... ess. Essential delight is not yet become a part of sense experience. Delight is self-existent. The delight is rendered available to the evolving consciousness here in terms of mental consciousness. It is mental consciousness that represents that Page 111 Being of delight here. How does it get that original delight which is cause of being, which is cause of life and cause of its existence... consciousness and mental consciousness together receive the multiple shocks of the cosmos, and render it in terms of pleasure, pain and neutral indifference. It is true they do not render all sensation in terms of delight. Fundamentaly the object is to give the experience of that self-existent Delight to the Being, which has evolved itself out of the Inconscient. So, the mental consciousness is not decisive... and in 'time' it comes to mental consciousness. This is just mentioned to show that in living organism, in matter, there is no experience of pain. There may be vibrations only—call it positive and negative, if you like—but there is no cognizing subjective sense to feel pain, pleasure, or indifference. Pain begins with life in matter and grows with the mental consciousness in matter. When the mind is ...
... Life-principle and Mental consciousness of which he is the special representative. But Mind is not the end of the process of evolution, a further development beyond what is accomplished is possible. You cannot ask Nature to stop at a certain point in her labour. The Life Divine has proved that in chapter 4. In fact, there is already a tendency, a tension at work in the mental consciousness always to go... making a conscious movement to go beyond the mental consciousness. Page 173 Now the question is : Is Supermind working behind Life ? We have already seen that it is involved and is indirectly working in Mind. Is the Supermind involved in Life also ? We have considered Mind as an independent power. But here on earth there is no mental consciousness that is not in Life, because Mind here manifests... unveiled to man. Otherwise he cannot live the divine life here. In actuality we feel two things : one is the unity of Satchidananda, and the other is the divided mentality; that is to say, the mental consciousness of man is not at all capable of reali- Page 159 zing that fundamental, essential, self-existent Delight. These two oppose each other. Human mind in its search for perfection ...
... as both western science and eastern mysticism agree, is an appearance based on our present mode of perception through the senses and the categories of the mental consciousness. When the Supermind descends and we pass into super-mental consciousness, then our perception of reality will change and we shall no longer be conditioned by space and time. This is how I understand the Resurrection. It... introduced this concept of evolution into the Vedic tradition, so I think we can conceive the resurrection as the culmination of the evolutionary process - the passage beyond matter and life and mental consciousness into transcendent, divine consciousness. The reference to the Virgin Mary is based on the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, body and soul, into heaven, which is a defined... especially, as I said, through his concept of the descent of the Supermind, the transformation of matter and Page 43 the body and the evolution of the universe towards super-mental consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin did something similar for the Christian revelation. For me Sri Aurobindo is a great philosopher - in the deepest sense of the word - and he illumines my understanding of ...
... cannot separate yourself from your mental consciousness in its activity. Naturally, if you take your mental consciousness off the reading, you can't understand what is being read, for it is with the mental consciousness that one understands. You have not to make the mental consciousness separate from the reading, but yourself separate from the mental consciousness. You have to be the Witness watching... that needs to take root. It has been there very well rooted since you began your human evolution in the primaeval forests. The physical mental or externalising mind is part of the mental consciousness, not part of the physical consciousness. But it is closely connected with the mental physical - so that the two usually act together. It is not by a general descent that people come... writing or talking, just as you watch the body acting or moving. I try to separate myself from the mental activity, but what happens is that, instead of the witness Purusha, the mental consciousness gets separated from the mental activity! It is, I suppose, because you have not yet got the mental Purusha separate from the mental Prakriti - so when you pull the Purusha back, the ...
... psychic being cannot halt at the point in the evolution now reached by humanity. For its redivinization it has also to experience and integrate into itself the higher levels of existence between mental consciousness and the absolute Divine if its presence in creation has to make any sense at all. This was exactly what the Mother observed on 1 July 1970, thanks to the presence of the same woman mentioned... questions for the simple reason that they were impossible to answer to human beings, in human language. The human is a mental being — the mental being — which cannot form an idea with its mental consciousness of that which surpasses such a kind of consciousness, not analogically but ontologically. The primates are very intelligent beings, but a jet engine, a recipe for a chocolate cake or a piano... same, everywhere.’ 22 (the Mother) In order to perceive substance in its unity, the perception has to be actuated from the Unity-Consciousness. In the infinite division of reality by the mental consciousness, conditioned in ignorance, we perceive substance as infinitely divided in apparently separate agglomerates of atoms and elementary particles. But the Mother has clearly said, for instance in ...
... has subtle limitations which cannot go with the qualities and powers which we see in this creation. If it is a mental consciousness that is the creator, then in the creation, mental consciousness would have been present. But we find that in the inconscient, the mental consciousness is not present. And what is present is not of the mental type, of the mental nature. The consciousness that is m... power of infinite existence must be other than mental consciousness. That seems to be almost axiomatic. Mental consciousness, therefore, is not the rule of the material universe. We know that something in us is conscious when we sleep, when mind is not active. If the nature of that consciousness were only mental, we would retain our mental consciousness all through. But there are conditions in which... Force that is manifesting, a consciousness is working. Now what kind of consciousness is it that is working in the universal, infinite force ? Is it a mental consciousness, a Mind that is at work ? The mental consciousness, however wide, cannot be the creator of the movement of the cosmos. The universe cannot be the product of a Mind, however wide, however universal, however great ...
... active agent and in which it plays the central role. In the Night arose Matter, in Matter arose Life, and in Life Mental Consciousness, because the Soul, the bearer of Consciousness, Love and Light, has developed in ever more complex forms of Matter, Life and Mental Consciousness. To Sri Aurobindo and the Mother reincarnation is the mechanism of the growth of the soul, which is the presence of the... vital — all the invisible but very real forces affecting his thinking, usually a bobbing cork on the restless inner waves. Sri Aurobindo called this ‘the downward gravitation’. Moreover, the mental consciousness of the human cannot actually know reality. We have seen that of reality, which is a whole, it can only know fragments, aspects, flints — the pieces of a puzzle of which it feels that it exists... realized. Higher on there are many more ‘spiritual’ steps. As the word ‘spirit’ is often misleading, when using it and its derivations we will keep in mind the difference between the ordinary mental consciousness and the gradations above it; ‘spiritual’ is henceforth used exclusively in relation to these higher gradations. All things spiritual seem airy, insubstantial and unreal to humans because ...
... the high tide, the inflation of the mental consciousness. Its greatest merit is its contribution to the unification of the world. This is why it is of use for the time being and why in its present form it may continue to exist for some time, for as long as it is indispensable within the global process. But once the Supermind takes over, the mental consciousness under all its aspects will become the... scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence.’ (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 3) We, humans, experience a linear time, measured out by our mental consciousness in a global Time, which in the Unity-Consciousness is a harmonious coexistence of the various time-experiences of the various forms of consciousness. The spectacular twentieth century with the... consternation of man on the threshold of the Unknown. Not only 1 January of the year 2000 is such a threshold: man has always stood on the threshold of the Unknown because it is a feature of his own mental consciousness which he cannot escape, except by a transformation of that consciousness which would take him beyond himself. In this book we have seen that such a transformation of consciousness has taken ...
... truly is, and utilize it, we must indeed go beyond this narrow perspective. After having attained a certain degree of mental silence, Sri Aurobindo was able to make the following observations: Mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of color or human hearing all the gradations of sound – for... realize how terribly unyielding it is. And it is too stupid to be open to reason. Yet, ultimately, it will have to yield, because just as the thinking mind is an obstacle to the widening of our mental consciousness and the vital mind is an obstacle to the universalization of our vital consciousness, the physical mind puts up a massive wall against the expansion of our physical consciousness, an expansion... power to transform Matter. So far, as we can readily see, none of the forms of consciousness or levels of consciousness known to humanity has had the power to bring about this change, neither mental consciousness nor vital consciousness nor physical consciousness. True, through sheer discipline some individuals have managed to defy natural laws and to overcome gravity, cold, hunger, illness, etc. But ...
... cannot separate yourself from your mental consciousness in its activity. Naturally, if you take your mental consciousness off the reading, you can't understand what is being read, for it is with the mental consciousness that one understands. You have not to make the mental consciousness separate from the reading, but yourself separate from the mental consciousness. You have to be the Witness watching... s and for some purposes. It may act too as a hindrance. All depends upon the consciousness from which it is done. The reading of books of a light character may act as a relaxation of the mental consciousness. In the early stages it is not always possible to keep the mind to an unbroken spiritual concentration and endeavour and it takes refuge in other occupations, feeling even instinctively drawn ...
... own limitation of form because mind can be quite free from the limitations of life and body. The crux of the difficulty is here—that man is a mental being and has a mental consciousness, and as a mental being and as a mental consciousness he is aware of universal forces. He is aware of the universal force, of a universal life and then he knows that he is only a part of it. And he does not know that he... must culminate into Truth-Consciousness, because the universal consciousness is not the whole truth of the Omnipresent Reality. Universal consciousness is only one term of it, and universal mental consciousness has a double strain of knowledge and ignorance. When you speak of the Universal Consciousness it is not as if you were dealing with highest spiritual Consciousness: You are dealing with the... diversity coexist then the problem of life, that is, the problem of division, struggle and opposition, and aspect of duality will be radically solved. That is how the overcoming of the limit of mental consciousness will operate. Individuals live in themselves. Then, when the individual rises to this unity and diversity simultaneously existing and working, individuals will know themselves and view each ...
... what way is it contained ? It speaks of this as the 'Vast', B ṛ hat —a vastness that is beyond the firmament of our physical and mental consciousness. It says The Vast is "beyond earth and heaven." Earth is the physical consciousness, Heaven is the mental consciousness. Beyond the two firmaments of earth and heaven is the Vastness, B ṛ hat, the word they use in the Veda. It is all-comprehensive... but it is attainable by man because it is man's own highest Page 142 possibility or the highest self. Man can and does occasionally open to that consciousness. Mind means the mental consciousness including the intellect and the heart, and generally the vital will-power is added to it. Sometimes the mind ascends and opens to it, or glimpses it, but then it closes; the door opens again... about it. An intuition comes, an inspiration Page 145 comes, some light comes, a vision of some revelation comes—giving a vision of some higher Truth. Thus an opening is made in mental consciousness. That gives us a first inkling. More than that, the fingerpost of this nature of creative Divine Consciousness is given in one of the oldest books of the world, the Veda. The language ...
... and death. And he carries in him everything that has emerged before in the evolution, not only matter and life but also mental consciousness, which is why he is able to think, to reason and even to ‘see’ a little. Although his true nature is that of an incarnated mental consciousness in matter and life, the lower evolutionary gradations still prevail in him to such a degree that he may still be considered... ‘ontological discontinuities’, called ‘irreducible mysteries’ by E.E. Schumacher, namely the hierarchically ordered forms of existence that have appeared on Earth: matter, life, lower and higher mental consciousness. Let there be no misunderstanding: the origin of life on Earth has not yet been scientifically accounted for. In this matter, as in many others, official science gives in to wishful thinking... its own laws and processes that are yet to be discovered by the true, comprehensive science of the future. The same reasoning is valid, and in still greater measure, in theories concerning mental consciousness. To us the processes of life can still be directly experienced, most intimately in our beating heart, but the mental processes are a lot more impalpable and intangible, so much so that they ...
... works in us to remove this brilliant formation of concepts and percepts and replaces them by the self-vision and all-vision."² The "veil" between the Lower Hemisphere and the Higher is the mental consciousness unenlightened by what is above it. This view of Reality's dichotomy changes after the Over- mind is sorted out from the Supermind. Now we are told: "A line is therefore drawn between... seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality."³ The face of the Isha Upanishad's Surya is now seen as veiled not by our perceptual and conceptual mental consciousness but by the creative superconscient Overmind. The Upper Hemisphere now commences beyond the Overmind plane. That plane is now to be placed at the farther end (the "violet" end, we may say)... disciples were not ready for such a direct process. The sadhana assumed a new form: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took their stations in the physical mind, which begins at the brain- level of the mental consciousness, and kept pulling there what was high up and from there acted upon individuals and the general earth-scene. The principal opening which they insisted upon in the sadhaks now was the Hrid-padma ...
... prejudice or predilection, pride, over-confidence, ambition and excessive optimism. Attitudes stemming from the mental consciousness reflect a rational and objective view of things, and an inclination towards ideals. All human beings are endowed with physical, vital and mental consciousness, and are therefore influenced by qualities of all the three parts of the outer being in different degrees. But... obscurity, mechanical and chaotic activity, repetitiveness. and narrowness or constriction. The vital consciousness is characterized by energism, action and passion. The characteristics of mental consciousness are rationality, objectivity, balance and harmony. The influence of the physical consciousness is to be seen in attitudes which are marked by lethargy, indifference, boredom, doubt, diffidence... mind can control the vital Page 119 nature and prevent its irrational tendencies from dominating one's attitudes, the mind's control is very limited and precarious. Secondly, mental consciousness, being interfused with the physical and the vital consciousness, needs to be freed from their influences before it can express its own rational nature. Most of the time, the lower influences ...
... personality capable of survival, but only in the human form when that is created. This would happen by the force of a sudden growth of mental consciousness, and at the same time a sheath of subtle mind-substance might develop and help to individualise this mental consciousness and would then function as an inner body, just as the gross physical form by its organisation at once individualises and houses the... universal process. Modern thought starts from the physical body as the basis of our existence and recognises the reality of no other world except this material universe. What it sees here is a mental consciousness associated with the life of the body, giving in its birth no sign of previous individual existence and leaving in its end no sign of subsequent individual existence. What was before birth is... not dependent on the material body. It might have practically to readopt the ancient idea of a subtle form or body inhabited by a psychic entity. A psychic or soul entity, carrying with it the mental consciousness, or, if there be no such original soul, then the evolved and persistent mental individual would continue after death in this subtle persistent form, which must have been either created for it ...
... lies at the summit of and beyond mental consciousness which begins with the physical mind and ends with the purely mental or sattwic mind with the rajasic development in the middle. This, in short, is the course of evolutionary development of human mental consciousness. We regard the sattwic or the religious men as' the highest manifestation of mental consciousness. And they represent a fairly large... way to reach it but for that another consciousness is needed and that is the spiritual .consciousness. When the mind and mental consciousness is completely exceeded, the spiritual or truth-consciousness begins. The spiritual is in effect the reversal of the mental consciousness, for, where the mind sees things in division, distinction and separation, the spiritual vision is Unitarian. It looks at ...
... being", though it is a complement which the average man does not deserve as he is hardly a "mental being." All the same we can say "human consciousness" or "the mental consciousness". As a radical change in this mental consciousness cannot be brought about by the mind, we want to change it by something which is not mind, we call it Supermind. As man is Page 137 removed from... for consideration a law : what do you mean by a law? It means that under certain conditions the same movement of forces always recurs. It depends on the human mind, – the condition of mental consciousness. But suppose the consciousness changes, then the law also is bound to change and it would be seen from quite a different position. So, all the laws are relative. That Page 77 ... mind- in India has believed that Yoga means Raja-Yoga, in most cases at least. It is apparent that Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is quite different from the Raja-Yoga of Patanjali. It does not take the mental consciousness and its condition as the constant point of reference; for, its aim is not to secure a mental state which might reflect the Infinite but to rise above the mind. Besides, it adds the process of ...
... a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of Page 287 mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit. He has no sufficient means of communication even with the animal who is his mental congener, though... Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation... builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature. If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true ...
... separative plurality; mind in body increases this relation into a phenomenon of absolutely separative plurality. From this basis of externalising individuation and separative plurality waking mental consciousness in the physical universe commences its operations. 103 Psychology is the knowledge of consciousness and its operations. A complete psychology must be a complex of the science... n. If this is in the first place a study of process and involves an utility for psychological action, yet what it leads to inevitably is not that action but an enquiry into the nature of mental consciousness. This necessity arises from the immediate perception by mind of something beyond and behind its operations, some energy of hidden consciousness greater than our apparent mentality. To know... becomes possible. Consciousness in the atom and the stone is either latent, non-manifest to us, suppressed, potential or nil. Life in any degree is not sufficient for the manifestation of mental consciousness. A certain high degree of it or else a certain indispensable kind of organisation is needed for this third tone of the scale. Plants are living, even in a degree intensely living, they have ...
... perceptions called senses. They are, moreover, limited by the mental processing of the sense perceptions, in its turn influenced by the deformations of the senses and a priori limited by our mental consciousness, by the mechanisms of division to which this consciousness automatically subjects the One Existence. The Mother in that room on the second floor of the central building of the Sri Aurobindo... forget it.’ ‘Being’, to us, is one of the most abstract words, but in the spiritual experience there are no abstractions. For abstraction is a fictitious projection of the impotently grasping mental consciousness. Unity is the basis; Unity is the stuff of experience; Unity is the aim of the supramental transformation; Unity is the medium in which the supramental being exists. Unity is the Divine. From... life of planet Earth, was clearly delineated. All previous Avatars had universalized themselves in their mental and vital to turn their evolutionary effort into a terrestrial acquisition. The mental consciousness, for instance, was turned into an established element of life upon Earth thanks to the work of the Avatar Shri Rama. But this time the Avatar had to universalize his body, as the new evolution ...
... of the stairs are clearly discernible for anyone not wearing the dark glasses of dogmatic materialism: at the bottom there is matter (the minerals), then life (plants and lower animals), then mental consciousness (higher animals and man). Each of these levels has grown out of the levels underneath and contains all their elements in itself. An original thinker like the economist E.F. Schumacher, author... the abundance of their creations throughout the centuries, and the role played by religion in the world of men, it would be absurd to deny the existence of these levels surpassing our ordinary mental consciousness. Surely, all that had to emerge from somewhere. And is there one important scientific discovery or invention that was not the result of an inspiration, of a sudden ‘insight’ or ‘illumination’... time had not yet come to insert it into the ascending stair of evolution. Sri Aurobindo, using a technical, neutral term, has called the sun-world ‘the Supramental’, because it is far above the mental consciousness, even above its highest reaches. The Supramental — itself a resplendent prism of worlds — is essentially a principle of Unity, to us unimaginable. For in our world everything is divided, ...
... witness part from the active part of the consciousness but also to distinguish among different kinds of consciousness—physical, vital, mental, etc. All of consciousness is experienced simply as mental consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words: For human beings who have not got deeper into themselves, mind and consciousness are synonymous. Only when one becomes more aware of oneself by a growing co... consciousness is less difficult than distinguishing different kinds of consciousness. Therefore, even when one is yet unable to distinguish in oneself a difference between physical, vital, and mental consciousness, one can, with some practice, succeed in separating one's consciousness from one's thoughts and be their observer. As Sri Aurobindo states: The Divine has been described as Being, Con... complete surrender is possible. 20 Sri Aurobindo's teachings on the witness consciousness previously stated differ in two respects from Eckhart Tulle's perspecrive. First, Eckhart regards mental consciousness as a state of unconsciousness. To be identified with mind is to be in a state of unconsciousness; therefore, if the witnessing Presence is to arise, one must step out of mind. Sri Aurobindo ...
... on by Mind itself. After the Mind, the next higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz,. first by an uplifting of the mental consciousness – a certain widening and deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness – and then by a descent, gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it. This, then, is the nature of creation and its process. First,.... And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it bas to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one pointed: and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing ( parāñci khāni ) and superficial. The One Absolute... harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees ...
... and veiled by the activities of physical, vital and mental consciousness. The reason for dwelling at some length on definitions of the mental, the vital and the physical lies in the fact that in Integral Yoga, psychological disturbances are seen as springing from various inherent characteristics of physical, vital and mental consciousness and of their subdivisions made up of their intermixtures... below. Disturbances Associated with the Mind From one viewpoint, the root cause of all psychological disturbances lies in the nature of the mind. The peculiar characteristic of mental consciousness is that it is self-reflective, that is, it can objectivise itself. One part of the mind can separate itself and observe the rest as an object. The part that stands back serves as a mirror which... disturbances are seen to exist within the individual. Freedom from psychological disturbances can therefore be attained only by developing a state of consciousness other than the physical, vital and mental consciousness which characterizes the "normal" state of the human being. The innermost consciousness -that of the psychic being spoken of earlier - constitutes a state of psychological well-being because ...
... more for many years; she did not utilize a mental consciousness for it had been ‘sent packing’ in 1962. What she spoke was said by ‘something’ in her; what she formulated was phrased by ‘something’ in her, only when necessary and not at other times, by a specially delegated ‘I’ to enable her to keep functioning among human beings. Using the mental consciousness, which is ours, would for her have been... because the vital and mental had disappeared that people got the impression of a very serious illness.’ 4 Who can live without the vital, without the life force? Who can live without a mental consciousness? ‘One cannot move a finger, speak a word, make a step without the mental being involved.’ 5 We know that the mental is present even in the cells and atoms. And without the life force one... is a form of death. Death is like thickenings, membranous thickenings in the subtle flow of omnipresent Life; but it is of such thickenings that the stuff of our consciousness consists, our mental consciousness is made up of evolutionary callosities. When these hardenings will be burned away by rays of the supramental Radiation, Life will become fully alive in us, we will possess eternal life. The ...
... long after the first mental consciousness incarnated in a human form, which had become sufficiently human, you see, to become a man; and probably before this form was produced there must have been numerous trials of Nature which spread out, perhaps over thousands and thousands and millions of years. I don't know. But there was a time, as I said, when this mental consciousness was able to come and take... from will be at least ameliorated if not cured, and that the general conditions will be more harmonious, and in any case more tolerable. This may happen, because it was the very nature of the mental consciousness which incarnated in man, who acted for his own satisfaction, with his own development in view and without much consideration for the consequences of his actions. Perhaps the Supermind will act... thinks it knows about what happened. I can tell you only what I know. Well, there was a time when what we call the human form, that is, with human capacities, was ready enough for a being with mental consciousness, entirely conscious, to be able to incarnate in it—and this indeed was truly the first man. Now, historically at what time this happened I can't tell you; but it was a very long time ago. Sometime ...
... itself. After the Mind, the next higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz. first by an uplifting of the mental consciousness-—a certain widening and Page 37 deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness—and then by a descent, gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it. This, then, is the nature of creation and its process... fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it has to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Page 23 Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one-pointed : and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing (paranci khani) and superficial. The One Absolute... harmonisa-tion of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles, is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and higher spiritual degrees through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees ...
... don't you are in the falsehood. But all this has never led to anything and has only created confusion. There is only one true guide, that is the inner guide, who does not pass through the mental consciousness. Naturally, if a child gets a disastrous education, it Will try ever harder to extinguish Within itself this little Page-141 true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well... perversion begin with conscious mind and the human species. It is the wrong use man makes of his mental capacity. Perversion begins with humanity. It is a distortion of the progress of Nature which mental consciousness represents. And, therefore, the first thing which should be taught to every human being as soon as he is able to think, is that he should obey reason which is a super- instinct of the species... they are latent and need a special education, a special training so that they can express the Light. It is certain that in ordinary life the brain is the seat of the outer expression of the mental consciousness; well, if this brain is not developed, if it is crude, there are innumerable things which cannot be expressed, because they do not have the instrument required to express themselves. It would ...
... that gives me the feeling of being ill, all the time. A: It is a vibration of disharmony. Yes, in truth it is the transition from the ordinary mental Page 445 consciousness to the supramental consciousness. The mental consciousness is panic-stricken in the presence of the supramental consciousness. I have the feeling—I shall tell you, this is how it comes to me—that at every moment... moment one could die, the vibration is so different. And so it is only when I am very still... the being, the consciousness... the old consciousness—which is not the mental consciousness at all, but still—the old consciousness goes on repeating its mantra. There is a mantra... it goes on repeating its mantra. And so that is like a background, like a point of contact.... It is strange.... And then beyond ...
... the Vedic worlds corresponding to the principle of the pure or unobscured Mind. Surya represents the illumination Page 73 of the ṛtam rising upon the mind; Swar is that plane of mental consciousness which directly receives the illumination. Vayu on the other hand is always associated with the Prana or Life-Energy which contributes to the system all the ensemble of those nervous activities... Ritam, to work in the human mentality. With the Ritam as the agency, ṛtena , increasing the action of the Truth in man, ṛtāvṛdhā , touching or reaching the Truth, enabling, that is to say, the mental consciousness to come into successful contact with and possession of the Truth-Consciousness, ṛtaspṛśā , Mitra and Varuna are able to enjoy the use of a vast effective will-power, kratuṁ bṛhantam āśāthe... human being of the Powers of wideness Page 77 and purity, of joy and harmony, a manifestation rich in forms, seated in the wideness of the Ritam and using the faculties of the supra-mental consciousness. This manifestation of the Powers of the Truth upholds or confirms the discernment while it does the work, dakṣaṁ dadhāte apasam . The discernment, now purified and supported, works in the ...
... in its running from moment to moment on the surface. A little analysis will make this apparent. We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject. In the self-experience of the self-observing inner being, the object is always some state or movement or wave of the conscious being, anger, grief... Time; yet it is equally real from moment to moment and equally impossible to arrest. But we see that the mental being only regards all this mutation so far as it produces effects upon its own mental consciousness, generates impressions and changes in its mental experience and mental body, because only through the mind can it be aware of its changing physical habitation and its changing world-experience ...
... for oneself: one lets the Divine decide in one’s stead, for he knows so much better at every step, at every moment. Moreover, what to us is an act of the will, is an act of the mental consciousness; as the mental consciousness within the global Unity is terribly limited and actually ignorant, a self-centered act of the mental will can only lead us astray. Sri Aurobindo had said that he had been progressing... experience from the position of the vital,’ we read in a conversation of the Mother with Satprem from January 1962. She meant the supramentalization of the vital. The supramentalization of the mental consciousness had taken place a long time ago; so had the supramentalization of the vital, as we have seen. What she was now talking about, however, was the complete supramentalization of the vital under ...
... step: out of the Inconscient evolved Matter, out of Matter evolved Life and out of Life evolved Mental Consciousness — everything in accordance with the design which the One had self-seen and by seeing established for our evolutionary world. But Man, the being which is the embodiment of mental consciousness, is still far from the rediscovery by the One of itself in him — just as, looking back, he is... Man, finds himself somewhere in between these two extremes, stretched out like on a cross. Man carries all that has grown in the past in himself. He consists of matter, and of life, and of mental consciousness by which he looks back to yesterday and ahead to tomorrow, and by which he sees himself in the act of doing things. And he contains in himself a particle of the One, a spark of the light which ...
... consciousness developed out of the inconscience first in the vegetable kingdom, then in insects, worms, reptiles, birds and beasts and lastly in the developed mental consciousness of developed animals and human beings. The mental consciousness Page 8 of human beings is not the last term of the evolutionary progression of consciousness. It will exceed Mind as mind has exceeded the life... thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of earth-consciousness ; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit." And again : "As there has been established on earth a mental consciousness and power which shapes a race of mental beings, so now there will be established here a gnostic consciousness and power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself ...
... At either end of this luminous stair of the mental consciousness Aswapati sees the heavens of the ideal mind. In these heavens he could have ended his long pilgrimage as he could have in the Paradise of the Life Gods. He is far away now from the contaminating touch of matter and life and he has full freedom to savour the realms of mental consciousness and its worlds of bliss. On one side there... point Aswapati crosses the boundaries of normal human mind 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid, p. 253. 54 Ibid, Canto 11. Page 291 which does not exhaust the range of mental consciousness. There is the greater mind which is free from the flaws of the little mind. The greater mind is the unfallen mind and is open to the glories of the ideal mind. The ideal mind is from ...
... being, and ānandamaya purusa, the bliss being. It is the individual being that accepts the identification, by means of exclusive concentration of consciousness, with the physical, vital and mental consciousness as also with the egoistic consciousness. The fall of the individual being in inconscience and its raising up the evolutionary forms of matter, life and mind is seen, when the higher knowledge... consciousness is embodied in physical, vital and mental complex, it (the soul) is identified through its Purusha consciousness with the body, with the vital consciousness and power, and the mental consciousness and power as also with the fluctuating egoistic consciousness by process of various degrees of exclusive concentration of consciousness; but this concentration is not involutionary but evolutionary... on diversity while ignoring the unity, which is always present behind it; this exclusive concentration of consciousness creates a wall or a veil between the supramental consciousness and the mental consciousness. This movement culminates, ultimately, in the state of inconscience; from that state, there is an upward evolutionary process. This evolutionary process develops the human consciousness; it ...
... On the other hand, what is distinctive of spirituality is its stress on the psychological contention that there is a vast domain of states of consciousness, which are beyond and deeper than mental consciousness and beyond and deeper than the realm of doctrines, beliefs or dogmas. Spirituality can be developed by Yogic methodised effort that is scientific in character, since it can be practiced without... institutions. Thirdly, various states of spiritual consciousness tend to constitute four psychological traits of personality, which are commonly found universally among all who have gone beyond mental consciousness or who stand on the borderlines of the mental and spiritual consciousness. These psychological traits are connected with those powers of the Spirit, which flower as the sage, as the hero, as... difficulty to propose and implement spiritual education. Page 345 There are, however, those who maintain that the mind is the highest faculty of the human being; that the limitations of mental consciousness can never be broken, and that there is no such thing as spirituality or that there are no spiritual states of consciousness. But this contention is now as outmoded as the contention that anybody ...
... but of complementarily, and the peace between peoples would inevitably follow. Having eluded us as long as we were restricted to a divisive mental consciousness, an ineluctable and sovereign peace would prevail as soon as we entered a unifying mental consciousness, of which that peace would be the symbol and the embellishment. It is most probably for this reason that in many traditions peace reigns... humanity to come will be like. The sense of ego—individual and collective—enables us to presently clarify and impose our existence—individual and collective—in a world which, as perceived by the mental consciousness, is governed by duality, restricted in all parts, subject to the idea of beginning and end, and consequently to that of birth and death, as well as to the sensation of I and not-I. The ...
... of Consciousness Chit — pure consciousness; the essential consciousness of the Spirit; the free and all-creative self-awareness of the Absolute. Chitta — the basic stuff of mental consciousness; the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse, etc. "Chitta really means the ordinary consciousness... ss including the mind, vital and physical — but practically it can be taken to mean something central in the consciousness." — Sri Aurobindo "Chitta is ordinarily used for the mental consciousness in general, thought, feeling, etc. taken together with a stress now on one side or another, sometimes on the feelings..., sometimes on the thought-mind — 'heart and mind' in its wider sense..... human nature with a result of development into the divine nature of the being. Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness. 2. one of the six systems of orthodox Indian philosophy systematised by Patanjali. Page 419 ...
... Supermind, is cosmic Delight, is Sachchidananda; yet it cannot really be defined by any of these things, not even by our largest conception of Sachchidananda. In the world as we see it, for our mental consciousness however high we carry it, we find that to every positive there is a negative. But the negative is not a zero,—indeed whatever appears to us a zero is packed with force, teeming with power of... the One become by a miracle the Many, nor the unconditioned deviated into the conditioned, nor the unqualitied sprouted out into qualities. These oppositions are only the conveniences of our mental consciousness, our divisions of the indivisible. The things they represent are not fictions, they are realities, but they are not rightly known if they are set in irreconcilable opposition to or separation... scientific divisions and metaphysical distinctions, but of our exclusive spiritual realisations which are only exclusive because to arrive at them we have to start from our limiting and dividing mental consciousness. We have to make the metaphysical distinctions in order to help our intelligence towards a truth which exceeds it, because it is only so that it can escape from the confusions of our first ...
... things according to the truth of the spirit and the law of its manifestation is not mental but supramental and even in its formulation nearest to mind as much above the mental consciousness in its light and power as the mental consciousness of man above the vital mind of the lower creation. The question is how far the perfected human being can raise himself above mind, enter into some kind of fusing union... half light and half darkness of a mingled truth and error, and creator too of a thing which it derives altered, translated, lessened from something greater than and beyond it. Man lives in a mental consciousness between a vast subconscient which is to his seeing a dark inconscience and a vaster superconscient which he is apt to take for another but a luminous inconscience, because his idea of consciousness ...
... what you meant by saying Page 158 that Sri Aurobindo performed miracles in the mind. I mean that he used to introduce the supramental force into the mental consciousness. Into the mental consciousness, the mental consciousness that governs all material movements, he would introduce a supramental formation or power or force which immediately changed the organisation. This produces immediate ...
... "miracles in the Mind." What are they? "Sri Aurobindo performed miracles in the Mind," you said. That was when he brought the supramental Force into the mental consciousness. He would bring into the mental consciousness (the mental consciousness that governs all material movements 1 ) a supramental formation, or power, or force, that instantly altered the organization. With immediate results... ...
... The truth is, it's the transition from the ordinary mental consciousness to the supramental consciousness. The mental consciousness panics in the presence of the supramental consciousness. The vibration is so different I feel one could die every minute. Only when I am very tranquil.... The old consciousness (which isn't at all a mental consciousness, but anyway...), the old consciousness keeps repeating ...
... On the other hand, what is distinctive of spirituality is its stress on the psychological contention that there is a vast domain of states of consciousness, which are beyond and deeper than mental consciousness and beyond and deeper than the realm of doctrines, beliefs or dogmas. Spirituality can be developed by Yogic methodised effort that is scientific in character, since it can be practiced without... institutions. Thirdly, various states of spiritual consciousness tend to constitute four psychological traits of personality, which are commonly found universally among all who have gone beyond mental consciousness or who stand on the borderlines of the mental and spiritual consciousness. These psychological traits are connected with those powers of the Spirit, which flower as the sage, as the hero,... great difficulty to propose and implement spiritual education. There are, however, those who maintain that the mind is the highest faculty of the human being; that the limitations of mental consciousness can never be broken, and that there is no such thing as spirituality or that there are no spiritual states of consciousness. But this contention is now as outmoded as the contention that anybody ...
... on sees the reality and the principles and forms of things in their true relations. On the other hand, the word Thinker refers to the laboring mentality, which works from the overmental and mental consciousness. The Supreme Reality, visioned supramentally, is at once the impersonal Brahman, bodiless and pure, and the Ishwara, the dynamic lord, who spreads out and becomes everywhere and orders objects... Ultimate Reality, according to the Gita, is One but complex and integral and this integrality is the highest object of knowledge and manifestation which we can attain by transcendence of the mental consciousness and by rising into various higher and highest levels of consciousness corresponding to the overmental and supramental consciousness. The principal ideas of the Gita which are woven into its... resolving experience. The fact is that there is in the domain of spiritual experience a wide variety, and as Sri Aurobindo has explained, as long as spiritual experience takes place at the level of mental consciousness, whether in a state of silence of the mind as in the process of Jnana yoga, or in the mind which is greatly quieted by overwhelming love of the Divine, as in the Bhakti yoga, or as else in the ...
... on. by Mind itself. After the Mind, the next higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz, first by an uplifting of the mental consciousness—a certain. widening and deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness—and then by a descent, gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it. This, then, is the nature of creation and its process. First,. there... harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles, is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and higher spiritual degrees through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees ...
... out of life evolves mind and Homo Sapiens emerges as the visible crown and roof of creation. The analytical mind of man both clarifies and confuses, both helps and hinders further progress. Mental consciousness is apt to take the part for the whole, to be dazzled by false lights, to defeat itself by the very perfection of its analytical subtlety, careering through an infinity of differentiations... isn't ordinarily aware of them but chooses to be weighed down by the weary burden of the lower dualities. Of course Evil is not outright illusion, and the pictures we form with the aid of our mental consciousness are neither Truth nor Falsehood - they are partly true and partly false. Imperfect as they are, the pictures do not cancel the richer and profounder reality of the living Spirit behind, anymore... force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into full or partial action". 66 Suppose the Supermind acted directly on the Mind, skipping so to say the four middle steps, might not mental consciousness be charged then with the Supermind's white radiance of Knowledge and be transformed in consequence as Mind of Light?* Technically it would be below Higher Mind, yet it might be more intrinsically ...
... his firm seat, neither too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin, with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control he should practise Yoga for self-purification, ātmaviśuddhaye ." The posture he takes must be the motionless erect posture proper to the practice of Rajayoga; the... the Yogin attains to the supreme peace of Nirvana which has its Page 241 foundation in Me, śāntiṁ nirvāṇa-paramāṁ matsaṁsthām ." This peace of Nirvana is reached when all the mental consciousness is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire and remains still in the Self, when, motionless like the light of a lamp in a windless place, it ceases from its restless action, shut ...
... sensational existence with its undelivered burden of unrealised delight climbing full of the "Ghrita" and the "Soma", the clarified mental consciousness and the illumined Ananda that descends from above, to the heaven of Immortality. The "secret Name" of the mental consciousness, the tongue with which the gods taste the world, the nexus of Immortality, is the Ananda which the Soma symbolises. For all this ...
... into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the ... life of the race. But none of these things satisfy the demand of the soul that is placed before us by the integral Yoga. Altruism, philanthropy, humanitarianism, service are flowers of the mental consciousness and are at best the mind's cold and pale imitation of the spiritual flame of universal Divine Love. Not truly liberative from ego-sense, they widen it at most and give it a higher and larger ...
... emerging in it the law of pain and suffering and the unrest of dissatisfaction with its status of division, inertia and ignorance. Ignorance would indeed bring no pain of dissatisfaction if the mental consciousness were entirely ignorant, if it could halt satisfied in some shell of custom, unaware of its own ignorance or of the infinite ocean of consciousness and knowledge by which it lives surrounded;... consciousness with the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only recover itself by rejecting as an error and a false step its attempt to find itself in the finite. Nor can the emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of Mind into which Mind ...
... from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity... little use if there were not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the senses. So also for the mental consciousness God moves round the personal ego and all His Page 58 works and ways are brought to the judgment of our egoistic sensations, emotions and conceptions and are there given values and ...
... or, even if one could persist in it for an indefinitely long period, it is always likely to be broken in upon by any strong or persistent call on the bodily life. And when one returns to the mental consciousness, one is back again in the lower being. Therefore it has been said that complete liberation from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the mental being is impossible until the... integral Yoga. There must be a positive transformation and not merely a negative quiescence of the waking mentality. The transformation is possible because, although the divine planes are above the mental consciousness and to enter actually into them we have ordinarily to lose the mental in Samadhi, yet there are in the mental being divine planes superior to our normal mentality which reproduce the conditions ...
... be a limited and inferior movement, guided and used by it, serving its ends even when it seems to combat its ends. We may deny Intelligence to such a Power, because it does not give signs of mental consciousness & does not in every part of its works use a human or mental intelligence; but our objection is only a metaphysical distinction. Practically, looking out on life & not in upon abstract thought... is it a fundamental & omnipresent attribute or only a development manifested in a select minority of her works? Here again, the difficulty is that we associate intelligence with an organised mental consciousness. But let us look at & interrogate the facts which Science has brought into our ken. We will glance at only one of them, the fly catching plant of America. Here is a vegetable organism which ...
... afterwards gradually bring down what they had realized into the degrees of existence between the Supermind and Matter. We have seen that Sri Aurobindo had brought down the Supramental into his mental consciousness by 1920 (it might be a useful yogic exercise to try and imagine what these words mean) and how he stopped the publication of the Arya in January 1921 because the Supramental was descending... inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place.’ 9 The Mind of Light is the undiminished, authentic, golden Unity-Consciousness, secretly present in the lower levels of the body: those of the mental consciousness of matter. 93 Sri Aurobindo had actualized the transformation of his body that far . But his was still an individual realization, clearly shown by the fact that it had to be transmitted ...
... from vegetable to life-consciousness in the worms, insects, reptiles, birds and thence to the mental consciousness of the animals and finally to the emerging higher consciousness of man, the mental being, the earth is progressively moving towards the yet un evolved spiritual and supra-mental consciousness which is at the summit of our evolutionary destiny. When the summit is reached ...
... quantities, not something that is real to its grasp." 49 How then, through the miraculous agency of what kind of mind-made speech, can the mystic expect to convey to the analytical dividing mental consciousness the true nature of the unitary spiritual consciousness in which he lives? (C)The Absolute, one of the essential goals of all serious and sincere spiritual pursuit, is in itself indefinable... becomes impossible of solution, when we have in view the situation in which the 'speaker' is a mystic reporting about his spiritual experiences and the 'hearer' happens to be a person of normal mental consciousness, having no direct and immediate access to the experiences in question. For, "even when they speak the same language it is a different order of perception to which the language refers, the products ...
... acts in the body's cells. The body's cells become something conscious, entirely conscious. A consciousness which is independent, absolutely independent of the vital consciousness or the mental consciousness: it's a corporeal consciousness. ( silence ) And this physical mind, which Sri Aurobindo said was an impossibility, that it was something that goes round in circles and would go on turning... sees it: one just has to open one's eyes to see it. Well, the same thing is now taking place: for the animal to become a man, it didn't take anything more than the infusion of a consciousness—a mental consciousness—and now, it's the awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The mind has withdrawn, the vital has Page 371 withdrawn, everything has withdrawn; ...
... the Supermind. There are several curves and circles coming up and down. They have to be understood and used for transforming the ordinary life. Shankaracharya understood Vijnan as a superior mental consciousness and as this was still mental he rejected that Vijnan, Shankaracharya did not believe in manifestation which to him was Maya. Manifestation is truth of Divine power and has to be accepted. That... possible for us to identify ourselves with that power and thus take part in the manifestation of the Divine on this earth. For some time I also could not understand Vijnan and mistook higher mental consciousness for Vijnan. It is not sufficient to realise the higher consciousness in meditation. Its working presence should be felt even while doing the ordinary works of life. But Supermind proper is ...
... pure spot his firm seat, neither too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer skin, with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control, he should practise Yoga for self-purification. Holding the body, head and neck erect, motionless, the vision drawn in and fixed between the eyebrows, not regarding... for him who gives up sleep and food, O Arjuna. Yoga destroys all sorrow for him in whom the sleep and waking, the food, the play, the putting forth of effort in works are all yukta. When all mental consciousness is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire and remains still in the self, then it is said, “he is in Yoga.” Motionless like the light of a lamp in a windless place is the controlled ...
... vital forces and the mind undergo a refreshing bath of purity and wideness and joy of fulfillment. The life-powers range with the voice of truth"-seeking thought in physical consciousness and mental consciousness; Mitra and Varuna, the two emperors or samrats, come to their cry with the brilliant clouds full of the creative waters. There is then the manifestation of the divine truth-knowledge, Maya... infinite plenary; between these two oceans is a third ocean of human consciousness, 21 and this third ocean is imaged as a sort of boundless wave that surges up to climb and to flow up beyond the mental consciousness to the supreme ocean of knowledge. Human life is thus visualized- as this wave, and it is described as a perilous wave which we have to navigate. In one of the significant parables of the ...
... Veda, in the 71 st sukta, Parashara speaks of the path to the great supramental consciousness, which is called the great heaven as distinguished from heaven or dyauh, signifying the realm of mental consciousness: "Our fathers broke open the firm and strong places by their words, yea, the Angirasas broke open the hill by their cry; they made for us the path to the great heaven; they found the Way and... by the power of seven-headed thought he became universal and discovered supramental consciousness, the fourth level of consciousness which transcends the triple state of physical, vital and mental consciousness. In the next verse, (b) the other conditions of the ripening Page 48 of consciousness are described: "atrsyantīr apaso yanti acchā, devān janma prayasā vardhayantīh” ...
... very nature of which will have inherent powers of the supramental consciousness, just as the human species is imbued with spontaneous powers of the development of the mind and various ranges of mental consciousness. Spirituality and Knowledge Spirituality and direct spiritual experiences carry with them poetic quality, iii and they claim certainty of knowledge and the certainty of the... to be rooted in the revealed truth. It also erects or creates systems of institutions and modes of collective life designed to sub-serve the revealed truth. But religion is still governed by mental consciousness; it often revolves in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices of set prescriptions and forms. Religion does promise eventual arrival at spiritual experience, but often, it is claimed that ...
... a pure spot his firm seat neither too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin, with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control, and he should practise Yoga for self-purification". The process of concentration, self-control and freedom from fear are then underlined. As a result, the supreme... familiarity, seem to us to be still more mysterious and strange and wonderful. But the realm of yoga opens up in our consciousness even Page 102 vaster marvels and mysteries when mental consciousness is extended and transcended in its capacities of experience. The psychological development that can take place by the intensities of our capacities opens up vistas of inmost sight and inmost ...
... infinity. Supermind occupies the position of a link between these two. The higher term above it is the Sachchidananda consciousness and the term below the supramental consciousness is that of the mental consciousness. The supermind may thus be described with a greater precision as the comprehensive and creative consciousness, which by its power of pervading and comprehending knowledge is the child of that... The mental nature is primarily concerned with particulars rather than with the universals; although universals can be conceived by the mental nature, here they are not experienced concretely. Mental consciousness is normally limited at a given time to one poise or one form of action, and it is difficult for it to hold several poises simultaneously. But the Divine Nature is not so particularized, nor ...
... very nature of which will have inherent powers of the supramental consciousness, just as the human species is imbued with spontaneous powers of the development of the mind and various ranges of mental consciousness. Spirituality and Knowledge Spirituality and direct spiritual experiences carry with them noetic quality, 20 and they claim certainty of knowledge and the certainty of the truth... revealed truth. It also erects or creates systems of institutions and modes of collective life designed to sub-serve the revealed truth. But religion is still governed by page - 36 mental consciousness; it often revolves in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices of set prescriptions and forms. Religion does promise eventual arrival at spiritual experience, but often, it is claimed that ...
... perception not dominated by intellectual concepts, but informed by intuition and culminating in knowledge by identity, we shall see that the consciousness of this infinite Energy is other than our mental consciousness, that it is indivisible and gives, not an equal part of itself, but its whole self at one and the same time to the solar system and to the ant-hill. To Brahman there are no whole and parts,... fiction of our intellectual conceptions starting from a false idea of the stable: for there is nothing that is stable; all is movement and our conception of the stable is only an artifice of our mental consciousness by which we secure a standpoint for dealing practically with the movement. It is easy Page 105 to show that this is true in the movement itself. There is nothing there that is stable ...
... from Sri Aurobindo's correspondence with Dilip Kumar. (1) Mental consciousness viz-d-vis Divine Consciousness: "I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt ...
... 'dream state' of the ancient Yogic tradition "are so named and figured because it is through dream and sleep, — or trance which can be regarded as a kind of dream or sleep, — that the surface mental consciousness normally passes out of the perception of objective things into the inner subliminal and the superior supramental or overmental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities... take on the character of precise visions and, at times, of dream revelations..." (The Mother: Words of Long Ago, pp. 44-45) Page 329 But along with this participation of mental consciousness, this revelatory intelectualisation of dreams, we must now try to cultivate in sleep a still higher and deeper mode of consciousness. In fact, our sleep-life should be as much a part of sadhana ...
... and understood only if one realizes that even at the summit of the ordinary mental level of consciousness, there is no solution to the problem of the kind that Arjuna was confronted with. The mental consciousness is limited and remains confined perpetually in the state of egoism and duality, and even at its highest level, the strain and stress of the stains of ego and dualities do not get diminished;... Sankhya and Yoga occupies a prominent place in Sri Krishna's answer, and this prominence is due to the fact that the Sankhyan view, which aimed at lifting human consciousness from the ordinary mental consciousness to a spiritual level of consciousness, advocated the gospel of renunciation or sannyasa and advocated, therefore, the inferiority and dispensability of the concepts of human duties and human ...
... The psychic or spiritual control. What is meant by the spiritual control? The control from the higher Consciousness above the ordinary mental. When the mental consciousness finds that what it had accepted was not true, should it not reject it and accept what was true? It should do so, but it is not always so easy as that. Page 212 ... free thinking. But even this free thinking is hindered by the upsurging of the vital. For. though we are mental beings, we live largely in the vital. Very few live purely and constantly in the mental consciousness. As we are more in the vital, the descent of peace straight into it is indispensable in order to calm completely our whole mental stuff. But this peace must descend into the inner ...
... being its vehicle. Agni in the physical consciousness is called grhapati, for the body is the house in which the soul is lodged and he is its keeper, guardian and lord. The fire in the mental consciousness is called daksina; for it is that which gives discernment, the power to discriminate between the truth and the false-hood, it is that which by the pressure of its heat and light 1... Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master ...
... a. Next to it is the consciousness in the mineral, it is unconsciousness. By unconsciousness it is meant here naturally the absence of the mental consciousness: the presence or absence of consciousness means the presence or absence of the mental consciousness. There is a generic consciousness, consciousness in itself, or pure consciousness, which is imbedded in all created things, for creation itself ...
... appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a little this psychological riddle. When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness.... something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence. I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentality – his ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions ...
... Of course if one wrote from his personal experience and vision it would be different. But remaining withdrawn need not lift one into the spiritual consciousness: one may very well be in the mental consciousness. Philosophical writings are of the mental plane. NIRODBARAN: Calm and peace may be there behind. SRI AUROBINDO: That is not sufficient. There must be the spiritual dynamism too, which... But one can keep it in the mind. It need not come into the vital. SRI AUROBINDO: No, but that would be the old Yoga, in which people want to depart from the world, living in their highest mental consciousness. But when they come into contact with the external world, they can't keep that poise and silence. The seeds have not been thrown; they have only remained dormant. There are also cases where ...
... example, or among animals, the response will be much quicker than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a very organized mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is "unconscious" will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle... stupidity; but it is Matter itself, conscious Matter, that will adhere before us and explode appearances before our bewildered eyes—Krishna in gold is growing amongst us. Furthermore, if our mental consciousness is really the veil, a veil over something else that is true Matter, conscious Matter, then the evil of the world is fundamentally nowhere, except in the veil. An evil veil, a veil of death ...
... revelation), the number of miracles Sri Aurobindo performed in the Mind is incalculable. What on earth can miracles in the Mind be?... And Mother answered, He would bring into the mental consciousness (the mental consciousness that governs all material movements [that is, the physical mind]) a supramental formation, or power, or force, that instantly ALTERED THE ORGANIZATION. With immediate results ...
... active whether man is conscious about it or not. Even then, the question how the division and disharmony did arise remains to be answered. It is true that in all the operations of the present mental consciousness of man the element of duality and division is present. But man is not bound to remain confined to his mental conscious- ness; it is possible for him to rise to a Truth-consciousness; which is... fulfilment of the collective spirit of man. Man's destiny, according to him, is to attain divine life on earth i. e. to attain and manifest the Truth- Consciousness which would take the place of his mental consciousness and recreate life, individual and collective, in the mould of that higher reality. That brings in the question of the place of collective life in Sri Aurobindo's vision. He affirms the ...
... conscious ego, asserting itself at every step of its life, imposing itself and encroaching upon others and demanding the subservience of everything to its personal ends. But its consciousness is a mental consciousness, floating like an isolated iceberg among other icebergs upon the waters of the encompassing Subconscient, and, more often than not, moved and tossed by them, though it has always the delusive... perception of the Will of God, which the soul is commissioned here to fulfil. Besides, it lives in limitations, and reasons and reflects and acts in the semi- Page 132 darkness of a mental consciousness. It proceeds on the basis of division and can only imperfectly imagine and conceive, but never realise and live, the unity and harmony of existence. But whatever its defects and drawbacks ...
... also finds a connection between lust and taste. Disciple : He wants to stick to the mental consciousenss and to the ordinary nature and tries to master the movements of nature from the mental consciousness helped, if possible, by prayer. He has hardly even a cursory acquaintance with the division of Purusha and Prakriti, so necessary to establish the basis of the spiritual life Disciple ... There is infinite possibility. So the potentiality of all the four castes is in every man, but that does not exist as a fact. No classification can be perfect so long as man is living in the mental consciousness. It is not possible to classify all natures into four orders. So we have come to the present confusion because it is regulated by birth. Of course, there are tradition, training, culture ...
... to model Matter directly, by emitting the corresponding vibration in their own Matter: they will act from Matter to Matter in the same way that today we communicate and act from mental consciousness to mental consciousness. It was why Mother said: The foremost realization for man is understanding—understanding things. For the Supermind, realization means Power, the creative Willpower. 25 Like ...
... changing phenomena of his being, the immutability evident to a direct and pure self-consciousness, the mutable evident indirectly through a conditional and secondary mental consciousness.—It is the character of this indirect mental consciousness which can experience only by succession of Time that brings in the device Page 492 of Memory. Memory is not the essence of mental experience of becoming ...
... being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally—the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the Page 30 spoken—precisely for the work of creation. The Mantra can not only create... measures,—and according to the rhythm is the law, arrangement, harmony, processes of the world it builds. Life itself is a rhythm of God. But what is it that is expressed or raised up before the mental consciousness by the Word in the phenomenal world? Not Brahman, but truths, forms and phenomena of Brahman. Brahman is not, cannot be expressed by the Word; he does not use the word here to express his very ...
... truth even to modern psychological observation & experiment,—and was known thousands of years ago to the Vedantin,—that only a small part of our active conscious being is revealed to our waking mental consciousness; a vast amount of work of action, work of impulse, work of knowledge goes either under or above the lower & the upper level of our waking existence and faculty. In the nature of things, therefore... its inherent existence there the processes, arrangements, life & functionings of the oak tree. We do not see this truth because the form God takes is still a material form without an organised mental consciousness. It is only when we arrive at Page 548 human life that, a little more clearly, & yet still very dimly, this truth begins to show itself. To our lower or material mind, for instance ...
... perception not dominated by intellectual concepts, but informed by intuition and culminating in knowledge by identity, we shall see that the consciousness of this infinite Energy is other than our mental consciousness, that it is indivisible and gives, not an equal part of itself, but its whole self at one and the same time to the solar system and to the ant-hill. To Brahman there are no whole and parts,... al conceptions starting from a Page 80 false idea of the stable: for there is nothing that is stable; all is movement and our conception of the stable is only an artifice of our mental consciousness by which we secure a standpoint for dealing practically with the movement. It is easy to show that this is true in the movement itself. There is nothing there that is stable. All that appears ...
... the supermind. There are several curves and circles coming up and down. They have to be understood and used for transforming the ordinary life. Shankaracharya understood Vijnan as a superior mental consciousness and as this was still mental he rejected that Vijnan, Shankaracharya did not believe in manifestation which to him was Maya. Manifestation is truth of Divine power and has to be accepted. That... possible for us to identify ourselves with that power and thus take part in the manifestation of the Divine on this earth. For some time I also could not—understand Vijnan and mistook higher mental consciousness for Vijnan. It is not sufficient to realise the higher-consciousness in meditation. Its working presence should be felt even while doing the ordinary works of life. But supermind proper is ...
... these parts of us are doing, and receive it very imperfectly in the terms and values of the thinking and reasoning mind. 16 Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound... the universe. Therefore, consciousness is not confined to the human being, but is present in the animal, the plant and also in matter. Human consciousness is not identical with mind; mental consciousness is only a middle term below which lie levels of consciousness which to us are subconscient, and above which there exist levels of consciousness which to us are superconscient. Page 333 ...
... elements - awareness and conscious-power or will-force. Each level of consciousness has its own characteristic type of awareness and degree of will-force. Intellectual awareness, which belongs to mental consciousness, is relatively ineffective because of the relative impotence of the will-force - the mental will-power - associated with it. As Sri Aurobindo observes: "Those who live in the mind and the... Awareness, Will, Force are always one movement and automatically effective." 15 In Yoga, on the other hand, the aim is to attain a progressively more evolved state of being than that of mental consciousness, thereby attaining a progressively greater force of one's being. To attain fullness of being, therefore, is not only, as previously stated by Sri Aurobindo, to be fully aware of one's being ...
... the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument. Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see inanimation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or communicate itself to its surfaces... it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti. Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental Page 8 consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations ...
... self-development.” 8 “We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being; so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of... discoveries of the billions of galaxies, the fantastic fireworks of the material universe, and the wonders in the subatomic world; the Subconscient is the murky waters in which our life and our mental consciousness have taken shape and on which they are still floating. Life and Mind are the level accelerating evolution has reached in the human being. We are the children of the evolution as concentrated ...
... Aurobindo and Mirra knew that they were missioned to bring a higher consciousness onto the earth, a consciousness intended to become embodied in a new species beyond present humanity, just as the mental consciousness had embodied itself in a new species beyond the primates. It was their intention to found the Life Divine upon earth, thus fulfilling the promise made to the human species since its beginning... and Being. On other occasions he mentions eight gradations. But one could also add the Inconscient and the universal subconscious below matter and the four spiritual layers of mind between the mental consciousness and Supermind (these will play an important part in our exposition further on). One should nonetheless never lose sight of certain facts. First, that Brahman is not only at the very top of ...
... the supramental transformation of Matter, where Matter can be touched and ennobled — the indispensable precondition for the supramental body to be realized in this material Creation. The mental consciousness of the human being encompasses several ‘steps’, several functional gradations. Its most apparent functions are the intellect and reason, although both are considerably influenced by the desires... including the cells. Let us therefore define unambiguously the following terms needed to describe the process of the supramental transformation of the body: The mind of the body : the mental consciousness of the body as a whole; the mastery over the mind of the body is an elementary condition in most yogas and was realized by the Mother long before she went to Pondicherry; The mind of ...
... supramental Light into the mental world,’ which is the same as saying that he had realized the Supramental or Supermind in his mental consciousness. These perhaps mysterious words mean nothing less than that Sri Aurobindo had, towards the end of 1920, divinized his mental consciousness. ‘The thinker and toiler’ had, on the mental level which is that of all of us, become the Divine Seer and therefore Doer ...
... this movement; but, the manifestation and the movement being given, the law is necessary. It is not enough simply to say that the law and all its circumstances are an unreality created by the mental consciousness, non-existent in God, and to be indifferent to these dualities or to get out of the manifestation into God's pure being is the only wisdom. It is true they are creations of mind Consciousness... partial character or incompleteness of the unfolding necessitates imperfection. An evolutionary manifestation demands a mid-stage with gradations above and under it,—precisely such a stage as the mental consciousness of man, part knowledge, part ignorance, a middle power of being still leaning on the Inconscient but slowly rising towards the all-conscious Divine Nature. A partial unfolding implying imperfection ...
... life and lowest animal the gulf is visibly deeper, for it is the difference between mind and the entire absence of any apparent or even rudimentary movement of mind: in the one the stuff of mental consciousness is unawakened though there is a life of vital reactions, a suppressed or subconscious or perhaps only submental sense vibration which seems to be intensely active; in the other, though the life... self-exceeding? In mind itself there are grades of the series and each grade again is a series in itself; there are successive elevations which we may conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the mental consciousness and the mental being. The development of our mental self is largely an ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on any one of them, while yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages ...
... regarding it not or aloof and not affecting it even as it is unaffected by it, is at bottom a carrying over, an imposing or imputation, adhyāropa , of an incapacity of our mental consciousness to That so as to limit it. Our mental consciousness, when it passes beyond its limits, loses its own way and means of knowledge and tends towards inactivity or cessation; it loses at the same time or tends to have no ...
... the experiences of our nervous being; through the mentality, whether by means of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind, or more largely by a general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. It may equally be accomplished through a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according... but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta , that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder ...
... direction. Afterwards it is transformed into intuition and from intuition to the instrumental action of the overmind or the supermind Consciousness. Chitta The Chitta is the general stuff of mental consciousness which supports Manas and everything else—it is an indeterminate consciousness which gets determined into thoughts and Page 170 memories and desires and sensations and perceptions... habit of observing things with or without use. The Physical Mental or Physical Mind and the Mental Physical or Mechanical Mind The physical mental or externalising mind is part of the mental consciousness, not part of the physical consciousness. But it is Page 182 closely connected with the mental physical—so that the two usually act together. The automatic or mechanical mind ...
... beyond our waking status; they are so named and figured because it is through dream and sleep—or trance which can be regarded Page 468 as a kind of dream or sleep—that the surface mental consciousness normally passes out of the perception of objective things into the inner subliminal and the superior supramental or overmental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities... the phenomenon to the Real, it still exists but is no longer valid to our consciousness; it is therefore unreal. Shankara takes up this contradiction, this opposition which is normal to our mental consciousness when it becomes aware of both sides of existence and stands between them; he resolves it by obliging the reason to recognise its limits, in which its unimpaired sovereignty is left to it within ...
... that which seems to us to govern and explain all our own action and creation and, therefore, if there is a Consciousness at all in the universe, we presume that it must be an Intelligence, a mental Consciousness. But intelligence only perceives, reflects and uses within the measure of its capacity the work of a Truth of being superior to itself; the power behind that works must therefore be another... withdraws from constitution and supports instead a process of dispersion. Not till then is there the real death of the body. Life then is the dynamic play of a universal Force, a Force in which mental consciousness and nervous vitality are in some form or at least in their principle always inherent and therefore they appear and organise themselves in our world in the forms Page 193 of Matter ...
... individual consciousness and is aware therefore only of a fragmentary movement of its own total activities. The whole crux and difficulty of human life lies here. Man is this mental being, this mental consciousness working as mental force, aware in a way of the universal force and life of which he is part but, because he has not knowledge of its universality or even of the totality of his own being, unable... greater being who will be more capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine humanity or give place to Superman. This results from the very logic of things because, the mental consciousness of man not being the completely illumined consciousness entirely emerged out of the obscuration of Matter but only a progressive term in the great emergence, the line of evolutionary creation ...
... meaning to a flower. It may answer, vibrate to the touch of this projection, accept the meaning, but a flower has no equivalent of the mental consciousness. In the vegetable kingdom there is a beginning of the psychic, but there is no beginning of the mental consciousness. In animals it is different; mental life begins to form and for them things have a meaning. But in flowers it is rather like the movement ...
... draws conclusions for action from them and gives impulse to this action. This power of organisation and impulse to action can be produced directly by the spiritual force which takes hold of the mental consciousness without these processes of analysis, deduction, reasoning being necessary. In intuition things already happen somewhat in this way; but spiritual intervention is, as it were, a super-intuition... they are latent and need a special education, a special training so that they can express the Light. It is certain that in ordinary life the brain is the seat of the outer expression of the mental consciousness; well, if this brain is not developed, if it is crude, there are innumerable things which cannot be expressed, because they do not have the instrument required to express themselves. It would ...
... working in the cells of the body. The cells of the body are becoming something conscious, wholly conscious. A consciousness that is independent, not depending at all upon the vital or the mental consciousness: it is a bodily consciousness. ( Silence ) And this physical mind of which Sri Aurobindo said that it was an impossibility, that it was something that turns round and round and will always... sees, it has only to open its eyes to see. Well, it is the same thing which happens: for the animal to become a man it did not require anything other than the infusion of a consciousness, a mental consciousness; and now it is the awakening of this consciousness which was altogether at the bottom, the very bottom. The mind is withdrawn, the vital is withdrawn, all is withdrawn. At the time when I was ...
... it was double, male and female: it wasn't the descent Page 77 of a single being, it was the descent of two beings), they were beings who lived in Nature an animal life, but with a mental consciousness; but there was no conflict with the general harmony. All the memories are absolutely clear of a spontaneous, animal life, perfectly natural, in Nature. A marvelously beautiful Nature that strangely... beautiful and luminous and easy!... A harmonious rhythm in Nature. A luminous animality, in fact. That's how we began, and it began that way because there was a descent of the higher human mental consciousness into the form that existed. The phenomenon may recur in the same way, with the difference that it can be more conscious and willed—there may be the intervention of a conscious will. It would ...
... Obviously, there could be only one solution: to lose the mental consciousness that gives you the perception or sensation that you are telling a "lie" or a "truth"; and you can obtain that only when you get to the higher state in which our notion of falsehood and truth disappears. Because when we speak from the ordinary mental consciousness, even when we are convinced that we are telling the whole ...
... must, however, be noted that although the subliminal consciousness opens out to us wider vistas of knowledge and action, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness, no less than our external consciousness, is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable or erroneous as well as of true perception. It may also... Yoga, it is necessary to have a clear idea and perception of the different planes and parts of the being, and each part has to get the Truth in it from the psychic or above. What is above the mental consciousness is the superconscient, which has also several grades leading up to the supramental consciousness and supreme integral Divine. It is the Truth acting from the psychic and descending from the ...
... has or is itself a formation of consciousness, most of whose operations are subconscious. Mind itself is an intermediate status of consciousness. For it is recognised that behind our ordinary mental consciousness, there is the subliminal consciousness, and above the mind, there are ranges of the superconscious. In modern times, the phenomena of the subliminal consciousness are being studied (although... superhuman strength and power. There is also behind our groping and labouring mental operations of perceptions, observation, imagination, ratiocination and pragmatic cunning and invention, an inner mental consciousness full of large and vast symptoms of ideas and images, clearly and systematically organised. The subliminal consciousness is what is popularly called the occult consciousness, the consciousness ...
... and understood only if one realises that even at the summit of the ordinary mental level of consciousness, there is no solution to the problem of the kind that Arjuna was confronted with. The mental consciousness is limited and remains confined perpetually in the state of egoism and duality, and even at its highest level, the strain and stress of the stains of ego and dualities do not get diminished;... Sankhya and Yoga occupies a prominent place in Sri Krishna's answer, and this prominence is due to the fact that the Sanmkhyan view, which aimed at lifting human consciousness from the ordinary mental consciousness to a spiritual level of consciousness, advocated the gospel of renunciation or sannyasa and advocated, therefore, the inferiority and dispensability of the concepts of human duties and human ...
... appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a little this psychological riddle. When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness... something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence. I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentality—his ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions ...
... being its vehicle. Agni in the physical consciousness is called grhapati, for the body is the house in which the soul is lodged and he is its keeper, guardian and lord. The fire in the mental consciousness is called daksinā; for it is that which gives discernment, the power to discriminate between the truth and the falsehood, it is that which by the pressure of its heat and light ... Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master ...
... . Next to it is the consciousness in the mineral, it is unconsciousness. By unconsciousness it is meant here naturally the absence of the mental consciousness: the presence or absence of consciousness means the presence or absence of the mental consciousness. There is a generic consciousness, consciousness in itself, or pure consciousness, which is imbedded in all created things, for creation itself ...
... through the active will, as in Karma Yoga, or through the understanding mind, as in Page 1 Jnana Yoga. 4 But the contact can also be established by a general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. Or it may equally be accomplished through a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. In the... unprecedented. The result of this vast and difficult endeavour is the effect it has produced in the evolutionary process itself and in breaking the limitations of the evolutionary boundaries of mental consciousness and in establishing and fixing the supramental consciousness as a new grade of evolution in the physical earth. Evolution itself has evolved; what has been accomplished is the penetration and ...
... integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo aims at perfect integration and perfection and integral transformation so that ultimately the mental, the vital and the physical can all be transformed by the supra- mental consciousness. The mental-vital, which is also called the vital mind, is the mind which is at the service of vital desires and vital emotions. It is a sort of mediator between vital emotion, desire... must, however, be noted that although the subliminal consciousness opens out to us wider vistas of knowledge and actions, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness is centered on multiplicity and divisions and not on unity, which is the characteristic of what can spiritually be called true Knowledge. As in our external ...
... satyascitrasravastamah, the collectivity of the highest inspirations that express multiple aspects of the Truth. Action that is inspired by the fire of aspiration has still to pass through mental consciousness, and that consciousness, even when not confined to the surface and even when enlarged into greater widenesses needs to be disciplined by the power of Will, and this disciplined will can be made... truth-bearing only when it becomes Goodwill. We find, therefore, in Yajurveda, which can be looked upon as the science of the knowledge of action and its right methodology, the famous hymn where mental consciousness is described in detail, and each of its powers is proposed to be united with Goodwill, shivasankalpa. At a higher level, master-action is manifested only when it begins to burn with ...
... lf, the *Rig Veda. Mandela I, Sukta 164, Verse 46. **Gita,VI.21. Page 28 Existence-in-itself. The question is whether we can remove the blinders of our subjective mental consciousness, look freely at truth, and experience in a state of total objectivity the reality as it is. The ancient Indian educational theory affirms that if, is possible to -transcend the limitations... was not merely a scholar, often he was not a scholar at all, but he could command knowledge whenever needed. He was not a mental being, but one who had transcended the limitations of the mental consciousness and had a direct access to superior modes of knowledge and action. All this was recognized by masses of people throughout the Indian history, and it is-a significant fact that throughout ...
... must, however, be noted that although the subliminal consciousness opens out to us wider vistas of knowledge and action, much surer and much more intimate than our external physical, vital and mental consciousness, still the subliminal consciousness, no less than our external consciousness, is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception. It may also... Yoga, it is necessary to have a clear idea and perception of the different planes and parts of the being, and each part has to get the Truth in it from the psychic or above. What is above the mental consciousness is the superconscient, which has also several grades leading up to the supramental consciousness and supreme integral Divine. It is-the Truth acting from the psychic and descending from the ...
... goes through an intermediate stage of hunger and desire, desire to possess and enjoy; and therefore through struggle and survival, possession and effort at perfection. Then it comes to the mental consciousness where mind realizes that even for individual life association is necessary, it accepts the need of interchange, and the necessity of self-giving and even the experience of love. A fourth... world; we see the animal world, we see the plant world; we see the human world and we see life as the fulcrum over which the whole process is proceeding until it has reached the stage of evolving mental consciousness, and the conscious individuality. Well, now, there is the impulse to perfection and the impulse to delight, which is the driving force of the whole cosmos or the whole process of evolution. ...
... knowledge. Its ultimate aim is not merely to bring about a moral perfection but to lead the human being towards the Infinite. None of these great realities can be fully realised within the limits of mental consciousness. It is the curing of the split-existence that is the remedy. Sometimes an undue stress is given to external action in the practice of ethics. As a social and conventional rule there may... exclusive concentration. In fact, this exclusive is purposeful and is. within the exercise of freedom of the Self. A similar phenomenon takes place—on a much smaller scale, of course, in the mental consciousness of the human being. Generally the human being is exclusively concentrated in his outward personality and is oblivious of the Subliminal, the Subconscient and Superconscient and Psychic ...
... synthesis can be complete and enduring that neglects to deal radically with these dark recesses of our being. And for a radical and effective dealing with them, the light and force we command in our mental consciousness are all too feeble and inadequate. The dismal failure of the great Tantric experiment is a standing warning to those who would venture to raise up the blind forces of these regions in order... tion, all is held and developed in the unitarian consciousness as one, and not as many. When the reflection of this primary poise of the Supermind falls upon our purified and tranquillised mental consciousness, we lose all sense of individuality and are immersed in the illimitable ocean of unity. This is the basic truth and rationale of pure Advaitism. In the second poise of the Supermind, "the Divine ...
... height and a looking down from it at the lower stages": in other words, the need to attain ultimately the supramental height, and for looking down from it to gather up and greaten the present mental consciousness. For example, words by themselves are but sounds or noise-emissions, "unless through a special grace they put you into contact with the Thing". 4 When one talks to another, it is basically... been made in an earlier section), for even Page 671 the mind's "power of organisation and impulse to action can be produced directly by the spiritual force which takes hold of the mental consciousness" 21 VII In two of the Mother's Playground talks, on 12 and 26 November, the discussion was on Sri Aurobindo's statement in The Life Divine: "The spiritual man has evolved, but ...
... or among animals, the response will be much more prompt than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a highly organized mind: beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as rock. It resists. According to my experience, what's “unconscious” will certainly follow more easily: it was a delight to see the water in the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle... inert, absolute inconscient. Then, little by little, it awakens. Well, the same thing is now taking place: for the animal to become a man, it didn't take anything other than the infusion of a mental consciousness; and now, it's the awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The mind has withdrawn, the vital has withdrawn (that's why it looked like a very serious illness) ...
... receptivity.... In short, it is the cosmic consciousness of the body—its natural consciousness. For the animal to become a man, it didn't take anything else than the infusion of a consciousness—a mental consciousness—and now, it's the awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The central light of the cell. And Mother said, It's a denial of all the spiritual assertions... acts in the body's cells. The body's cells grow into something conscious, entirely conscious. A consciousness which is INDEPENDENT, absolutely independent of the vital consciousness or the mental consciousness: it's a corporeal consciousness.... Then, out of that, once it has been thoroughly kneaded (there's no knowing how much time it will take), a new form will be born, which will be the form Sri ...
... mere mechanism of Karma from which the soul has to escape into the immutable eternity of its unconditioned existence or non-existence. But for rebirth, the soul, instead of evolving into the mental consciousness of the human being, would have remained a perpetual prisoner of the subconscient obscurity; and if it ever rises from the mental twilight into the solar glory of the infinite supermind and reveals... context of universal karma and universal manifestation. The second point of importance is that while, according to the current interpretations of Karma, rebirth comes to an end as soon as the mental consciousness of the individual abolishes itself in the spiritual, Sri Aurobindo regards rebirth as a means of ascent into "a higher scale of Nature." The mind is not the highest degree of consciousness ...
... clearly and beautifully imaged. These ideas and many of the expressions are the same as those of the hymn of Gritsamada. Nodha says of the Night and Dawn, the dark physical and the illumined mental consciousness that they new-born ( punarbhuvā ) about heaven and earth move into each other with their own proper movements, svebhir evaiḥ ... carato anyānyā (cf. Gritsamada's ayatantā carato anyad anyad ...
... the word used for the vision brought by the Dawn, cakṣuḥ , is capable of indicating only physical sight, yet in other passages it is ketuḥ which means perception, a perceptive vision in the mental consciousness, a faculty of knowledge. Usha is pracetāḥ ̣, she who has this perceptive knowledge. Mother of the radiances, she has created this perceptive vision of the mind; gavāṁ janitrī akṛta pra ketum ...
... explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument. Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see inanimation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or communicate itself to its surfaces ...
... Questions and Answers (1929-1931) Different Kinds of Space and Time - Fearlessness on the Vital Plane Space and time do not begin and end with the mental consciousness: even the Overmind has them. They are the forms of all cosmic existence: only, they vary on each level. Each world has its own space and time. Thus the mental space and time do not tally ...
... and passions, increase their vital receptivity so much at times that it reaches proportions very unpleasant to themselves and to their surroundings. And then there are those who live in the mental consciousness; their mental receptivity grows very much. All who create mentally, study and live in mental activity, if the mental activity is constant, can progress indefinitely. Mind in the human being ...
... moves, a certain time intervenes; but it is an extremely short time compared with physical time. On the mental plane the notion of Time disappears almost totally. For example, you are in your mental consciousness, you think of someone or something or of a place, and immediately you are there. There is no need of any time between the thought and the realisation. It is only when the mind is mingled with ...
... find a psychic behind the physical... you can enter into contact with the psychic directly through the physical consciousness, directly through the vital consciousness, directly through the mental consciousness. It is not as though you had to cross all the states of being in order to find the psychic. You can enter the psychic without leaving your physical consciousness, through interiorisation, because ...
... For example, your physical consciousness or your subtle physical consciousness, your vital consciousness or the consciousness of your higher or lower vital, your psychic consciousness, your mental consciousness, each one is completely different! So when you sleep you have one consciousness, and when you are awake you have another. In your waking state you look at things projected outside you, in your ...
... form. This is what makes children grow up, it is a kind of inner thing which pushes, pushes for action, pushes for movement, pushes for progress. But it is physical, it is not a vital or mental consciousness, it is purely physical. It is something which pushes Page 137 from within towards manifestation and is concentrated and channelled in the manifestation. It is vaster and more imprecise ...
... physical or the vital or the mind. But one sees something of me: for instance, if I send out a force or a thought or a movement, an action to someone, in his atmosphere this takes my form, in his mental consciousness it takes my form. So he sees it. It is a fact. I send something and he sees it. It is not my whole being (there the interpretation goes wrong most of the time), but it is something of myself ...
... entered consciously the higher regions above the mind, far above the mind, that you no longer need to concentrate in the psychic because you will naturally find it. But to rise above the mental consciousness, not into a higher speculative mind, but far beyond all mental movements is not an easy thing. To begin with, the mind must be absolutely silent and quiet, otherwise one can't do it. It is only ...
... human field, one is inspired. So when one is not altogether limited by the ordinary consciousness one receives inspirations from above; the source of his production is higher than the ordinary mental consciousness. That's all? No more questions? Page 276 Mother, sometimes one feels a silence, but feels himself outside this silence. Why is it like that? One feels a silence, and then ...
... the true contact comes through the psychic; because the psychic consciousness is certainly the medium with the greatest affinity with the divine Truth. Later, when one has emerged from the mental consciousness into a higher consciousness beyond the mind, beyond even the higher mind, and when one opens oneself to the Overmind regions, and through the Overmind to the Supermind, one can receive inspirations ...
... perversion begin with conscious mind and the human species. It is the wrong use man makes of his mental capacity. Perversion begins with humanity. It is a distortion of the progress of Nature which mental consciousness represents. And, therefore, the first thing which should be taught to every human being as soon as he is able to think, is that he should obey reason which is a super-instinct of the species ...
... This method of asking questions and getting solutions in an interview is one of which the Mother does not approve. She finds it useless and it forces her to come down to meet a superficial mental consciousness which she has long left. 2 October 1935 The Mother did not say Yes [ to giving a personal interview ]. Nothing could be worse for you than your making your condition depend on your physically ...
... have written in my books, needs the help of the Guru and cannot be done without it. The condition into which his father got was a breakdown, not a state of siddhi. He passed out of the normal mental consciousness into a contact with some intermediate zone of consciousness (not the spiritual) where one can be subjected to all sorts of voices, suggestions, ideas, so-called aspirations which are not genuine ...
... that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be placed before the central idea; if it finds a right place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be thrown out, so that it cannot ...
... this has never led to anything and has only created confusion. Page 39 There is only one true guide, that is the inner guide, who does not pass through the mental consciousness. Naturally, if a child gets a disastrous education, it will try ever harder to extinguish within itself this little true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all ...
... The idea is good but naturally the value of the expression depends entirely on the value of that which wants to express itself. At present almost all artists live in the lowest vital and mental consciousness and the results are quite poor Try to develop your consciousness, endeavour to discover your soul, and then what you will do will be truly interesting. This is the programme I am ...
... affecting the others, or are rather different scales of one graded and interwoven system of being, parts therefore of one complex universal system. The fact that they can enter into the field of our mental consciousness would naturally suggest the validity of the second alternative, but it would not by itself be altogether conclusive. But what we find is that these higher planes are actually at every moment ...
... The Signature Of Truth SPACE AND TIME Space and time do not begin and end with the mental consciousness: even the Ovcrmind has them. They are the forms of all cosmic-existence: only, they vary on each level. Each world has its own space and time. Thus the mental space and time do not tally with what we observe here in the material universe. In the mind-world ...
... THE SUPRAMENTAL REALISATION In order to know what the Supramental Realisation will be like, the first step, the first condition is to know what the supra-mental consciousness is. All those who have been, in one way or another, in contact with it have had some glimpse of the realisation to be. But those who have not, can yet aspire for that realisation, just as they ...
... note on the "uplifting" of an entire part of humanity by the action of the new forces: But those who cannot be lifted up, those who refuse to progress, will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and will fall back to a sub-human level. I shall tell you about an experience I had which will help you to understand better. It was shortly after the supramental experience of the third ...
... experience in its essence and its true power. Gradually, as the action is prolonged and the outer being begins to assimilate this action, there awakens a capacity of observation, first in the mental consciousness, and a kind of Page 341 objectivisation occurs: something in the mind looks on, observes and translates in its own way. This is what you call understanding, and this is what gives ...
... Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 839-40 The difficulty of the problem is that only a mental being could take an interest in this process of transformation and creation, and that the mental consciousness in the animal species was not sufficient for it to take an interest in this process. Page 292 Animals had no means of noting what was happening, of taking it into consideration and ...
... which are after all only very rough approximations to the truth of things. If we go deep enough into mental human knowledge, we realise that all this knowledge as we have it externally in the mental consciousness is scarcely anything more than a language—a fairly complicated one—making it possible for us to understand each other but corresponding only very remotely to the truth of things. There is ...
... whose relation with the outer being is completely different, cannot be deceived and cannot make a mistake. It is these people the mental being does not understand. So long as one is in the mental consciousness, even the highest, and sees the spiritual life from outside, one judges with one's mental faculties, with the habit of seeking, erring, correcting, progressing, and seeking once again; and one ...
... receptive, immobile within and surrendered, then he goes, he sees the person and tells him and the thing is done—without any complication whatever, like that. If this person has an active mental consciousness, if he does not have total faith, if he has all the mixture of everything brought in by ego and ignorance, Page 179 he sees difficulties, he sees problems to be solved, he sees all ...
... that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have ...
... consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance. Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During ...
... one or more of these aspects can become more and more sublimated and tend towards its supreme transcendental intensity, and whatever aspect is so experienced is declared by the spiritualised mental consciousness to be the supreme thing. But when one goes beyond mind all tends not only to sublimate but to fuse together until the separated aspects recover their original unity, indivisible in the absoluteness ...
... capacity, therefore to a greater and greater perfection and perhaps finally to an absolute of consciousness which has yet to come, an absolute of its truth, an absolute of its dynamic power. The mental consciousness of man is greater in its perfection, more progressive towards the absolute than the consciousness of the animal, and the consciousness of the overman, if I may so call him, must very evidently ...
... surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre ...
... conditions of the perfect spiritual success. Not only the whole mental, vital and physical nature of the ignorant human being has to be overcome and transformed, but also the three states of mental consciousness which intervene between the human and the supramental and like all mind are capable of admitting great and capital errors. Till then there may be descents of supramental influence, light, power ...
... mind's or vital's inclination to indulge in accustomed occupations or by sleep or by losing oneself in some outer action such as talking—because these things are associated with the ordinary mental consciousness and still need it to be done. At a later stage it will be possible to do these things with the surface mind only while the new consciousness remains intact and is either found there immediately ...
... the physical consciousness Atman becomes the material being, annamaya puruṣa . In the vital or nervous consciousness Atman becomes the vital or dynamic being, prāṇamaya puruṣa . In the mental consciousness Atman becomes the mental being, manomaya puruṣa . In the supra-intellectual consciousness, dominated by the Truth or causal Idea (called in Veda Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the True, the Right ...
... Mind entering into the vitalised body tends still farther to hasten the period of dissolution by the higher demands of its vibrations upon the body. Mind is a knot of motion in the stream of mental consciousness. Like life, it is not itself subject to death, but only to expulsion from the vitalised body it has occupied. But because the mental ego identifies itself with the body and understands by its ...
... vital force or the life-breath, speech and the five senses of knowledge are the instruments of the mind. Prana, the life-force in the nervous system, is indeed the one main instrument of our mental consciousness; for it is that by which the mind receives the contacts of the physical world through the organs of knowledge, sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, and reacts upon its object by speech and ...
... subconscient and make it luminous. "Patala" [ in an experience described by the correspondent ] is a name for the subconscient—the beings there had no heads, that is to say, there is there no mental consciousness; men have all of them such a subconscient plane in their own being and from there rise all sorts of irrational and ignorant (headless) instincts, impulsions, memories etc. which have an effect ...
... it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti. Page 15 Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound—for ...
... question of those who would make Page 340 the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the Divine something less than Mind or is It something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action ...
... acting in its own way. It is somewhat the same principle here. The experience you had of something going out from the head like an arrow probably indicates something going out of the mental consciousness towards some aim or object. Sometimes it is a part of the mind-consciousness itself that goes like that either upward to a higher plane or somewhere in the world around—and afterwards returns ...
... being done for an ultimate good to the individual & the world. As the Ananda of defeat, of the asundara, of the ashiva is insisted on, there begins to be finally settled in the knowledge & mental consciousness a more luminous sense of the necessity & meaning of the adverse movements in the siddhi & the life. The whole environmental nature is therewith assuming a more perfect & all-pervading anandamaya ...
... for a moment to the perception of the mere man in the Sarvam Brahman; but its normal pitch is now the Anandam J. A S [Jnanam Anantam Sarvam] Brahman as represented by the individual limited mental consciousness. The Darshana of KrishnaKali is no longer normal. It is now, however, manifesting again holding in itself both the double Personality & the bhava of Purusha enjoying Prakriti. Stable ...
... wideness. At first it is usually felt as a void of all other things but consciousness alone or existence alone. The feeling [ in meditation ] of having no head usually means that the mental consciousness is no longer imprisoned in the head at the time—but silent and extended. A Transitional State of Inwardness The condition which you feel is one which is very well known in sadhana. It ...
... have written in my books, needs the help of the Guru and cannot be done without it. The condition into which his father got was a breakdown, no a state of siddhi. He passed out of the normal mental consciousness contact with some intermediate zone of consciousness (not the spiritual) where one can be subjected to all sorts of voices, suggestions, ideas, so-called inspirations which are not genuine. ...
... mental will on the rest for transformation. The trembling and the heat come from a resistance, an absence of habituation in the body and the vital to this demand and to this liberation. When the mental consciousness can take its stand permanently or at will above like this, then this first liberation becomes accomplished ( siddha ). From there the mental being can open freely to higher planes or to the ...
... e. instinctive and impulsive and non-mental in her movements, she Page 536 can be relied upon to be an asexual friend. Some women can be, but it is usually those who have a clear mental consciousness and strong will of self-control or else those who are incapable of a passion for more than one person in their life and you are lucky enough not to be that person. Tell X on behalf ...
... right-willed or rightly working omniscient Fire is evidently the inner Flame of power and aspiration, the divine Will-Force that takes up the sacrifice, योगयज्ञ. It rises up to the heavens above the mental consciousness and brings down the divine power into the being. It is man's messenger to the gods, the priest of the call. It leads aright all the inner and outer actions because it is the Divine Knowledge-Will ...
... the original Self obscures and overlays that which preceded it, until the last state of the Self appears to be an inert brute and inanimate condition of gross physical matter devoid of life, mental consciousness or spiritual possibilities. From this state of inert and lifeless matter the upward evolution starts and, as in our spiritual evolution the course set down for us is to recover from a firm footing ...
... the altar of the Lord of Mind, but on the altar of the unknown God.Vidma hi te yatha mano asmabhyam na ditsasi. Not so, says Indra, shalt thou attain. Through me, through the mind, through thy mental consciousness, thou shalt aspire to That which is wonderful; for all its actions & movements are not in its pure self-being but in the field of another’s consciousness, there it must be sought; approached ...
... the gifts and activities of the sacrifice, becomes a pure energy leading our days and ascends to the Vastness and the Truth. By the Truth he fashions anew our two firmaments, the physical and mental consciousness. This is the golden Affirmation of him in our heavens.] अबोध्यग्निः समिधा जनानां प्रति धेनुमिवायतीमुषासम् । यह्वा इव प्र वयामुज्जिहानाः प्र भानवः सिस्रते नाकमच्छ ॥१॥ 1) Strength is ...
... arrive through this mixed truth to a clearer and truer figure of self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The obstruction of the original and enveloping inconscience would diminish, and an increasing mental consciousness would reach a clarity and wholeness which would enable the concealed powers of direct knowledge and intuitive process to emerge, utilise the prepared and enlightened instruments and make mi ...
... being, the command of the Divine Guide of the Yoga, the vision of the higher Self or Spirit, the illumined guidance of the Master. The way of the spirit is not a mental way; a mental rule or mental consciousness cannot be its determinant or its leader. Equally, a combination or a compromise between two orders of consciousness, the spiritual and the mental or the spiritual and the vital or a mere ...
... Page 119 transient joy or happiness or pleasure. A changeless imperishable infinity, a timeless eternity, a self-awareness which is not this receptive and reactive or tentacular mental consciousness, but is behind and above it and present too below it, even in what we call Inconscience, a oneness in which there is no possibility of any other existence, are the fourfold character of this ...
... of a subtler, higher and wider existence, consciousness, force, happiness and delight of being; in proportion as we rise in the scale of mind, a greater power of these things comes to us: our mental consciousness acquires for itself at the same time more vision and power and more subtlety and plasticity, and we are able to embrace more of the vital and physical existence itself, to know it better, to ...
... divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no reason to suppose that there cannot be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms or that forms and their immediate supports, mental consciousness, energy of vital force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in ...
... Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in ...
... energy which it informs and uses for its vehicle. But as the consciousness becomes more subtle by practice of Yoga, we can come to be aware of the sea of pranic shakti around us, feel it with the mental consciousness, concretely with a mental sense, see its courses and movements, and direct and act upon it immediately by the will. But until we thus become aware of it, we have to possess a working or at least ...
... with its gross physical organs. Then there is the inner instrument, antaḥkaraṇa , the conscious mentality. This inner instrument is divided by the old system into four powers; citta or basic mental consciousness; manas , the sense mind; buddhi , the intelligence; ahaṅkāra , the ego-idea. The classification may serve as a starting-point, though for a greater practicality we have to make certain farther ...
... returning to its native planes or the self or spirit to its pure existence. The perfection of the soul then is to be found not at all in, but beyond Nature. But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit ...
... ignorance even when the soul in Mind Page 475 possesses something of the knowledge. And even if the soul were to reflect or to represent all the largeness of the knowledge in its mental consciousness, it would be unable to mobilise it rightly in force of action. The truth in its action might greatly increase, but it would still be pursued by a limitation, still condemned to a divisibility ...
... secret core of his conscious being. To enter into identity with that Spirit must then be his way to control and lordship. He can do it passively by a sort of reflection and receiving in his mental consciousness, but then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then ...
... that mental being within us which our humanity is in the inwardly governing but still too hampered essence of its psychological structure. It is possible for man to awaken to this higher mental consciousness, to become this mental being, 1 put on this mental nature and live not only in the vital and physical sheaths, but in this mental body. If there were a sufficient completeness in this tr ...
... truth-consciousness and its progressive determinations will be made by a conscious Knowledge and not in the forms of an Ignorance or Inconscience. As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness ...
... becomings and is their true Self and conscious Spirit, and not to know it only intellectually but to know by a self-experience that shall compel into its own diviner mould all the habits of the mental consciousness. This Self that we are has finally to become to our self-consciousness entirely one with all existences in spite of its exceeding them. We have to see it not only as that which contains and ...
... partially covered up by the superficial activity of the physical mind and senses that brings to the surface the submerged or subliminal inner vital consciousness and also an inner or subliminal mental consciousness and sense capable of perceiving and experiencing directly, not only the life forces and their play and results and phenomena, but the mental and psychical worlds and all they contain and the ...
... complete but even replace its own proper action. That will be the beginning of the discovery of the supramental energy of the spirit. The supermind, as we have seen, lifts up the action of the mental consciousness towards and into the intuition, creates an intermediate intuitive mentality insufficient in itself but greater in power than the logical intelligence, and then lifts up and transforms that too ...
... at least how I understand things — from what the Mother once told us. She said in effect: "The gulf between the Overmind and the Supermind is just like the gulf between the Overmind and man's mental consciousness." I recollect lines in Savitri where the Supermind is said to be seen like a faint star in a remote distance of night from the top ridge of the Overmind. So you can imagine the difference ...
... separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation...into the material Inconscience...." 14 The line at which the fall takes place is the formulation of the mental consciousness which can either build a constructed whole out of separate units or else grasp a commonality or an essentiality of things by an insubstantial-seeming abstraction. And, when out of the material ...
... grandeur of asceticism, but are still imbued intellectually & overshadowed in temperament by these high & fatal doctrines. A better day will dawn for India when the shadow is lifted and the Indian mental consciousness without renouncing the truth of Maya, perceives that it is only a partial explanation of existence. Mundane existence is not indispensable either to God's being or to God's bliss, but it is ...
... above and is now seen only by broken glimpses through sudden rifts in the giant wall of our limitations. Or else there is something yet to be evolved from below, sleeping under the veil of man's mental consciousness or half visible by flashes, as life once slept in the stone and metal, mind in the plant and reason in the cave of animal memory underlying its imperfect apparatus of emotion and sense-device ...
... much in the universe which is neither good nor evil. Perhaps the greatest part of the totality is either supramoral or inframoral or simply amoral. Good and evil come in with the development of mental consciousness; they exist in their rudimentary elements in the animal and primitive human mind, they develop with the human development. Good and evil are things which arrive in the process of the evolution; ...
... consciousness is the whole meaning of the process of Yoga[.] 114 Yoga is the science, the process, the effort and action by which man attempts to pass out of the limits of his ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness[.] 115 All yoga is in its essential [ ... ... ... ] heightening or deepening of our consciousness so that it may become capable of something ...
... of our human personal will, then its merger in a greater divine or greatest supreme Will is the central secret and core of intention of the Karmayoga. But this cannot be entirely done by our mental consciousness in its little human boundaries. Our Yoga must help us to leave it and enter into a greater consciousness enlightened by a truer radiance of knowledge, armed with a mightier unerring strength ...
... physical siddhis. Ananda Ishwara. The Ananda Ishwara darshana is persistently bridging the gulf; the perception of the Anandamaya in objects is pouring into and taking up the personal mental consciousness. This movement has to be completed in perfection. There is as yet no sign of the fulfilment of the proposed advance; but a siege and a reduction of ideality to the intuitive mentality, c ...
... more development will securely found the whole base of swapna samadhi. K.A in samadhi, interrupted occasionally by an intervening cloud of nidra power between the physical and the higher mental consciousness, but afterwards more persistently by a deepening towards nidra; but after the brief sleep there was an immediate recovery of the Ananda. It is now noticeable that when the Ananda occupies the ...
... receptive, inwardly immobile and surrendered , he goes, sees the other person, tells him, and the thing happens—without the SLIGHTEST complication, just like that. If the person has an active mental consciousness, doesn't have total faith and has all the mixture of ego and ignorance, he sees the difficulties, sees the problems to be resolved, sees all the complications—naturally, they all occur! So according ...
... divine aim. Secondly, the archetypes are what Sri Aurobindo calls Real-Ideas, Page 294 the creative movements not of Mind but of Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness. In our mental consciousness, "we regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality ...
... vanished! So... to help you understand this enigma, let me tell you that the mother is physical Nature as she is, and the daughter is the new creation. The manageress is the world's organizing mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision. Naturally, when ...
... in it to feel it, otherwise... However, to the consciousness it was very, very clear. It was neither mysterious nor incomprehensible, it was absolutely obvious—though untranslatable to our mental consciousness. For they were contradictory, yet they existed simultaneously, indistinguishable: they were not stacked one upon another—it was all simultaneous. How can you explain that?! It's too difficult ...
... we stand. Indeed, for passing into the supramental being it isn't necessary to pass though the overmind ... I don't understand. I mean that for contacting or reaching this SUPRA-mental consciousness or being, it is not necessary to pass through the overmental being. What do you call "overmental being"? What Sri Aurobindo calls "overmind." Oh, no! No. I see. Not necessary ...
... Yoga , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, second ed. 2001, pp. 34-35. Page 310 spiritual is the higher or superconscient consciousness which is above the normal mental consciousness. Distinguishing between the subliminal or inner consciousness and the spiritual or higher consciousness, Sri Aurobindo writes: The inner consciousness means the inner mind, inner vital ...
... Earth, the gradations that have been integrated until now are the three lower ones: matter, life, mind. Our eyes are only able to perceive what we call ‘matter’, but this Earth, and the life and mental consciousness on it, remain connected to their involutionary planes of origin. “The immense material world in which we live is not the sole reality but only one of innumerable potential and existent universes; ...
... pass through without casting off their material body. It is as if by that lid the Light of Unity is filtered into rays of (apparent) division — a division which is subdivided endlessly into our mental consciousness which can no longer conceive of total unity, and ultimately into the so-called elementary particles of matter, into the fields which constitute matter, and into their mysterious basis. ‘It is ...
... Aurobindo and the Mother’s whole effort from the beginning of their destined collaboration. The human being had appeared in evolution because of the descent of Mind, the rational level of the mental consciousness, into the earth-atmosphere. Now the condition for the appearance of the supramental being, the species beyond the human being, was the descent of Supermind. “The ancient dawns of human knowledge ...
... created a split between things material and non-material. Then the prevalent view was still that of the Chain of Being, the hierarchical ladder of (in ascending order) matter, the life force, mental consciousness, and the spirit. The new, materialistic statement directly implicated the definition and interpretation of Reality, and therefore of God. It was one of the main causes in the attitude of the ...
... evolution, announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is the “superman” or supramental being. The human is the mental being; therefore, what is more than human must be called supra-mental. As the mental consciousness has been incorporated into life on Earth from its pre-existent involutionary level in the cosmic manifestation, so the supramental consciousness will incorporate from the supramental level or ...
... out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god.” 19 As the incorporation of the mental consciousness in the scale of evolution led to the formation of Homo sapiens , so a higher consciousness, called “supermind” by Sri Aurobindo, is necessary to form the new, higher species in the scale. ...
... The Grace of the Mother made it possible for me to control external conditions. Time was passing fast and the number of inmates increased from 24 to 150 in 1935. The descent of the over-mental consciousness and Light had charged the atmosphere of the ashram with dynamic silence. The main object, however, was to transform the human nature into the divine and that demanded its own pace. A good deal ...
... What the Mother means here is, as she said many times, that animal-man was so enthralled by the new capacities bestowed on him by his acquisition of the mind, the mental consciousness proper to the human being, that he has played with it and tried it out to its possible limits. For it was this mind which equipped him with the capacities of abstraction, mental formulation ...
... ory forces, those of good and evil, light and darkness and Truth and Falsehood. These antagonists are striving to dominate our earth life ; they have ever done since the creation arrived at mental consciousness culminating in the creation of a mental humanity. But mind and mental humanity though they have been taken in the forefront of our life for over many millions of years have long been weighed ...
... which meant the arrival at the stage of separation of Purusha or the Soul from Prakriti and was never tried even by the Vedic Rishis to bring down to earth. Like the Page 31 mental consciousness and Power which has been in operation on earth shaping a race of mental beings, this supramental consciousness has to be brought down to earth to shape a race of spiritual or gnostic beings ...
... and more rational and instructive. "Dreams would then take on the character of precise visions and, at times, of dream revelations." 2 But along with this participation of mental consciousness, by not coming out abruptly into the waking state or getting up quickly, but remaining quiet for a time to see if the memory remains or comes back." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1494.) ...
... or sleep" 1 ), can very well open the gates of these superior planes of our being; for in sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of our limited waking personality and "the surface mental consciousness...passes out of the perception of objective things into the subliminal and the superior supramental or over-mental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities in t ...
... revealed in his robe of Matter and Nature steps into the eternal Light. Then only ends the dream of nether Life. 1 But that Golden Dawn, the overt emergence of the Supra-mental Consciousness, heralding the annulment of the nescient sleep of Night, is still lying in the womb of the future. In the meantime, does man, the mind-conscient being, possess no possibility whatsoever of ...
... It can be limited, nor is there any conception by which It can be defined. 18 It is ineffable by mental thought and language; It is beyond the grasp of the ineffectual probe of separative mental consciousness. But there is a spiritual consciousness, a knowledge by identity which can seize this reality in its fundamental aspects and its manifold powers and forms and figures. This Absolute ...
... evolution will take, though a very long time for sure. As human beings, we carry all the developed steps of the evolution until now in our being. We consist of matter, the life forces and (mental) consciousness; we have in us, too, the Subconcient and Inconscient below, and the perspectives of the Spirit and its infinite ranges above. On the upward ladder of evolution the human being stands somewhere ...
... power, light, joy and peace, and it suffused the whole earth's atmosphere. This descending Consciousness was afterwards identified by me as being an intermediate level between the present mental consciousness and the Supramental Consciousness. This descending Consciousness is that of the Superman, which is still that of man but with a very enlarged range and power, but not transformed into the gnostic ...
... are no longer movements of ascent and descent, but ( Mother turns her hand over ) something like inner reversals. I think the problem arises only when you try to see and understand with the mental consciousness, even with the higher mind. Page 381 I am telling you this because, as soon as I got your letter, I replied with what I'll read to you now; then I was immediately faced with something ...
... to the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think, see yourself doing and begin to discuss, you are full of sin. It is man's mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery which it brings! Animals are not unhappy in the way we are, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those that ...
... simplicity of a wholesome, unperverted animal life. ( After a moment of silence, Mother adds ) But those who cannot be lifted up, who refuse to progress, will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and fall back into an infrahuman stage. I'll tell you of an experience I had which will help you better understand. It was a short while after the supramental experience of February 3 , ...
... yet expressed in its outer form. Whereas the part of humanity nearer to the simplicity of the animal or of Nature will be reabsorbed by Nature and entirely reassimilated. The possibility of a mental consciousness that allows for perversion—that makes mental perversion such an excruciating thing—will be abolished. It will disappear. These things will no longer be. In the vision, I went much deeper ...
... When you sincerely follow your nature, spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think or look at yourself acting or start questioning, you are full of sin. It is man's mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with Page 181 the idea of sin and all the misery it brings. Animals are not at all unhappy in the way we are. Not at all, not at all, except—as Sri Aurobindo ...
... among them, there is only ONE person, one person who lives in a joyous consciousness. Only one among all the people I know. Even then, it's because that person lives in a very harmonious vital-mental consciousness and is contented.... Besides, I feel that if one were to scratch a little... [the person's joy would vanish]. Yes, the condition of human bodies is very miserable. It's miserable. ...
... one. Why the "right one"? I say that because there is confusion in many people's minds. When, from the standpoint of progress, for instance, I speak of progress, I mean "going from the mental consciousness to a higher consciousness," but people generally understand "to make progress materially or mentally or..." So when they are told of transformation, all kinds of queer things come to their minds ...
... room. Surely, his eyes being generally open during meditation to and fro was not due only to the spiritual movement going on in the soul-profundities, the inmost heart, rather than through the mental consciousness playing about the brain. A greater action was going on along with it. His mind was eternally silent and what acted in him was a self-luminous immensity above the head which reached out towards ...
... But there is no sign in it, as there is none also in Teilhard's "super-consciousness", that man the mental being will go beyond the utmost possibility open to mind itself. A widening of the mental consciousness and its achievement of technological mastery on a grand scale are the limits of its prognosis. But, if the cosmos is anthropos-oriented and if life emerges from matter and mind from life, there ...
... " and "the white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss." The new brought in many strange figures in place of psychological simple postures. Thus what once was a straightforward exceeding of-the mental consciousness - For him the limiting firmament ceased above. In a tense period of the sleepless urge A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault - had later not only the first line ...
... to the higher. Besides being, in an ultimate sense, the material inconscience or ignorance on the one hand and the Supreme Light on the other, they would be the dark and the bright sides of mental consciousness itself, within both of ________________ 1 The Hymns of the Rgveda, Translated with a Popular Commentary by Ralph T. H. Griffith (The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Varanasi, 1974) ...
... son of Dasaratha (the Divine as the mental Man, the embodiment of Dharma, the perfect Moral Consciousness) and, again, Krishna (the Divine as the "Overman", openly exemplifying a more-than-mental Consciousness, what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, the world of the Great Gods) and, later, Buddha who shoots beyond the cosmic formula to the sheer Transcendent but to that Transcendent's absolutely ...
... In mind itself there are grades of the series and each grade again is a series in itself; there are successive elevations which we may conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the mental consciousness and the mental being. The development of our mental self is largely an ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on any one of them, while yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages ...
... Ibid., pp. 79, 80. × Qualities (Gunas) inherent in the ordinary physical, vital, and mental consciousness. × Lord, Master × ...
... conscious awareness and what is therefore not accessible to introspection. Regarding this early view of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound - ...
... returning to its native planes or the self or spirit to its pure existence. The perfection of the soul then is to be found not at all in, but beyond Nature. But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we Page 103 find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power ...
... Nirvana state of consciousness, previously alluded to, the ego is an illusion. According to yoga psychology, the true view of things can be obtained only by going beyond the normal superficial mental consciousness and looking from a deeper or higher consciousness. ...knowledge only begins when we get away from the surface phenomena and look behind them for their true operations and causes. ...
... even if one could persist in it for an indefinitely long period, it is always likely to be broken in upon by any strong or persistent call on the bodily life. And when one returns to the mental consciousness, one is back again in the lower being. Therefore it has been said that complete liberation from the human birth, complete ascension from the life of the mental being is impossible until the ...
... constituting another or inner self." 6 Figure 1. The Concentric System The vertical system consists of various levels or gradations of consciousness below and above mental consciousness — the level with which we are most familiar as human beings. The Inconscient, the Subconscient, the Physical, the Vital, Mind, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind and ...
... Stair, he experiences successively all the planes of consciousness that influence or impinge upon our own inner and outer being. These influences, for the most part undetected by our waking mental consciousness, are explored by Aswapati through the power of his Yoga. Their essence or their vibration as the Mother puts it, is captured and held by Sri Aurobindo before it has passed through the ...
... The first experience of this complete identification with the cosmic consciousness in one of losing one's separate identity in the universal subconscient, material, vital, emotional and mental consciousness. What seemed herself was an image of the Whole. She was the subconscient life of tree the flower, The outbreak of the honied buds of spring; She burned in the passion and splendour ...
... can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate. 62 If Spirit is liberty, fate cannot be inflexible for those great souls who have completed the transition from the present mental consciousness into the higher and superior consciousness, the spiritual, the Divine. Indeed nothing less than that enables man to transcend his fate. 4: Sun-Ray in Savitri In the twelve ...
... tic of the Overmind working in life here in the mortal world, mrityuloka . Overmind dynamism in the hierarchy of the Planes of Consciousness comes from the topmost plane standing above the mental consciousness in its widest sense. Which also means that the Gita itself is an utterance of the supreme transcendent being standing on the Overmind plane, Krishna as the Overmind Avatar. In the evolutionary ...
... Not only do we have the substance of spiritual philosophy in its trueness; there is throughout the authenticity of overhead poetry with its genuine power of revelation coming from beyond the mental consciousness. Let us have a quick look at this Ashwattha tree depicted by the Yogi-Poet. (The Gita: 15.1) Page 33 With its original source above, its branches ...
... knowledge of the Brahman, the knowledge that is secret and difficult of discovery, and it is subtle which is seizable only in the light of the Brahman, but the light which can be kindled in our mental consciousness by the process of yoga. But even the beginning of this process is difficult unless one wakes up and takes up the staff for the upward journey. Hence Yama tells Nachiketas: "Arise, awake ...
... Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. 8 The word intuition is often used in religions and philosophical literature so as to include in its connotation all the levels of consciousness that transcend mental consciousness. In a more precise connotation, it can be limited to immediate grasp of the truth by a spark that flashes out when the subject and the object of knowledge happen to get identified with each ...
... the vital and the physical can be controlled and mastered, although the real and lasting integration can come about only when one develops higher degrees of consciousness which transcend the mental consciousness. According to the ancient Indian psychology, the physical, the vital, and the mental can be uplifted to their higher perfection ¦when the Spirit is made to manifest its four powers, the ...
... because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself ...
... subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds, but the experiences of these worlds are similar to the experiences which come under the scope of our ordinary physical, vital, Page 40 mental consciousness. Hence, the experiences of subliminal consciousness can be said to be experiences of yogic dream-state. Just as in ordinary dream-state, objects are cognized, not through sense organs, but by ...
... from the udder of the shinning cow of the infinitude, Aditi. This deva is to be found by the soul of man who soars as the Bird, -the Hamsa, passes the shinning firmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbs as a traveller and fighter beyond earth of body, and heaven of mind and ascends on the path of the Truth. When the soul discovers the Truth, it attains to the ambrosial wine of divine ...
... because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. .. .As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and the plant up ...
... articulated form for the truths that are seen directly, without the operations of mediate reasoning. For understanding the true nature of intuition, we need to transcend the limitations of the mental consciousness and begin to accustom ourselves to looking in through the gates of the being's secret universal self-vision and knowledge. And even then intuition is still a transitional stage that has still ...
... inconscience and observe that Inconscience is a state of involved Supermind. As Sri Aurobindo points out, there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond mind. There is, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the unconquerable impulse in man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality ...
... is not possible. We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being, so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and Page 130 wider than the ordinary emotional and ...
... addition to two forms of intuition, Space and Time. But we fail to experience the Object-in-itself, the Existence-in-itself. The question is whether we can remove the blinders of our subjective mental consciousness, look freely at truth, and experience in a state of total objectivity the reality as it is. The ancient Indian educational theory affirms that it is possible to transcend the limitations ...
... harmony and the play of life is guided spontaneously by that harmony. But in the course of evolution of our mind, there is the inevitable urge for self- consciousness. And this urge tends in mental consciousness to manifest by breaking the original spontaneous harmony. Once this harmony is broken, there comes into operation the second law, the law of ascending from below upwards, which builds up in ...
... know the Divine Force, which is utilised to raise the triple being of man to divinity. Thereafter one makes an offering of the physical Page 21 consciousness, vital consciousness and mental consciousness to the divine consciousness. Then one finds the Lord of our being whom we adore, and we are led to know the Brahman, which is even beyond the Lord whom we adore. Then one goes beyond birth and ...
... and unified in the very Body of the Divine. The soul admitted to this awe-inspiring vision beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial, and therefore bewildered seeing of the mental consciousness but with the all-embracing and therefore all-reconciling courageous vision of the heroic spirit. For the happy consequence of this vision of the Universal Spirit we may read with interest the ...
... Consciousness and make that the overt master even over our outer existence and nature. It follows, therefore, that the evolutionary emergence upon earth cannot stop short with man and mental consciousness. For Mind is no more than an intermediate power of consciousness, Page 306 limited in vision and limping in action. Now, evolution being an inverse movement to involution ...
... importance of the specially structured human body in relation to the subjective-objective development of man, we may for a moment try to visualise any subhuman animal body but somehow possessing mental consciousness within. We can then very well comprehend the enormous difficulties that this imaginary hybrid creature will encounter in the process of manifesting dynamically a truly mental human culture ...
... and action? The Intrinsic Incapacity: To answer the above question we must first note that between the normal consciousness of man the mental being and a truly spiritual supra-mental consciousness, there lies a thick veil, an almost impenetrable lid, satyasyāpihitaṁ mukham, and unless this veil is lifted and the lid removed, there is no possibility of knowing the divine, far be it ...
... spiritual consciousness as reflected and refracted in the bosom of our normal mentality. This is what has been termed 'spiritual mental realisation'. (iii)To still and withdraw from the mental consciousness and retire to the supra-mental reaches. This is what can be called the 'trance-solution.' (iv)To transform the nature of the normal waking consciousness, to divinise it as we would ...
... me, is there no possibility to start the actions from the Page 196 "true consciousness"? Activity would mean either directing work by the ordinary vital or mental consciousness or else handing it over to the Mother's Force. But for that you must be conscious of the Mother's Force doing things through you. You wrote, "Rasa must be there in the work ...
... She spent five years, five long years in that country. Japan is the land of the Zen system of meditation, that is to say, a special way of entering into an inner consciousness, not a rational mental consciousness but a gaze inward into an occult and more sensitive region. The Japanese as a nation represent indeed a very sensitive vitality, an artistic vitality that seeks order and beauty in life, in ...
... Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities—the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supra-mental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there ...
... hemisphere in the scale. It is not an extension or intensification of the mind and its capacities that will solve the problem: a radical change in the very nature of the mind, a reversal of the mental consciousness—a turning of it inside out Page 182 as it were, an opening out and up is needed to discover the true source of the Light. Therefore it has been said that man must transcend ...
... even as it was difficult for the ape to envisage the advent of his successor, man. But certain characteristic signs, rudimentary or fragmentary movements of the higher status are visible in the mental consciousness even as it is: the ape likewise was not without a glimmer of Reason and logic, even the faculty of ratiocination that seems to be the exclusive property of man. There is, for example, a movement ...
... higher reality than mind and Page 8 suffused with a light and power belonging to that reality: a spiritual consciousness will emerge and with it spiritualised Matter, even as a mental consciousness emerged and mentalised (however inadequately) Matter, and yet anterior to that a vital consciousness emerged and vitalised Matter. There cannot be a limit to the degree of spiritualisation also; ...
... his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusa; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pranamaya purusa; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a manomaya purusa; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law—dharma—of ...
... physical body, then it seems that the veinous blood collects in the brain and brings about a sort of anaesthesia of the brain. When the brain is thus completely quieted down then the mind – the mental consciousness – is released from the entanglement of body. It can then experience more freely the other levels of consciousness.) Disciple : What is the veinous blood? Disciple : Blood having ...
... Then the talk turned to various experiences. NIRODBARAN: I once felt as if my head were suspended in the air and the other parts of the body did not exist. SRI AUROBINDO: That's the mental consciousness separating from the rest. NIRODBARAN: Are you able to know what experiences the sadhaks are having I mean any experiences and not only the decisive ones? SRI AUROBINDO: No, for I am not ...
... can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one play explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anterior – in the evolutionary movement – and ...
... his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusa ; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pranamaya purusa; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a manomaya purusa; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law – dharma ...
... will be taken up by a higher reality than mind and suffused with a light and power belonging to that reality: a spiritual consciousness will emerge and with it spiritualised Matter, even as a mental consciousness emerged and mentalised (however inadequately) Matter, and yet anterior to that a vital consciousness emerged and vitalised Matter. There cannot be a limit to the degree of spiritualisation also; ...
... body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusa; then he raised himself and was centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pr āņ amaya purusa; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became the manomaya purusa; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned' according to the central character, the law - dharma ...
... is simple, i.e., instinctive and impulsive and non-mental in her movements, she can be relied upon to be an asexual friend. Some women can be, but it is usually those who have a clear mental consciousness and strong will of self-control or else those who are incapable of a passion for more than one person in their life. You are lucky enough not to be that person. (Laughter) ...
... difficult to grasp—mental, vital, physical. SRI AUROBINDO: It is a demarcation which is not rigidly fixed. Each overflows into the others. In man, all are differentiated aspects or states of the mental consciousness in general. EVENING The Mother came in with a telegram for Sri Aurobindo, smiled and said, "Another problem to be solved." The telegram said, "Praying permission for our residence." ...
... and Infinite, the supreme Spirit, the bedrock of existence. Higher and higher means formulations of the Reality in a gradually evolving expansion up the ladders of the physical, the vital, the mental consciousness and towards the higher mental and overmental, indeed towards the Supramental. II It is not sufficient that the central psychic being comes forward and exercises what ...
... not by pursuing the normal track, continuing the habitual line of gradual growth and development. The measures – the tensor and vector, to use again a jargon, a mathematical one – of the mental consciousness do not apply there. There is a cut, a gap, a hiatus between Here and There; one has to take a leap to cross over. Nature herself has adopted that procedure. She has risen from stage to stage ...
... that... I am That-with all the obstructions that the present consciousness may still have.' - Mar 14 Finds 'a spirit of confusion' in the atmosphere, a vibration of disharmony. 'The mental consciousness is panic-stricken in presence of the supramental. I have the feeling... that at every moment one could die, the vibration is so different.' And so her consciousness goes on repeating its mantra ...
... Page 31 change decisively, a 'rending' of the 'veil' is necessary, for then the Supermind or the supramental consciousness would operate here, even as Mind of the mental consciousness is already operating. Neither the denial of matter through asceticism nor the denial of the Spirit through materialism or hedonism, neither escaping into the upper hemisphere nor absorption ...
... incomplete and partial, but it was a starting point just the same. Why could it not be now? 8 There will be a moment when a human consciousness reaches a state sufficient to allow the supra-mental consciousness to enter and manifest in it.... It does not keep stretching like a rubberband, you know: it has to happen sometime. It may happen in a flash. 9 The "Descent" It was a "Wednesday ...
... into another plane where you become a conscious participant and a dynamic agent in the working out of a Higher Destiny. 23 VI In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, the aim is to exceed the mental consciousness and attain in the overhead levels up to the supramental. This does not mean that mind, reason, intellect are entirely useless, or necessarily inimical to Yoga. Everything in its own place ...
... kinds of perversion: Perversion is a human disease, it occurs only very rarely in animals.... ...Perversion begins with humanity. It is a distortion of the progress of Nature which mental consciousness represents. And, therefore, the first thing which should be taught to every human being as soon as he is able to think, is that he should obey reason which is a super-instinct of the species ...
... in the world. Thus is the Buddha's core-teaching linked up with the Aurobindonian affirmation of the need to join the spiritual consciousness to an evolving Page 641 mental consciousness leading to the establishment here of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Such, the Mother feels, "was the original conception of the Buddhist teaching". The 13th and 14th verses are about ...
... only answer from the metaphysical position will be that mind is the only reality in the world, that man is a mental being, that the process of the universe is led, if at all it is led, to a mental consciousness and that there is nothing more than mind at work in the cosmos. In that case, only that solution can be satisfying. Whether that is so is another question. Incarnations and philosophers have ...
... Absolute. One of such potentialities is that the Absolute that is all-Knowledge, all-Consciousness etc. can become inconscient. These are not vain and abstract possibilities as we find in our mental consciousness. Mental ideas and truths are not all realisable in life. One can say that mental potentialities have not sufficient power to realize themselves in life. But we are considering the potentialities ...
... forces of life. No religion or moral veneering will effect anything substantial and abiding. Those who are aspiring to help the world and its evolutionary march must go beyond the ignorant mental consciousness. Yoga is the only remedy, and our Yoga, in particular, is the most difficult of all inasmuch as it has to effect a radical and integral transformation of earth consciousness. All collective ...
... rejects the personal; if it regards Reality as static and inactive, it dubs all creation and action as illusion; or if, like Heraclitus and Bergson, it perceives ¹"It is not in the mental consciousness that things can be harmonised and synthesised". The Mother Page 212 the exclusive reality of the universal flux, it considers the status and immutability of ...
... vain pride. What we should never lose sight of is the fact that Truth is one and infinite, though its formulation are many and mutable, and however brilliant a formulation may appear to our mental consciousness, however much it may claim our homage and fealty, to make it the only ideal to be realised is to elect to live in a half-way house and refuse to go forward. Surely, nothing can be more pr ...
... only an "outer court"; mind is not the inmost chamber, the inmost sanctuary. This "court" of the mind is not only "outer" but "many-frescoed". Man goes on painting pictures on the walls of his mental consciousness. Thus the outer court of the "Imperishable Inhabitant" is nicely painted with many frescoes. This beautiful image brings out into clear relief, the place and the value of all mental activity ...
... time after Pranam or meditation. Disciple : I felt once as if the head were suspended in the air and that parts of body did not resist. Sri Aurobindo : That is separation of the mental consciousness. Disciple : Are you able to know what experiences Sadhaks are having, especially if they are some decisive ones? Sri Aurobindo : I don't. But Mother knows. Whenever it is a ...
... will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance. "Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During ...
... and become the foundation and governing principle of the human consciousness. We shall live in the supramental consciousness and work with the supramental force, even as we now live in the mental consciousness and work with the mental force. The revolutionary nature of the transition from the mind to the Supermind need not paralyse our aspiration with doubt or distrust, for the transitions from stones ...
... reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery: the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it. Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging being which plunges into remote depths below and spreads high above in the infinitudes ...
... the outer form. From the apparent Inconscient that was in the beginning-if ever there was a beginning,— organised Matter has evolved; from Matter, life; from life, Mind. Man represents this mental consciousness. But mind is not the last, though at present it is the highest term of this evolutionary movement. Man is, therefore, a transitional being. Page 73 The destiny of Man is ...
... lly thought out speech. The same poet defines poetry as "the immortal manifestation of the soul" "Amṛtām ātmanah kalām". Sri Aurobindo pleads that as poetry is bound to evolve beyond mental consciousness our aesthesis also correspondingly should evolve; "an evolutionary ascent of all the activities of mind and life is not impossible" (Letters). The importance of the planes of consciousness ...
... is no reason to suppose that the present relation between sense and substance, as represented by matter, is binding. Is the relation between substance and sense bound by the present form of mental consciousness ? That is the problem. Even material states exist which man has not yet perceived, and so there is no reason to suppose that the present knowledge and possibility Page 230 of ...
... To Savitri "Nothing was alien or inanimate. Nothing without its meaning or its call". She represented a further step in the journey of consciousness towards Light, She had outgrown the mental consciousness and hers was "A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force". "A body instinct with hidden divinity": thus Savitri grew up "an image of the coming god." As she advanced towards adolescence ...
... the disciple is perfectly transparent, if nothing moves or questions in his consciousness, he goes, speaks the words and the thing is done instantly, quite simply. If the person has an active mental consciousness, Mother said, he sees the difficulties, sees the problems to be resolved, sees all the complications—naturally, they all occur! So according to the proportion (everything is a question of ...
... it is an old story, even if we are sufficiently blind or ignorant not to perceive it with our eyes blinkered with obscurity. The moment one is slightly formed, conscious, developed in one’s mental consciousness, when these are no longer mere “ideas” that one juggles by the dozen, but a mental force, an emotional force or a spiritual one that one concentrates around oneself and handles, a subtle body ...
... The facsimile ‘To the children’ in Mother’s handwriting Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During ...
... increased सुतस्य पीतये & ज्यैष्ठाय, primarily for the drinking of the joy & vitality that has been distilled, secondarily, through & as a result of the taking up of that joy & vitality in the active mental consciousness for supremacy, that is to say, for full manifestation of his force in that fullness in which he is always the leader of the divine war, king & greatest (ज्येष्ठ) of the battling gods. Therefore ...
... Seer of our knowledge, the White Steed in the front of our days who gallops towards the upper Ocean. The soul of man soars as the Bird, the Hansa, past the shining firmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbs as the traveller and fighter beyond earth of body and heaven of mind by the ascending path of the Truth to find this Godhead waiting for us, leaning down to us from the secrecy of the ...
... madhumanto asridho, hiraṇyaparṇā uhuva uṣarbudhaḥ . Full of the honey these winged energies shower on us as they rise the abundance of the waters of heaven, the full outpouring of the high mental consciousness; they are instinct with ecstasy, with rapture, with the intoxication of the immortal wine; and they touch, they come into conscious contact with that superconscient being which is eternally ...
... their previous deeds, of the light of Indra, the movement of the Ashwins, the full yield of the fostering Cow to restore youth to the aged Parents of the world, Heaven and Earth. Heaven is the mental consciousness, Earth the physical. These in their union are represented as lying long old and prostrate like fallen sacrificial posts, worn-out and suffering. The Ribhus, it is said, ascend to the house of ...
... s & expectant forces, so that the ground may be clear for the generalisation of ideal certainty. Tapas-siddhi is now at the 50° and there fairly sure of itself and general. The whole mental consciousness is now beginning to be pervaded by a sense of substantial light (jyotih) and the body with a sense of the flowing of a wine, an ecstatic subtle liquor of delight, Soma. The sense of will as ...
... the mind; liberation is another state of the mind. When through the principle of desire in the mind the soul, the Ish, the lord, mixes himself up in the whirl of Prakriti, he sees himself in mental consciousness as if carried forward in the stream of causality; he seems to the mind in him to be bound by the effects of his works; when he relinquishes desire, then he recovers his lordship—which in his ...
... × The sacrifice of the lower existence to the divine, consummated on the three planes of man's physical, vital and mental consciousness. × The Purusha or Divine Being, Knower of the Field, who dwells within all and for whose pleasure ...
... is not then in the form of Matter itself, but in the Force which is at work in Matter, that we must seek the origin of Mind. That Force must either be itself conscient or contain the grain of mental consciousness inherent in its being and therefore the potentiality and indeed the necessity of its emergence. This imprisoned consciousness, though originally absorbed in the creation first of forms and then ...
... reluctant to its touch. It would be, subject to whatever supramental power might be above it, master of a ductile and easily responsive material. But still Sense would be there, because contact in mental consciousness and formation of images would still be part of the law of being. Page 50 Mind, in fact, or active consciousness generally has four necessary functions which are indispensable to ...
... its proper plane or world & containing its proper principle of consciousness. Man, living here in the Bhu, has, he too, his seven bodies.He has for instance the Manahkosha containing his pure mental consciousness and, although mind can & does play in the other sheaths, it can only be by becoming awake & living in his mental body as well as his physical that he can realise the utmost potentialities of ...
... seemingly bound and subject to its stains, our true and only way is not to renounce action but to vindicate that secret spiritual freedom hidden within us as a possession for our outward and active mental consciousness. So shall a man be free, calm & joyous and yet through action accomplish God's purpose in him in the motional universe. The strife between quietism and pragmatism in philosophy and religion ...
... unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other. In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge. Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted ...
... We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different Page 105 from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being, so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of ...
... activity to enter into Sachchidananda. If you can do this, then when you wake up you have the feeling of an extraordinary power, a perfect joy. Space and time do not begin and end with the mental consciousness: even the overmind has them.... Each world has its own space and time. Thus the mental space and time do not tally with what we observe here in the material universe. In the mind-world we can ...
... you in a dream, is it always a symbolic dream? No, not necessarily. It can be a fact.... If I send out a force or a thought or a movement, an action to someone, in his atmosphere in his mental consciousness it takes my form. So he sees it.... It is not my whole being... but it is something of myself.... certainly, it has a significance... mostly even a very precise aim... Symbolic dreams are ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Vision of Man rising to the Divine and when the moment came, of Divinity descending on the aspirant. That Aurobindonian quest should be ours as well. Nothing less than a supra-mental consciousness should satisfy the intellectual and if the profoundly conservative intellectual makes the effort that ideal could be achieved. Page 331 ...
... (psychic love), blue (higher-mind at work, spiritual consciousness of Divine Truth), white (the force of purity and the power of Divine Truth), gold (knowledge). Here, this means that as the mental consciousness grows higher and higher it finally meets the golden light of the Divine Truth as “gold at its most intense indicates something from the supramental”. It gets modified according to the level ...
... and unified in the very Body of the Divine. The Soul admitted to this awe-inspiring vision beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial, and therefore bewildered seeing of the mental consciousness, but with the all-embracing and therefore all-reconciling courageous vision of the heroic spirit. For the happy consequence of this vision of the Universal Spirit we may read with interest ...
... the earth itself, in the sense of evolution of Matter to Life and Mind, etc. This simultaneous movement from below and above is essential. In this manner Satyavan now represents the mental consciousness of man. He is the son of Dyumatsena and "Dyumatsena is Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan. He is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision." He ...
... of intellectuals. That is why, as it is now discovered, humanity has made little progress in the last three thousand years, except in information and material equipment. 22 Because mental consciousness represents a higher or more evolved level of consciousness than that of the vital, which human beings have still not fully outgrown, the mind is regarded in yoga as not only a useful but also ...
... from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti. Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound—for ...
... expressed in the Vedantic concept of Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss). All things and creatures are united in the One Reality, though they appear to be separate and divided to mental consciousness which is Page 391 an ignorance-consciousness. Through a process of involution, the One Existence and Consciousness is plunged in the universe into its opposite — the Inconscient ...
... Course (Notre Dame, Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 43. 4. Sri Aurobindo uses the term "vital" to designate the part of our psychological make-up which lies between the mental consciousness above it and the physical consciousness below it. The vital part of our being — often referred to simply as "the vital" — represents the Life-Nature, made up of sensations, instincts and ...
... and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supra-mental Consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit ...
... maladjustment, pain of attachment, disappointed desire, grief of loss and failure." 2 Coping and Mastery reflect different degrees of the predominance of Sattwa, the quality inherent in mental consciousness. As Sri Aurobindo describes it, Sattwa makes for "... clear comprehension, poise and balance... it understands, sympathises; it fathoms and controls and develops Nature's urge and her ways: ...
... would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping Page 77 enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something ...
... as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit.” “He has no sufficient means of communication even with the animal who is his mental congener ...
... Self-manifestation Sri Aurobindo calls “Truth-Consciousness” or “Supermind”, “the real creative agency of the universal existence”. The Supermind is not an inflated or supreme degree of the human mental consciousness as we know it, and “lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or map of it or any grasp of mental seeing and description. It would be difficult for the normal unillumined ...
... distorting them until they have become a caricature of the original source. Spirituality is based on the direct experience of a supra-mental reality; as such, it is felt to be irrational by the mental consciousness of the human being. Religion is always suspicious of true mysticism and of the true spiritual experience, for it knows itself to move on a much less elevated plane. Once religion has the worldly ...
... without respite, even during the years he wrote the Arya, as witnessed in his Record of Yoga. This is why the Mother could say: ‘When I returned in 1920, he was bringing the Supramental in the mental consciousness’, i.e. in the highest of the three elements humans consist of. In Purani’s report about his meeting with Sri Aurobindo in 1921, we read that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were already bringing ...
... human being is not fully human. And poetry, to him, was not an irrational fancy of characters who cannot manage reality: it was a direct contact with the ‘overhead’ regions between our ordinary mental consciousness and the Supramental. To Sri Aurobindo, writing poetry was not a fanciful flight of the imagination, but a means of access to higher worlds, and therefore a form of spirituality if practised ...
... are discovered, no big creation is possible. March 25, 1934 The first step is a quiet mind—silence is a further step, but quietude must be there; and by a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own. Thoughts, mental, movements ...
... would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the Divine something less than Mind or is it something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action ...
... in connection with Yogic workings and whose chief mouthpiece Swami Vivekananda paid a visionary visit, day after day for a fortnight, to Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Jail pointing beyond the mental consciousness towards the Page 213 "overhead" planes whose culmination is the earth-fulfilling Supermind realised and rendered operative for the first time by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... direct, irrespective of whether your doings conform' to one or another position taken up by people. Only those who believe that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother possess a greater light than the mental consciousness will be real followers and they will not argue their heads off about subjects your friend is fond of fighting over. We are not there to make converts by entering into all sorts of controversies ...
... convince those students that since all he can know is his own perceptions the students have no existence outside the teacher's own mind and that the classroom is another construction of his mental consciousness which is roomy enough to hold everything in heaven and earth and is the sole subject-object deserving to be classed and studied as "existence"! Maybe, philosophy sometimes falls into disrepute ...
... the proofs of Mother India journal. Those few moments of waiting for Amal Kiran to finish his work in hand were the ones during which an indelible image of Amal was engraved in my mental consciousness: a radiant face with delight in its eyes! He would turn around and with a welcoming smile he would ask me the purpose of my visit. It was as if he had suspended the avalanche of higher thoughts ...
... perceiving it which constitutes Disorder, the actual Falsehood.’ 33 We do not experience the world as it is, we experience a distorted reproduction of the world, distorted by the way our mental consciousness functions. All is One, all is connected and coherent, all exists in Unity, but thereupon we project our pettiness, our impotence to comprehend the Unity, and we see everything as separate entities ...
... ss will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance . Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During ...
... C.I.D. I suppose even if he had left Bangalore it could have been forwarded to him. You can write and inform him of the fact. Sri Aurobindo As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness ...
... the knowledge of the universe must lead the mind of man to the same large revelation. For he cannot know Nature as Matter and Force and Life without being driven to scrutinise the relation of mental consciousness with these principles, and once he knows the real nature of mind, he must go inevitably beyond every surface appearance. He must discover the will and intelligence secret in the works of Force ...
... not only from outside, develops a power of will which also acts in the inner (Yogic) way on things and people etc. Its opening is often the beginning of the Yogic as opposed to the ordinary mental consciousness. In the forehead between the eyes but a little above is the Ajnachakra, the centre of the inner will, also of the inner vision, the dynamic mind etc. (This is not the ordinary outer mental ...
... the individual law of his being. Man, the mental being in Nature, is especially distinguished from her less developed creatures by a greater power of individuality, by the liberation of the mental consciousness which enables him finally to understand more and more himself and his law of being and his development, by the liberation of the mental will which enables him under the secret control of the ...
... of the eternal existence of the Supreme and Eternal. The power that brings it into play is the infinite consciousness of the Supreme aware of itself and all that is itself, not a limited mental consciousness like ours but supramental and illimitable, not bound by this or that condition, but determining out of an infinite truth of self-existence its own conditions, nor by this or that relation or ...
... ego-sense that gives a first basis of coherence to what otherwise might be a string or mass of floating impressions: all that is so sensed is referred to a corresponding artificial centre of mental consciousness in the understanding, the ego-idea. This ego-sense in the life stuff and this ego-idea in the mind maintain a constructed symbol of self, the separative ego, which does duty for the hidden real ...
... work to evolve in force and form all the inevitable truth of the Idea into which it has originally thrown itself. This conception of the Idea points us to the essential contrast between our mental consciousness and the Truth-consciousness. We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches ...
... realised as an utter Self of one's own being; or the very idea of a self and of one's own being may be swallowed up in it, so that it is only for the mind an unknowable That, unknowable to the mental consciousness and without any possible kind of actual connection or commerce with world-existence. It can even be realised by the mental being as a Nihil, Non-Existence or Void, but a Void of all that is ...
... I desire, I feel"; he does not even say like the sadhaka striving after unity but before he has reached it, "As appointed by Thee seated in my heart, I act." For the heart, the centre of the mental consciousness is no longer the centre of origination but only a blissful channel. He is rather aware of the Divine seated above, lord of all, adhiṣṭhita , as well as acting within him. And seated himself ...
... such a higher level and greater intensity. It assumes naturally a great importance in the Yoga of knowledge, because there it is the very principle of its method and its object to raise the mental consciousness into a clarity and concentrated power by which it can become entirely aware of, lost in, identified with true being. But there are two great disciplines in which it becomes of an even greater ...
... ten Brides, sisters in the heaven that has to be crossed", a phrase that recalls at once the ship of the Ashwins that carries us over beyond the thoughts; for Heaven is the symbol of the pure mental consciousness in the Veda as is Earth of the physical consciousness. These sisters who dwell in the pure mind, the subtle ones, aṇvīḥ , the ten brides, daśa yoṣaṇāḥ , are elsewhere called the ten Casters ...
... l idea of the Vedic Rishis brought out in the Hymn of Creation (X.129) where the subconscient is thus described. "Darkness hidden by darkness in the beginning was this all, an ocean without mental consciousness...out of it the One was born by the greatness of Its energy. It first moved in it as desire which was the first seed of mind. The Masters of Wisdom found out in the non-existent that which builds ...
... device is as awkward & clumsy as it is unnecessary. जनासः O Asuras, says Sayana. Grit. is explaining to the Asuras that he is a poor weak mortal & not Indra! Heaven & Earth, the physical & mental consciousness become subject to the divine Mind or are shaken with the grandeur & awe of this mighty advent. For he is full of an aggressive heroic force that subjects all things by its attack & the greatness ...
... he is contained. Preferring ordinarily a concrete to an abstract language, the Rishis speak of the physical consciousness as the physical world, earth, Bhu, Prithivi. They describe the pure mental consciousness as heaven, Dyaus, of which Swar, the luminous mind, is the summit. To the intermediate dynamic, vital or nervous consciousness they give the name either of Antariksha, the intermediate vision ...
... resides therefore the power of all the other godheads. × The whole physical and the whole mental consciousness become full of the knowledge which streams into them from the supramental plane and they, as it were, turn into the supramental light and action around the divine Seer-Will as he moves about ...
... 16 June 1914 St. Raw materials (Fr. D.). Script. It is the raw materials (áma) that are now being brought forward for pachana . This exactly describes the defect in the siddhi of the mental consciousness which was being strongly felt all the morning & especially at the moment of the sortilege. Neuralgia with a struggle in the consciousness between discomfort Page 497 of pain ...
... taking cognisance of the intention in things & events. Dream incoherently consecutive, full of present association & ego. Forgotten entirely, afterwards by passive & empty tapas on the mental consciousness, almost all the details returned. Swapna samadhi; but no advance. 15 October 1914 Great weakness followed by chill & fever. Utthapana of arms for half an hour, interrupted owing ...
... Tat Sat and able to identify with it. Believed to be obtainable in its absoluteness only in absolute Trance—nirvikalpa samadhi. All this (first in the Upanishads) is the viewpoint from the mental consciousness. It is incomplete because two things that are one have been left out, the Personal Manifestation and the name of the Mahashakti. The subsequent growth of spiritual knowledge has brought about ...
... the Being, somewhat as the imaginations of a creative Mind are true representations of itself, yet not quite real in comparison with itself, or real with a different kind of reality. But mental consciousness is not the Power that creates the universe. That is something infinitely more puissant, swift and unfettered than the mind. It is the pure omnipotent self-awareness of the Absolute unbound by ...
... that may well be at least a partial Avatarhood. The Lord stands in the heart, says the Gita,—by which it means of course the heart of the subtle being, the nodus of the emotions, sensations, mental consciousness, where the individual Purusha also is seated,—but he stands there veiled, enveloped by his Maya. But above, on a plane within us but now superconscient to us, called heaven by the ancient mystics ...
... × The Vedic term kratu means sometimes the action itself, sometimes the effective power behind action represented in mental consciousness by the will. Agni is this power. He is divine force which manifests first in matter as heat and light and material energy and then, taking different forms in the other principles of man's c ...
... forms of consciousness. The point is that there is no such thing as the self-existent Matter posited by nineteenth-century Science. "chitta" and "chetas" Chitta is ordinarily used for the mental consciousness in general, thought, feeling, etc. taken together with a stress now on one side or another, sometimes on the feelings as in citta-pramāthī , sometimes on the thought-mind—that is why I translated ...
... s and upward into the Self and higher spiritual Mind above the head. The lightness, the feeling of the disappearance of the head and that all is open is a sign of the wideness of the mental consciousness which is no longer limited by the brain and its body sense—no longer imprisoned but wide and free. This is felt in the meditation only at first or with closed eyes, but at a later stage it becomes ...
... in such visions 1 indicate points of light or of higher experience in the consciousness. The earth means the physical consciousness. Stars indicate points of light in the ignorant mental consciousness. Moon = spiritual light Sun = the higher Truth light They [ gold stars in the sky ] are simply indications of divine Truth in the mind—the sky is a symbol of mind very often. ...
... physical has to pour down into this subconscient and make it luminous. "Patala" is a name for the subconscient—the beings there [ in a dream ] had no heads, that is to say, there is there no mental consciousness; men have all of them such a subconscient plane in their own being and from there rise all sorts of irrational and ignorant (headless) instincts, impulsions, memories etc. which have an effect ...
... Dawn Sky The sky usually symbolises a plane of consciousness mental or higher than the ordinary mental—stars are formations of light on that plane. The sky is a symbol of the mental consciousness (or the psychic) or other consciousnesses above the mind—e.g. the higher mind, intuition, overmind etc. Akasha as the ether indicates also the infinite. The sky in the heart is the chidakash ...
... rid of them; one is to reject them one by one before they can come in; another is to look at them with detachment till they fade away. It is of course because of the old habit of the mental consciousness that it goes on receiving the thoughts from outside in spite of its being a fatigue—not that it wants them, but that they Page 302 are accustomed to come and the mind mechanically ...
... spiritual consciousness and for this also a quiet mind is the first need. The first step is a quiet mind—silence is a farther step, but quietude must be there, and by a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about, but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identify itself with the thoughts or call them its own. Thoughts, mental Page 141 ...
... of doubt, despair and inertia from the adverse side of Nature. You have to move towards a firm basis of calm and equality in the vital and Page 127 physical no less than in the mental consciousness; let there be the full downflow of Power and Ananda, but into a firm adhara capable of containing it—it is a complete equality that gives that capacity and firmness. When the peace of ...
... of consciousness. The point is that there is no such thing as the self-existent Matter posited by nineteenth-century Science. "chitta" and "chetas" Chitta is ordinarily used for the mental consciousness in general, thought, feeling, etc. taken together with a stress now on one side or another, sometimes on the feelings as in citta-pramāthī , sometimes on the thought-mind—that is why I translated ...
... don't you are in the falsehood. But all this has never led to anything and has only created confusion. There is only one true guide, that is the inner guide, who does not pass through the mental consciousness. Naturally, if a child gets a disastrous education, it will try ever harder to extinguish within itself this little true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all contact ...
... not happy, but all that changed during the night; the next day the uneasiness had gone. Page 19 It was undoubtedly a mental opening to the higher consciousness, an ascent of the mental consciousness towards the higher consciousness. And it was probably a resistance in the emotional vital which caused the pain, that disagreeable sensation which disappeared during the night with the liberation ...
... longer and you enter the mind itself, there are relations which may be rendered by a certain time and certain space which do not exist for the physical consciousness but which exist for the mental consciousness. That then would be, if you like, the explanation of what you were saying, that Time changes; for it is evident that in the universal formation there is an infusion of progressive consciousness ...
... ordinarily lived in the world. Sri Aurobindo tells us that in order to reach the Truth and to have the power of realising this Truth you must join the spiritual consciousness to a progressive mental consciousness. And these few words certainly prove that such was the original conception of the Buddhist teaching. 6 December 1957 Just as the rain penetrates through the thatch of a leaking roof ...
... physical... you Page 44 can enter into contact with the psychic directly through the physical consciousness, directly through the vital consciousness, directly through the mental consciousness. It is not as though you had to cross all the states of being in order to find the psychic. You can enter the psychic without leaving your physical consciousness, through interiorisation, because ...
... disappeared at the same time. If... To help you to understand this riddle, I could tell you that the mother is physical Nature as it is and the daughter is the new creation. The manager is the mental consciousness, organiser of the world as Nature has made it until now, that is, the highest sense of organisation manifested in material Nature as it is now. This is the key to the vision. Naturally, when ...
... do anything without this having any real influence on the state of consciousness one is in. This is what really matters. To try through outer gestures or arbitrary decisions which come from a mental consciousness aspiring for a higher life can be a means, not a very effective one but still a sort of reminder to the being that it ought to be something other than what it is in its animality—but it's not ...
... s could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way." How is it possible to fuse into one all these views? It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised and synthesised. For this it is necessary to rise above and find the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions ...
... you think, "Fifty years... where will I be in fifty years?" Even without your being clearly aware of it, it is there in your consciousness. But if simply you look from the point of view of a mental consciousness, of something which lasts like a written work, for instance—a work of truly fine quality can last for hundreds and even thousands of years; so, if you are told, "For your ideas to spread it ...
... language, mystical language, philosophic language and materialistic language and that from the point of view of the lived truth, it makes very little difference. It is only when one is in the mental consciousness that one thing seems true to you and another does not seem true; but all these are only ways of expression. The experience carries in itself its absolute, but words cannot describe it—one may ...
... many corrections too (exactly of those facts that have been put in books and are not correct). And you need not walk on or climb up: you send along quite simply something like a concentrated mental consciousness and that goes forward and touches the thing. Only, if you do this without completely detaching yourself from your own mental activity, I am afraid you will see only what is in your own head ...
... who has a very profound knowledge and a great power, this can turn out badly. Therefore, for these long journeys it is usually the most subtle part of the vital (which corresponds to a kind of mental consciousness of the vital), which goes out. So one sees everything which has a similar quality. But supposing there is something very material, one doesn't see it as it is. So one can't say with certainty ...
... they are latent and need a special education, a special training so that they can express the Light. It is certain that in ordinary life the brain is the seat of the outer expression of the mental consciousness; well, if this brain is not developed, if it is crude, there are innumerable things which cannot be expressed, because they do not have the instrument required to express themselves. It would ...
... beings it is always this consciousness that governs their lives and organises both the circumstances of their existence and their individual reaction to these circumstances. What the human mental consciousness does not know and cannot do, this consciousness knows and does. It is like a light that shines at the centre of the being, radiating through the thick coverings of the external consciousness ...
... the notion of an absolute determinism of cause and effect and feel that things are what they are because they are what they are and cannot be otherwise. It is only when you come out of the mental consciousness completely and enter a higher perception of things—which you may call spiritual or divine—that you suddenly find yourself in Page 176 a state of perfect freedom where everything ...
... The idea is good—but naturally the value of the expression depends entirely on the value of that which wants to express itself. At present almost all artists live in the lowest vital and mental consciousness and the results are quite poor. Try to develop your consciousness, endeavour to discover your soul, and then what you will do will be truly interesting. This is the programme I am giving ...
... sensation or a feeling than an image. The image always comes to those who have a formative Page 378 mental power, an active physical mind. It is an indication that one is active in one's mental consciousness. (The child who had asked the first question) But is this right? But everything is right if it has a result! Any means is good. Why shouldn't it be right?... Images like that are not ...
... 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 mental consciousness to a supramental and divine consciousness, and when the ascent is completed, to return to the material world and infuse it with the Page 98 supramental force and consciousness that ...
... individual has a spark of the Divine, it is only when the spark becomes individualised that it emerges as the Psychic Being which then, if recognized and accepted by our physical, emotional and mental consciousness, evolves into a direct contact with the Godhead. As the Mother writes: It is this spark that is permanent and gathers round itself all sorts of elements for the formation of that ...
... will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance. Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During ...
... must make a resolution never to legitimize any of these movements, at any cost. To be able to see the problem as it is, it is absolutely indispensable, as a first step, to get out of the mental consciousness, even out of a mental transcription (in the highest mind) of the supramental vision and truth. A thing cannot be seen as it is, in its truth, except in the supramental consciousness, and if ...
... upon the mass. It is likely that once a certain movement has been mastered to some degree, what the mass does or doesn't do (this whole human mass that has barely, barely emerged into even the mental consciousness) will become quite irrelevant. You see, the mass is still under the great rule of Nature. I am referring to mental humanity, predominantly mental, which developed the mind but misused it and ...
... example, or among animals, the response will be much quicker than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a very organized mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is unconscious will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle ...
... of a wonderful transformation in all things. 13 December 1968 In order to be conscious of the constant Presence, is memory a good aid? Memory is a mental faculty and helps the mental consciousness. But feeling and sensation must also participate. 17 December 1968 Page 390 When the Presence becomes concrete, does this indicate the participation of feeling and sensation ...
... living, that means it's functioning normally; as soon as it feels itself living in some part of itself, it means that something isn't quite normal, and instinctively (I don't mean the vital or mental consciousness), but its primal consciousness is alarmed, because it's not normal (not what it calls "normal"); and then that sort of alarm (an alarm that's not formulated in thoughts) brings it into contact ...
... with what REFUSES to admit the possibility of divinity. In other words, the materialistic concept in its most stubbornly dark aspect. However... in the consciousness up above, even in the mental consciousness, there are no consequences (I mean that the fierceness of the struggle doesn't change anything, the phenomenon is simply witnessed), but it's this poor body that receives the blows. The main ...
... weakness; when something tires you or bores you, it's really a sign of weakness. It doesn't happen to me very often anymore; I don't even think it happens at all: there's just, somewhere in the mental consciousness (and it doesn't come from me, it comes from others, rather), a suggestion that "it's really a bit too much." Otherwise... What about your book? How is it going? Last night again—very often ...
... peculiar thrill and colour and we get the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Sri Aurobindo intuits in a self-transfiguring lift of the pure mental consciousness the supreme Spirit's Force one with unimaginable rest. In all these expressions the inspiration is absolutely unmarred. Sri Aurobindo has experienced the very state he poetises ...
... of view, the things that seem to us the least transparent or expressive are sometimes the best expressions. It's hard to explain. Page 77 There was the perception of what the mental consciousness ADDS to the action of the supreme Consciousness, and that addition, or judgment, was still something quite relative—relative to time, to the occasion, the person; it's not an absolute: in one ...
... speak to ("you" is singular), to humanity or the human being, I don't know. But this one is fine: "The soul wears no disguise...." That's fine. It was so concrete how the human (especially mental) consciousness ALWAYS wears a disguise: you have to appear like this, you have to appear like that, you have to give this impression, you have to have that appearance—a disguise. ( meditation ) ...
... cells—not deep down, but the consciousness that makes the cells function) is accustomed to effort, struggle, misery, defeat... so accustomed—that's quite universal. In people, it's only their mental consciousness (and often, when they are more advanced, their vital consciousness) that holds out; but their physical consciousness tends to foresee catastrophe, so accustomed it is: the end, you know, that ...
... of approach but also the level on which the realisation is reached. If this realisation is permanent, it is no small achievement and yet how far from the all-transcending Nirvana in which the mental consciousness is overpassed, the infinite self-luminous abyss of the Silent Brahman beyond the time and space of the entire "sevenfold chord" of manifested existence! I have no quarrel with this limited status ...
... present-day physics. When you ascribe anti-mentalism to Sri Aurobindo you are at Page 25 once right and wrong. Right if you mean that he does not accept the mental consciousness in any form as the world-creator. Wrong if you mean that he does not accept consciousness at all as the creator of the world. Mind, to Sri Aurobindo, is not a synonym of consciousness: it ...
... utterance, the moved imaginative speech proper to the plane distinguished by Sri Aurobindo as the creative intelligence which is no more than a particular intensified operation of the same mental consciousness we find in the bulk of human activities. Most poetry is written from the creative intelligence, though the founts of it are more inward, more secret than those of our habitual mental life ...
... veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind" — states towards which we are directed by "the unconquerable impulse of man towards God ...
... The mountain always represents the ascending hill of existence with the Divine to be reached on the summits. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III: Earth Sky: A symbol of the mental consciousness (or the psychic) or other consciousnesses above the mind. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III: Sky, Weather, Night and Dawn The higher consciousness in any of its levels is seen usually ...
... man is changed, there appears Page 69 no hope for human survival. And that change can come only by self-knowledge, by a change of our present half-enlightened mental consciousness into a spiritual and supramental Truth-consciousness or All-knowledge, All-power, All-bliss. A change of consciousness alone can bring about a change of human nature—from the ignorant separative ...
... consciousness than mental which is almost ignorant compared with spiritual consciousness which is the consciousness of truth. So., to judge Sri Krishna and Sri Rama from your ignorant and mental consciousness will not be of any meaning. It will be senseless, and land one in a helpless morass from which one will not be able to extricate himself. I am not therefore enlighten you about the actions of ...
... V. 8) Page 294 make it the overt master there even over our outer existence and nature. It follows then that the evolutionary emergence cannot stop short with man or mental consciousness. For Mind is no more than an intermediate power of consciousness, limited in vision and limping in movement. Now, "evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and ...
... that controls the physical consciousness), prāṇamaya Puruṣa (Puruṣa consciousness that controls the vital consciousness), and manomaya Puruṣa (Puruṣa consciousness that controls the mental consciousness). A transition needs to be made, according to the Taittiriya Upanishad, from the lower self to the higher self, and this transition is the main subject of the discipline that involves cultivation ...
... The highest Brahman is beyond the three letters of the mystic syllable. 7. The sacrifice of the lower existence to the divine, consummated on the three planes of man's physical, vital and mental consciousness. 8. The Purusha or Divine Being, Knower of the Field, who dwells within all and for whose pleasure Prakriti fulfils the cosmic play. Page 42 Nachiketas." Nachiketas ...
... SATYENDRA: Is descent easier than ascent? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. NIRODBARAN: I thought it was through the head alone that both happen. SRI AUROBINDO: It is usually through the mind, when the mental consciousness goes up, but it can happen otherwise also, the vital or physical consciousness directly going up without passing through the mental. NIRODBARAN: Sahana's experience of ascent and her feeling ...
... Sharira and he identifies it with the mental plane. SRI AUROBINDO: What he and others mean is that it belongs to the Higher Mind or Higher Intelligence, not to the Manas or ordinary lower mental consciousness but to the Buddhi. SATYENDRA: Meher Baba says Karana Sharira is the root of Samskaras which are manifested on the subtle planes. He puts the human consciousness on the gross planes but he ...
... motive force of evolution. Now, this emergence and growth of consciousness in evolution has by no means ended with the appearance of man on the earth-scene, with his characteristic mental consciousness. For, mind is too imperfect an expression and man too hampered and limited a creature to be the last terms of evolution . It must then imply a progressive ascent to higher and higher reaches ...
... ignorance of their true self and Reality in the mind, life and body. (iii)This absolute Reality is in its nature indefinable; it is beyond the grasp of the ineffectual probe of separative mental consciousness; but there is a spiritual consciousness, a knowledge by identity, - attainable by a certain psycho-spiritual discipline otherwise called Yoga, - that can seize this Reality in its fundamental ...
... totality of this involved Consciousness and make it the overt master even over our outer existence and nature. It follows then that the evolutionary emergence cannot stop short with man and mental consciousness. For Mind is no more than an intermediate power of consciousness, limited in vision and limping in movement. Now, "evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and ...
... to impose his own view on the other; instead, he should try to place himself in — the interlocutor's position, seek to understand his view with great sympathy. This will help him to widen his mental consciousness instead of keeping it confined in a narrow bound. This will immensely help in the reception of newer and newer light from above and within. (3) Harmonious Ordering of the Mental Field: ...
... one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or He is something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action ...
... always direct the students to this unity. There are golden reaches of our consciousness, and from them Page 90 and from the reaches intermediate between them and our ordinary mental consciousness there have descended forces and forms, which have become embodied in literature, philosophy, science, in music, dance, art, architecture, sculpture, in great and heroic deeds and in all that ...
... and the present does not become a prison preventing the visions of the future. There are golden reaches of our consciousness, and from them and from the reaches between them and our ordinary mental consciousness there have descended forces and forms which have become embodied in literature, Page 109 philosophy, science, in music, drama, art, architecture, sculpture, in great and heroic ...
... Power). But before we can hope to understand the true rationale of this action, we must make some basic ideas clear to our mind. The very first thing we have to know is that the level of mental consciousness in which the general run of humanity is at present living, is not the only or the highest level possible to consciousness. There are many ranges of consciousness above the human level, one after ...
... fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the ...
... the vital and the physical can be controlled and mastered, although the real and lasting integration can come about only when one develops higher degrees of consciousness which transcend the mental consciousness. According to the ancient Indian psychology, the physical, the vital, and the mental can be uplifted to their higher perfection when the Spirit is made to manifest its four powers, the ...
... sah of the Veda; it is parat para higher than the highest, of the Upanishad; it is Purushotamma of the Gita; it is the Supreme Lord of the Shakti of the Tantra. It is unknowable to our mental consciousness but self-evident to knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us is capable. It is That which is known to us when it is manifest Page 63 to us as Sachchidananda, an Eternal ...
... the bodily being but of the mental being; although it admits the utility of asana and pranayama, but not as liberally as in the Hatha Yoga. It fixes its eyes on the chitta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which the activities of the emotional and sensational life and of thought and consciousness arise. The primary movement of Raja Yoga is a careful self-discipline consisting of yama and ...
... consciousness. One comes to discover the astonishing phenomena of the subliminal consciousness in which complexities of the subtle physical consciousness, inner vital consciousness and inner mental consciousness can be experienced and studied. One even comes to acknowledge that there are inner treasures of knowledge, will and feelings of which one can learn by means of what is called in yoga the process ...
... because a girl is simple i.e. instinctive and impulsive and non-mental in her movements she can be relied upon to be an asexual friend. Some women can be, but it is usually those who have a clear mental consciousness and strong will of self-control or else those who are incapable of a passion for more than one person in their life and you are lucky enough not to be that person. [Chand's telegram:] "Partial ...
... This method of asking questions and getting solutions in an interview is one of which the Mother does not approve. She finds it useless and it forces her to come down to meet a superficial mental consciousness which she has long left. Is it not quite wrong of a sadhak to judge the Mother from her outward expression of smile or seriousness; and then make his sadhana depend on such reactions ...
... fused into each other and become one. Yes, that is the perfect state. Suddenly there surged in a stilled Silence, a condition in which the very stuff of the mental consciousness sank into muteness. But how to carry out the physical work when the whole being is in an absolute motionless state? The Mother's Grace came to my rescue and touched the stillness — that gave ...
... have done, not as a result of my tapasya but as an act of her Grace, is this: she has opened me to her higher spiritual knowledge, and has linked it through this opening with the stuff of my mental consciousness, so that whenever the knowledge flows in I feel it as a natural product of my own consciousness, but when the opening is closed the same knowledge seems foreign to me. The action of this knowledge ...
... which determine the state and experiences of our nervous being, through the mentality whether by the means of our emotional heart, the active will or more largely by general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. It may be equally accomplished through a great awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according ...
... a rule—they are the psychological phraseology of the old Yoga. What exactly is the relation between the Manas and the Chitta? The Chitta is the general stuff of mental consciousness which supports Manas and everything else — it is an indeterminate consciousness which gets determined into thoughts and memories and desires and sensations and perceptions and impulses and feelings ...
... creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence ...
... there arises the Pure Existence (Sat). That pure Existence is gradually found to possess or be Delight also. As Being is not the being in creation even so the Consciousness is not the normal or mental consciousness, and Delight too is not the joy of life; they are all of quite another quality and category. In other words Purusha is given the exclusive reality, while Prakriti is negated, being identified ...
... completely cured, at least to a large extent alleviated and that conditions of living here will be more pleasant and harmonious, at least tolerable for all. That is quite possible. In man, the mental consciousness that he incarnated acted, by the very force of its nature, for its own satisfaction, for its own growth, without much consideration for the consequences of its actions. The Supramental, on the ...
... Existence (Sat). That pure Existence is gradually found to possess or be Delight also. As Being is not the being in creation even so the Consciousness Page 8 is not the normal or mental consciousness, and Delight too is not the joy of life; they are all of quite another quality and category. In other words Purusha is given the exclusive reality, while Prakriti is negated, being ...
... can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one may explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anterior—in the evolutionary movement —and inferior ...
... hemisphere in the scale. It is not an extension or intensification of the mind and its capacities that will solve the problem: a radical change in the very nature of the mind, a reversal of the mental consciousness – a turning of it inside out as it were, an opening out and up is needed to discover the true source of the Light. Therefore it has been said that man must transcend himself, find a new status ...
... this power: only all depends on the nature of the consciousness and the will it embodies. For consciousness-will has varying degrees and levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For ¹ Milton: Paradise Lost. Bk. 1. 253 Page 156 it is only one ...
... free independent movement. There is a basis here of the spirit of independence that shows itself more clearly in the biological units, and of course, very overtly and patently in the human mental consciousness. There seems to be an entity lying at the other end away from Matter, it is the Spirit, the individual Conscious Being. If Matter is Bondage, Law, Determinism, Spirit is Freedom, Liberty ...
... completely cured, at least to a large extent alleviated and that conditions of living here will be more pleasant and harmonious, at least tolerable for all. That is quite possible. In man, the mental consciousness that he embodied acted, by the very force of its nature, for its own satisfaction, for its own growth, without much consideration for the consequences of its actions. The Supramental, on the ...
... Accomplishment in Matter The integral aim that Sri Aurobindo came to formulate involves the realization of the divine consciousness in all its integrality, which can be possible only when a mental consciousness, even in its highest degrees of development, is transcended and the supramental consciousness is attained. page - 115 But this aim also includes the manifestation of the Spirit in Matter ...
... level of the supermind in full state of consciousness and awareness. Sri Aurobindo has, in the course of his yogic research, discovered that there are several gradations of the rising layers of mental consciousness such as those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind; and Sri Aurobindo points out that even in the overmental plane of consciousness, the unity and integrality of the ...
... his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusha; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pranamaya purusha; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a manomaya purusha; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law— dharma—of ...
... this power: only all depends on the nature of the consciousness and the will it embodies. For consciousness-will has varying degrees and levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For it is only one among a million contending forces and its effect will depend upon the ...
... physical plane, embody it in our external activity: in other words whatever you do you do the truth, whatever you speak you speak the truth; the Truth first appears in your mind, in your mental consciousness, then it realises itself in your physical activity. Number seven has a special meaning. The number seven gives the scheme of creation; it is the number of the worlds that constitute creation ...
... together produced a new line of growth. So thus from matter came life, from life came mind—and man was born. Yes, man is the highest peak of evolution on earth up to now. In him the mind or mental consciousness seems to have reached its highest possible height. But still, man is not fully a mental being, he is rather a mental animal. Page 59 The mind is not yet the master in his Adhara; ...
... realising the destiny of India, so that she might fulfil the destiny of mankind; the inevitable evolutionary work of raising man to the sunlit peaks of his being from the dim valleys of his mental consciousness, and unveiling the divine glory in his nature and life, so dear to Vivekananda's heart, and so glowingly prophesied by him, for which God summoned Sri Aurobindo away from the field of politics ...
... that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be placed before the central idea; if it finds a right. place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be thrown out, so that it cannot ...
... he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one may explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anterior—in the evolutionary movement—and inferior ...
... Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case. the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in ...
... earth evolution. Sri Aurobindo advocates the control of Matter by the Spirit but in order to be able to do that man must rise above his present state of consciousness. He must rise from his mental consciousness to the Truth-Consciousness, to the Supermind. When I spoke in Cambridge in Friends' Hall in 1955, I said to the audience, 'Yours is an old seat of learning, and it has the distinction ...
... human portion, we must grow divine." It is for working this great miracle that the Supreme has accepted Ignorance and limitation in an infinitesimal particle of Matter with a very poor mental consciousness. The whole ocean can thus be manifested in a drop of water—this miracle is performed by the Divine and under the goad of this very Ignorance man is going to achieve its highest marvel : the ...
... reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing, problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery; the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it, Page 363 Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging being which plunges into remote depths below and spreads ...
... Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but ____________________ ¹ On Yoga II, Tome One, P . 347 ² ibid P. 253-254 ³ Ibid P. 254 4 Ibid P. 254 Page 139 mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound—for ...
... condition of consciousness and a sub-conscious state of being even as modern psychology does. But it admits in addition, what modern psychology knows nothing about, a "super-conscient ", above the mental consciousness. Modern psychology would perhaps like to relegate the super-conscient to the Page 112 realm of the abnormal. From the super-conscient to the realm of the abnormal. From the ...
... mortal frailty cradles an immortal force". Above this first awakening of mind was the realm of intelligence which worked behind the outer appearance of Inconscience, half-consciousness and mental consciousness. It seemed to be "A prototypal deft Intelligence Half-poised on equal wings of thought and doubt" working ceaselessly between two hidden ends of existence—the ...
... travailing expanses of the material existence, ignorant and sorrowful. Man must raise himself out of the lower yoke of desires and passions, ascend to the peak of his being, now veiled from his mental consciousness, and take his effective seat in the intermediate world from where he can canalize and conduct the golden stream of God's descending Light for the illumination and transfiguration of the whole ...
... philosophy which can convey the idea of the Supermind as a creator is "Prajna" – the Knower. He creates for himself, but Prajna is spoken of as superconscient because it is above the ordinary mental consciousness and ordinarily one enters it in Samadhi, unless one does like us to bring it down into the ordinary consciousness. Supermind also is superconscient but that is because it has not yet been attained ...
... presence or power. We are alas! out of touch with our "subliminal quiverings"; rather we are slaves, in our daily activities, to our own petty acts, and we are content to be imprisoned in a mental consciousness with its dungeon narrowness and stark obscurity. But what could be, what is to be, is an open book to the immortals, and the power behind them: Above the world the world-creators ...
... the Supermind, is to be brought down and made to inhabit and energise the earth consciousness. The physical, vital, mental, all would then come under the supramental influence, just as now the mental consciousness is able—thanks to our arts and sciences— to influence our physical and vital life. Even now the human mind, while it has some influence on our body and passions, is unable to influence the life ...
... and claimed the larger freedom of a more universal consciousness. Page 293 But these exceptions have nevertheless failed to effect a basic or total revolution in the mental consciousness. The mass of humanity has remained largely unaffected by the example of these great leaders of humanity. What Sri Aurobindo has called the 'lower' knowledge, in other words the knowledge of ...
... Well, in the same way it is practical for man to take up the adventure of the spirit. If he takes up the adventure of the spirit, he can break this barrier of the manifested universe, mental consciousness, intellectual consciousness, and go to the potential universe, called the House of the Spirit. This is the third book of Savitri, the House of the Spirit. Aswapathy enters there and meets ...
... rise permanently to his true self an occasional ascent or exaltation would enable him to create from there. This was what the Greeks meant by 'Enthusiasmos'. If the artist could rise from his mental consciousness to intuition, inspiration and beyond to the universal plane and still beyond to the plane of Truth-harmony he could then give us an art that would be an embodiment of the higher movement of ...
... there's the apocalypse, there's Vasudeva everywhere. The One is also the Many: the transient is also the Illimitable Permanent. All this is wonderful, of .course, but during the play of the normal mental consciousness, it is the variety, the multiplicity, the distinctions, the dichotomies that stand foremost. The fateful "either - or" seems to be that one either seizes and clings to separativity or one plunges ...
... them had given serious thought as to what would have contributed to their intrinsic good or to the real and lasting good of the human aggregate. They were doubtless intelligent men, but their mental consciousness had failed even to pose the right questions. They were yet to see that "behind these fleeting appearances there is an eternal reality, behind this unconscious and warring multitude there is ...
... patiently, but just when they reached the room, the manager disappeared! As the Mother saw it, ...the mother is physical Nature as it is and the daughter is the new creation. The manager is the mental consciousness, organiser of the world as Nature has made it until now.... The disappearance of the manager and her key was a clear indication that she was quite incapable of leading to its true place what ...
... deliberate offering—brought to bear upon a global and irrevocable orientation to the Divine and a moved seeking for an integral union with Him. Concentration, which is exclusively an affair of the mental consciousness in the path of jñāna yoga— though it is doubtful how far it can be fully achieved without the aid of the heart and the life will—becomes, if we can say so, an organic and harmonic gravitation ...
... earth as a supramental being, a vessel of the Page 204 gnostic Truth and Light and Bliss, instead of struggling and suffering in the dim light of his half-enlightened, egoistic mental consciousness. This divine perfection of the human race is the logical outcome of our acceptance of two truths upon which the whole conception of the Life Divine is founded: (1) the truth of the soul's evolution ...
... was precisely its peculiarity, Page 80 double —male and female —it wasn't one single being, it was two who descended. Those beings lived an animal life in Nature, but with a mental consciousness, without, however, any disaccord with the general harmony. All the memories are perfectly clear about a spontaneous animal life, absolutely natural, lived in Nature. A marvellously beautiful ...
... her birth. Aswapathy's character as a seeker of the Divine and as an adept of the great spiritual and mystic realisation of the past gives us a wonderful picture of man's growth from mental consciousness through various intermediate stages to the Supreme Divine Mother Consciousness. "The Yoga of the Soul's Release" is the subject of this Canto. Here for the first time it becomes ...
... constant and effective, even when it is not perceived. 15.12.1968 In order to be conscious of the constant Presence, is memory helpful? Memory is a mental faculty and helps the mental consciousness. But feeling and sensation must also participate. 17.12.1968 1 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (1972), p. 103. Page 63 When the Presence becomes concrete, does ...
... makes the cells function [or more precisely that which hypnotizes the cells] is accustomed to effort, struggle, misery, defeat... so accustomed—that's quite universal. In people, it's only their mental consciousness that holds out; but their physical consciousness tends to foresee catastrophe, so accustomed it is: the end, you know, that end which for centuries and centuries was inescapable.... It weighs ...
... we make up rules because of an incapacity to be, we mechanize things because of an incapacity to grasp the real Mechanism of the world. Whereas in the true oneness—supramental—of the supra-mental consciousness and substance, everything is an infinitely varied play of one and the same thing. So this single thing is never in competition with itself, no more than one's feet are the enemy of one's arms ...
... of rising toward it to serve as a link between the two... but those who cannot be raised up, those who refuse to progress, will be "dementalized": they will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and regress to an infrahuman stage. One must rise above, emerge into the Light and Harmony, or fall back down to the simplicity of a sound animal life without perversion. 3 For once, ...
... even more interesting than we think, because this "from above” is still a way of saying things to make oneself understood by children; “from above” in no way explains how a human (that is, mental) consciousness can simultaneously pull on ten thousand threads and a number of sentences, all in logical, coherent order, and what is more, without using the brain! What was it that organized this totality ...
... unflawed manifestation of God in man. It promises to fulfil all the deep-seated aspirations of man by developing all his powers and faculties, visible and invisible, and raising him beyond his mental consciousness to the Truth-Consciousness of the Supermind. It does not ask him to renounce or unduly reduce the activities of his life, and forswear the salutary, secular aims of his existence. That way lies ...
... defeat. The physical mind, the sense-mind, the vital mind and the mind proper with its triple order of the understanding, reason and higher intelligence are the different planes of the human mental consciousness. Man, in his evolution,, Page 267 starts perforce from the lower levels, but has to ascend to the higher. He should, therefore, arrange and regulate his life and nature and ...
... of the word. The ethical rules and austerities, metaphysical speculation and cogitation, even religious cults and creeds have nothing to do with Yoga—they rotate within the confines of the mental consciousness; but Yoga is a movement of the human consciousness to contact the Infinite by self- transcendence; it is a direct leap or a headlong plunge into -the Eternal. Even its start is characterised ...
... instinctive movements. With the growth of the mental self-consciousness man loses the sense of his limits and always seeks to exceed himself. And therefore failure and fall have become almost his constant companions. His efforts are not commensurate with his powers. Hence in his case modesty is a great asset and a desideratum. Modesty, we said, is the consciousness of one's limitation – not over-estimating... that matter under-estimating oneself: it is judging exactly what one is. That, however, is the case with the normal man with the normal nature. But precisely because of the growth of self-consciousness, man has developed the power to increase his powers: he can extend the boundaries of his capacities and possibilities. He need not confine himself within the dimensions that he naturally possesses... the incalculable, even the very fount and origin- of all power. That is the gift of Yoga, spiritual discipline. Yoga brings in a different line and scheme of life. For it is built upon soul-consciousness, upon Divine Nature which means another history of individual destiny. Even then tranquillity and self-confidence are at the basis of a Yogic life also and a new degree of modesty and humility. ...
... quality...." It's beginning to come. But I was also wondering why it didn't come faster.... Although I know very well: it's because we distort everything; we are so accustomed to living in a MENTALIZED consciousness that we distort everything, and naturally the Power cannot come just to get distorted. So now, the lesson is this: the Power comes for a specific action, for instance, to act on someone—the... it's the power to make contact. ( silence ) Ultimately, it's simply a question of consciousness: people (ordinary people) have a consciousness that reaches up to a certain point (a point not very far away generally), and what's beyond it, to them, is the "unconscious" (although it's full of consciousness!), but it's unconscious to them because they can't make contact. It's the same as when at... conscious and have a "dream" (what people call a dream, meaning an experience), then you return to your ordinary consciousness, and as there is no contact between the two consciousnesses, you don't even remember your dream. But you can, through methodical development, extend your consciousness and make a connection between the two; and the minute the connection is mader to bring you into contact with your ...
... association is determined either by birth or by circumstance or even by deliberate choice. While describing the nature of collectivities formed by mental man solely basing himself on the resources of his unregenerate ego-bound mental-vital consciousness, Sri Aurobindo writes: "In our present human existence there is a physical collectivity held together by the common physical life-fact and all... clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction..." (The Life Divine, pp. 1034,1035,1054) And is this not what we meet with at times in our Ashram? And it cannot but be so. For most of us, the inmates of the Ashram, are in our surface consciousness, bound to... be perfect so long as the constituent individuals remain fixed in what they are now. And what is the actuality of the state of our consciousness and nature, whatever may be our professions and pretensions? In Sri Aurobindo's words: "Our nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of each other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must strive to establish some kind ...
... being but is above it—it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not exercise its control, then the consciousness is in great disorder and every part of the... inherent in the deepest substance of the consciousness, a sense of the good, true, beautiful, the Divine, is its privilege. The central being—the Jivatman which is not born nor evolves but presides over the individual birth and evolution—puts forward a representative of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya puruṣa , on the vital plane... al nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human—it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth, it cannot in fact do so. If ...
... being as the self and lord of all existence. So far we arrive by considering mind and memory mainly in regard to the primary phenomenon of mental self-consciousness in Time. But if we consider them with regard to self-experience as well as self-consciousness and other-experience as well as self-experience, we shall find that we arrive at the same result with richer contents and a still clearer light... that is the man: or, if we regard only our normal surface existence, Mind is the man,—for man is the mental being. Memory is only one of the many powers and processes of the Mind, which is at present the chief action of Consciousness-Force in our dealings with self, world and Nature. Nevertheless, it is as well to begin with this phenomenon of memory when we consider the nature of the Ignorance in... have seen,—an eternal conscious being who supports the mobile action of mind on a stable immobile self-consciousness free from the action of Time and who, while with a knowledge superior to mind he embraces all the movement of Time, dwells by the action of mind in that movement. As the surface mental entity moving from moment to moment, not observing his essential self but only his relation to his e ...
... but is above it — it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not exercise its control, then the consciousness is in great disorder and every part of... nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human — it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Letters on Yoga, pp. 438-39 The Jivatman, spark-soul and psychic being are... being; a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual physical tendencies. There coalesce too with the obscured soul-influence the ignorant though well-intentioned efforts of these external parts towards a higher direction; a mental ideation of a very mixed ...
... ascent of the consciousness to the higher planes, the other is of a descent of the power of the higher planes into the earth consciousness so as to drive out the Power of darkness and ignorance and transform the nature. All the consciousness in the human being who is the mental embodied in living matter has to rise so as to meet the higher consciousness; the higher consciousness has also to descend... way for the lower (mental-vitalphysical) consciousness to rise up to meet the higher Consciousness above and for the powers of the higher (spiritual or divine) Consciousness to descend into mind, life and body. This is what is called in this Yoga the spiritual transformation. A Double Movement in the Sadhana There is a double movement in the sadhana—the Divine Consciousness, Power, Light, Peace... the subtle nervous system and by the opening one escapes from the limitations of the surface consciousness bound to the gross body, and great ranges of experience proper to the larger subliminal self, mental, vital, subtle-physical, are shown to the sadhaka. When the Kundalini meets the higher consciousness, as it ascends through the summit of the head, there is an opening to the higher superconscient ...
... ordinarily used in the sense of anything relating to the inner movements of the consciousness or anything phenomenal in the psychology; in this case I have made a special use of it, relating it to the Greek word psyche meaning soul; but ordinarily people make no distinction between the soul and the mental-vital consciousness; for them it is all the same. The ascent of the Kundalini—not its descent, so... themselves in the inner consciousness and alter it, transform it, if you like, one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self, the universal Shakti Page 141 doing all things, one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda, but that need not transform the instrumental being. One can go on thinking with the intellect, willing with the mental will, feeling joy and... in that case it will at least be one of its hundred tails or at least a hair from one of the tails. The very first step in the supramental change is to transform all operations of consciousness from the ordinary mental to the intuitive, only then is there any hope of proceeding farther,—not to, but towards the supramental. I must surely have done this long ago, otherwise how could I be catching the ...
... A lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind... Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one extreme possibility of self-revelation adopted by the Divine in the course of His varied "adventure of consciousness and joy" in terms of time and space. For, as Sri... to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol ...
... lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. [p. 4] In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind... Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one extreme possibility of self-revelation adopted by the Divine in the course of His varied "adventure of consciousness and joy" in terms of time and space. For, as Sri... to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol ...
... and desire-nature controls the consciousness to a large extent in most men because men are governed by desire. But even in the surface human nature the proper ruler of the consciousness is the mental being, the manomayaḥ puruṣaḥ prāṇa-śarīra-netā of the Upanishad. The psychic influences the consciousness from behind, but one has to go out of the ordinary consciousness into the inmost being to find... described as a spark of the Divine Fire in life and Page 117 matter, that is an image. It has not been described as a spark of consciousness. There is mental, vital, physical consciousness—different from the psychic. The psychic being and consciousness are not identical. When the soul or "spark of the Divine Fire" begins to develop a psychic individuality, that psychic individuality... ordinarily used in the sense of anything relating to the inner movements of the consciousness or anything phenomenal in the psychology; in this case I have made a special use of it, relating it to the Greek word psyche meaning soul; but ordinarily people make no distinction between the soul and the mental-vital consciousness; for them it is all the same. "Psychic" in the sense in which it is used ...
... existence, it had no Karma. Page 537 What again do you mean by "the all-veiling Maya" or by "losing all consciousness"? The soul cannot lose all conscious ness, for its very nature is consciousness though not of the mental kind to which we give the name. The consciousness is merely covered, not lost or abolished by the so-called Inconscience of material Nature and then by the half-conscious... al nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human—it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Till then, till it has reached the spiritual realisation, there is no reason why it should... happenings in the present existence. A soul can go straight to the psychic world but that depends on the state of consciousness at the time of departure. If the psychic is in front at the time, this immediate transition is possible. It does not depend on the acquisition of a mental and vital as well as a psychic immortality—those who have acquired that would rather have the power to move about in ...
... divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life." (Ibid.) "The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human - it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state." (Ibid., pp. 438-39) "Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth... previous mental, vital, physical motives after death, and this internal liberation or lightening of impediments must be put through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be discarded or otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that nature; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the activities which have to be exhausted and rejected from the consciousness so that... evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self- Page 165 expression. All this it does from behind a veil..." (Letters on Yoga, p ...
... also—all vital, practical, not reflectively mental in the human way. But it is true that when one gets beyond the mind, this sense of time changes into timelessness, into the eternal present. No doubt, the physical regulated time consciousness belongs mainly to the waking state but it can be subliminal as well as of the mental waking consciousness. E.g. sometimes one wills at night to get up... right perception of their consciousness helps to get out of the human mental limitations and see the Cosmic Consciousness on earth individualising itself in all forms—plant, animal, man and growing towards what is beyond man. Plants It is true that the plant world—even the animals if one takes them the right way—can be much better than human beings. It is the mental distortion that makes men... capacity of consciousness etc. This is the familiar attitude of the Indian or at least the Vedantic mind which held that our knowledge, perception and experience of things in the world and of the world itself must be vyāvahārika , relative, practical or pragmatic only,—so declared Shankara,—it is in fact an illusory knowledge, the real Truth of things lying beyond our mental and sensory consciousness. Einstein's ...
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