inspired bodies—into ...
... religionism; but they have their concealed truth and their psychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in the ignorance of material Nature. Page 221 The middle stage, the second type starts from these things, but gets behind them; it is capable of understanding more clearly and consciently the psychic truths, the conceptions ...
... limited habitual human self into all things and judge them from the standpoint he has personally evolved, which most effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete sight. Material Nature is not ethical; the law which governs it is a co-ordination of fixed habits which take no cognisance of good and evil, but only of force that creates, force that arranges and preserves, force that ...
... beauty or delight of creation? A Mind, a seeking and curious inventive Thought, a hidden determining Will might be there, but there is no trace of it in the first and fundamental appearance of material Nature. A first possible explanation points to a self-organising dynamic Chance that is at work,—a paradox necessitated by the appearance of inevitable order on one side, of unaccountable freak and ...
... pleasure: go farther still and master that which all material things are in their essence and we may arrive even at the power of transmutation which would give the greatest possible control of material Nature. Thus the knowledge of distinctions arrives at its greatest truth and effective use when we arrive at the deeper knowledge of that which reconciles distinctions in the unity behind all variations ...
... Sri Aurobindo to be hinting vaguely the effort celebrated in the Vedic hymns to reclaim by means of Yoga what they call the lost Sun, the divine Light that has got submerged in a material Page 101 Nature which seems to begin as a blind unconsciousness and out of which evolve various forms of Ignorance struggling to live and see. In Sri Aurobindo's poem the term Death regains its Vedic ...
... still far from the goal of explaining every vital process, is entitled by past successes to be materialistic about the living organism. We may feel philosophically that by conceding the non material nature of mind Sherrington has exposed his case to a subtle attack. But we have strictly limited our discussion to the biological field and we have to meet his materialism on that particular ground: thus ...
... into the supraphysical must evolve, accept and test an appropriate means and methods other than those by which one examines the constituents of physical objects and the processes of Energy in material Nature. To refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge as the religious obscurantism which opposed in ...
... elevation the mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of body, the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and Nescience, the control of an inconscient material Nature over his conscious evolution, its power for limitation, its law of difficult development, its immense force for retardation and frustration. This control by Page 28 the original ...
... not acting on their own initiative. When there is a strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in Page 103 this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible." 23 Weakness of the will may be regarded by some as pertaining to the province of ethics and morality rather than that of psychopathology. However, we must ...
... Suffering and evil are ethical problems which we measure according to moral norms. Sri Aurobindo, thirdly, draws our attention to this and makes us realize that “we do not live in an ethical world. … Material nature is not ethical … Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical, although as it progresses it manifests the crude material out of which the highest animal evolves the ethical impulse.” (Evolutionary ...
... the colour of Auroville’ (orange). With her was ‘the physical Mother’ whom we would call Mother Nature, and who accepted the formation of the new body with a symbolic gesture. ‘This means that material Nature has accepted the new creation.’ 24 March 1972. ‘For the first time, early in the morning, I have seen myself, my body. I do not know whether it is the supramental body or — how to say ...
... who question—then what is to be done? what can be done? Nothing. We can only wait for the supramental descent—and descent is methodical but slow, for the opposition to that is obstinate in the material Nature. However, we must go on and do what can be done under these difficult conditions. I do not know how far it is wise not to come to pranam— the result in others has not been brilliant—but ...
... after knowledge and human nature is made of that Ignorance and the character of the individual is made from the elements of the Ignorance. It is largely mechanistic like everything else in the material Nature and there is almost invariably a resistance and, more often than not, a strong and stubborn resistance to any change demanded from it. The character is made up of habits and it clings to them ...
... were felt by Sri Aurobindo to be hinting vaguely the effort celebrated in the Vedic hymns to reclaim by means of Yoga what they call the lost Sun, the divine Light that has got submerged in a material Nature which seems to begin as a blind unconsciousness and out of which evolve various forms of Ignorance struggling to live and see. In Sri Aurobindo's poem the term Death regains its Vedic and Upanishadic ...
... counterpart is in the centre of our chest. He calls it the psyche or psychic being which is in its essence a spark of the Divine. This spark came originally from the highest world into the night of material Nature and from that abyss kept yearning towards God and rose through various organisations of matter to its present level where it has developed a human in-strument: it had during its lesser development ...
... He "in whom we live and move and have our being". When Shelley sings of the young Keats,"Adonais", becoming by his death a portion of universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature and to be part of it is not to be individually annulled, either. Here is neither the sleep of death in which ...
... The next morning the Mother sent me a huge card illustrating Shiva and Shakti. She had written on it: This can be taken as one aspect of the collaboration between the Spiritual Power and the Material Nature. I sent her the report of what she had said the previous evening. It ran: Nature is always going on her own ways. Spiritual things also are going on their own ways. Nature and Spirituality ...
... Matter. Mind and Life are evolved in Matter, but they are limited and modified in their action by the obligation to use its substance for their instrumentation and by their subjection to the law of material Nature even while they modify what they undergo and use. For they Page 732 do transform its substance, first into living substance and then into conscious substance; they succeed in changing ...
... into the supraphysical must evolve, accept and test an appropriate means and methods other than those by which one examines the constituents of physical objects and the processes of Energy in material Nature. Page 676 To refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge as the religious obscurantism which ...
... certain part of his intellect and his longing for rest may be placated by such a solution, just as his physical intelligence is easily satisfied by a denial of the Beyond and a deification of material Nature; but Page 716 his heart, his will, the strongest and intensest parts of his being remain without a meaning, void of purpose or justification, or become merely a random foolishness agitating ...
... society for a while by a momentary elevation. The truth is that neither the mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature. She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary concessions ...
... , morbidities, and comes easily to regard these things as the whole or the greater part of him and to treat life as if it were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon material Nature: it ends, indeed almost begins, by an exaggeration and overstressing which betrays its true character, the posthumous child of romanticism perverted by a pseudo-scientific preoccupation. Romanticism ...
... tion of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental light and force in material Nature. The Mental Vital or Vital Mind It is the mental part of the vital that is there between the throat and the heart. The place of the mind is from the crown of the head to the throat (where ...
... are able to move on the highest levels. The first condition of our consciousness, that in which we now move, is this mind of ignorance that has arisen out of the inconscience and nescience of material Nature,—ignorant but capable of seeking for knowledge and finding it at least in a series of mental representations which may be made clues to the true truth and, more and more refined and illuminated ...
... Chapter XIX The Nature of the Supermind The object of Yoga is to raise the human being from the consciousness of the ordinary mind subject to the control of vital and material Nature and limited wholly by birth and death and Time and the needs and desires of the mind, life and body to the consciousness of the spirit free in its self and using the circumstances of mind, life ...
... been that of the Mind turning its gaze upon its vital and physical frame and environment to know and conquer and dominate Life and Matter. The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human being ...
... borders of an upper, a greater hemisphere of spiritual existence. There the ignorance, the inconscience, the original blank Nescience slowly awaking towards a half-knowledge, which are the basis of material Nature and which surround, penetrate and powerfully limit all our powers of mind and life, cease altogether; for an unmixed and unmodified Truth-consciousness is there the substance of all the being, ...
... root an evolutionary principle, if Page 496 our ignorance is a half-knowledge evolving towards knowledge, another account and another issue and spiritual result of our existence in material Nature, a greater manifestation here becomes possible. A farther distinction has to be made in our conceptions of unreality, so as to avoid a possible confusion in our dealings with this problem of ...
... of the divine life towards which we aspire. What then would be the existence of a divine soul, not descended into the ignorance by the fall of Spirit into Matter and the eclipse of soul by material Nature? What would be its consciousness, living in the original Truth of things, in the inalienable unity, in the world of its own infinite being, like the Divine Existence itself, but able by the play ...
... aggregation of this matter there has been built up for man a physical body separate, divided from others and subject to the fixed habits of process or, as we call them, the laws of inconscient material Nature. His force of being too is nature or Force working in matter, which has waked slowly out of inconscience to life and is always limited by form, always dependent on the body, always separated by ...
... phenomenon is not really abnormal or contrary to the general law of things. For do we not see a perfect working of the secret universal Will and Intelligence in the apparently brute ( jaḍa ) action of material Nature? And it is precisely this universal Will and Intelligence which thus acts through the calm, indifferent and inwardly silent Yogin who offers no obstacle of limited and ignorant personal will and ...
... alone a true practice of life can be founded. The error proceeds from a false identification. Nature has created within her material unity separate-seeming bodies which the Soul manifested in material Nature enfolds, inhabits, possesses, uses; the Soul forgetting itself experiences only this single knot in Matter and says "I am this body." It thinks of itself as the body, suffers with the body, enjoys ...
... to be in possession of the system of their Vedic predecessors and that they surely did not regard this system as merely a minute collection of ritual practices or merely an elaborate worship of material Nature-Powers. Minds that saw the world steadily as a whole, they did not repel that worship or disown that ritual. Surya was to them the god of the Sun; Agni they regarded as the master of fire; but ...
... or low the form of the worship, however limited the idea of the godhead, however restricted the giving, the faith, the effort to get behind the veil of one's own ego-worship and limitation by material Nature, it yet forms a thread of connection between the soul of man and the All-soul and there is a response. Still the response, the fruit of the adoration and offering is according to the knowledge ...
... the totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in the immobile and eternal Akshara. This mobile Power of Self acts in that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle of material Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregation and separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the formative force of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and other elemental movements ...
... 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, its final contradiction of materialism ...
... express that thought itself in the old solemn and sacred language. “And with regard to this there are spoken these Riks.” In what light did these ancient thinkers understand the Vedic gods? As material Nature Powers called only to give worldly wealth to their worshippers? Certainly, the Vedic gods are in the Vedanta also accredited with material functions. In the Kena Upanishad Agni’s power & glory ...
... difficulty after knowledge and human nature is made of that Ignorance and the character of the individual is made from the elements of the Ignorance. It is largely mechanistic like everything else in material Nature and there is almost invariably a resistance and, more often than not, a strong Page 631 and stubborn resistance to any change demanded from it. The character is made up of habits and ...
... vital forces that are used to produce kāya siddhi in Hathayoga? The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature—not by imposing siddhis on them, but by Page 108 creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has ...
... question,—then what is to be done? what can be done? Nothing. We can only wait for the supramental descent—and that descent is methodical but slow, for the opposition to that too is obstinate in the material Nature. However, we must go on and do what can be done under these difficult conditions. I do not know how far it is wise not to come to pranam,—the results in others have not been brilliant but if ...
... test and you were among the first to fall. The creation had to be postponed, the process changed, and, instead of doing all from above, it became necessary to come down into the lower vital and material nature for a long, slow, patient and difficult work of opening and change. 4 This is the sadhana that has been going on here. Are you prepared for this opening and change which needs an absolute ...
... integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material nature the supreme Ananda. * Purity is to accept no other influence but only the influence of the Divine, Faithfulness is to admit and to manifest no other movements but only the movements ...
... conditions, to paint or to compose music or write poetry; well, everything that they produced was thoroughly second-rate and could not be compared with the works of the great geniuses who had mastered material nature—and this of course gave the materialists a good opening: "You see, your so-called power is nothing at all." But this was because in their external life they were ordinary men; for the greatest ...
... and the daughter is the new creation. The manager is the mental consciousness, organiser of the world as Nature has made it until now, that is, the highest sense of organisation manifested in material Nature as it is now. This is the key to the vision. Naturally, when I woke up I knew immediately what could solve this problem which had seemed absolutely insoluble. The disappearance of the manager and ...
... Conceivably, if a practicable way and means could only be found, this last invincible obstacle too might be overcome and the body maintained by an interchange of its forces with the forces of material Nature, giving to her her need from the individual and taking from her directly the sustaining energies of her universal existence. Conceivably, one might rediscover and re-establish at the summit of ...
... Divine. 9 June 1971 * THE ATOMIC BOMB The Atomic bomb is in itself the most wonderful achievement and the Sign of a growing power of man over material nature. But what is to be regretted is that this material progress and mastery is not the result of and in keeping with a spiritual progress and mastery which alone has the power to contradict and counteract ...
... other Nature." (Sri Aurobindo); see also* Purusha. prāṇamaya puruṣa —soul in life; the (true) vital being. the physical (being) —not the body alone, but the whole physical mind, vital, material nature. physical mind —See under mind . physical vital —the part of the vital that is turned entirely upon physical things, full of desires and greeds and seekings for pleasure on the physical ...
... tion of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature." Letters on Yoga , Cent. Vol. 22, p. 340 ...
... it when I became conscious of the life of the earth as a whole. But I cannot say how long it lasted nor what area it covered. I do not know. I can only remember the condition, the state, what material Nature was like, what the human form and the human consciousness were like at that time and this kind of harmony with all the other elements on earth—harmony with animal life, and such a great harmony ...
... from the work Thou hast given me. Wherever Thou placest my consciousness, it will remain without any attempt to rise to the blissful heights. Even if Thou willest it to be in the mud of the most material nature, it will stay there peaceful and at rest. But wherever it is, it cannot but be without aspiring towards Thee, opening to Thy influence and calling Thee down into itself as the sole reality of its ...
... sometimes impatiently, for some light to be thrown on Sri Aurobindo's own experience, one reads with genuine amazement... that "one can draw on energies from above instead of drawing on them from the material nature around oneself, or from an animal sleep," or that "one can modify his sleep and render it conscious... master illnesses before they enter the body." All of that in less than a page; and you conclude ...
... 3 because it was deep down below; yet despite it all, Mother Nature was in charge there: she was familiar with everything, knew everything and it was all at her disposal—absolutely the most material Nature. And she herself had no light, but was very, very... she had a concealed power that was completely invisible. Page 34 Each time I set out to leave her domain and ascend above, it triggered ...
... Thy grace when they have to make the peace. 15 August 1945 The Atomic Bomb The Atomic bomb is in itself the most wonderful achievement and the sign of a growing power of man over material nature. But what is to be regretted is that this material progress and mastery is not the result of and in keeping with a spiritual progress and mastery which alone has the power to contradict and counteract ...
... like this up there, in the ideal), here, a central point. This central point is a park I had seen when I was a little girl (perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world with regard to physical, material Nature), a park with water and trees like all parks, and flowers, but not too many (flowers in the form of creepers), palm trees and ferns (all species of palm trees), water (if possible, running water) ...
... difference between occult powers and the supramental realization. ) "The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature—not by imposing Siddhis [occult powers] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been ...
... our chest. He calls it the psyche or psychic being which is in its essence a spark of the Divine. This spark came originally from the highest world Page 276 into the night of material Nature and from that abyss kept yearning towards God and rose through various organisations of matter to its present level where it has developed a human instrument: it had during its lesser development ...
... Conceivably, if a practicable way and means could only be found, this last invincible obstacle too might be overcome and the body maintained by an interchange of its forces with the forces of material Nature, giving to her her need from the individual and taking from her directly the sustaining energies of her universal existence. Conceivably, one might rediscover and reestablish at the summit of ...
... encounter so much resistance, revolt and attack from my physical nature while trying only to enlighten it. How much resistance you and the Mother must be facing while supramen-talising the whole material Nature! How do you manage it? The attacks must be coming on your physical body also. When one knows that it is like that and sees the play of forces one does not get disturbed. There is the inner ...
... the self-existent bliss and universal delight of being. And all this experience will be in all parts of his being. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through ...
... research into the supraphysical must evolve, accept and test appropriate means and methods other than those by which one examines the constituents of physical objects and the processes of Energy in material Nature". 17 Here at this point there is some scope for serious misgivings about the prospect of reconciliation between Science and Spirituality. For, it is generally asserted that the methods ...
... but of which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature." (Ibid., pp. 592-3) The abysmal sleep of consciousness is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Inconscience, and it is itself a result of the involutionary ignorance, which has its origin in the ...
... and States of Yogic Knowledge Swami Vivekananda has stated: "Yoga is really one of the grandest of sciences ... take up the study of this science as you would any other science of a material nature and remember there is no mystery and no danger in it." Page 75 Science is a quest of knowledge, but modem science has so far tended to concentrate on the knowledge of Matter or of life ...
... universal and infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out-flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through ...
... and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it will be a greater and happier constant miracle. As Sri Aurobindo points out, if there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life will manifest at an early or ...
... to its own domain, following its own dharma of that domain. Thus one can be perfectly calm and at ease witnessing the catastrophies and cataclysms in nature, for one knows it is the dharma of material nature. Man terms them disasters for he judges them according to his own convenience. Even so, one should not be perturbed at the wild behaviour—man calls it wild—of wild animals. Likewise the gods in ...
... element which was not there before and which could not be foreseen or foretold by any process of deduction from the actual factors in play. At the very outset of the evolutionary march, when material Nature meant only a mass or masses of incandescent gaseous elements, the first miracle that happened was the formation, the advent of water. There was Hydrogen and there was Oxygen existing and moving ...
... Divine Incarnation, avatara, literally means he who has descended. The Divine comes down himself as a terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, ,in order to raise the terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary course—even so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid mass of earth from out of the waters of the Deluge. It is his purpose ...
... Avatara, literally means he who has descended. Page 60 The Divine comes down himself as a terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, in order to raise the terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary course—even so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid earth from out of the waters of Deluge. It is his purpose to effect ...
... element which was not there before and which could not be foreseen or foretold by any process of deduction from the actual factors in play. At the very outset of the evolutionary march, when material Nature meant only a mass or masses of incandescent gaseous elements, the first miracle that happened was the formation, the advent of water. There was Hydrogen and there was Oxygen existing and Page ...
... way of living that develops higher instruments of world-vision and world-action for dynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world of material Nature. page - 108 ...
... , but they have their underlying truth and their psychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul that is shrouded in the ignorance of material Nature. Page 44 The bulk of people who belong to the second stage may start from these things and can get behind them. They are capable of understanding more clearly and consciously the ...
... the self- existent bliss and universal delight of being. And all this experience will be in all parts of his being. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through ...
... Mind developing afterwards in the later philosophy and science. But in fact the mass of men at the time, it is quite evident, lived entirely on the material plane, worshipped the Godheads of material Nature, sought from them entirely material objects. The effort of the Vedic mystics revealed to them the things behind through a power of inner sight and hearing and experience which was confined to ...
... truth. Science avowedly seeks to arrive at the truth within the framework of reasoning by weighing and measuring the material limbs of Nature, confining itself strictly within the four corners of material Nature. But the one thing which, if not manifest even at the outset, has gradually blossomed and taken hold of the scientist, that has from the beginning existed as a hidden inspiration behind the veil ...
... earth what ... might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.20 This at least is the highest hope, the possible destiny that opens out before the human view, and it is a possibility which the progress of the human mind seems on the way to redevelop ...
... world, for we will not get a true answer. Man reads himself into the world and therefore wants to find ethical values and this prevents him from seeing the solution of the problem. For instance, material Nature is not ethical. Electricity comes and strikes, there are no ethical considerations. The tornado arises and destroys, Earthquakes and storms come, they are not moved by ethical considerations at ...
... Nature it has so successfully explored, there are far-flung uplands and hinterlands and netherlands which it has yet to explore; depths upon depths of human consciousness and nature, and even of material nature, beckon to its adventurous spirit. It must march forward to the Page 74 conquest of the unknown with the same unflagging will and energy by which it has already conquered many a ...
... savagery and dark treachery for which this swift retribution has overtaken them. The atomic bomb is in itself the most wonderful achievement and the sign of a growing power of man over the material Nature. But what is to be regretted is that this material progress and mastery is not the result of and keeping on with a spiritual progress and mastery which alone has the power to contradict and counteract ...
... .. 13.6.1928: The Mother was very smiling; gave her feet; meditated. All took nearly 30 minutes. Quite delightful, inspiring .... 27.12.1928: The great opening to the most external material nature between 4.30 and 6 a.m. and the śrutidarśana (like that of the Vedic sages) .... 1.1.1929: With the Mother, at Her feet. ... 4.1.1929: Throughout night, with the Mother in dream. She ...
... processes in order to express a new kind of beauty that is higher and purer, truer and nobler. So long as I still feel bound to human animality, I cannot free myself completely from the forms of material Nature. Although the aspiration was there, he lacked the knowledge, the vision. His life, he must admit, has clearly been a failure! When it is his turn, the Industrialist - this part was written ...
... suffering, for example, when there is a call from within the cells, the pain subsides for a while, and then it returns, and one has to begin all over once again. Without a total transformation of material nature, the changes cannot be definitive. What is the human body but a conglomerate that keeps together just so long as there is a will behind to keep that so? A few days before 7 October, in a d ...
... became conscious of the life of the entire earth. But I can't say how long it lasted or what area it covered —I don't know. I only remember the condition at the time, the state of being, how the material Nature was, and how the human form and human consciousness were; and also this type of harmony with all the other elements of the earth. There was a kind of spontaneous knowledge of how to use Nature's ...
... tion of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature. 8 But for this to happen, a point of asphyxiation had to be reached in the old matter — or false matter, we should say. And now we are faced with the question, the real question: what ...
... tion of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilization of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature. 105 It is Mother’s whole experience: once delivered from the hypnotism of the physical Mind, this corporeal, cellular mind began to fix the supramental vibration and form a new body. It began ...
... functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments Page 130 for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature." That is what Sri Aurobindo said. By "stabilisation," he means the establishment of a new mode of vibration or being in matter. Naturally, a number of knowledgeable people will find such ...
... indicate that the cause of this significant uniqueness is something bound up with the very nature of spirit; it is something it held in itself and is bringing out more and more as it emerges out of material Nature into self-conscience. The laws of being are at bottom one for all of us, because all existence is one existence; one spirit, one self, one mind, one life, one energy of process is at work; one ...
... perfect & liberated existence. For we are not here in the phenomenal world as independent existences; we appear as limited beings clashing with other limited beings, clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with Page 311 forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the physical senses but with the mind. We must become this multitudinous world, become it in our ...
... question and the whole method lie then in the liberation of the soul from the limitations of our present natural being. In our natural life the first dominating fact is our subjection to the forms of material Nature, the outward touches of things. These present themselves to our life through the senses, and the life through the senses immediately returns upon these objects to seize upon them and deal with ...
... can preserve in its intricate truth and dynamic order. The tendency of the normal Western mind is to live from below upward and from out inward. A strong foundation is taken in the vital and material nature and higher powers are invoked and admitted only to modify and partially uplift the natural terrestrial life. The inner existence is formed and governed by the external powers. India's constant ...
... forms of our subjectivity in the evolving consciousness of animal and man, we shall see that the Sankhya system squares well enough with all that modern enquiry has elicited by its observation of material Nature. In the evolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, the reverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution, and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following and almost ...
... seemed to be like stones, not white in colour but black. Why was that? It was probably the subconscient physical that you saw—that would explain the shadowy character; the stone indicates the material Nature. 30 September 1933 In the afternoon I went to sleep remembering the Mother. After a while I saw that my subtle mind, vital and body had risen up high into a beautiful world, profound and ...
... but sometimes the doors open, then She rushes in immediately, the unconsciousness disappears and consciousness comes—without needing any tricks or any intermediaries. She becomes conscious. But material Nature, physical Nature is not like that, she is full of tricks; she makes you move all the time, she pulls the puppet strings; for her you are so many little dolls: she pulls the strings and makes them ...
... have only to persevere and done they will surely be. Then things will be much more easy for you. 31 December 1934 1935 After November the push for descent stopped and the resistance of material Nature arose—that is always a sign of something that has still to be conquered before the descent can be complete. In the silence the necessary preparation is being done. No doubt, I expect something ...
... action and mentality). Page 124 Overmind — see under spiritualised mind. the physical (being) — 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 ...
... there on the ideal plane—here, a central point. This central point is a park which I saw when I was very young—perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world from the point of view of physical, material Nature—a park with water and trees, like all parks, and flowers, but not many; flowers in the form of creepers, palms and ferns, all varieties of palms; water, if possible running water, and possibly ...
... the spiral and now with all that this knowledge of matter has brought us, we shall be able to give to our spiritual progress a more solid basis. Strong with what we have learnt of the secrets of material Nature, we shall be able to join the two extremes and rediscover the supreme Reality in the very heart of the atom. 24 January 1958 Those who are intelligent, meditative, persevering, who ceaselessly ...
... 16 January 1957 " Man seeks at first blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search; He seeks and enjoys man's blindness like the hands of a little ...
... disturbing for the human consciousness with its sense of its short duration and the kind of impatience this brings. So I have been asked: "Will it take long for the Supermind which is involved in material Nature to emerge into the outer consciousness and bring visible results?" That depends on the state of consciousness from which one answers, for... For the human consciousness, obviously, I think ...
... there was an opening of some existing body to a supraphysical influx so that it was transformed into a new body; but no such event can lightly be assumed to have taken place in the past history of material Nature: in order to happen it would seem to need either the conscious intervention of an invisible mental being to form the body he intended to inhabit or else a previous development of a mental being ...
... offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine Shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bond slave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance ...
... create a new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of humanity; for ...
... processes, in order to express a new kind of beauty that is higher and purer, truer and nobler. So long as I still feel bound to human animality, I cannot free myself completely from the forms of material Nature. The aspiration was there, but the knowledge, the vision was lacking. And now that we are about to die, I feel that I have produced nothing of what I wanted to produce, I have created nothing ...
... integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material Nature the supreme Ananda. The coming of sex on seeing the image of Krishna and Radha is due to the past association of sex with the cult of RadhaKrishna. But in fact the image has nothing to do ...
... security, ease and dignity of our human existence, but in the true, the good and the beautiful. This is the manhood of man, his unique distinction and abnormality in the norm of this inconscient material Nature. This means that man has developed a new power of being,—let us call it a new soul-power, with the premiss that we regard the life and the body also as a soul-power,—and the being who has done ...
... material man through his physical mind chiefly or alone; the endeavour is overpowered by the machinery it creates and becomes the slave and victim of the machine. That is the revenge which our material Nature, herself mechanical, takes upon all such violent endeavours; she waits to master them by their concessions to her own law. If mankind is to be spiritualised, it must first in the mass cease to ...
... 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 the Rishis spoke, but on higher levels also. I have pointed out that Ritam is the law of the Truth, of vijnana ...
... first the higher (divine or spiritual) Light and Power and Ananda, and then the supramental Truth which is the object of our Yoga. But there is an obstinate dark and inert resistance both from material Nature and from the physical conscious ness of the sadhaks—of which the lower vital and the material consciousness, both of them still unregenerated, are the cause. It [ the material ] is the most ...
... Nature. It is not seated above the manifested being; it enters into the manifestation of the self, consents to be a part of its natural phenomenal becoming, supports its evolution in the world of material Nature. It carries with it at first an undifferentiated power of the divine consciousness, containing all possibilities, but at first unevolved possibilities, which have not yet taken form but to which ...
... ness, for its very nature is consciousness though not of the mental kind to which we give the name. The consciousness is merely covered, not lost or abolished by the so-called Inconscience of material Nature and then by the half-conscious ignorance of mind, life and body. It manifests, as the individual mind and life and body grow, as much as may be of the consciousness which it holds in potentiality ...
... 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 to come. I do not think X 's trance has anything to do with her ill health; I have never known the habit of trances of that kind to have any such result ...
... be built up in which no further sanction will ever seem to be given to the past mistaken movements of the sadhaks which were standing in the way of the descent of the Truth into the physical (material) nature. The basis cannot be built in a day, but the Mother had to stand back, otherwise to build it at all would be impossible. 7 December 1931 If it is the same part of the vital that was on the ...
... that philosophy as we find it massively concentrated into some of its greatest principles in the Isha Upanishad, I hazarded the theory that the Vedas were not a collection of sacrificial hymns to material Nature-gods, as supposed by the Europeans, but something more profound and noble, that they were indeed, I thought, the true substance & foundation of the Upanishads, if not of all “Hindu” religion & ...
... realities it covers, as for instance, the record of the past it always preserves even in its dumb inconscience or the working of its involved forces and invisible movements revealing veiled powers in material nature to a subtler generalised perception of the new human intelligence, this would be an immense change promising greater changes in the future, but it would mean only an uplifting and not a disturbance ...
... objections to a complete Page 582 evolutionary possibility then fall away; it would, on the contrary, be the inevitable consequence contained not only in Nature as a whole but even in material Nature. In this vision of things the universe will reveal itself in its unity and totality as a manifestation of a single Being, Nature as its power of manifestation, evolution as its process of gradual ...
... and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at ...
... of the Sun of Truth. × Day and Night,—the latter the state of Ignorance that belongs to our material Nature, the former the state of illumined Knowledge that belongs to the divine Mind of which our mentality is a pale and dulled reflection. ...
... poison can cure as well as kill, a medicine kill or harm as well as cure or benefit. The world of pure Matter is neutral, irresponsible; these values insisted on by the human being do not exist in material Nature: as a superior Nature transcends the duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature falls below it. The question may begin to assume a different aspect if we go behind physical knowledge and ...
... sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine Shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance ...
... possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in man's physical being and vital energies and in his material environment for his full ...
... every step upwards: the attempt to grow out of this limitation of the wholeness, power and truth of the spirit by the materialised mental intelligence and out of this subjection of the soul to material Nature is the first step towards a real progress of our humanity. For our ignorance is not entire; it is a limitation of consciousness,—it is not the complete nescience which is the stamp of the same ...
... Mind awakes and seeks to know the who, the why, the how of itself and all things and above all to use its knowledge for the imposition of its own freer law and self-guiding action upon things, material Nature seems to yield, even to approve and aid, though after a struggle, reluctantly and only up to a certain point. But beyond that point it presents an obstinate inertia, obstruction, negation and even ...
... affect every part of our natural being. They have indeed their strongest relative hold in the three different members of it, mind, life and body. Tamas, the principle of inertia, is strongest in material nature and in our physical being. The action of this principle is of two kinds, inertia of force and inertia of knowledge. Whatever is predominantly governed by Tamas, tends in its force to a sluggish ...
... infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out-flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that Page 696 one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through ...
... it can be converted to the law of a possible perfection. This present law of his being starts from the inconscience of the material universe, an involution of the soul in form and subjection to material nature; and, though in this matter life and mind have developed their own energies, yet they are limited and bound up in the action of the lower material, which is to the ignorance of his practical surface ...
... of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in the material Nature." XXII.340 ...
... in a completely materialistic atmosphere; but once, I saw something in a dream: a being came to me, a woman, and she told me, "What you need you will always have in abundance." That was Nature, material Nature, the same being I always saw later on. And it's true, absolutely true! ( Mother, laughing, shows the jumble around her ) Later, when I saw Théon, he explained to me; but at that time, I knew nothing ...
... collective triumph instead of an individual achievement. A farther step towards the conquest of all Evil was disclosed in the Message of January 1, 1958, in which she spoke of the consent of material Nature to the demand for transformation. Nature has always been rejected by spiritual seekers and left to its own devices of slow circuitous development and aeonic travail with ill-lit forces. Nature ...
... a particular possibility, the possibility of the Divine's emergence from what seems at the outset the very negation of Him. But there is another factor at work which derives from beyond material Nature. This is not merely undivine: it is also anti-divine. The undivine resists by sheer inertia, the anti-divine by a various strategy of attack. And the attack comes from occult dimensions of ...
... direct immediacy of knowledge", writes 7 : "In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge ...
... towards spiritual truth. He is, somehow, always subject to the dual attraction of Matter and Spirit. Living and thinking in a physical body, he cannot neglect the demands and necessities of his material nature, its comfort, gratification and development, its insatiable push towards a perfect secular fulfilment. But at the same time there is in him a conviction of something else than his first insistent ...
... uglinesses, morbidities in man's life and psychology as if they were the whole or the greater part of him and as if life "were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon material Nature", 16 is not unconnected with Romanti-cism which too "laid a constant stress on the grotesque, diseased, abnormal, but for the sake of artistic effect, to add another tone to its other glaring ...
... tongues were all given to them. The day of Pentecost is still kept holy by the Christian Church. Joan of Arc used her siddhis to liberate France. Socrates had his siddhis, some of them of a very material nature. Men of great genius are usually born with some of them and use them unconsciously. Even in natures far below the power and clarity of genius we see their occasional or irregular operation. The ...
... and vehicle. A Consciousness, a Being, a Power, a Joy was here from the beginning darkly imprisoned in this apparent denial of itself, this original night, this obscurity and nescience of material Nature. That which is and was for ever, free, perfect, eternal and infinite, That which all is, That which we call God, Brahman, Spirit, has here shut itself up in its own self-created opposite. The ...
... photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula. 149) Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows & hints of them she possesses but they themselves tower above her. 150) There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God's touch ...
... immortality. The opposite opinion is due to certain tendencies which have bulked large in the history and temperament of our race. The ultimate goal of our religion is emancipation from the bondage of material Nature and freedom from individual rebirth, and certain souls, among the highest we have known, have been drawn by the attraction of the final hush and purity to dissociate themselves from life and bodily ...
... —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, but ...
... division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering. Man seeks at first blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search; He seeks and enjoys man's blindness like the hands of a little ...
... tion of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature. ( XXII.340 ) It corresponds exactly to my own experience. It is this mind of the cells which seizes upon a mantra or a japa and eventually repeats it automatically, and with what ...
... most unexpected way of interpreting this vision. I hadn't given it that meaning at all. The images in these visions are always symbolic and should be taken as such. The rocks represent the material nature, hard and inflexible yet concealing in itself the stream of life. Because of the resistance of matter, this stream of life is freed only with difficulty and can hardly emerge into the light. But ...
... creation. The manageress is the world's organizing mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision. Naturally, when I awoke, I immediately knew what could resolve this problem which appeared so absolutely insoluble. The vanishing of the manageress and her key ...
... 1972 I've found a very interesting quotation from Sri Aurobindo. What is it? This one: "The principle of mechanical repetition is very strong in Page 288 the material nature, so strong that it makes one easily think that it is incurable. That, however, is only a trick of the forces of this material inconscience; it is by creating this impression that they try to endure ...
... Blake's version of the myth celebrated in the Mysteries of Eleusis, the story of the descent of Persephone into Hades, and the search of the Mother for her lost child". 16 Hades or Pluto is material Nature. The Virgin Persephone or Proserpine is the vital animating part, commonly called the Soul, descending into that world of generation. Her mother Demeter or Ceres is the Intellect, the higher part ...
... begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity.” 3 “The scientist is man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis, and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human ...
... relived it when I became conscious of the life of the earth as a whole. Yet I cannot say how long it lasted nor what area it covered, that I don’t know. I only remember the condition, the state of material Nature and what the human form and the human consciousness were like then, and this kind of harmony with all the other elements on earth: harmony with the animal life and such a great harmony with the ...
... 09 November 1957 SHIVA AND SHAKTI: (The Picture sent by the Mother) This can be taken as one aspect of the collaboration between the Spiritual Power and the Material Nature. ...
... there on the ideal plane―here, a central point. This central point is a park which I saw when I was very young―perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world from the point of view of physical, material Nature―a park with water and trees, like all parks, and flowers, but not many; flowers in the form of creepers, palms and ferns, all varieties of palms; water, if possible running water, and possibly ...
... Love Words of the Mother - II Love for the Divine Greed, greed, always greed... is the response of material nature. In whatever way the Divine manifests there, it becomes at once an object of covetousness. A rush to appropriate, an endeavour to rob, exploit, squeeze, swallow and in the end crush down the Divine, this is the receptivity of matter to ...
... to go into trance! And it grabs me exactly at the same place each time. Yesterday, I suddenly saw a huge living head of blue light—this blue light which is the force, the powerful force in material Nature (this is the light the tantrics use). The head was made entirely of this light, and it wore a sort of tiara—a big head, so big ( Mother indicates the length of her forearm ); its eyes weren't closed ...
... become fit to fulfil his role and give the divine realisation to the world. But man was so unfit that he was not even willing to submit to the conditions needed to prepare himself for the task, and material Nature, finally convinced that she was on the wrong track, turned directly to the Divine and asked Him to take possession of this world that had been prepared for the divine realisation. With this ...
... photograph or a shadow. The reader who sees in Falstaff, Macbeth, Lear or Hamlet imitations of Nature, has either no inner eye of the soul or has been hypnotised by a formula. 149—Where in material Nature wilt thou find Falstaff, Macbeth or Lear? Shadows and hints of them she possesses, but they themselves tower over her. Page 249 150—There are two for whom there is hope, the man who ...
... evoking the Supreme Mother. At the Thursday evening meditation, he appeared as the 'Guru of Tantric Initiation,' magnified and seated upon a symbolic representation of the forces and riches of material Nature (in the middle of the playground, to my left), and he put into my hand something sufficiently material for me to feel the vibrations physically, and it had a great realizing power. It was a kind ...
... when I first became conscious of the life of the entire earth; but I can't say how long it lasted or what area it covered—I don't know. I only remember the conditions at that time, the state of material Nature and the human form and human consciousness, and this state of harmony with all the other elements of the earth: harmony with animal life and a great harmony with plant life—there was a kind of ...
... unreality—the fundamental unreality—of illnesses. That's what I say here [in the Talk]: it's merely a disequilibrium. It's the habit of leaving it to a sort of impersonal collective will of the most material Nature, which organizes things IN THEIR APPEARANCE. That's the sort of work being done at present, these last few days—constantly, constantly. The only moment when it's not done is when I see people ...
... directly in the very power of consciousness. Before man, consciousness was still too buried in its material support; with man, it has disengaged itself sufficiently to assume its true mastery over material Nature and work out its own mutations by itself. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, this is the end of sexuality. We have reached the stage at which we can switch from natural evolution through ...
... visible, you know: it wasn't something thought out—it was visible. Life is funny, you have no idea how funny! I find that interesting. Page 153 It was clearly a higher Command to the material Nature, and it has obeyed. I don't know if he will be cured—that's not certain. But the important thing was that he should regain understanding and speech. ...
... n of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the Supramental Light and Force in material Nature' "¹ Taken along with other talks of the same period, what the Mother is speaking of is obviously the work going on in her of the illumination of the body's cells by the Supermind. However ...
... habituated to obey, but not acting on their own initiative. When there is a strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible. Mind and vital nature are on the contrary all for will and initiative and so when one is in mind or vital or acting under their influence will feels itself ...
... that of the Mind turning its gaze upon its vital and physical frame and environment to know and conquer and dominate Life and Matter. The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis and to know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities they give to the human ...
... but a state of consciousness in which one turns to a power good or evil in a great limited way When, for example, Aswapati has acquired secret knowledge and cut off his moorings with material nature, he lives as a figure Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts Under its arches dim with infinity. 53 On the other hand, when the great Traveller comes to the Kingdoms of ...
... collective triumph instead of an individual achievement. A farther step towards the conquest of all Evil was disclosed in the Message of January 1,1958, in which she spoke of the consent of material Nature to the demand for transformation. Nature has always been rejected by spiritual seekers and left to her own devices of slow circuitous development and aeonic travail with ill-lit forces. Nature ...
... way of living that develops higher instruments of world-vision and world-action for dynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world of material Nature. Page 129 ...
... Aurobindo and the Mother have envisaged would be the life of unity, mutuality and harmony. The synthesis of yoga that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have put forward envisages that evolution in material nature is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms of power; the evolutionary process has Page 48 reached today at a point where the fullness of being, fullness ...
... into itself and so replace the blind Ananke of the Inconscience." 53 When the supermind descends, the whole substance of the being comes to be changed supramentally. At the lowest level of material nature, the involved Supermind emerges to meet and join with the supramental light and power descending from the superconscient. The consequence of the transformation of the Inconscient would mean the ...
... affirmed that the ascetic has succeeded in proving that he can transcend the limitations of the body-life-mind complex and can gain the capacity of voluntary escape from the limitations imposed by material Nature. It is true that this proof does not amount to the proof of the power of the Spirit to transform Nature; but it can be argued that the capacity of the Spirit to transcend Nature can serve as ...
... universal and infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through ...
... sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in their sense of identity. This would be evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life over the Inconscience and the limitations of material Nature. But such a survival could only persist in the subtle body; the being would still have to discard its physical form, pass to other worlds and in its return put on a new body. The awakened mental ...
... the mind and the overmind, and even of a supramaterial world. The Vedic gods had their permanent dwelling in the supramental world. As Sri Aurobindo would say, "The gods of the Rig Veda are not material Nature powers but great world deities with complex functions material, mental and spiritual. The same Agni who burns here in fire, is master of pure force in the mind and of simple active energy in the ...
... foundation of the reign of Matter." (The Life Divine, pp. 821-23) This, the triple immortality, would be evidently an immense victory of soul and mind and life over the basic limitations of material Nature. But is the conquest of physical death at all possible ever in the future upon earth? For, as Sri Aurobindo has warned us: "Even if Science, - physical Science or occult Science, - were ...
... progressive self-revelation, all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either case concealed from the superficial view in the shroud of apparently acting material Nature. "Matter could not have become animate if the principle of life had not been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of life-in-matter; life-in-matter could not have begun to ...
... vital world and had the experience. In a dream I saw the dawn of the 15th of August: a great storm arose, something like a cyclone. My mind considered it as a final revolt of the material nature against the higher Powers that were brought down by you on the occasion of your birthday. Very soon all the resistance vanished and instead of the obscurity, created by the storm, I found a ...
... garland of the Truth) and She (this Kundalini Shakti) who carries in her the eternal Memory of all things secreted in the apparent Inconscience kindles from the oblivious depths of Earth (the material Nature) the first lightning of the Word of the churning of the Depths i.e. the first bringing up of all that is concealed and undelivered in the consciousness of Matter. It is a very cryptic but also ...
... luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life. Those that have stood against this Dark Force ...
... thousands of millions of them strewn about and scattered in infinite Space. And these gradually condensed and gathered in volumes and masses, definite forms and shapes, gradually changed their material nature also, developed into sentient forms, living creatures, conscious beings and self-conscious human persons. I have said also that the original dead material particles had in them or associated with ...
... material world because, it was not properly faced and negotiated. One sought to avoid and by-pass it. It was there Sphinx like and none stopped to answer its riddle. The mystery is this. Matter, material Nature that is dubbed unconsciousness is not really so. That is only an appearance. Matter is truly inconscient, that is to say, it has an inner core of consciousness which is its true reality. This ...
... It all began by a separation in the consciousness and it ended by a separation in respect of the worlds and their elements, by a division Page 36 that we witness down to the material nature. The separation in consciousness has produced the separation of forms and the separation of forms has induced pain and suffering. Now therefore there are these countless objects that lie about ...
... luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and Page 8 armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life. Those that have stood ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 THE QUEST AND THE GOAL Man and the Gods 1 THE Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It is the body and substance, the very personification, of unconsciousness-Ignorance carried to the last limit and concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality at the summit ...
... organism, that is to say, it does not happen at a given point of time. A soul is truly aja, unborn; it was always there imbedded as the element of secret consciousness in the bosom of the inconscient material Nature. Only it grew out, manifested itself, attaining gradually an individuality and an integrated personality. Neither can it be said that all souls originally, that is to say, at the very beginning ...
... material world because, it was not properly faced and negotiated. One sought to avoid and bypass it. It was there Sphinx-like and none stopped to answer its riddle. The mystery is this. Matter, material Nature that is dubbed unconsciousness is not really so. That is only an appearance. Matter is truly inconscient, that is to say, it has an inner core of consciousness which is its true reality. This ...
... for Divine Incarnation, avatāra, literally means he who has descended. The Divine comes down himself as a terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, in order to raise the terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary course – even so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid mass of earth from out of the waters of the Deluge. It is his purpose ...
... luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life. Those that have stood against this Dark ...
... earthly misery as we know it. It all began by a separation in the consciousness and it ended by a separation in respect of the worlds and their elements, by a division that we witness down to the material nature. The separation in consciousness has produced the separation of forms and the separation of forms has induced pain and suffering. Now, therefore, there are these countless objects that lie about ...
... to its own domain, following its own dharma of that domain. Thus one can be perfectly calm and at ease witnessing the catastrophies and cataclysms in nature, for one knows it is the dharma of material nature. Man terms them disasters for he judges them according to his own convenience. Even so, one should not be perturbed at the wild behaviour–man calls it wild – of wild animals. Likewise the gods ...
... quality. Even so, Matter, however subtilised, de-materialised remains Matter – pulverized into infinitesimal particles at the farthest limits of the material universe it, does not abandon its material nature, it does not become Life. So again with regard to Life: Life-force, however extended or subtilised, does not acquire the mental power and become Mind. Matter evinces Life-power only when life is ...
... reference. The mind and the life bound normally, because tied to the body-scheme attain the freedom of the spirit when linked to the spirit. The body is bound because it is bound to the ignorant material nature. The body too can attain freedom, the freedom of the spirit, when submitted to the spirit. Freedom is a divine quality; it belongs to the Divine Consciousness. Nothing below that status is ...
... the printed pages of a book, and although she never forgot what she had seen but once —landscape, human figure or painting —yet was she left dissatisfied. She longed to go beyond the forms of material nature, but lacked a knowledge, a vision that could take her beyond. She had also found the artists to be 'mostly a fallow ground.' Even the best among them were unable or unwilling to expand their horizons ...
... being superior to them, a power of Supermind as much above our incomplete mental nature as that is above the nature of animal life and animated Matter,.. as it is immeasurably above the mere material nature. The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free .from the Ignorance which. is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and ...
... infallible. All the objections to a complete evolutionary possibility then fall away, it would, on the contrary, be the inevitable consequence contained not only in Nature as a whole but even in material Nature. In this vision of things the universe will reveal itself in its unity and totality as a manifestation of a single Being, Nature as its power of manifestation, evolution as its process of gradual ...
... and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different, it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at ...
... spiral and now with all that this knowledge of matter has brought us, we shall be able to give to our spiritual progress a more solid basis. Strong with what we have learnt of the secrets of material Nature, we shall be able to join the two extremes and rediscover the supreme Reality in the very heart of the atom. The Mother is unhappy that in translating verse 24 a virtuous life should be ...
... When the question was put to her, the Mother wrote dispassionately on 30 August 1945: The Atomic bomb is in itself the most wonderful achievement and the sign of a growing power of man over material nature. But what is to be regretted is that this material progress and mastery is not the result of and in keeping with a spiritual progress and mastery which alone has the power to contradict and counteract ...
... completely materialistic atmosphere. But once, I saw something in a dream: a Being coming to me, a woman, and telling me, 'You will always have in abundance whatever you need.' It was Nature, material Nature, the same Being I have always seen afterwards. And it's true, it's perfectly true," Mother smilingly swept her arm in a wide arc which included the room, the laden table, the piled up objects on ...
... particular light emanated, as well as its action, by the light's colour. Later, Mother and Sri Aurobindo made a detailed organization of this notion —the gradation of consciousness beginning from material Nature right to the Supreme, shown by different coloured lights. 1 1. Sri Aurobindo's letter on ' Lights' and Mother's Agenda (specially the conversation of 18 May 1963), will give the ...
... Page 1245 There is nothing complete yet done in the material physical Nature, and yet till that is done, there will be nothing complete in finality anywhere. Many things are established, but even the most advanced need the last touches or even many last touches. There is still the problem of the physical material, the flesh and the organs. These have to become unassailable and ...
... communal atavism brought about by worldwide destructive forces in whose workings both Nature and man have assisted. Animism is the obscure memory of an ancient discipline which put us into spiritual communion with intelligent beings and forces living behind the veil of gross matter sensible to our limited material organs. Nature-worship is another side of the same ancient truth. Fetishism remembers barbarously... into the tamasic, crumbling into the animal and almost into the clod by that disintegration through inertia which to the Hindu idea is the ordinary road to disappearance into the vague & rough material of Nature out of which we were made. The ascent of man, according to this theory, is not a facile and an assured march; on the contrary, it is a steep, a strenuous effort, the ascent difficult, though... natural phenomena by means of a system of animal sacrifices, this is the Veda; high religious thinking & profound Monistic ideas forcibly derived from Vedic Nature-worship marred by the crudest notions about physics, psychology, cosmology and material origins & relations generally and mixed up with a great mass Page 315 of unintelligible mystical jargon, this is the Upanishads. If that be so ...
... obscuration of Nature, in the lowest unintelligence of Matter, it is this Will that is a concealed knowledge and compels all these darkened movements to obey, as if mechanically, the divine Law and adhere to the truth of their Nature. It is this which makes the tree grow according to its seed and each action bear its appropriate fruit. In the obscurity of man's ignorance,—less than material Nature's, yet greater... accepted by other divine Powers, that is, it must bring out some potentiality in the nature or bring into it some light of realisation by which the divine Workers may be induced to manifest in the superficial consciousness of humanity and embrace openly their respective functions. And it must be illuminative of the double nature of Agni, this Lord of the lustrous flame. Bhāma means both a light of knowledge... eged body; Agni brings them to effective actuality and perfection. He creates in us the luminous forms of the Immortals. This work he does as a cosmic Power labouring upon the rebellious human material even when in our ignorance we resist the heavenward impulse and, accustomed to offer our actions to the egoistic life, cannot yet or as yet will not make the divine surrender. But it is in proportion ...
... He might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally than now. Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in he course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement... painter, for example, trains his eyes so that he can know how to appraise the beauty of form and colour, line and design, composition and harmony that is found in physical Page 68 nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives them, it is taste, culture, development of the sense of sight, appreciation of beauty that is his preoccupation. Generally, artists who are truly artists... This training of taste, this education of the senses is a very good, a necessary means to prepare the consciousness for a higher development. There are persons who are very crude and very simple in nature. They can have a strong inspiration and arrive at a certain spiritual growth but the foundation will always remain of a somewhat inferior quality: and when they come back to their ordinary consciousness ...
... might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally as now. Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in the course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement... same way the artist, a painter for example, trains his eyes so that he can know how to appraise the beauty of form and colour, line and design, composition and harmony that is found in physical nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives them, it is taste, culture, development of the sense of sight, appreciation of beauty that is his preoccupation. Generally, artists who are truly artists... This training of taste, this education of the senses is a very good, a necessary means to prepare the consciousness for a higher development. There are persons who are very crude and very simple in nature. They can have a strong inspiration and arrive at a certain spiritual growth but the foundation will always remain of a somewhat inferior quality: and when they come back to their ordinary consciousness ...
... atavism brought about by worldwide destructive forces in whose workings both Nature and man have assisted. “Animism is the obscure memory of an ancient discipline which put us into spiritual communion with intelligent beings and forces living behind the veil of gross matter sensible to our limited material organs. Nature worship is another side of the same ancient truth. Fetishism remembers barbarously... into the tamasic, crumbling into the animal and almost into the clod by that disintegration through inertia which to the Hindu idea is the ordinary road to disappearance into the vague and rough material of Nature out of which we were made. The ascent of man, according to this theory, is not a facile and an assured march; on the contrary, it is a steep, a strenuous effort, the ascent difficult, though... “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 ...
... always the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it has developed a sense of limited and separate individual being in mind, life and body. By this instrumentation he acts as if he were a separate existence in the material universe. Nature has evolved certain habitual limiting conditions under which that... self-awareness is the intuitive sense of the witness Purusha, sākṣī . Witness Purusha is a pure consciousness who watches Nature and sees it as an action reflected upon the consciousness and enlightened by that consciousness, but in itself other than it. To mental Purusha Nature is only an action, a complex action of discriminating and combining thought, of will, of sense, of emotion, of temperament... with its own object and way of proceeding. It is quite possible for him to accentuate it in a direction away from existence in Nature, a detachment, a withdrawal from mind, life and body. He may try to live more and more as the witness Purusha, regarding the action of Nature, without interest in it, without sanction to it, detached, rejecting the whole action, withdrawing into pure conscious existence ...
... If there were not this factor, the physical mind of man left to itself would live like the animal, accepting his first actual physical life and its limits as his whole possibility, moving in material Nature's established order and asking for nothing beyond it. But this vital mind, this unquiet life-will comes in with its demands and disturbs this inert or routine satisfaction which lives penned within... inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature,—and even in this construction, these functionings, these reactions... cosmic Illusion. For Mind can only create out of substance what is possible to the substance, it can only do with the force of Nature what is in accordance with her realisable energies; it can only invent or discover what is already contained in the truth and potentiality of Nature. On the other side, it receives inspirations for creation from within itself or from above: but these can only take form if ...
... world And Nature's correspondence with the soul Are written in the mystic heart of life. In the glow of the Spirit's room of memories He could recover the luminous marginal notes Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll, Rescue the preamble and the saving clause Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled That rises from material Nature's sleep. 58... communications: Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes. To these high-peaked dominions sealed to our search Too far from surface Nature's postal routes, Too lofty for our mortal lives to breathe, Deep in us a forgottens kinship points. 29 How wonderfully appropriate and apt this figure of postal routes is! For surface Nature's lines of communication are all restricted... mind becomes a nursery in which Nature and soul carry on their play: A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul, A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms, A play of love and hate and fear and hope Continues in the nursery of mind Its hard and heavy romp of self-bom twins. 151 Nature and soul play on their game of ...
... Page 262 One begins to wonder if the supposed opposition between body and mind or consciousness is not a myth. It may be that the body is fundamentally of the nature of the mind or the mind is really material in nature. In the modern behaviourism, it is supposed that there is no such thing as consciousness, that all the so-called mental or conscious phenomena of perception, emotion, thought... together, both considered as the results of Prakriti, which is fundamentally a material principle. Both mind, (that is, manas, buddhi, chitta and ahamkara) and body are physical, unconscious, jada. The phenomenon of consciousness is explained by supposing an independent principle of Purusha whose very nature is that of conscious luminosity and inactivity. Once again, we have a trenchant ... origin of Nature in a higher Nature, the origin of apara prakriti in the para prakriti, where is also to be found the origin of multiple individualities which are the centres of the Supreme Self, Purushottama, who at once reconciles and synthesises the status of Purusha, Brahman and Ishwara. And the knowledge of this higher Nature not only liberates us from the tangle of Nature, but gives ...
... the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it has developed a sense of limited and separate individual being in mind, life and body. By this instrumentation he acts as if he were a separate existence in the material universe. Nature has evolved certain habitual limiting conditions under which that... arrives at this immortality; it is the individual who rises into self-knowledge, in him it is possessed and by him it is made effective. All life, spiritual, mental or material, is the play of the soul with the possibilities of its nature; for without Page 137 this play there can be no self-expression and no relative self-experience. Even, then, in our realisation of all as our larger... universality. The soul still makes the world-becoming the material for individual experience, but instead of regarding it as something outside and larger than itself on which it has to draw, by which it is affected, with which it has to make accommodations, it is aware of it subjectively as within itself; it embraces both its world-material and its individualised experience of spatial and temporal ...
... premature pulling down of the higher Forces, their contact may be too strong for the flawed and impure material of Nature and its immediate fate may be that of the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine; or the descending influence may withdraw or be spilt because the nature cannot contain or keep it. Again, if it is Power that descends, the egoistic mind or vital may try to... the will, the self-affirmation of the spirit in the material universe. What the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is concealed by her appearances: a certain change of nature prepares, accompanies or follows upon this illumination... soul gathers the essence of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it for Page 925 the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action is occult and not obtruded on the surface. In the early material and vital stages of the evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness of soul; there are psychic activities, but the instrumentation, the form of these ...
... electricity, gas etc. Disciple : What is Nature ? Sri Aurobindo : The Universal Divine has projected the Universe and there is Universal Nature which affords all the material for us. Essentially, everything in Nature corresponds to something in the Universal Soul. For instance, the vital corresponds to the divine Tapas. The details about the law and the process of rebirth are too complex to... formations of Universal Nature – as in the case of ordinary souls. In case these are Supramentalised the whole being is quite ready ; one has simply to take up the ready formation and manifest the Divine. Disciple : But what affords the material for the physical or the vital bodies ? Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by "what affords" ? It is already there in Nature, as there is electricity... its need gathers the material from Nature. The k ā rana-śarira generally means the Supramental body. Disciple : In the orthodox terminology, though k ā rana-śarira means .vij ñā namaya , yet they speak of it not as a means of development but as a means of escape. To them the use of k ā rana-ś arira is to burn away the seeds of everything that is in Nature. They believe that ...
... Matthew 16:17 shows Peter as receiving his revelation about Jesus' Messiahship not from "flesh and blood" but from Jesus' "Father in heaven": man in general is meant, with an emphasis on "his material, limited nature as opposed to that of the spirit Page 160 world." 78 From the context of Hebrews 2:14, where "blood and flesh" instead of "flesh and blood" occurs, we gather that Jesus... and the epithet "dramatic" by Brown leads us to Wright's further elucidation of a midrash-character: "the biblical material is handled creatively. Details are altered to fit the purposes of the author and events are idealized and even embellished upon with legendary and imaginative material to make them more ample, vivid and edifying." While we are about Matthew and his exaggerations, a short... work of the individual evangelist." This means that the tradition anterior to both Luke and John was already "crassly material" and they accepted it, only exercising their narrative artistry, their dramatic faculty. But their readiness to incorporate a tradition of crass materiality in order to oppose critics who made out the resurrected Jesus to be a phantom, a ghost, is apparent, as also their proclivity ...
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