... mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have... constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality. Self-preservation, self-repetition, self-multiplication are necessarily, then, the predominant instincts of all material existence. Material life seems ever to move in a fixed cycle. The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change, and the more our mentality acquires elevation and organisation, the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect... them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities. It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but ...
... conditions. It is very well taken care of. ( silence ) How is it over there? 6 I have to get used to it.... I find it very difficult to reconcile the inner consciousness with material life. Material life is a dreadful burden to me: all material things are so heavy, so leaden.... I find it very difficult. I can't seem to reconcile the two. Oh!... Did you go to the performance of The... exactly! That's right. Material life is.... I don't know why, perhaps it comes from past lives, but I find it unbearable. Oh!... In what way is it unbearable? Do you have particular difficulties? No, nothing, small difficulties, nothing to speak of, but everything Page 166 is a burden. I can't seem to infuse any consciousness into this material life, you know; there's a sort... extraordinary. Extraordinary. But it would seem that the external world was something... absurd to him, you know. Yes, exactly. Absurd. Absurd. Yes. I've reached the point where the only material life I could tolerate would be that of a sannyasin in a hut—and even then, a naked sannyasin, because even clothes are a nuisance! Ohh! You see, everything seems dreadfully.... I just can't infuse ...
... Might Have Been in the past is the material out of which much of the Page 513 future is shaped. It would not be so if the material life were a self-existent thing, proceeding out of itself, sufficient to itself, ending with itself. But the material life is only a selection, a formation, a last result of an infinite conscious life behind which far exceeds the sum of all that actually exists... to arrive at the precise & practical meaning of this identification & this separation, this detachment & freedom & shall discover the secret of action & rebirth if we look at the actual facts of material life & then at the Vedantic explanation of our conscious existence. We have, to start with, this fundamental divergence already noted between ordinary psychology & the psychology of Vedanta,—the former... vitalised matter, which have been trained to harbour & bear its workings. But in the process Mind, like Life, has become to a large extent a slave to its instruments; the processes of matter & material life enter into its action, encase, condition and limit its workings, are intolerant of increasing complexity & intensity, tend to damage or break the form & the functions when subjected to the increasing ...
... inanity of the present way of seeing and understanding things, based on right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark ... all those contradictions; the entire judgment, the entire conception of material life is based on that. Even the physical part which thought it knew how to live and knew what needs to be done and how it should be done, it too has to understand that this is not true knowledge, not... I don't know. And truly, with the feeling that ALL that one has lived, all one has known, all one has done, is a perfect illusion. Then, you know.... When one has the spiritual experience that material life is an illusion (some find it painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and cheerful that it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life), but now, it's the whole spiritual construction... feeling. There's no need to go off anywhere, no need at all, none at all. 72.275 (Question:) But where do you go when you suddenly go off like that? But I don't “go off”! I don't go out of material life, but it ... appears different. As if it were made of something else. Here we are then, faced with a few of the main coordinates — minus one, which we will soon describe and which opens up .. ...
... We're really... ( helpless gesture )—we know nothing. All our so-called knowledge is.... We don't even know our own destiny. Yes! It's pathetic. ( silence ) And materially, in the material life, you feel you are entangled in something in which every solution is false. Yes, yes, that's exactly it. So you don't know what to do. In practical life, you don't know what to do.... You... For instance, I say "the Divine"—what is the Divine? I don't know—and yet I can't say that I don't know. And even saying that is false—that's not it. Everything is NOT IT. It isn't it. Even material life is like that. Take eating, for example, depending on a certain attitude (is it an attitude? I don't know, because the consciousness is the same), the SAME food can be either absolutely detestable... positive ones, depending on.... What does it depend on? That's the point. Because the consciousness is apparently the same, you simply don't know what causes the change.... In other words, the whole material life is... unreal. You were talking of fighting, but fighting what? Everything is a mirage. We don't know what it is, we don't know WHAT there really is. What does it depend on? There is something ...
... underlined. Supra-cosmic Aim of Life But there are theories and even yogic experiences which, even while admitting the relative validity of the material life and also of the existence of supra-terrestrial planes, maintain that both material life and supra-terrestrial life are temporary and that the entire cosmos and individual souls in the cosmos are ultimately unreal, and the only effort that... corresponding aims of life. The question is as to whether the Upanishads put forward the possibility and page - 104 realization of the transformation of the inconscient and transformation of material life into divine life. For, the full integration would imply the conquest of the Inconscience by the superconscience, so that the super-conscience, if it is concealed in the inconscience, can also manifest ...
... not only for the triumph of the soul in the kingdom of Light, but also—and more—for the triumph of God in the kingdom of the material life. They strove, both of them, with an astonishing equipollence of intuitive knowledge, for the complete illumination of the material life and an unflawed manifestation of the Divine on earth—an Epiphany in transfigured humanity. Page 362 Human reason... on the shoals of his animal self. His inherent divinity must awake and assert itself. He must one day come to realise that this mind, however developed, is a tool of the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by ...
... to a tissue of compromises. Of the two elements, abstractionism is a denial of the ultimate Reality Page 32 in the experience of man, and anti-pragmatism a denial of the truth of material life; and both lead to a deep and rankling discontent in the popular mind, whatever may be heir effect upon exceptional individuals. Nihilism or agnosticism cuts away the peaks of the being, and anti-... that is an eventuality which has to be faced in any work of radical purification. At this juncture of Indian spiritual culture, when the higher light seemed to hide behind the veil, and the material life pressed forward with its clamorous demands and irresistible claims, came the impact of the materialistic West, at once disruptive and galvanizing. It disrupted the spiritual values which had been... epoch of inner exploration and outer creation, and the incrustation that had J begun in time-worn traditions and dead formalism, seemed to disappear under this powerful and fateful impact. The material life which is the foundation of Spirit's.! self-manifestation on earth, and which had been sedulously neglected and discouraged by the followers of Jnânayoga in their overmastering mental absorption ...
... developed the finer perception of any higher values and supersensuous realities, any refined aesthesis and sensibilities; when it wallows in the material life and its crude amenities, or even makes its mental powers and faculties subserve the ends of material life, it means that the psychic in it has not awakened—the being is still wandering through a spiritual night. The psychic being has an infallible... causality; it is the determining agent, in union with the divine Will in it, of the purpose and processes of its incarnations. It freely accepts the conditions and inherent limitations of the material life and the risks and hazards of its journey through the supraphysical planes to work out the tangled complex of possibilities without which the many-sided perfection and fulfilment of its destiny ...
... transition, then the secret of material creation will be solved, and Science will be able to create material life and not as now merely destroy it. We can now understand what the Sruti means when it says that Matariswun in Brahman setteth the waters to their places. Brahman is the reality behind all material life, and the operations of creation are Page 128 only a limited part of His universal... its body as a robe surrounds its wearer, for it is wider & less trammelled in its nature & range; it is the selecting agency from which & by which a part is selected for waking purposes in the material life. The Dream Consciousness Page 104 is itself [surrounded] by a still wider consciousness which we call the Sleep Condition or the Causal Body and from this & by this it is selected for ...
... fullness of its complexity. Its first evolutionary basis is the material life: Nature began with that and man also has to begin with it; he has first to affirm his material and vital existence. But if he stops there, there can be for him no evolution; his next and greater preoccupation must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life—both individual and social—as perfected as possible. This was... master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life. Page 1091 A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider ...
... Supra-cosmic Aim of Life But there are theories and even yogic experiences which, even while admitting the relative validity of the material life and also of the existence of supraterrestrial planes, maintain that both material life and supra-terrestrial life are temporary and that the entire cosmos and individual souls in the cosmos are ultimately unreal, and the only effort that... existence and their corresponding aims of life. The question is as to whether the Upanishads put forward the possibility and realization of the transformation of the inconscient and transformation of material life into divine life. For, the full integration would imply the conquest of the Inconscience by the superconscience, so that the superconscience, if it is concealed in the inconscience, can also manifest ...
... if the vehicle is weak or weary, the Light will find either no expression at all, or only a mutilated and warped one. Many brilliant spiritual adventures have been shipwrecked on the shoals of material life and paid the penalty of its disdainful neglect. Let us take a concrete example to illustrate the point : There was a lady of admirable spiritual perception and capacity. She was steadily advancing... the Will of the Supreme. What is that Will ? What is the object of creation, the final aim of this long evolutionary labour? It is the revelation of the One in the Many in the conditions of material life, or, as it is put in philosophical terms, the manifestation of the Divine in Matter. Each individual, being an essential and eternal part of the Divine, is driving, without being aware of it, towards... towards the same consummation—the manifestation. What is Manifestation As we have said above, manifestation is the self-revelation of the One in the Many in the conditions of material life. Matter, though in essence a mode of the Spirit, is yet its negation and denial in evolutionary earth life, which arises out of the Inconscience—a level of Existence created by the descent of the Spirit ...
... not only for the triumph of the soul in the kingdom of Light, but also—and more—for the triumph of God in the kingdom of the material life. They strove, both of them, with an astonishing equipollence of intuitive knowledge, for the complete illumination of the material life and an unflawed manifestation of the Divine on earth —an Epiphany in transfigured humanity. Human reason understands... on the shoals of his animal self. His inherent divinity must awake and assert itself. He must one day come to realise that this mind, however developed, is a tool of the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by ...
... real & ultimate peace in material world, that great flux & whirl of movement, we are driven to look within for a principle of eternal stability. To look within is to look behind the veil of our material life. The very movement supposes that material existence is not everything, that our waking consciousness is not the whole field of our consciousness, but only one outward movement of our being & there... form the knot in the bondage of rebirth; action, whether of the thought, the speech or the body, is only an outward mechanical process by which the soul-state shadows out or symbolises itself in material life. It has no essential value of its own, but only the value of what it expresses; it can therefore have no binding power upon the soul which originates & determines it. What it does and can help to ...
... certain pure enjoyments of its own as a sort of reward for its service or regard it as no more than an extension and flower of the vital urge, an ideal luxury contingent upon the satisfaction of the material life. The mind much more intimately than the body and the life is the man, and the mind as it develops insists more and more on making the body and the life an instrument—an indispensable instrument... themselves to a higher and more integral secret into which as yet only the few individuals have shown themselves fit to enter. The Gita's message to the mind that follows after the vital and material life is that all life is indeed a manifestation of the universal Power in the individual, a derivation from the Self, a ray from the Divine, but actually it figures the Self and the Divine veiled in ...
... nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed... that of the eternal succession of dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are in ...
... the world is an illusion or a delusion, neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother accepts "the refusal of the ascetic" to grant material life a final goal, just as they do not accept "the denial of the materialist" to accord a reality to a "soul" or "spirit" exceeding material life and serving as its very basis and as the reason of its existence. Since money is an important force at work in the field of ...
... 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 of the other planes of existence. It is necessary now to look more closely into this problem, regard it in itself and determine the nature and limits of this connection and interco... rigid world-balancement could have conceivably come into being. There could have been a conception of this kind and a fiat in an All-Will, or an idea, a movement of the soul towards an egoistic material life of the Ignorance. The eternal individual soul urged by some inexplicable desire arising within it can be supposed to have sought the adventure of the darkness and taken a plunge from its native ...
... three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument. Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection... liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind. The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect Page 49 spiritual existence would ...
... spirit, present indeed in all our outward [being] and action,—for all being and action are of the spirit, but still its real nature, its native action is concealed, altered, not manifest in the material life in its true nature of a spiritual force. This is a fundamental idea of Vedic thinking; and if we keep it well in mind, we shall be able to understand the peculiar imagery of the Veda. Earth is the... plants, all vegetation, वन, वनस्पति, ओषधी. Agni is hidden in the trees and plants, he is the secret heat and fire in everything that grows on earth, वनेषु. All that we take pleasure in in the material life, could not be or grow without the presence of the secret flame of the spirit. The awakening of the fire by the friction of the Aranis, the rubbing together of the two pieces of tinder-wood is one ...
... may make the crucial choice and either accept or refuse transformation. My whole work depends upon this movement; it is the decisive ordeal of this Yoga. For the physical consciousness and the material life cannot change if this does not change. Nothing that may have been done before, no inner illumination, experience, power or Ananda, is of any eventual value if this is not done. If the little external... perceive by its own inadequate instruments or judge by its puerile standards; in spite of all opposition this is pressing down for manifestation in the physical consciousness and the material Page 155 life. On the other side is this lower vital nature with all its pretentious arrogance, ignorance, obscurity, dullness or incompetent turbulence, standing for its own prolongation, standing ...
... vehicle of the nervous responses of our physical nature; it is the field and instrument of the smaller sensations, desires, reactions of all kinds to the impacts of the outer physical and gross material life. This vital physical part (supported by the lowest part of the vital proper) is therefore the agent of most of the lesser movements of our external life; its habitual reactions and obstinate pettinesses... life—and transformation as we conceive it and speak of it. Not only an individual or a group of individuals or even all individuals, but life, the overall consciousness of this more or less developed material life, have to be transformed. Without such a transformation we shall have the same misery, the same calamities and the same atrocities in the world. A few individuals will escape from it by their psychic ...
... powerful in its activities and robust in its health and organic functioning. To achieve these results, it will be good, as a general rule, to make use of habit as a help in organising one's material life, Page 50 for the body functions more easily within the framework of a regular routine. But one must know how to avoid becoming a slave to one's habits, however good they may be; the... peace, and with goodwill and a steadfast aspiration, you will be able to create a harmonious atmosphere which is very conducive to progress. In social life, in addition to the words that concern material life and occupations, there will be those that express sensations, feelings and emotions. Here the habit of outer silence proves of Page 58 valuable help. For when one is assailed by a wave ...
... It was so intense that it was painful. It reinforces what the old Schools have always taught—but Sri Aurobindo rejected it! Sri Aurobindo told us precisely that the Truth could be lived IN material life.... Of course, there must be a change of consciousness, but I thought.... ( silence ) My body's consciousness has changed—that much I know. Not totally, of course, but enough to feel that... one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion—that's what I was living yesterday evening. And then.... It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully Page 147 beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual construction ...
... life—and transformation as we conceive it and speak of it. Not only an individual or a group of individuals or even all individuals, but life, the overall consciousness of this more or less developed material life, have to be transformed. Without such a transformation we shall have the same misery, the same calamities and the same atrocities in the world. A few individuals will escape from it by their psychic... and you have to start all over again. If it were the transformed part of the being going back to its old ways, it would be most depressing, but it is not like that. It is the material part, the material life which is sustained, supported, so to say, by a subconscient life. And this subconscient is beginning to get individualised around some people; it has certain affinities with a kind of subconscient ...
... trance, not at all: I am wide awake and FULLY active. I see things, I do things, I hear people, I... the whole time. But I forget—I simply forget about material life. Then someone comes and abruptly calls me back. I don't go out of material life, but... it appears different. ( silence ) Nothing to ask? No, Mother. Or to say? No, Mother, not really.... I am in the course of revising ...
... followed and completed by the discovery and uncovering of the light in the very depths of darkness of the Inconscient, tamas. Not the rejection of Matter and material life but realisation that Matter too is Spirit and that material life too can bear and manifest the spiritual light and bliss - this seems to be the basis of the Vedic teaching. " Page 33 It i s this unitive perception ...
... or nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she... Page 116 succession of dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries ...
... is said the outer existence, the material life does not continue long, it comes sooner or later to a dead stop. Thus the inner being is liberated completely and is freed into the life beyond, the Divine Existence, the Brahman. It is said that when each and every seed of the various elements that compose the being, that sprouts into the luxuriant tree of material life, when each and every seed is burnt ...
... or nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she... is that of the eternal succession of dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. 29.Sri Aurobindo: ...
... is to divinize the normal material life of humanity and also to divinize the great secular attempt of humanity of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by the integralization of a widely perfect spiritual existence. This would be the crown alike of the individual and common effort of humanity. Consummation of this process of divinizing material life of humanity means the kingdom ...
... darkest caves of the physical or the inconscient, and that one must descend into the depths of darkness to recover that highest light. In practical terms, this implied not rejection of physical and material life but an intensive cultivation and transformation of that life. It is true that there was a gradual deviation from the original Vedic conception of life and education. Much of it was recovered... of their teachings. But already a kind of exclusivism had become manifest during the Upanishadic Age. Later, sharp distinctions came to be made between Spirit and Matter, and a denunciation of material life became more and more predominant. The call of the spirit and a recoil from matter characterize powerful movements of Indian thought. This affected the educational system, and the original impulse ...
... followed and completed by the discovery and uncovering of the light in the very depths of darkness of the Inconscient, tamas. Not the rejection of Matter and material life but realisation that the Matter too is Spirit and that material life too can bear and manifest the spiritual light and bliss — this seems to be the inner basis of the Vedic teaching. It is this unitive perception that could ...
... approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an outflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not... everything in the twinkle of an eye. (Letters on Yoga, p. 35.) * * * It is darkest nights that prepare the greatest dawns and it is so because it is into the deepest inconscience of material life that we have to bring, not an intermediate glimmer, but the full play of the divine Light. (Letters on Yoga, p. 35.) Page 102 ...
... attitude towards them. This weakness—for, it is nothing short of that—has to be cured and replaced by a masterful dealing with the money-power for the organisation of a rich and powerfully creative material life in the world. What is Money ? According to Sri Aurobindo, "Money is the visible sign of a universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical... selfless and disinterested. We do them, because the ego in us takes a positive delight in them—a self-regarding delight, full of pride and complacency. The perception that we have been given the material life and its powers and resources not for the egoistic satisfaction of our desires and cravings, not even for our mental ideas and predilections and moral principles, but for the realisation of the ...
... contact—with WHAT IS THERE. Then it will be the fairy tale for the whole world. The Third Position And by the same token, a whole big chunk of spiritual life collapsed. A big chunk of material life, too. Or rather, the collapse of that material wall or partition, that web, automatically and simultaneously brought with it the collapse of the whole terrestrial spiritual mode, as if one were... (and probably before, but Sri Aurobindo said nothing about it). Since man has been man, he has vaguely perceived, first in his sleep, then with closed eyes, in his "lost" moments (lost for the material life), all kinds of forces and influences which assumed one face or another, frightening or sweet, luminous or dark, threatening or beneficent; he has felt immense movements that carried him off to "heaven ...
... the glories of his spiritual existence, he does not necessarily die to his mental - and material life, but can bring those glories down into his earthly nature, and achieve a dynamic harmony of divine existence. Therefore, any philosophy or culture that clips his spiritual wings and chains him to the material- life is, by the very logic of evolution, an obscurantism,, a reactionary movement doomed to ...
... the only way to the inevitable .self-transcendence and divine fulfilment, which is his destiny. What dangers does he not brave, what risks does he not manfully take in the adventures of his material life! How many lives have not been sacrificed in the expeditions and explorations undertaken from age to age! Failures after failures have been accepted on the way to a cherished goal; dire threats... pervasive degeneracy calls for a radical and revolutionary redemption—and that can only be Yoga. "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner .being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and Page 12 followed unless there is a strong awakening ...
... beautiful objects we reach to the Mighty Spirit behind them whom our soul recognizes no longer as an object of knowledge or of worship but as her lover, to whom she must fly, leaving her husband the material life & braving the jeers & reprobation of the world for His sake. Thus by a singular paradox, one of those beautiful oxymorons of which the Hindu temperament is full, we reach God through the senses... their utmost depth and measured their utmost reach, and far passed the stage of soul-evolution where they can satisfy. And yet the work of the philosophic mind incidentally serves sensuous and material life by increasing its resources and the depth of its charm. For the power of the philosophic ideals which have profoundly affected humanity is not limited to the domain of the intellect but also affects ...
... & sages?We can conceive with difficulty such ideas as belonging to that undeveloped psychological condition of the semi-savage to which sacrifices of propitiation & Nature-Gods helpful only for material life, safety & comfort were all-sufficient. Certainly, also, the earliest Indian writings subsequent to Vedic times bear out these indications. To the writers of the Brahmanas the sacrificial ritual... a term of being, not formal though instrumentally creative of form, measuring & containing it, mind, mati or manas. Mind itself is biune in movement, modified mind working in direct relation to material life (anu, the Vedantic prana) and moulding itself to its requirements in order to seize and enjoy it, and pure mind above Page 119 and controlling it. For each of these three subjective ...
... years, until the world was fit to receive it. The time has now come for her to impart it to the other nations, who are now on the verge of decadence and death. The peoples of Europe have carried material life to its farthest expression, the science of bodily existence has been perfected, but they are suffering from diseases which their science is powerless to cure. England with her practical intelligence... that the world may come and sit at her feet to learn the secrets she alone has to give. When the restless spirit of Europe has added a new phase of discovery to the evolution of the science of material life, has regulated politics, rebased society, remodelled law, rediscovered science, the spirit of Asia, calm, contemplative, self-possessed, takes possession of Europe's discovery and corrects its ...
... very self of the self of things, the very spirit of which the soul of man is a living power and to a vision of unity and totality which is bound to take note of all that lies behind our apparent material life. What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature Page 249 and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his backlook upon the past... separate world. The seeker of the Self and Spirit, the God-lover, tended to become the cloistered monk, the ascetic, the mystic, the eremite and to set the spiritual apart from and against the material life. The lover of Nature went away from the noise of man and daily things to commune with her largeness and peace. The gods were found more in the lights of solitude than in the thoughts and actions ...
... distinction, and in that, even if Matter is not really cut off from Spirit, yet it seems with such a practical definiteness to be so cut off, it is so different, even so contrary in its law, the material life seems so much to be the negation of all spiritual existence that its rejection might well appear to be the one short cut out of the difficulty,—as undoubtedly it is; but a short cut or any cut is... impulse to embrace all knowledge, to become all light, to possess truth and be truth, to enforce love and joy and be love and joy; but always there is the deviation and error and grossness of the material life-instincts and the denial and obstruction of the material sense and the physical instruments. Error ever pursues its knowledge, darkness is inseparably the companion and background of its light; ...
... is worth noting that a few aspects of Shahr-i-Sokhta in the field of burial practices, craft techniques, 54.Books & Books, New Delhi, 1985. 55.Pp. vi-vii. Page 231 material life and ideology, can be related to earlier traditions in Baluchistan or in south Afghanistan as we know them from Mehrgarh or from Mundigak (periods I and II). Exchanges, influences and contacts between... of massive resistance to the Aryans' quest of soul and God, must we be prevented from seeing behind the mystic poetry a struggle on the physical plane? Just as the Rishis took the details of the material life around them to figure forth the vicissitudes of the inner adventure, just as there were physical animals and rivers and hills and various barriers to get round or get through, should we not visualize ...
... theirs is an abiding and eternal reality while matter Page 459 and material life are subject to constant change and are fleeting and transitory. The sages have .found that there is an eternal Reality stable and unchanging behind this phenomenal world of constant change. Matter or material life is subject to birth, growth,, development and decay and nothing .can stop this process ...
... and philanthropic works. The fact was that ever since Buddha and Shankara appeared on the Indian scene and made Nirvana or Moksha their principal appeal to the people, the life element and the material life were relegated to the background and we fell an easy prey to the more dynamic invaders from the west. Now the balance has to be righted in the light of the new spiritual ideals recovered from our... life on earth. He therefore delved deep into the spiritual traditions of the past based on the Vedas and Upanishads and found that there was only one way out of the age-long impasse between the material life of the 'Vest and spiritual life of the East and that is to establish a new way of life, a new principle of consciousness .higher than the mental principle which has been operative on earth from ...
... new discoveries, which require exploration of the psychical and spiritual domains. Similarly, centuries of experiments in the spiritual fields have shown that the Page 141 neglect of material life and neglect of collective welfare result in poverty or bankruptcy and even in economic and political slavery. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out: It is therefore of good augury that after many... therefore, Page 145 this crisis has to be met, development of psychic and spiritual consciousness should be fostered. Unfortunately, spiritual consciousness is often conceived as a denial of material life and concerns of collective life. In Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's view, however, there is no fundamental opposition between Matter and Spirit. True integrality, according to them, implies rejection ...
... darkest caves of the physical or the inconscient, and that one must descend into the depths of darkness to recover that highest light. In practical terms, this implied not rejection of physical and material life but an intensive cultivation and transformation of that life. It is true that there was a gradual deviation from the original Vedic conception of life and education. Much of it was recovered... second century B.C.) already a kind of exclusivism had become manifest during the Upanishadic Age. Later, sharp distinctions came to be made between Spirit and Matter, and a denunciation of material life became more and more predominant. The call of the spirit and a recoil from matter characterize powerful movements of Indian thought. This affected the educational system, and the original impulse ...
... conquest of the inconscient, we have to assign a central importance to those pursuits of the supra conscient and the supra-rational which deal with the cosmic and terrestrial, right up to our material life and its subconscious and unconscious recesses. In this context, our aim should be to give the right place and justification to that tendency in materialism which affirms matter, discovers secrets... a rich accumulation of results of these efforts. The treasure of these results can now come to our help. The most important element of this treasure is related to the acceptance of dynamic material life and its transformation by means of superconscient light. In contrast to the life negating philosophies, here the emphasis is on life-affirmation, and education is so conceived that life itself is ...
... master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life'.¹ The question was as to the ways and means by which this greater whole-being,... be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded is my conception of the matter.¹ The descent of the Supermind into the Inconscient, and the manifestation of the Supermind in material life—this was the clear object on which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked together. A major portion of this work, in its external aspect, was the development and organisation of their research laboratory ...
... said the outer existence, the material life does not continue long, it comes sooner or later to a dead stop. Thus the inner being is liberated completely and is freed into the life beyond, the Divine Existence, the Brahman. It is said that when each and every seed of the various elements that compose the being, that sprouts into the luxuriant tree of material life, when each and every seed is burnt ...
... nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed,... proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. 1 Book VII: Canto 4: p. 590. 2 Book VII: Canto 4: p. 591. Page 272 From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are inte ...
... thing is very singular. For it is above all contradiction, all smirch and stain. It remains always shining and pure. At times you will remember it in your outer material life. You will be entering now another order of material life. Perhaps you will forget this precious thing, but it will not forget you: it remains for ever vigilant, watchful, resplendent. And at any critical moment of your life ...
... nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she... creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousnes to higher reaches of consciousness. ¹ Book VII: Canto 4: p. 590. ² Book VII: Canto 4: p. 591. Page 252 From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries ...
... idea of what is the Kingdom of Heaven. Then there will be a perfection of knowledge, a perfection of will, a perfection of aesthetic life, a perfection of the plenty of life and a perfection of material life. There you have got the four aspects in which perfection must be realized: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati, the four aspects of the supreme Mother that are perfect. This conception... into his consciousness so that she may give him true Knowledge. The man who is dedicated to machinery will have to bring into his life the Mahasaraswati aspect - perfect detail and organization in material life - so as to make matter a fit receptacle of the spirit, to make matter express the spirit perfectly. That is how the four aspects of the divine Nature have to come into the human being and embody ...
... formative Light, the poise of a special Power for a new creation and a renovation and remoulding of the entire being of man. Unless She assumes upon Herself the discords and disabilities of the material life, and descends into the blind abyss of its inconscient origin. Her divine Light cannot grow and glow in this dim waste of terrestrial existence. If the transcendent and universal poises could effect... divine life. Besides, the aim of the Integral Yoga being the supra- mental fulfilment of the Divine in man, the infusion of the supramental principle into Matter and the eventual conversion of the material life into the supramental life, are a work of such immense and intricate difficulties that even the most mighty and daring human effort, though aided and fortified by the universal and transcendent Mother ...
... at all in a trance: I am wide awake and fully active. I see things, I do things, I hear people, I ... the whole time. But I forget—I simply forget about material life. Then someone comes and abruptly calls me back . I don't go out of material life, but it appears different. And Mother sat staring thoughtfully. I really think the physical world is changing. People will probably notice it only in ...
... promise of motion in the figure of Nadir, pervade the picture. A certain stiffness of design marks much of the old Hindu art, a stiffness courted by the artists perhaps in order that no insistence of material life in the figures might distract attention from the expression of the spirit within which was their main object. By some inspiration of genius the artist has transformed this conventional stiffness ...
... of concealment who fences in the Light, Panis, lords of sense-activity who intercept the herds of the divine Rays & pen them up in the obscure cavern of our unexpressed being behind this outward material life—or the battle is, generally, against the legioned hosts of evil, the armies of mortality for the victory of Immortality in the mortal. The journey, the ascent, the march is, by the very nature of ...
... to him. We have subjective faculties hidden in us which correspond to all the tiers and strata of the objective cosmic system and these form for us so many planes of our possible existence. This material life and our narrowly limited consciousness of the physical world are far from being the sole experience permitted to man,—be he a thousand times the Son of Earth. If maternal Earth bore him and retains ...
... iousness is not only Mind of our mind. Speech of our speech. Sense of our sense; it is also Life of our life. In other words, it is a supreme and universal energy of existence of which our own material life and its sustaining energy are only an inferior result, a physical symbol, an external and limited functioning. That which governs our existence and its functionings, does not live and act by them ...
... resting-place, the earth, from under my feet and make havoc of my life in sensation; even Science therefore consents that I shall work on the evidence of my senses as an acknowledged fact in my material life of earth-bounded existence. In this duplicity of standpoint we see as in a glass darkly some image of the manner in which the Absolute wills to be phenomenally conditioned; at once knows perfectly ...
... personality. Beyond direct seeing there is a faculty of direct being, if I may so express it, which, if we can entirely reach & hold to it, makes us one with God, brahmabhúta, can reveal in this material life the perfection of Brahman as it is intended to be manifested in humanity, so that man on the human level, in the human cadre, becomes perfect as God is perfect. The intellect itself cannot reach ...
... things; but it has to be seen in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life. That is why the Japanese with their fine sense in these things,—a sense which modern Europe with her assault of crowded art galleries and over-pictured walls seems to have quite lost, though perhaps ...
... natural to forecast a Westernised world with such petty differences as might be permissible in a European unity given up to the rigorous scientific pursuit of the development and organisation of material life. Across this possibility falls the shadow of India. Sir John Woodroffe quotes the dictum of Professor Lowes Dickinson that the opposition is not so much between Asia and Europe as between India ...
... has a significance... mostly even a very precise aim... Symbolic dreams are usually very coherent, one remembers everything, to the least detail... more living, more real more intense than the material life.... The Mother ...
... non- mechanistic biology, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, not only to criticise defects in prevalent vitalistic theories but to repudiate the very essence of vitalism which posits a purposive more-than-material life-force utilising physico-chemical processes within certain limits imposed by them: he adheres to another type of materialistic thought which has come to be known as "organicism". We must now examine ...
... has much grown in reality, intensity and deepness. With my love and blessings The Mother 2.2.1948 Matter, blind to the Light, deaf to the call, the material consciousness and material life are the last and most obstinate refuge of the Inconscient and its resistance. There, the nearer the light the higher it raises its wall of resistance. When that is overcome, the decisive transformation ...
... detail; all the words pronounced, all the gestures made have their importance and the least infraction of the rule, the least fault committed can have fatal consequences. It is the same in the material life and if one had the initiation into the true way of living, one could transform the physical existence. This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the ...
... master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life.” 45 ...
... the moment I cannot think of any other sense. February 27, 1932 It is the darkest nights that prepare the greatest dawns— and it is so because it is into the deep inconscience of material life that we have to bring, not an intermediate glimmer, Page 177 but the full glory of the divine Light. I can take no stock in your friend's theories—at that rat half the world's ...
... the aura of the Divine Presence. On that inward plane you are not a defective body with a struggling soul but a sheer soul with its own subtle responsive body free of all embarrassments of the material life. The dream begins on this plane, then shifts to the other where you need help, but even the help is a sufficient minimum and it can be dropped at the earliest opportunity. From that moment you are ...
... Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. About Shelley who would seem to be a sheer "sun-treader" Sri Aurobindo 2 has written: "If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; the very stumblings ...
... Somebody asked the Mother: How dependent is the building of Auroville upon man's acceptance of spirituality? The Mother answered: The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two has no sense for me as, in truth, life and the spirit are one and it is in and by the physical work that highest Spirit must be manifested. The Mother, Words ...
... ss which would not only meet but outweigh their full force of darkness. It is the darkest nights that prepare the greatest dawns—and it is so because it is into the deep inconscience of material life that we have to bring, not an intermediate glimmer, but the full glory of the divine Light. Page 296 The Vital World and the Supramental Descent When there is a pressure on the vital ...
... Works The Synthesis of Yoga Chapter II Self-Consecration All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger ...
... when we study and understand, we perceive that Page 575 only a little of her action and growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is carried on subconsciously as in the rest of her material life. We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence. A superficial observation of our ...
... ideal an entire return, loss, immersion or extinction of the Jiva in the Supreme. The Dualist or the partial Monist turns to the path of Devotion and directs us to shed indeed the lower ego and material life, but to see as the highest destiny of the spirit of man, not the self-annihilation of the Buddhist, not the self-immersion of the Adwaitin, not a swallowing up of the many by the One, but an eternal ...
... any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner. In India, 1 Egypt, Chaldea, China, Greece, the Celtic countries they have formed part of various Yogic systems and disciplines which had once a great hold ...
... man, helps us to cease seeing the world in the terms of our sense experiences and enables us to become sensitive to the great unseen forces, powers, impulses & tendencies which stand behind our material life and determine and govern it. To jnana the whole machinery of the world reveals itself in its hidden principles; the nature of Purusha, the workings of Prakriti, the principles of our being, God's ...
... to their truth that, when tested by the rude ordeal of life and experience, they go to pieces. All that inopportune disaster proves is that they are no fit guides to ordinary human conduct; for material life which is the field of conduct is only intellectual on its mountaintops; in the plains and valleys ideas must undergo limitation by unideal conditions and withstand the shock of crude sub-ideal forces ...
... the law they impose on him for the law of his life, a world of struggle, suffering and sorrow. The way to liberation is to turn from the outward to the inward, from the appearance created by the material life which lays its burden on the mind and imprisons it in the grooves of the life and the body to the divine Reality which waits to manifest itself through the freedom of the spirit. Love of the world ...
... the afternoon offering to the Rudras and the evening offering to the Adityas and all the gods,—where then is the world of the Yajamana? (that is to say, what is the spiritual efficacy beyond this material life of the three different sacrifices & why, to what purpose, is the first offered to the Vasus, the second to the Rudras, the third to the Adityas?) He who knows this not, how should he perform (e ...
... Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the frame of their symbolic imagery from the material life around them. 20 October 1936 Homer and Chaucer are poets of the physical consciousness—I have pointed that out in The Future Poetry . 31 May 1937 You can't drive a sharp line between ...
... the more vehement movements of the vital ego are among the more prominent landmarks on the road. 2 February 1947 Matter, blind to the Light, deaf to the call, the material consciousness and material life are the last and most obstinate refuge of the Inconscient and its resistance. There, the nearer the light, the higher it raises its wall of resistance. When that is overcome, the decisive transformation ...
... and realise it. Otherwise she will follow the disastrous curve of other western peoples. India and America stand prominent at the two poles that have to meet and become one, the spiritual and the material life; one has shown a preeminent capacity of realisation on the spiritual, the other on the material plane. America must be able to receive freely India's riches and to give freely in return from her ...
... every movement to the Divine and the Shakti" [ p. 10 ]. Can I take this to mean surrender of the outward life to the Universal Nature through reason and will (i.e. a rational adaptation of the material life to the ways of Nature) and surrender of the inward life to the Divine through faith? No. Universal Nature is a mass of forces, mental, vital and physical. The Divine is above with its supreme ...
... whatever to do with sadhana or Yoga and I absolutely repudiate the right of anyone to impose it as a basis for my work or for the life of the Asram. There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Asram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what ...
... Mother with Letters on the Mother October 7, 1914 Oh, let Light be poured on all the earth and Peace inhabit every heart.... Almost all know only the material life heavy, inert, conservative, obscure; their vital forces are so tied to this physical form of existence that, even when left to themselves and outside the body, they are still solely occupied with ...
... beings of the higher regions have no psychic being—the "angels" have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual ...
... Delight means to be free, free with the true Freedom, the Freedom of the constant, invariable union with the Divine Will. Gods are those that are immortal, who are not bound to the vicissitudes of material life in all its narrowness, pettiness, unreality and falsehood. Gods are those who are turned to the Light, who live in the Power and the Knowledge; that is what the Buddha means, he does not mean ...
... conceive or perceive by its own inadequate instruments or judge by its puerile standards; in spite of all opposition this is pressing down for manifestation in the physical consciousness and the material life. On the other side is this lower vital nature with all its pretentious arrogance, ignorance, obscurity, dullness or incompetent turbulence, standing for its own prolongation, standing against the ...
... and you have to start all over again. If it were the transformed part of the being going back to its old ways, it would be most depressing, but it is not like that. It is the material part, the material life which is sustained, supported, so to say, by a subconscient life. And this subconscient is beginning to get individualised around some people; it has certain affinities with a kind of subconscient ...
... in a certain definite form, from all feeling of sex, it... it means that you are still up to your neck in the original animality. In the inner thought one feels it, but in the actuality of material life... What about the actuality? In the outer life I haven't yet realised that. In the inner... You spend your time thinking about it? But one may live twenty-four hours out of twenty-four ...
... never had the integrality, the totality, the perfection of those who concentrated on material realisation. And this is why those who live only in the external consciousness, for whom the earthly material life is all that really exists, concrete and tangible, perceptible to all, always feel that spiritual life is something hazy, something almost mediocre from the material point of view. I have met ...
... animal life—that we depend for life on the circulation of the blood and to have blood we need to eat, and so on, and all that this implies—these are terrible limitations and bondages! As long as material life depends on that, it is obvious that we won't be able to divinise our life. So, we must assume that animality in the human being should be replaced by another source of life, and this is quite ...
... difficult. And the body is made for doing yoga. We are upon earth; the period one passes on earth is that in which one can make progress. One does not progress outside terrestrial life. The earthly, material life is essentially the life of progress, it is here that one makes progress. Outside the earthly life one takes rest or is unconscious or one may have periods of assimilation, periods of rest, periods ...
... doctor because this means that they have no spiritual perseverance and only material means can convince them of their effectiveness. Page 103 When one wants to change something of the material life, whether the character or the functioning of the organs or habits, one must have an unfaltering perseverance, be ready to begin again a hundred times the same thing with the same intensity with ...
... very clumsily—if one returns to the same point of the spiral (only a little higher), one will discover that it is the embryo of a new art which will be an art of beauty and will express not only material life but will also try to express its soul. Anyway, we have not yet come to that, but let us hope we shall reach there soon. So that's all. Why does evolution go in spirals instead of being a ...
... no psychic being — the "angels" have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the Page 22 psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual ...
... beings of the higher regions have no psychic being—the “angels” have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual ...
... is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely material life. This gives, first to the appearance and also to the activity, a kind of vibration, of intensity of vibration, which often creates the impression that this person has a living soul; but it is not ...
... ing things, based on the good, the bad, the fair, the foul, the luminous, the obscure... all these contradictories; and the whole judgment, the whole conception of life is based upon that (the material life), and it is to teach you the inanity of this perception. And I see it. The work has become very acute, very persistent, as though you were called upon to go quickly. Even the practical part ...
... whole yogic terminology, for these Bulletins are meant more for people who lead an ordinary life, though also for students of yoga — I mean people who are primarily interested in a purely physical material life but who try to attain more perfection in their physical life than is usual in ordinary conditions. It is a very difficult task but it is a kind of yoga. These people call themselves "materialists" ...
... time imposes on all radical transformation, on all new creation. The integral Yoga is not an escape from the physical world which leaves it irrevocably to its fate, nor is it an acceptance of material life as it is without any hope of decisive change, or of the world as the final expression of the Divine Will. The integral Yoga aims at scaling all the degrees of consciousness from the ordinary ...
... creation of Auroville. 5 November 1968 Divine Mother, How dependent is the building of Auroville upon man's acceptance of spirituality? The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two has no sense for me as, in truth, life and the spirit are one and it is in and by the physical work that the highest Spirit must be manifested. 19 April 1968 ...
... illumines and enraptures us, the whole reason of our existence and all our goal. Is this not enough to cure us of every personal thought, to make us spread our wings and soar above the contingencies of material life, so as to fly away into Thy divine atmosphere and be able to return as Thy messengers to the earth to announce the glorious tidings of Thy approaching Advent? O Divine Master, sublime Friend ...
... October 7, 1914 Translated by Sri Aurobindo or revised and published under his guidance. Oh, let Light be poured on all the earth and Peace inhabit every heart.... Almost all know only the material life heavy, inert, conservative, obscure; their vital forces are so tied to this physical form of existence that, even when left to themselves and outside the body, they are still solely occupied with ...
... another. Source True Progress We are upon earth; the period one passes on earth is that in which one can make progress. One does not progress outside terrestrial life. The earthly, material life is essentially the life of progress, it is here that one makes progress. Outside the earthly life one takes rest or is unconscious or one may have periods of assimilation, periods of rest, periods ...
... soul states of the earth, the soul states... Soul states that were translated by images. It was interesting. I cannot say it was not interesting; it was interesting, but there was no contact with material life, very little: I could hardly eat, hardly walk... in short, it was something with which one had to busy oneself. And then, at the contact of X, the body began to be interested in all that, to ...
... are obliged to say: this is divine or a help towards the Divine; and that goes against the Divine, it's the Divine's enemy. But this is a pragmatic standpoint, geared to action, to movement in material life—because you haven't yet attained the consciousness surpassing all that; because you haven't reached that inner perfection where you no longer have to fight, since you have gone beyond the field ...
... concrete reality that it appears absolutely unquestionable. Well, to be able to cure that, which of all the obstacles is the greatest (I mean the habit of putting spiritual life on one side and material life on the other, of acknowledging the right of material laws to exist), one must make a resolution never to legitimize any of these movements, at any cost. To be able to see the problem as it is ...
... every detail; all the words pronounced, all the gestures made have their importance, and the least infraction of the rule, the least fault committed can have fatal consequences. It is the same in material life—if one had the initiation into the true way of living, one could transform physical existence. Page 207 If we consider the body as the tabernacle of the Lord, then medical science, for ...
... because I had said, 'Ah, no! I've had enough of this business! Why all these stupid complications!' 5 But these are not 'dreams,' they are types of activity—more real, more concrete than material life; the experience is much more concrete than ordinary life. I have had hundreds of such examples ... It's not always the same scene. The scenes are different, but the story is always the same—the ...
... tomorrow and so on. I don't think it is true to say that a person is "harmonious" if he has no inner complexity. People who have this kind of illusory harmony are usually deeply immersed in material life, so Page 287 that the slightest unpleasantness upsets them completely, because they have nothing else. No, a truly harmonious personality implies a conscious arrangement of the inner ...
... everywhere, but everywhere, the opposition, the resistance is rising up; and the more it rises up, the more imperative That is. But at such times one feels how precarious the equilibrium of material life is.... Oh, it's very, very interesting. When I am able to say all this, it will be worthwhile. ...
... nothing of the sort. So I said, "Very well, we'll wait four years, another four years," but for what, I don't know... the something I was expecting and which didn't happen. But the external, material life had become very difficult—there were 3,000 extra people from outside. So it made a sort of confusion in the atmosphere, which isn't over yet. ( silence ) I heard from some people that a great ...
... way of seeing and understanding things based on the good and the bad, good and evil, the luminous and the dark... all those contradictions; and the whole judgment, the whole conception of life (material life) is based on that—it's to teach you the inanity of this base. I see that. The work has become very acute, very persistent, as if with a will to go fast. Even the practical part which thought ...
... 1967 The last few nights, I have spent almost the whole night, several hours of it, in a place which must certainly belong to the subtle physical and where material life is being reorganized. It's immense—immense—and the crowd innumerable; but they are individualities, not a crowd, which means that I deal with each one of them. And there are also types of documents ...
... states, the soul states of the earth, the soul states... Those soul states were expressed in pictures. It was interesting. I can't say it wasn't interesting—it was—but there was no contact with material life, very little: I could hardly eat and couldn't walk.... Anyway it had become something others had to look after. And through the contact with A., the body began to be interested in all that, asking ...
... others' lives unbearable. No, Mother. No, no! So it works out this way: it has to be the doctor who says, "It MUST be like this." So... You understand, it's ridiculous. That is to say, material life is given an importance infinitely greater than it has ever had, and it's no fun!... It's just when it's full of difficulty, grating... So naturally, as I look tired, they don't want to tell me ...
... to the impatient beat of the aspiring human heart. The possibility dawns of a rapturous acceleration of the Truth-Consciousness's transforming process — and a greater, more luminous mastery of material life, a deeper invasion of the body by the Immortal Existence, a swifter and more palpable progress towards the conquest of darkness and death for which the secret decisive blow was struck in that strangely ...
... incapacity to control his own nature, the passions, lusts, greed's and desires that dominate him to the end of his life. What at the best Science has achieved is the improvement of man's material life, the many comforts and amenities it has placed at his disposal in his personal, group and social existence. It has, at the same time, because of man's incapacity to control his own primitive nature ...
... moksha. It is against the background of this synthetic aim of life that we can understand how the great representatives of Indian culture came to embody and manifest tendencies towards richness of material life, on the one hand, and overarching detachment and renunciation, on the other: Bhartrihari, some of the extracts from whose writing we are presenting here, is one such representative of Indian ...
... the conditions of the present organisation of consciousness. What is proposed, therefore, is that the bodily life should undergo a great perfection and even an evolutionary mutation so that the material life of the body becomes fully transformed. Divine life in a divine body is thus proposed as the aim of the highest integral view of life. In the light of this aim and realisation, Socratesʼ views ...
... its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisadon. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifiesltselfwith Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the ...
... way: the secret spirit-consciousness that is alive in and through the material cosmos, that alone gives its total sense and significance. And the secret spirit must embody itself here below in material life, the status must be made supremely dynamic – the transcendent consciousness, even while maintaining its transcendence, has to deploy its immanence in things of the earth and earthly existence. That ...
... liberty and all its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown ...
... ideal, because it is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in" all things they can see this ideal, this reason of being and never do they descend to the sordidness of material life. "So the conclusion: Never wish for death. Never will to die. Never fear death. In every circumstance, will to exceed yourself." 1 Yes, the unflinching and ...
... the truth of your ideal. Make that the only real thing in your life, the raison d'être of your being, and in all things see this spiritual ideal and never come down into the sordidities of the material life. 'If you can do so, you will find that whenever and in whichever way death comes to you, you will be able to keep your head high and smile and say, "Here I am." 'In that case you will ...
... this noxious whispering of self-love in another context. The purpose of this whispering is of course to dissuade the sadhaka from following the path of the Spirit in preference to the worldly material life of the senses. Here is what she says: "... this horrible notion that only material realities are real.... the whole of modern civilisation is based on this conception: 'Ah, what you can ...
... The second question requiring answer is: Are visions a freak and abnormality? The answer is: No, the faculty of subtle sight is always there. Only, as one is concentrated in the most material life, one does not notice it. For the normal functioning of this supraphysical occult sight, the conditions that have to be fulfilled are: (i) the quietening and the purification of the surface ...
... progression. If, therefore, this crisis has to be met, development of psychic and spiritual consciousness should be fostered. Unfortunately, spiritual consciousness is often conceived as a denial of material life and concerns of collective life. In Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's view, however, there is no fundamental opposition between Matter and Spirit. True integrality, according to them, implies rejection ...
... quest of knowledge, and progress will be accelerated by ardent aspirations to realise higher spiritual truths and their manifestation in physical life; c)The new world of the future will cultivate material life so as to make it prosperous and rich and it will replace poverty wherever it exists by elimination of drudgery, exploitation and slavery and encourage nobility, dignity and continuous empowerment ...
... the negation of Matter, but that Matter itself is an expression of the Spirit, and that Spirit is unfolding itself gradually in Matter so that there would be a total spiritual transformation of material life, here itself, ih eva, in this earthly Earth. There is no need to renounce Matter in order to embrace the Spirit. Indeed, all life is an evolving expression of the Spirit, and therefore, a truly ...
... yoga, which not only aims at the integral realization of the Infinite but also at the full manifestation of the supramental consciousness in Matter and at the total transformation of matter and material life to which the name of the divine life is given, Page 102 is to be found in the persistence of the individual even after liberation is attained by unity and self-knowledge. For ...
... Sri Aurobindo describes a number of circumstances under which the call to Yoga comes to the seeker: "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless Page 96 there is a strong awakening to the necessity ...
... highest supramental consciousness. The aim is to work for the establishment of supermind as a grade in physical life, in the same way as life is established in matter and mind is established in material life by the evolutionary process of Nature. It was this work which was undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and by the Mother who joined him from 1914 onwards for accomplishing this work. This entire work required ...
... remain confined to the individual, but it would extend progressively to the development of the collective divine life on the earth. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike ...
... Ignorance. As a result, it has come to be maintained that the worldly life and ignorance are so inseparable from each other that in order to depart from ignorance one must depart from earthly and material life of the world. This view has now come to be shown to be mistaken, not only philosophically but even in yogic process of realization. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have succeeded in establishing ...
... in Matter and of establishing divine life on the earth. This yoga, therefore, does not reject life but transforms life so as to bring out fully the hidden Spirit behind all manifestations of material life. This yoga rejects exclusiveness of any spiritual experience, which has so far been claimed to be ultimate, and it also establishes that science of yoga is not a closed book, but continues ...
... sacrifice is consciously discovered and practised. "Sacrifice symbolically means kindling of fire; but this fire is not physical fire; it is the fire of aspiration; it is the fire that unites material life with the light of the spirit. In practical terms, the law of sacrifice prescribes that all activities should Page 173 be offered as the fuel of the sacrifice, as an offering to the Supreme ...
... the common secret of their divergent methods and capable therefore of organizing a natural selection and combination of their varied energies and different utilities. The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike ...
... Yoga. We are upon earth here and it is precisely during the period of our life upon earth that we can make progress. You cannot progress outside the life on earth. The terrestrial life, the material life is essentially the life for progress. It is here that we develop and advance. Outside the earthly life you take rest, otherwise you remain unconscious. You can have this period of assimilation, ...
... the level attained turns back upon the preceding levels, influencing and moulding them as far as possible in its own mode and law of existence. When life appeared in Matter, wherever there was material life, the Page 66 matter thus taken up by life behaved differently from dead matter: an organic body does not follow the strict mechanical laws of inanimate bodies. Likewise a life ...
... concrete form, it is the utterance of the physical, the language it knows in order to ask for and seek the union with the Divine. It is the holy ritual expressing and embodying in the physical, material life, one's adoration, one's adhesion to the ideal, to the deity one worships. Work or service expressing harmonisation needs to be based, as I have said, upon a higher and higher ...
... that are superhuman. Shakespeare has depicted men solely as human beings, while Valmiki read into men the symbol of some larger and higher truth. In the works of Shakespeare we feel the touch of material life and enjoy the savour of earthly pleasure, the embrace of physical bodies with each other, as it were. But Valmiki deals with experiences and realities that exceed the bounds of ordinary earthly ...
... the level attained turns back upon the preceding levels, influencing and moulding them as far as possible in its own mode and law of existence. When life appeared in Matter, wherever there was material life, the matter thus taken up by life behaved differently from dead matter: an organic body does not not follow the strict mechanicallaws of inanimate bodies. Likewise a life endowed with mind has a ...
... concrete form, it is the utterance of the physical, the language it knows in order to ask for and seek the union with the Divine. It is the holy ritual expressing and embodying in the physical, material life, one's adoration, one's adhesion to the ideal, to the deity one worships. Work or service expressing harmonisation needs to be based, as I have said, upon a higher and higher consciousness. ...
... individual contributing his mite of sincerity and efficiency, a combined endeavour may create a wide and secure opening for the new Power and Presence to come to its own and possess a home in the material life here below. Page 41 ...
... Yoga. We are upon earth here and it is precisely during the period of our life upon earth that we can make progress. You cannot progress outside the life on earth. The terrestrial life, the material life is essentially the life for progress. It is here that we develop and advance. Outside the earthly life you take rest, or else you remain unconscious. You can have this period of assimilation, period ...
... in the conquest of the inconscient, we have to assign a central importance to those pursuits of the supra-conscient and supra-rational which deal with the cosmic and terrestrial, right up to our Material life and its subconscious and unconscious recesses. In this context, our aim should be to give the right place and justification to that tendency in materialism Page 213 which affirms matter ...
... because that is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in all things they can see this ideal, this reason of existence, and never do they come down into the sordidness of material life." (CWM, Vol. 4, pp. 355-56) We have so far discussed eight principal psychological factors which create in a man's heart an undercurrent of fear and anxiety concerning the physical dissolution ...
... in others would be the inevitable outcome as well the Page 76 broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'The divinising of the normal material life of man of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike ...
... beyond your psychic formation and be the wide, the vast, the limitless, the Infinite itself, void of all name and form. And then with that virgin consciousness drop straight into the world of material life and form, into your body and bodily reactions. The world will give itself up to you in its pristine purity, its original beauty and truth, always luminous and glorious. This experience has to ...
... aspiration from below and the response from above: it is only in the union of these two that this work can be done. — Man with his mind can determine his conduct in the practical, material life but then the very imperfection of man's earthly life can completely unsettle everything. No political ideology, no religious discipline, no philosophical system, no intellectual understanding ...
... made it both in its structural form and its organic workings a free channel and means of communication and a plastic instrument of cognition and dynamic action for all that they had to do in the material life, in the world of Matter. There would have to be a change in the operative processes of the material organs themselves and, it may well be, in their very constitution and their importance, they could ...
... and experience. He was a great admirer of Science and its achievements. He acknowledged our indebtedness to Science for making us conscious of the immense potentialities of Matter and material life, and curbing the traditional religious tendency to the ascetic denial and escapism. Science has opened our eyes to the reality and sanctity, if not yet the divinity of Matter. It has helped to ...
... of the life of service as conceived and taught by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. In Matter itself, and not elsewhere, lies "the seed of its own salvation." Therefore, not by renouncing the material life and its activities—a renunciation which the Mother calls "a struggle useless and pernicious"—but by recognising in ¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, November 28, 1912. ² ...
... sublime work.”¹ If we take a flight to the Infinite, it is not to merge in but to be united with It, and to return to the world with Its force and benediction in order to conquer and transform our material life for Its self- revelation. We cannot, therefore, afford to coerce the mind into a complete inaction and impose upon it a progressive atrophy in order to transcend it. The mind has its essential, ...
... higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.”² So long as one is in the material world, living the material life in a physical body, one cannot lead the life of an absorbed contemplative—the ineluctable necessities of this life will constantly pluck at his elbow and remind him again and again of the work he ...
... upon earth. The conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient will ¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother; February 9, 1914, Page 182 mean the conquest of material life and nature, and the conversion of human nature into divine nature. The Mother says that the majority of beings, even of human beings, live constantly in the Subconscient, "few, emerge from it,” ...
... With my love and blessings. THE MOTHER Page 22 Page 23 2.2.1948 Matter, blind to the Light, deaf to the call, the material consciousness and material life are the last and most obstinate refuge of the Inconscient and its résistance. There, the nearer the light, the higher it raises its wall of resistance. When that is overcome, the decisive trans- ...
... posits the possibility of individual effort starting the alchemic process of the divinisation of man and nature. Finally, the Indian preoccupation with the Spirit and the Western preoccupation with material life are adroitly and convincingly gathered in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy into a greater affirmation that denies neither Spirit nor Matter, but sees them both in the one utterly inclusive arc of Omnipresent ...
... the mind from this thraldom of the senses, and launch it upon an exploration of the Infinite. And in proportion as it is delivered from its preoccupation with Matter and the gross pursuits of the material life, it will grow in lightness, limpidity and transparence, and develop its higher powers and faculties which will open to it new realms of vision and experience. An increasing power of stillness and ...
... the Mother before that date breathe the same intense aspiration for and are instinct with the same flaming will to integral transformation, integral union and integral manifestation of God in the material life of man, as we find in the writings of Sri Aurobindo. The key thoughts of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and philosophy were also the key thoughts of the Mother's life before their meeting on the physical ...
... energies. That to live we depend on the circulation of blood, and on food to have blood, and so on and so forth, with everything this entails—what a terrible limitation and slavery! As long as material life depends on this kind of things, it is obvious we won't be able to divinize our life. 1 How do we get there ? That is how the mystery first appeared to her and quite logically She concluded, ...
... intended to be achieved, was the realisation of some of the marvellous possibilities of the subtle physical in the gross body; and the ultimate aim of these yogas being the renunciation of the material life, no further perfection of the body was thought either necessary or possible. But the Integral Yoga makes the bringing down of these dynamic principles of perfection its chief objective. The opening ...
... clarify the ideas, put things in their place, see all the relationships... [you would almost think of a film director organizing the various sequences—except it is not a film, it is a slice of material life that is being organized] and when the work is finished, it goes away. Only, it takes the form of a memory, so I ask myself why I remember that. It is odd, these are circumstances that are going ...
... of the life of service as conceived and taught by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo In Matter itself, and not elsewhere, lies "the seed of its own salvation." Therefore, not by renouncing the material life and its activities,—a renunciation which the Mother calls "a struggle useless and pernicious"—but 1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother —Nov. Page 35 by recognising ...
... religious or the religio-philosophic mind to its own heights, its noblest realities, its largest riches of vision and experience. It was in such periods that intellect, thought, poetry, the arts, the material life flowered into splendour. The ebbing of spirituality brought in always, on the contrary, the weakness of these other powers, periods of fossilisation or at least depression of the power of life, ...
... temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, "Forth now and push forward also in other fields." 4 If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning ...
... most human lives are spent; this is what human beings most often call thinking ─a mental activity that is almost mechanical, unreflecting, out of our control, a reflex. All thoughts concerning material life and its many needs are of the same quality. Here we face the first difficulty to be overcome; if we want to be able to truly think, that is, to receive, formulate and form valid and viable thoughts ...
... It is as though one had another pair of eyes behind these, eyes which could see in the vital instead of seeing in the physical. And this is always there. Only, as one is concentrated on the most material life, one doesn't notice it. But some children have the two conjointly, they see even physically all kinds of things which are not physical. Usually they are told that they are saying stupid things; ...
... is in disorder around it, this is always a sign of a lack of vitality; it does not have sufficient vitality to take interest in these outer things. The second reason is that it lacks interest in material life, the life of things, and that it has no discipline, doesn't discipline itself. For instance, children when they undress throw their clothes all over the place; or else, when they have finished playing ...
... so deaden it that it exists no longer. All ascetic methods are invented for abolishing and deadening the vital. For that evidently is the most convenient way of cutting off all connection with material life: one becomes worse than a vegetative kind of being. What is needed is that the vital, instead of serving its own ends or being an instrument of anti-divine forces, should become an instrument ...
... because that is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in all things they can see this ideal, this reason of existence, and never do they come down into the sordidness of material life. So, the conclusion: One must never wish for death. One must never will to die. One must never be afraid to die. And in all circumstances one must will to exceed oneself. Page ...
... they have in them an emanation of adverse vital forces, and the being or power which has emanated this force has done so in order to make Page 246 use of the body, to make it do in the material life exactly the things it wanted to do. But now, when there is no longer a body left, it is no longer interesting.... You see, it was this body which was meant to do a certain number of things to act ...
... to answer a question at times. Symbolic dreams... symbolic dreams are usually very coherent, one remembers everything, to the least detail; it is more living, more real, more intense than the material life, and it is fairly rare. When one returns from a symbolic dream, one remembers everything, all the details, and feels that one has lived for those moments a much in tenser and truer life than the ...
... of the higher regions have no psychic being —the "angels" have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual ...
... Yoga is not asceticism, but to do with things or without things in the same spirit of equality and non-attachment—only in that spirit can one make a true and spiritual use of physical things and material life. 5 July 1937 You must get a change of consciousness which makes these external things of no importance to you. A change of room will not bring it, on the contrary your stay in this room is ...
... of life as well as to inner experiences or high ideals on a large scale. You ought to know by this time that the Mother attaches a great importance to the true spirit in the organisation of the material life. It is more often in relation to these petty things that the genuineness of one's spiritual change is tested—so there is little point in talking of petty things or material or outward things as ...
... in its activities and resistant in its health and organic function. To get these results it will be good, in a general way, to form habits and utilise them as a help in organising the material life. For the body works more easily in a frame of regular routine. Yet one must know how not to become a slave to one's habits, however good they may be. The greatest suppleness must be maintained so ...
... consciousness of those beings are of a purity, beauty and perfection much higher than our ordinary physical forms. It is only in the nearest vital world, the one which is, so to say, mixed with our material life―though it lies beyond it and there is a zone where the vital is no longer mixed with the material world―of that material vital one can say that in some of its aspects it is even uglier than things ...
... a very vague and loose way. Whatever is not physical is spiritual! In comparison with the physical world all other worlds are spiritual! All thought, all effort which does not tend towards the material life is a spiritual effort. Every tendency which is not strictly human and egoistic is a spiritual tendency. This is a word used to season every dish." 11 The distinction between the inner ...
... is why one can laugh. +Sep. 1969 * Q: To what extent does the building of Auroville depend on man's acceptance of spirituality? The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two, has no meaning for me, for in truth life and the spirit are one and it is in and by physical work that the highest spirit must manifest. 19.4.1968 * ...
... whole yogic terminology, for these Bulletins are meant more for people who lead an ordinary life, though also for students of yoga—I mean people who are primarily interested in a purely physical material life but who try to attain more perfection in their physical life than is usual in ordinary conditions. It is a very difficult task but it is a kind of yoga. These people call themselves "materialists" ...
... a very vague and loose way. Whatever is not physical is spiritual! In comparison with the physical world all other worlds are spiritual! All thought, all effort which does not tend towards the material life is a spiritual effort. Every tendency which is not strictly human and egoistic is a spiritual tendency. This is a word used to season every dish. I just read this in Illustration: "The spiritual ...
... is why, moreover, people who are used to judging from appearances and without knowing what they are talking about, say that in the Ashram there is no spiritual life, that we lead an altogether material life. That's how it is! But it is so much the worse for them, it is not any the worse for us; indeed it is all the same to us. There we are. No more questions? Nobody has anything to say? Page ...
... say, "This is divine, or this helps me toward the Divine; and that is against the Divine, it is the enemy of the Divine." But this is a pragmatic point of view, for action, for the movement in material life─because one has not yet reached the consciousness which goes beyond all that; because one has not attained that inner perfection, having which one has no longer to struggle, for one has gone beyond ...
... withdraws within himself, escapes from physical Page 246 life and the physical consciousness and goes to far-off heights to find his spiritual joys. Someone who tries to make his material life the expression of his highest aspiration is certainly more noble, more upright and sincere in character than a man who splits himself into two saying that the outer life is of no importance and ...
... to such an extent that if someone tries to challenge this sacrosanct authority, he is considered half-mad or extremely dangerous.... It seems to me one must still go a very long way to consider material life in the way Sri Aurobindo has described it here. And I am quite convinced that if one feels it Page 289 like that, sees it like that, as he has described it, one is very, very close to ...
... other person. That gives you an idea of the power of immobility. And it is a very common fact which can occur every day; it is not a great event of spiritual life, it is something of the outer, material life. There is a tremendous power in immobility: mental immobility, sensorial immobility, physical immobility. If you can remain like a wall, absolutely motionless, everything the other Page 67 ...
... spiritual life. And so there is only one solution—it was that of the old Yogas, you know—the total rejection of life as not being able to participate in the spiritual life at all, the rejection of material life. This is what he explains. He says that with this attitude, that's how one looks at life. He does not say that it is like that; he says that one looks at it, considers it like that; that it is the ...
... "physical" I include the whole mental and intellectual life and all human achievements, even the most remarkable; I am speaking of a physical which is the summit of human capacities, of an earthly and material life in which man can express values of a higher order from the mental and intellectual point of view—one can go beyond that state, open oneself to the supramental force which is now acting on earth ...
... the soul, that knowledge is so much more wonderful than material knowledge that there is almost a smile of disdain. I do not think he means that the knowledge of the soul teaches you things about material life that one cannot learn through science. The only point—I do not know whether science has reached it—is the unpredictability of the future. But perhaps they say it is because they have not yet ...
... aspires and the memory of them, not indeed quite distinct, but still environing his imagination with its luminous ethereality, is yet with him. If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen into the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an actual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one of these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; Page 140 ...
... approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an outflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outward, not by ...
... capacity, adhikāra . Everywhere there was a system of gradations by which this purpose could be served. It provided for a continual contact of man at every step with what was behind and beyond the material life. In Vedic times meditation, worship and sacrifice were the means by which this connection with the Unseen was sought to be established and maintained. The sacrifice was symbolic in its ritual and ...
... external way and on the surface. After the material formula which governed the greater part of the nineteenth century had burdened man with the heaviest servitude to the machinery of the outer material life that he has ever yet been called upon to bear, the first attempt to break through, to get to the living reality in things and away from the mechanical idea of life and living and society, landed ...
... made it both in its structural form and its organic workings a free channel and means of communication and a plastic instrument of cognition and dynamic action for all that they had to do in the material life, in the world of Matter. There would have to be a change in the operative processes of the material organs themselves and, it may well be, in their very constitution and their importance; they could ...
... Page 202 nervous responses of our physical nature; it is the field and instrument of the smaller sensations, desires, reactions of all kinds to the impacts of the outer physical and gross material life. This vital physical part (supported by the lowest part of the vital proper) is therefore the agent of most of the lesser movements of our external life; its habitual reactions and obstinate pettinesses ...
... possession, conquest); 3rd the lower vital (all the small egoistic movements of desire, enjoyment, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, vanity etc. etc.); 4th the physical energies concerned with the material life and its functioning, needs, outer action, instrumental fulfilment of the other powers. It cannot be explained accurately in a few words; but roughly thoughts are of the mind, emotions are ...
... Other Planets As for the other question, there is no reason to suppose that there is not life in any part of the material cosmic system except earth. No doubt the suns and nebulae cannot harbour material life because there is not the necessary basis, but wherever there is a formed world, Life can exist. It used formerly to be supposed that life could not exist except in conditions identical with the ...
... अग्निषोमाविमं सु मे शृणुतं वृषणा हवं । प्रति सूक्तानि हर्यतं भवतं दाशुषे मयः ।। ie Forces of Action & Delight are to be combined and constitute the Ananda of perfect self-expressions in the material life. Trikaldrishti of Time is beginning vaguely to arrange itself, eg Richard's arrival on the 29ᵗʰ, not as had been arranged on the 28ᵗʰ, his visit on the same day, & less clearly in the afternoon ...
... they dominated by the lower energies (adabdhah); they are not revealed in their sheer nakedness of self-being, for all of them are rendered in the mental values proper to this existence of mind in material life, neither are they covered & concealed by the obscurations of the lower & false values given by our present tainted & muddied perceptions. The truth of them shines through the thin mental veil they ...
... a horse towards a goal,—the kshaya of Mitra, the viҫvani bhuma,—and seeking to discern. This force is constantly satisfying our desires & increasing its own heat by enjoying the objects of our material life imaged as the growths of earth, the plants that hold the heat of life and by eating which we get that vital heat & force into us; but in all this action of devouring desire the Force acts as the ...
... of our Self and not as mere names and forms. They become to us realities of the Eternal. Our minds are no longer subject to the delusion of trivial unworthiness or the illusion of unreality. The material life loses indeed for us its old absorbing value, but finds the greater value which it has for the divine Purusha; regarded no longer as the sole term of our becoming, but as merely having a subordinate ...
... of the Spirit. When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these things can be established; for their opposites come from a pressure of external forces on the physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the body organism, from an ignorance that does not know how to meet these forces or is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some obscurity, pervading the stuff of the physical ...
... Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the form of their symbolic images from the material life around them." What are we to conclude from this? We may be sure of one thing: the Vedic poets, if they had not been mystics, would have written with the subtle physical plane as their common poise ...
... hoping for a swing-back to normal humanity. From the occult standpoint, Nazism is the exact opposite pole to the Aurobindonian dynamic. It is no brief outbreak touching the superficies of material life or a few domains of it but an attempt at total supremacy because the Aurobindonian dynamic is also bent on an all-comprehensive integrality of effect on earth. Sri Aurobindo's spirituality is ...
... is fallacious: for when we study and understand, we perceive that only a little of her action and growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is carried on subconsciously as in the rest of her material life. We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence."² A deeply helpful gloss ...
... things and an organisation of personality which is superficial and not the whole of ourselves, a wave only of the ocean of our hidden being, our secret reality. To build an ego which will deal with material life and nature as its user but also as its subject, a life that is bound by matter, a mind that is bound by both matter and life has been her main preoccupation. But still the evolution of consciousness ...
... it instead of living in and according to the appearance of things. Yoga is a passage from ignorance to self-knowledge, from our apparent to our true being, from an outer phenomenal mental vital material life-existence to an inner spiritual existence and a spiritualised nature. By Yoga we pass from the phenomenal to the real Man, from the consciousness of our own apparent outer nature to the consciousness ...
... Sadhana or Yoga and I absolutely repudiate the right of anyone to impose it as a basis for my work or for the life of the Ashram. Page 167 "There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Ashram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what ...
... the problem arises. Sri Aurobindo says it's permanent, while all the ancient traditions say it disappears with the body. A permanent individual self? Otherwise there could be no permanent material life—for this [individuality] is the very nature of materialization. Were it destined to disappear, then the phenomenon of physical dissolution would become permanent, and there would never be physical ...
... large and sympathetic view of the Ashram-commune and its life is first struck by its organisation, the orderly functioning of its various departments, businesslike and realistic as far as the material life is concerned. It may even appear too materialistic at first sight. The second aspect that would come to be noticed is the freedom in which the people seem to move about, a kind of laissez ...
... ordeals we find these words abundantly and often poignantly illustrated. Nevertheless: ‘It was interesting. I cannot say it was not interesting: it was interesting. But there was no contact with the material life, very little. I could hardly eat, I couldn’t walk. In short, it [her body] had become something one had to look after.’ 8 ‘Happy New Year!’ Then came the upswing again, in a movement ...
... say it is too strong for them, they can’t help it!’ 28 He therefore found it necessary to make clear what things in the Ashram were about. ‘There are only two possible foundations for the material life here. One is that one is a member of an Ashram founded on the principle of self-giving and surrender. One belongs to the Divine and all one has belongs to the Divine; in giving one gives not what ...
... ironical Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. We now know the explanation: the evolutionary leaps take place in Consciousness, the essence, carrier and developing factor of all manifestation, and the material life forms are what the processes in Consciousness have fixed in Matter because they proved to be viable organisms. It is important to give some consideration to this topic. For questions about humankind ...
... substantial volume could be written about their insights into this subject. Here the following prediction will have to suffice: “If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning ...
... realising their Self were emulated by the rest who had a spiritual seeking. Thus at the top level of Indian humanity, the very best were cut off from the world and the result was failure of vital and material life which was considered fit only for the ignorant masses. This state of affairs continued to be prevalent up to the advent of Ramkrishna and Vivekananda. Vivekananda wanted to broadcast the spiritual ...
... modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence 37. Letters on Yoga, pp. 206-207. 38. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Second Series, p. 571. Page 55 in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning ...
... Many, many years ago I discussed the Integral Yoga with Pavitra—[Philippe Barbier Saint-Hilaire] while walking in Pondicherry Botanical Gardens. I was talking to him about the refinement in material life—its sensations and movements. When we were walking in a certain lane, there did not seem any sign of flowers. But while coming back to the same spot after a long walk, we saw a bush full of white ...
... attained to the first steps of supermanhood. Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human: The Divine Superman The Gods are those who are immortal, who are not bound to the Vicissitudes of the material life with all that is narrow, mean, unreal and false in them. The Gods are those who are turned to the Light and live in the Power and in the Consciousness. These are real and living beings, each ...
... feel very tired. I also have a slight headache. My dear child, I don't need to tell you where your headache comes from; I suppose you know. Only when you become absolutely regular in your material life will you be able to have good health. Love from your mother. 6 September 1935 My sweet Mother, For three days I have been feeling sad in the evening. This morning I felt sad too ...
... I looked after his personal affairs, his housekeeping, his food, his clothes and so forth. I kept myself quietly busy with that, doing nothing else, not seeing people, simply looking after his material life—like a child at play. It was seven years of integral peace. Later, when he withdrew and put me in front, there was naturally a bit more activity, as well as the semblance of responsibility—but ...
... every detail; each word uttered, each gesture made has its importance and the least infraction of the rule, the least mistake committed can have disastrous consequences. It is the same with the material life, and if one were initiated into the true way of living, one would be able to transform physical existence. If the body is considered as the tabernacle of the Lord, then medical science, for example ...
... 30 August 1967 For the last several nights I have been passing almost the whole night, many hours, in a place which must certainly belong to the subtle physical and where the material life gets reorganised. It is vast—vast—the crowd is innumerable, but these are individualities, not a crowd; that is to say, I have to deal with each one of them. And then, it is as though at the same ...
... Enemy's opposition is nothing, for I can see clearly that it comes from outside and that it's hostile, so I do what's necessary. But where the difficulty lies is in all the small things of daily material life—suddenly the body no longer understands, it forgets. Yet it's HAPPY. It loves doing the work, it lives only for that—to change, to transform itself is its reason for being. And it's such a docile ...
... holds out a note on Auroville ) (Question:) How dependent is the building of Auroville upon man's acceptance of spirituality? (Mother's answer:) The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two has no sense for me as, in truth, life and the spirit are ONE and it is in and by physical work that the highest spirit must be manifested. I got today a letter ...
... tomorrow..." like that, regarding their ideal. Interesting things. There's another... ( Mother tries to remember ) Ah, yes, Purani 9 also. They go about there. There's an extraordinary likeness to material life, except that you can feel they're freer in their movement. But that's not new, it's just growing more concrete and precise. What's new is what has taken place these last few nights... My sleep ...
... be possible if life in matter is something different in its very stuff from them?" Unless the stuff is basically the same, the attempt will always fall short. In however hidden a way, material life has to be divinity itself, for else the idealities will never be earth-existence altogether. As the lines I have quoted from "The Life-Heavens" show, Sri Aurobindo finds Godhead concealed in its ...
... Such obviousness—what we customarily call "natural." So obvious, so simple, so natural, so spontaneous, without even the memory of what might be an effort—the constant effort you have to make in material life just to live, just to keep all those cells together. The strange thing is that (I was very conscious, perfectly conscious; the "Witness" consciousness is never canceled, but it isn't in the way) ...
... soul's knowledge, that knowledge is so much more wonderful than material knowledge that you almost smile with disdain. I don't think he means that the knowledge of the soul makes you know things of material life that science can't teach you. The only point (I don't know if science has solved it) is the unpredictability of the future. But maybe they say that's because they haven't yet reached the perfection ...
... knows: nothing, nothing whatever is impossible, everything is possible. Here inside, here inside, in this ( Mother strikes her body ), everything is possible. All the impossibilities created by material life have disappeared. One must have the strength—the strength to carry it in oneself always. Page 110 × ...
... well." This body's answer is very simple: "We certainly aren't anxious that life should continue as it is." It doesn't find it very pretty. But we conceive of a life—a life as objective as our material life—which wouldn't have all these sordid needs, which would be more harmonious and spontaneous. That's what we want. But he says it's impossible—we have been "told" it's not only possible but certain ...
... the adventure and the joy of creation and discovery. Life is seen as an adventure of the Spirit; it is not an error of the soul, but a deliberate enterprise that seeks a full transformation of material life on the earth. And when that transformation in achieved, the superman may not withdraw from life and Matter, but would continue to lead the evolution in Knowledge, a continuous self-unfolding of ...
... to the pressures of new discoveries which require exploration of the psychical and spiritual domains. Similarly, centuries of experiments in the spiritual fields have shown that the neglect of material life and neglect of collective welfare result in poverty or bankruptcy and even in economic and political slavery. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out : "It is therefore of good augury that after many ...
... asked their adherents to prepare themselves for the life after death, for the Day of Judgment, for some paradise, some supra-terrestrial abode of God or of gods, vaikuntha. Their concern for material life turns out ultimately to be a temporary compromise, at the most as a school for the 'fallen' soul to be chastened and trained, even under the threat of some eternal punishment, to enable it to return ...
... Sri Aurobindo describes a number of circumstances under which the call to Yoga comes to the seeker: "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger ...
... is being put at the service of the demands and needs of the economic being. Our civilisation does not deal with the problems of egoism and vital indulgence; it has developed the science of material life but neglected the science of self-control and self-discipline. As a result, it has no remedy of the uprush of forces and violence and of appetites that come upon individuals, societies and nations ...
... remain confined to the individual, but would extend progressively to the development of the collective divine life on the earth. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike ...
... still not been able to provide the required conditions of the step forward which is the one thing needful, viz., a new flowering of spiritual culture which does not reject matter but transforms material life in all its splendour and beauty." Our conversation seemed to be coming to an end. Coffee was being served, and I was about to express my thankfulness for the excellent dinner, when she asked: ...
... perfection cannot remain confined to the individual, but would extend progressively to the collective divine life on the earth. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike ...
... Supermind The process of ascent to the supermind is complex, and Page 36 in the integral yoga, the ascent to the supermind has the eventual aim that implies transformation of material life into divine life, carrying with it eventually the appearance of a new physical vehicle of divine life by means of the descent of the supermind on all planes of consciousness right up to the physical ...
... activities and resistant in its health and organic function. Page 434 To get these results it will be good, in a general way, to form habits and utilize them as a help in organizing the material life. For the body works more easily in a frame of regular routine. Yet one must know how not to become a slave to one's habits, however good they may be. The greatest suppleness must be maintained so ...
... do not strain ourselves to transcend the limitations of consciousness where exclusivism of religions is overpassed so as to create a dynamic Dharma and dynamic spirituality, which does not shun material life but transforms it for the highest possible synthesis of Spirit and Matter. We want rapid social transformation, but we are still nourishing those institutions that foster casteism and narrow loyalties ...
... are not mere intellectually cogitated assumptions but wise insights bom of spiritual experience, — are, in an adaptation of the language of Sri Aurobindo: (1)All life, even the vital and material life, is indeed a manifestation of the universal Power in the individual but veiled in a disguising Maya, and to pursue the lower life for its own sake is to persist in a stumbling path and to enthrone ...
... come to our proper subject. Last time, I gave you some examples of how the Divine Hand is behind everything. This instance also illustrates it. But I emphasized the fact that, even in our small, material life, the Hand is always present. I'll give you another example of Their influence, but this one is in the psychological field, not the material one. Some days ago, I was subject to some abhimaan ...
... way: the secret spirit-consciousness that is alive in and through the material cosmos, that alone gives its total sense and significance. And the secret spirit must embody itself here below in material life, the status must be made supremely dynamic—the transcendent consciousness, even while maintaining its transcendence, has to deploy its immanence in things of the earth and earthly existence. That ...
... deliver it. The Divine Grace, mellow with all the tears of love and sympathy and tenderness she has gathered for the labouring godhead, has pity for the hard lot of a humanity stone-bound to the material life, yet yearning and surging towards freedom. The godhead is not consoled or appeased until that freedom is achieved and light and immortality released. The Grace is working slowly, laboriously perhaps ...
... individual contributing his mite of sincerity and efficiency, a combined endeavour may create a wide and secure opening for the new Power and Presence to come into its own and possess a home in the material life here below. —Nolini Kanta Gupta Page 33 A Review of Our Ashram Life In its early days, quite at the beginning, we may now say long, long ago ...
... discrimination, Page 47 training and discipline. Viewed in the true light, occultism is dynamic spirituality; in other words, it seeks to express and execute, bring down to the material life the powers and principles of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of mind and life and the subtle physical. Occultism is naturally shunned by those who worship, who seek to experience ...
... the level attained turns back upon the preceding levels, influencing and moulding them as far as possible in its own mode and law of existence. When life appeared in Matter, wherever there was material life, the matter thus taken up by life behaved differently from dead matter: an organic body does not not follow the strict mechanical laws of inanimate bodies. Likewise a life endowed with mind has ...
... you need to discriminate among them. What kind of image has to be rejected and what to be accepted ? What is first to be rejected is the ordinary working of the mind and the images of material life that surround us. Afterwards one has to remain passive. What seems to come from above is not necessarily pure and then one has to discriminate. Mr. G. has spoken to Mr. V., head of the College ...
... documentations will be typed on loose sheets. When a book is used. it should be only to find out a specific information (generally a picture). All aspects of life will be brought under review: material life, agriculture, cities, crafts, trade, classes of society, dresses, habits, language, arts, religion, etc. At this stage Page 127 geography should be synchronized with history. The ...
... (material) it could not carry out its ideas of possibilities and impossibilities there. It established a kind of understanding (compromise) with matter and it had to accept the limitations of material life. Page 333 Disciple : You said that to overcome the resistance of the material plane is possible if one can open a direct connection with the plane of the Gods. I& there a ...
... establish the Dharma. Sri Aurobindo's stand in this field is very definite and clear. The goal or end is clear, and with it the way too. What he envisages is the transformation of Matter and material life, that is to say, neither rejecting it as an impossible thing nor trying to gloss it over with a coat of mental luminosity, but delving into it and cleaning and purifying it, removing its mire and ...
... required is right attitude and discrimination, training and discipline. Viewed in the true light, occultism is dynamic spirituality; in other words, it seeks to express and execute, bring down to the material life the powers and principles of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of mind and life and the subtle physical. Page 192 Occultism is naturally shunned by those who ...
... that my work is done as perfectly as possible, and evidently faster. You know, it is in the physical perfection that the work of transformation begins. And it is in an impeccable perfection in material life that the seed of transformation can grow. That is why she is indispensable to begin the process of material transformation. When all around me, and everywhere I look, in the surrounding and near ...
... go beyond your psychic formation and be the wide, the vast, the limitless, the Infinite itself, void of all name and form. And then with that virgin consciousness drop straight into the world of material life and form, into your body and bodily reactions. The world will give itself up to you in its pristine purity, its original beauty and truth, always luminous and glorious. This experience has to be ...
... his works a concrete illustration or a crystallisation of the new man with a new consciousness. In our world the great error of our thought has been to divide our life between spiritual life and material life. But the great dream of Auroville, based on Sri Aurobindo's life-work, is to unite the two. With this reunion or marriage between Spirit and Matter we shall have truly the possibility of a new world ...
... the Sun of Poetic Truth should shine is not the complex of outward actualities alone, but, more importantly, all - all the invisible worlds below and above - that may lie behind our apparent material life: What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his back look upon the past, his sweep ...
... is true..." - but the experience wouldn't last. Speaking again on 30 August, the Mother said that for several nights past she had spent hours together in the subtle physical world "where the material life gets reorganised". It was a strange, yet coherent world; was it the creation of her memory of earthly forms, or was it "really like that"? For there were both correspondences and differences. Earlier ...
... Divine and total surrender to Him. The fourth way is to become a brave warrior. Through inner knowledge we have to know that death is nothing. It is nothing but a bad habit of the unconscious, material life. This habit has been encrusted into our mind, age after age, through various religious thought and collective attitudes. Different thoughts, sentiments and movements enter our being through the ...
... The human aspiration from below and the response from above: it is only in the union of these two that this work can be done. Man with his mind can determine his conduct in the practical, material life but then the very imperfection of man's earthly life can completely unsettle everything. No political ideology, no religious discipline, no philosophical system, no intellectual understanding, no ...
... has lived, all one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion—that's what I was living yesterday evening.... It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual construction as one has lived it ...
... perception of the forces behind appearances and the play of these forces". 15 Occultism may in fact be described as dynamic spirituality; for what it attempts is to discover and bring to the material life the potencies and puissances of the Spirit through the agency of the subtler forces of the Mind, the Vital and the Physical. And Sri Aurobindo clinches the whole issue in the following passage: ...
... precisely, clearly, definitively upon the smallest detail as upon the whole. (22 December) On 7 October, Mirra starts with the sad observation that most people are only concerned with the material life, "Heavy, inert, conservative, obscure"; there are also people with an awakened mental life, but they too are "restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic", and alas! "Caught altogether ...
... unless the Divine informs them and wills their respective functional activities, "all is inert, brute or inconscient". But what a wonderful thing it is to "soar above the contingencies of material life" towards the Divine, yet with power "to return as Thy messengers to the earth to announce the glorious tidings of Thy approaching Advent?" At other moments, it is rather the limitations of ...
... the liberated man is not affected by the turmoil of his lower nature, but the turmoil persists, in however diminished a form, and he endures it in the hope that it will end with the end of his material life. The imperfections of the nature and the evils of life are suffered with a calm fortitude as indispensable elements of human existence, and a release from the wheel of karma and the painful process ...
... and endeavours to give all its nature and all its instruments of expression also to Him, so that He may transform and illumine them, and use them as perfected means of His manifestation in the material life. When psychic love is united with the divine Love and the psychic will with the divine Will, there is no limit to the possibilities of divine manifestation. All knowledge is within the reach of ...
... beginning for kindling the flame of aspiration and directing and fortifying our intense endeavour for self-offering, and in the end for the conquest of the supreme Truth and its manifestation in material life. "Let us offer our will to the Divine Grace, it is the Grace that accomplishes all. ”³ The Integral Yoga, as it proceeds, cleaves through many a rocky tract and virgin forest. There are temptations ...
... In the Mother's Light Transformation IF a perfect manifestation of the Divine in material life is the end of evolution, transformation of human nature is the principal means of achieving it. Man in his unregenerate state manifests not the Divine but the animal from which he has emerged and upon which he stands in his endeavour to transcend himself. His inherent ...
... or the Divine, whom we seem to have lost in the wilderness of the sense-objects—the Divine whom we seek in all our obscure and groping endeavours, and aspire to realise and reveal here in our material life. Even the atheist seeks an absolute of atheism, the rationalist an absolute of reason, the hedonist an absolute of life-enjoyment. They too are, therefore, seekers of the Divine, whom they profess ...
... step of Vishnu; and some Vedic Rishis endeavoured to rise into its solar glory. But there is no trace of a collective ascent into it or of any attempt on their part to bring it down into the material life for a conversion of the earth-consciousness. It was even held by some Rishis that it was not possible to pass through the gates of the Sun, i.e. the Supermind, and yet retain the human body. ...
... some Vedic Rishis endeavoured to rise into its solar glory. But there is no trace of a collective ascent into it or of any attempt on their part to bring it down into Page 335 the material life for a conversion of the earth-consciousness. It was even held by some Rishis that it was not possible to pass through the gates of the Sun, i.e. the Supermind, and yet retain the human body. The ...
... complacency in its habitual avenues, its fenced, familiar pastures and bounded horizons, it strains after the Unknown and thirsts for the Infinite. It is a bridge between the blind mechanism of the material life and the luminous dynamism of the superconscient Spirit. Even if it be a fiction, as some hold, it is, according to Sri Aurobindo, "a practical and effective fiction." If it is a shadow cast by the ...
... Whatever that may be, we must not Page 90 forget that the psychic has a specific mission to fulfil in the material world—it is the transformation of Matter, and the Epiphany of God in material life. It cannot, therefore, stop short at its own liberation, but securely established in it, must work for the fulfilment of its mission. It progress lies along a road which is interminable, indeed ...
... then desire is its dominating law. And on the plane of life it determines all the facts of vital plane on the basis of desire and impulse. There matter is not allowed to intervene. Independent of material life, if you can conceive of life plane—where matter is not indespensable to life,—there life acts on impulse and desire. There it is not limited by matter at all. So that a spirit in the vital world ...
... body and those without a body are mingled without difference. 11 They have the same reality, the same density and the same conscious, independent existence. There's an extraordinary likeness to material life, except that you can feel they're freer in their movement. But that's not new. What's new is... My sleep is no longer sleep at all, I don't know, its a sort of... withdrawal, that is, I go within ...
... happiness: freedom, absolute power, and no limits—no limits, no impossibilities, nothing. It was ... all other bodies were itself. There was no difference. 72 Innumerable life. Innumerable material life. No more carapace, no more prison. And a life on earth. In a terrestrial body formed by the cells. A body that does not die. The Fact of the Corpse After that, Mother looked at death ...
... clicking all the time), but "in loneliness, in the solitude of one's self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life". 29 Man and Nature and God are then inseparable to our understanding, and the One and the Many, the visible and the invisible, seem lost in the ineffable experience of harmony and peace. And ...
... practical intelligence, France's clear logical brain, Germany's speculative genius, Russia's emotional force, America's commercial energy - but he also thought that the West's mastery of the arts of material life was certainly not enough. Asia's awakening was necessary to restore the balance: "Asia is the custodian of the world's peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which Europe generates." 30 ...
... of humanity - would nevertheless not be strong enough to ensure human unity so long as man or collective man refused to see the spiritual reality behind the brilliant and bewildering facades of material life: A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future.... A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all ...
... climbs to planes of thought and experience inaccessible to natural or animal man, man's praise of the divine Light, Power and Grace at work in the mortal." Unlike latter-day saints who rejected material life to swoon into some rarefied air, the Vedic Rishis were very much concerned with the life of the living being. The Veda speaks of two oceans; one is the ocean of the subconscient, dark and inexpressive ...
... everything, everything exists in relation to the Divine, in the Consciousness of the Divine—everything goes on wonderfully! Easy! And I speak of material things, of the material physical life (morally speaking it has long been known to be like that), but things material, that is to say, the small inconveniences of the body, its reactions, having pain or not, circumstances going bad, not being able to swal... Because I have experiences hardly agreeable, physically, materially, and then everything changes according to whether one pays attention to it or not, according to an attitude like this ( gesture turned to oneself ) in which one looks at oneself living, or else an attitude in which one is ( gesture of wideness ) in all things, in movement, in life, and an attitude in which one gives importance only to... is in that direction. The goal of this creation is this Consciousness of the Infinite, the Eternal who is Omnipotent—Infinite, Eternal, Omnipotent (called God by our religions: for us, in relation to life, it is the Divine)—Infinite and Eternal, Omnipotent... beyond time; each individual particle possessing this Consciousness, each individual particle containing this same Consciousness. It is division ...
... everything, but everything is in regard to the Divine, in the Consciousness of the Divine—all is marvelous, all is easy! And I am speaking of material things, of the material, physical life (for psychological things, we've known it for long), I mean material things like little discomforts of the body, or reactions, feeling pain or not, circumstances going wrong, not being able to swallow your dinner—the... I am convinced that we have a way of receiving things and reacting to them that CREATES difficulties—I am more and more convinced of it. Because, for example, I have rather unpleasant physical and material experiences about food. You know that for a very long time now I have completely stopped being hungry (I eat only to be reasonable, because "one must" eat, otherwise...), and I have some small difficulty... them or not, depending on an attitude like this ( gesture of being focused on oneself ) in which you watch yourself living, or an attitude in which you're ( vast gesture ) in things, in movement, in life; and a third attitude in which you pay attention only to the Divine. If you succeed in being like that all the time, there are no difficulties—and yet things are the same. That's the experience: the ...
... birth, progresses from one to the other even in the same life and goes on towards the total development of his inner existence. Our life itself is at once an inquiry after truth and knowledge, a struggle and battle of our will with ourselves and surrounding forces, a constant production, adaptation, application of skill to the material of life and a sacrifice and service. These things are the ordinary... leadership, protection, rule, victory in every kind of battle, a creative and formative action, the will-power which lays its hold on the material of life and on the wills of other men and compels the environment into the shapes which the Shakti within us seeks to impose on life or acts powerfully according to the work to be done to maintain what is in being or to destroy it and make clear the paths of the... relations, adapts itself to settled and developing movements, produces and perfects the outer technique of creation and action and life, assures possession and proceeds from possession to growth, is watchful over order and careful in progress and makes the most of the material of existence and its means and ends; then a power of self-spending skilful in lavishness and skilful in economy, which recognises ...
... as the lesser gods have theirs. But, they want to dominate the evolution and for that purpose they have taken their station in the vital worlds which influence the earth nature and give it its materials for life. They were created or rather manifested like other orders of being as a type or several types expressing some cosmic stress, some possibility in the Infinite, the expression of a certain kind... Shakespeare described as the Devil quoting Scripture for his own purpose. At present what they are most doing is to try to raise up the obscurity and weakness of the most physical mind, vital, material parts to prevent the progress or fulfilment of the sadhana. As to Asuras, not many of them have shown signs of repentance or possibility of conversion up to now. It is not surprising that they... by destruction. Asuras, Rakshasas and Other Vital Beings The Asuras and Rakshasas etc. do not belong to the earth, but to supraphysical worlds; but they act upon the earth life and dispute the control of human life and character and action with the Gods. They are the Powers of Darkness combating the Powers of Light. Page 465 Sometimes they possess men in order to act through them ...
... French, also, but a little of the Celtic Italian type—The Celtic type is dreaming artistic impulsive delicate intuitional a little formless; the Italian has the sense of form & mastery over the materials of life or of art—He is a Bengali, but no man belongs only to his present nation to the exclusion of his soul's past history—He is of the practical, formative type—Which? No—but I must try to get into... Possibly; but more often united—I don't see him—Also—That is a thing which most of us don't like to reveal—Not on earth—Yes—Rather, the sign of a constant connection with earth, a persistence in the life of the earth—Sometimes a great, sometimes little according Page 1405 to the particular case— 1 It is difficult to say; the mentality is sometimes strongly reproduced, the nervous part... strongest, is in her half asleep. Yes, but others can do that better than I can. No, but if he is as you say, ask him to come soon. Who? In defining the higher knowledge so as to make it useful for life—Precisely, the light is too high as it is; I can help him as it descends to define it more practically. No, that is your affair—In managing the way of the earthly world in which you are. Not in the ...
... enough, material enough compared with the thing seen and attempted, but which still makes a farther advance possible though often after a period of quiescence and reaction. And times there are, ages of stupendous effort and initiative when the gods seem no longer satisfied with this tardy and fragmentary working, when the ideal breaks constantly through the dull walls of the material practical life, in... of life and matter, our present field of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the flux of force in the material universe... he realises in action. This is indeed the order of evolution. It begins with a Page 112 material working in which the Prakriti, the executive Power, is veiled by its works, by the facts it produces, and itself veils the consciousness which originates and supports all its workings. In Life the force emerges and becomes vibrant in the very surface of its works; last, in Mind the underlying ...
... s and relations with the Divine is to miss that closer union towards which these crude beginnings are the first steps, however faltering. Page 558 All life, we have said, is a Yoga of Nature; here in this material world life is her reaching out from her first inconscience towards a return to union with the conscient Divine from whom she proceeded. In religion the mind of man, her accomplished... with the sense of a Power or perhaps a number of Powers greater and higher than himself by whom his life in Nature is overshadowed, influenced, governed, man naturally applies to it or to them the first primitive feelings of the natural being among the difficulties, desires and dangers of that life,—fear and interest. The enormous part played by these motives in the evolution of the religious instinct... even most primitively, from fear alone, but from twin motives, fear and desire, fear of things unpleasant and maleficent and desire of things pleasant and beneficent,—therefore from fear and interest. Life to him is primarily and engrossingly,—until he learns to live more in his soul and only secondarily in the action and reaction of outward things,—a series of actions and results, things to be desired ...
... hold on the material of life and on the will of others. At a lower level of development, this temperament creates the personality of a fighter or man of action; at a higher level, it manifests the man or woman of self- imposing active will; or at a still higher level, the Kshatriya is a ruler, conqueror, leader of a cause, creator, founder in whatever field of the active formation of life. In his refined... 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 later stage of the march of humanity; in spite of the problems and hurdles of ... certain rhythm appropriate to growth and development of the soul over its instruments, — mind, life and body. The law governing the rhythm of development appropriate to each individual has been called in Indian psychology, swadharma, and the process and becoming of the soul and its increasing power of the body, life and mind has been called swabhava. Swabhava and swadharma do not belong to Apara Prakriti ...
... disintegration of the life; not to do it sufficiently means languor, weakness, inefficiency, the danger of being oppressed by the environing forces and overborne; not to be able to do it wisely, intuitively, with a strong use of one's inner material and inner powers, means confusion, disorder and finally decline and loss of vitality. But also not to be able to use the material that the life around offers us... growth, some increment of the power and material of life; the energies of the being are stimulated and helped by the attack. It may act as a stimulus, awakening a new action of the self-consciousness and a sense of fresh possibility,—by comparison, by suggestion, by knocking at locked doors and arousing slumbering energies. It may come in as a possible material which has then to be reshaped to a form... takes in from it fresh materials of thought, modified when it is wakened by its stimulus to new activities, modified even when it denies and rejects; for even an old thought or truth which I affirm against an opposing idea, becomes a new thought to me in the effort of affirmation and rejection, clothes itself with new aspects and issues. My life is modified in the same way by the life influences it has ...
... three parts: (1) Sri Aurobindo on Himself: Notes and Letters on His Life; (2) Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother; Page 853 and (3) Sri Aurobindo on the Mother. The material comprising Parts Two and Three is published in volume 32 of THE COMPLETE WORKS, The Mother with Letters on the Mother . This material is discussed in the Note on the Texts of that volume. The... November 1926 and November 1950 that deal with any of the four subject areas listed in the first paragraph of this Note. Autobiographical Notes consists of various sorts of documentary material, including life sketches and corrections of statements made by biographers and others; letters written by Sri Aurobindo to family members, professional and political associates, newspaper editors, early... 1926—1950 corpus in which Sri Aurobindo referred directly or indirectly to his inner and outer life, his works, his contemporaries, and his ashram. These letters, together with the documents published in Autobiographical Notes , constitute nearly all the surviving biographical and historical source materials that Sri Aurobindo wrote. The Selection, Arrangement and Editing of the Letters ...
... never quite forgotten even under the stress and material exigencies and the externalities of political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social life an expression of man's true self and some highest realisation of the spirit within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art, literature, and... and drawbacks, the distinguishing advantages of the political and social effort of Europe. Page 399 On the other hand the tendency of the reason when it pretends to deal with the materials of life as its absolute governor, is to look too far away from the reality of the society as a living growth and to treat it as a mechanism which can be manipulated at will and constructed like so much... of the mind and life of the people, but as a part of and in its relation to the organic totality of the social existence. A people, a great human collectivity, is in fact an organic living being with a collective or rather—for the word collective is too mechanical to be true to the inner reality—a common or communal soul, mind and body. The life of the society like the physical life of the individual ...
... your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness. And you must not believe that by leaving the body you will free yourself of this atmosphere; on the contrary, the body is a kind of a veil of unconsciousness which diminishes the intensity of the suffering. If you are without the protection of the body in the most material vital life, the suffering... it appease their quarrels. When you think you may die the next moment, immediately, automatically, there occurs in you a detachment from all material things; it is logical that from then on you think only of what does not depend upon this physical life and which is the only thing that will still belong to you once you have left this body, that is to say, the eternal existence. The Buddha did not... Mara represents the Spirit of Evil, all that is contrary or opposed to the spiritual life; in certain cases he represents death—not so much physical death as death to truth, to the spiritual being. Here, it means that so long as one does not control one's senses and desires, and concerns oneself with external material satisfactions as the most important thing, one has not the will necessary to resist ...
... 114 An autonomous cellular life governed by the Mind of the cells, by that small indestructible, universal vibration. And as I did not understand very well back then what this new Mind was, I asked Mother: “How do you define this physical Mind, that which was subject to this transfer of power?”— That isn’t the physical Mind. It is the material Mind—not even the material Mind: the mind OF MATTER. It... is no material impossibility, there is no physiological impossibility, no more than in the Iron Age or the Age of nickel—there is always, eternally, a difficulty of the past that does not want to die and clings to the old forms. To its favourite suffocation. Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s experience is no doubt the most violent traumatism the earth has suffered since the appearance of Life. It is... new materiality to the old one, and it would be truly the supramental body on earth. The old body would be the bridge. The whole question lies in this “ponderability” or in this new materiality; there we are completely in the unknown—perhaps “the dangerous unknown” that Mother spoke of—and we will not truly know until the thing is done. How could the mineral understand the “materiality” of life ...
... existing materials mind, life, body must be supramentalised; otherwise the discordances and oppositions of mind will remain oppositions and discords, the confusions and conflicts of life will remain confused and conflicting, the cramps and limits of form will prevent plastic change, perfection, fulfilment. Mind has failed to liberate and perfect life, because it has imperfectly mentalised life and form... of Life, this Intuition assumes a working proper to that stage and acts from behind the veil, supporting and enforcing the immediate necessities of the creative Force. There is an intuition in Matter which holds the action of the material Energy together and dictates the organisation of the material world from the electron to the sun and planet and their contents. There is an intuition in Life which... materialistic with an externalised intellect and life-endeavour, which you find so painful, is an episode, but one which was perhaps inevitable. For if the spiritualisation of mind, life and body is the thing to be achieved, the conscious presence of the Spirit even in the physical consciousness and material body, an age which puts Matter and the physical life in the forefront and devotes itself to the effort ...
... correspondence of life action in body, life thinking itself out in body, body living and thinking out its experience in mind, but it is not the same thing as life and body. Life is a new or second power emerging from or in material energy. Mind is a new or third power emerging from or in the life-energy. But this is only the ascending scale. Mind is not only awakened by life-action in the... appears as a larger thing than life and material being. Though apparently an evolution from life and the body, it may have been in reality a prior power, life and body only its occasions and means for self-manifestation on the material plane of being. At any rate, psychology has to regard the scale not only from the upward point of view of body creating life, life creating mind, but from the downward... to be a resultant, development or deformation from physical experience. The life in the body is the necessary modification of the first fact of material being, without whose intervention consciousness is unable to manifest in any material form. The atom is a form of matter, the stone is a material body, but life in these things is either nil or not developed to the point where manifestation of ...
... the thinking activity is the pragmatic idea mind that lifts itself above life and acts creatively as a mediator between the idea and the life-power, between truth of life and truth of the idea not yet manifested in life. It draws material from life and builds out of it and upon it creative ideas that become dynamic for farther life development: on the other side it receives Page 842 new thought... altered in the action of the normal intelligence, and the life-mind of sensation, instinct, impulse, which is in its own nature a sort of obscure involved intuition and which supplies the intelligence from below with its first materials and data. And each of these other powers is in its own kind an intimate action of the spirit operating in mind and life and has a more direct and spontaneous character and... between the subconscient power of the spirit organising the life of the animal and the superconscient power of the spirit which becoming conscient can organise the existence and life of a spiritual supermanhood. The characteristic power of the reason in its fullness is a logical movement assuring itself first of all available materials and data by observation and arrangement, then acting upon them ...
... animate but Page 710 subconscient; then, in imperfect formulations of a conscient life, it strives towards self-finding through successive forms of that material substance, forms more and more adapted to its own completer expression. Consciousness in life, throwing off the primal insensibility of a material inanimation and nescience, labours to find itself more and more entirely in the Ignorance... can become even in his manifest existence, is the object Page 711 of his creation. This hope is the justification of his life upon earth amidst the phenomena of the cosmos. The outer apparent man, an ephemeral being subject to the constraints of his material embodiment and imprisoned in a limited mentality, has to be come the inner real Man, master of himself and his environment and universal... is he the Eternal and the All; therefore by himself he cannot be the explanation of the cosmos of which his mind, life and body are so evidently an infinitesimal detail. The visible cosmos too, he finds, is not sufficient to itself, nor does it explain itself even by its unseen material forces; for there is too much that he finds both in the world and in himself which is beyond them and of which they ...
... response to stimuli etc. They are processes of life not life. Life is an element which is present everywhere, even in what appears to be inconscient. Life is present in the earth, in the material elements, because they are an expression of life. They are not devoid of life because Life in them takes the submental or subconscious form. If life were not present in them they could not have come into existence... itself or flowing out into life-movement in which the transition from the inconscient to the conscient is effected. So life is a mid-term between the inconscient and the conscient. Life seems to begin with the inconscient matter and ends in mind-consciousness. Life is present in matter as submental life, not mental life, a submental operation of an intelligence and will in material form, in atoms, in molecule... waking, infancy, maturity and old age, all these are characteristics of all forms of life. Infinitely varied though they might be in their expression, still the common processes are seen easily by our mind. Life that is involved, in matter, gives rise to forms of life proper by a pressure of life from above. Material energy creates not living groups, but inanimate aggregates. In the insect world you find—in ...
... donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly... the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul—the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted... Rain. Next, it enters the earth atmosphere and clothes itself with the earth consciousness. Then it waits and calls for the formation of the material body, first by the contribution of the father and then by that of the mother; when these two unite and the material body is formed, the soul incarnates. Apart from the question whether the biological phenomenon described is really a symbol and a cloak ...
... donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly... the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul – the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted... the world. The Path of the Fathers (Pitry ā na) enjoins the right accomplishing of the dharma of Life – it is the path of works, of Karma; it is the line of progressive evolution that, man follows through the experience of life after life on earth. The Path of the Gods (Devay ā na) runs above life's evolutionary course; it lifts man out of the terrestrial cycle and places him in a superior consciousness ...
... Life is a dangerous river. You have to cross it to go over to the other shore of safety, the spiritual life. But once in it, you are doomed. You are drowned in its fathomless depths or if you try to clamber up its sides you are bogged down in their sticky mud. The one thing to do is to build a bridge – it can be only out of the materials of life itself. Life's experiences form the materials. They... Bishop = Indian term 'tusker' (elephant) which means material power. Five = the senses. Page 264 6. Queen = the Divine Consciousness-Power. Chit-Shakti. King = the ignorant being (Purusha) that normally rules the ignorant nature. 7. 64. squares = fullness, integrality of life. Kali, Mother Nature, is said to have 64 yoginis, powers... spilt and spoilt – the material sheath with its teguments and ligaments must be strong and make a resisting armour. 3. The supreme consciousness is simplicity itself. What can be more simple than Zero (Nirvana)? One who follows, adheres to simplicity is the Simple Man (Sahaja). This simple single consciousness is to be affirmed, firmly established in this material frame, the body – which ...
... is a love which does not last long. It will soon fade and die when she has found the company of other men. Love, according to Death, is nothing but a habit of flesh in the darkness of the material circumstance. Life and love cannot coexist in this physical universe with its law of crude gravitating heaviness; by its dissipative potency and power everything proceeds towards extreme fragmentation, towards... protecting them on the path of heaven. As will in the material world it is he who shapes and moulds forms and brings concreteness to things ethereal. Agni is the creative principle or power of immortality in Matter. Identification with him is a certain and effective means of attaining the beatitude of deathlessness, but not presently in the embodied material form; his form has not yet evolved to that stage... reason to life's passion. The harsh fact is that Truth in this world is "bare like stone and hard like death," which first she must accept. Moving on a more metaphysical level, Death tries to explain to Savitri that the laws of Nature are immutable and that there is no agency which can change them. No one has succeeded and Savitri should not attempt the futile. Restoration of Satyavan's life is against ...
... struggle for life. This hungry Prana first needs to build up a body in which it can subsist and in order to do so, it devours external substances so as to provide itself with the requisite material. This body once found it is continually eating up by the ceaselessness of its vital activity and has to repair its own ravages by continually drawing in external substances to form fresh material for an ev... to recover Page 239 out of the inertia of gross physical materiality Life, Mind, SupraIntelligence, Will until we know our infinite and eternal Self who is one with the Supreme Self of the Universe. With inanimate matter the world began, says evolutionary Science; but in inanimate matter there is no evidence of life or mind or spirit, no apparent possibility of the evolution of animate... the sun gives light and heat, fire burns, clouds give rain, earth revolves. Not only all animate, but all inanimate existence owes its life and various activity to Matariswan and its energy Prana. But it owes not only its life and activity, but the very materials out of which it is made. Here lies the insufficiency of Shankara's interpretation. The word apah naturally and usually signifies "waters" ...
... 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 is part of the knowledge necessary for transcending them. Life and the body have to be... knowledge and material achievement was immensely inferior, Page 281 yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better its object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection. In the range of the mind's life itself, to live in its merely practical and dynamic activity or in the mentalised emotional or sensational current, a life of conventional... the bodily life. She has effected a certain combination and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth,— Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the ...
... compromises with the materials (body, life, mind) comprising the medium, and try to communicate as from the "beyond" to the "here and now". But such communications are seldom articulate to any definite purpose. There could be exceptions, of course, and Sri Aurobindo himself later claimed that Vivekananda had spoken in the Alipur jail to him and that Rammohan Roy had given the material that went into... "Karmayoga" was simply "the application of Vedanta and Yoga to life". Vedanta and Yoga were nothing forbiddingly esoteric; nor were they limited to India. Already in 1909, they had exceeded their "Asiatic limit" and were beginning to "influence the life and practice of America and Europe". And Vedanta didn't mean a flight from life, and Yoga wasn't simply a series of exercises: "Abandon all... to be a national review and not a weekly newspaper. Current events were important only in so far as they tended to help or hinder "the growth of national life and the development of the soul of the nation". Many things went into the life of the nation, and unless they became a total and purposive strength, an integrated dynamic of forward * Cf. Sri Aurobindo: "The writing was done as an ...
... by the fivefold (panchabhautic) complex movement of the material Brahman, of conscious being as the essential substance of things, reveals himself as universal life activity, upholder of our vitality, prompter & cause of our actions. He as Life, is latently active in the utter inanimate, present, but unorganised in the metal, organised for life and growth only in the plant, for sense & feeling & thought... diabolical, not the kingdom of a lower spirit or an aberration in knowledge, but God's movement, mahimanam asya, the manifest might, the apparent extension in Itself of the Brahman. Life here is God, the materials of Life here are God. The work is not separate from the worker nor the thought from the thinker. All is the play of a divine Unity. We can now grasp what the Sage intends when he says, Tad... in union or withdrawal from union all our life & activity return. When we have known what the world is, when we have exhausted Science & sounded all the fathomless void, we have still to know what God is, & unless we know what God is, we know nothing fundamental about the world. Tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam. He being known, all the rest is known. Material Philosophy & Science have to admit in the ...
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