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A Vision of United India [1]
Auroville references in Mother's Agenda [1]
Champaklal Speaks [1]
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 [1]
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Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 4 [1]
Education at Crossroads [1]
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From Man Human to Man Divine [1]
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Landmarks of Hinduism [1]
Lectures on Savitri [1]
Letters on Himself and the Ashram [1]
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Light and Laughter [1]
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My Burning Heart [1]
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On Education [2]
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Our Many Selves [2]
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The Destiny of the Body [3]
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The Life Divine [11]
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The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo [3]
The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 10 [1]
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Vedic and Philological Studies [1]
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Words of Long Ago [1]
Words of the Mother - III [1]
144 result/s found for Mental life

... The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a common possession. In actual appearance it would seem as if it were only developed to the fullest in individuals and as if there were great numbers and even the majority in whom it is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active. Certainly, the mental life is not... dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity.... If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and... material mind. Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not yet normally possess it. Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, Page 257 frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity ...

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... utilisation is the aim in view with which they have been created and developed in us. If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil... not a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high human ideal. But beyond this intellectual mentality is the divine. The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a Page 12 common possession. In actual appearance it would seem as if it were only developed to the fullest in individuals and as if there were great... great numbers and even the majority in whom it is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active. Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ...

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... a larger curve of progress and self-fulfilment. It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,—his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our... both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society. The pursuit of the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense according to our ideas and predilections. For our mental... complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital. And we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses, sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates although with the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of the mental being concerned ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
[exact]

... There is, therefore, in man an effort to work on the vital and physical and lower mental life so that that life may be transformed into modes of the higher mental and eventually the supramental harmony. The aim is not to mutilate and destroy the instruments of the vital Page 35 and physical and lower mental life but to tame them, to purify them and eventually to transform them. Man does not... inspiration, revelation and 'intuition. It is these powers, which impel man to develop different varieties of religion; man even seeks to control and integrate the physical life, vital life and mental life under the guidance of various Page 33 religious forms, which also shape more and more organized and complex formulations. Religion tends to be the governor of life, and it may be said... We also find in man the operation of the law of integration, and we find that the human mind takes up the lower grades and gives to their action and reaction intelligent values. He takes up the mental life of the animal, as well as the material and bodily. It is true that he loses something in the process, but he gives to what he retains a higher value. In the course of the process of integralization ...

... concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments... Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily existence, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital... their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary concessions. The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman, 1 is ever a dreamer ...

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... with him. Everything is made with this in view. We may wish to add to this possibility other things which seem to have been sacrificed just for the sake of the mental life—but also precisely because of this capacity of expressing a mental life man is able to develop in himself faculties which are only latent. Man has a power to educate: his body can be developed, educated. He can increase certain faculties... to the ground does not give you the feeling that you are looking at things from another plane or Page 219 even from above. The whole structure of the human body is made to express a mental life. The proportions of the brain, for instance, the structure of the human ad, the structure of the arms and hands, all that, from the point of view of the expression of the Spirit, is unquestionably ...

[exact]

... itself to the constitution of other vital bodies; our life energies while we live are continually mixing with the energies of other beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dissolution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of mind upon mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements... can be used to enter into the elemental formation of other lives. The extent to which this law reigns in Nature has not yet been fully recognised and indeed cannot be until we have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter. Still we can Page 213 see broadly that not only the elements of our physical body ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
[exact]

... and read and heard according to the old chromosomic and cultural rut, but a being conscious of the universal Mind, who has an independent mental life) does not disintegrate mentally after death, he keeps the acquired dynamism, the special form of his mental life, the imprints and memories of this life, which he carries over into another life, such as certain predispositions or spontaneous openings... harsh, dry, crumpled up—it's violent, it's aggressive. Even goodwill is aggressive, even affection, tenderness, attachment—all of that, it's all terribly aggressive. Like the blows of a stick. All mental life is harsh, actually.... That's it, that's what we must catch hold of—a sort of cadence, a wave movement, and it has such vastness, such power! It's tremendous, really. And it doesn't disrupt anything ...

[exact]

... intelligent values. Man has not only like the animal the sense of his body and life, but an intelligent sense and idea of life and a conscious and observant perception of body. He takes up too the mental life of the animal, as well as the material and bodily; although he loses something in the process, he gives to what he retains a higher value; he has the intelligent sense and the idea of his sensations... are rebellious. And that indeed is the true inmost aim and meaning of ethics, discipline and askesis, to lesson and tame, purify and prepare to be fit instruments the vital and physical and lower mental life so that they may be transformed into notes of the higher mental and eventually the supramental harmony, but not to mutilate and destroy them. Ascent is the first necessity, but an integration is... the being; at a highest intensity of this life impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds, the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
[exact]

... 3 The Life Divine, p. 201. Page 250 while we live are continually mixing with the energies of other beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dissolution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements." 1... fully recognised by men of our time, — who take their stand on the supposed substratum of Matter, — and indeed cannot be recognized, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "until we have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter." 3 When that day arrives the man of science will wake to the discovery that "not only ...

... the next higher stage of development. Four Aims of Human Effort: Normally, a human being has a composite personality expressing physical life (annamaya), vital life (prānamaya) and mental life (manomaya). How to harmonise rhythms of these three aspects and how to exceed them is the main domain of dharma. Physical and vital life have to be developed gradually and should be regulated... development. The principles of mental development are those of the pursuit of truth, harmony and goodness. These principles are the central core of Dharma. At more advanced stages when the mental life begins to predominate, more rigorous methods of Dharma should be applied. Here, the laws that would govern the processes of crossing the limitations of ordinary manhood should be applied. ... constituents of dharma.” _______________ 8 Mansmriti, VI.92 Page 187 At a still later level, the aim should be not only perfection of the physical life, vital life and mental life but also attainment of the status of liberation (moksha) and perfection. Three Levels of Human Life: Without going into details, it may be said that methods of dharma are the methods ...

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... Matter is beyond his immediate field, therefore he makes no reference to matter. Careless of comprehensiveness, he keeps to the exact matter of his revelation—the working relations between man's mental life and his supreme Existence. With the same scrupulous reserve he abstains from the discussion of the nature of these organs & their essential relation to the supreme Existence. For this knowledge we... by its opening word, Kena, very much as we have seen the subject of the Isha Upanishad to be indicated and precisely determined by its opening words Isha Vasyam. To reveal the true Master of our mental life, the real Force of the Vitality which supports it and of the sense-activities which minister to it and of the mentality which fulfils it in this material existence, is the intention of the Upanishad ...

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... not happy. So perhaps it could be said that this way of approaching the problem is not altogether satisfactory, for it is a purely and exclusively mental way, and can satisfy only those who have a mental life, and they do not form the majority. Besides, this is what has caused all religions to be vulgarised, even those which had at the start something very high and very true to give; they have been obliged... human being is much more complex than a mental being, though he is supremely mental, for he is its new creation in the world. He represents the last possibility of Nature, and in that, naturally his mental life has taken immense proportions, because he has the pride of being the only one upon earth to have it. He does not always make a good use of it, still it is like this. But it's not here that he will ...

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... in subtle matter, but in gross matter with a hampered and imperfect activity; they considered therefore that man's mental life belonged properly to the Dream State and only worked indirectly and under serious limitations in the Waking State. They determined accordingly that mental life must be the result of Consciousness working in the Dream State on subtle matter. There remained the fundamental energy ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
[exact]

... something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of ... effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there may be a strong concentration on the inward central change of the consciousness and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental life or else its relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of it may be taken up again from time to time to see how far the new inner psychic and spiritual consciousness ...

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... good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the ...

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... subtle matter, but in gross matter with a hampered and imperfect activity; they considered therefore that man's mental life belonged properly to the Dream-State and only worked indirectly and under serious limitations in the Waking-State. They determined accordingly that mental life must be the result of consciousness working in the Dream-State on subtle matter. There remained the fundamental ...

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... Philistine is not dead, — quite the contrary, he abounds." 3 For, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, the mere participation in the benefits of civilisation is not enough to raise a man into the mental life proper. Hence it is that "the Philistine is in fact the modern civilised barbarian; he is often the half-civilised physical and vital barbarian by his unintelligent attachment to the life of the... than his body, life and mind; he must be in his essential nature something transcending his terrestrial appearance in a human embodiment, Finally, there opens in man, with the deepening of his mental life and the development of subtle knowledge, "the perception that the terrestrial and the supraterrestrial are not the only terms of being; there is something which is supracosmic and the highest ...

... opening centres in France or French-speaking countries? Are life and mind to be governed by material utility or outward practicality? Spiritual life would then be inferior even to ordinary mental life where people learn for the sake of acquiring knowledge and culturing the mind and not only for the sake of some outward utility.   Is my French study of any help to the sadhana? ... express the knowledge properly in the mental way. What else do you expect them to do?   I am not aware that by learning logic one gets freed from physical things. A few intellectuals lead the mental life and are indifferent to physical needs to a great extent, but there are very few. Page 67 Would a developed mind help the sadhana? It may or may not - if it is ...

... "Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature’s aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities... also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions ...

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... triple formula of Mind, Life and Body, corrected by the statement of a more real and potent existence behind them, a sufficient present clue, at least, to the nature, the workings and the goal of mental life in this material universe. The basis of our existence here is Matter, but Matter with life and mind involved in it. Every cell of the human body, every fibre of bark & leaf, every grain of earth... mati, not drishti. It does not know the Right, the way of our journey, but has to seek for it; therefore it cannot proceed straight to its goal, but follows a devious & wandering journey. The lower mental life is not only dabhram & alpam, says the Veda, but it is hvaram & vrijinam, in action of knowledge & action of heart & action of body a crooked going, not like the action of vijnana, riju, straight-moving ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
[exact]

... life and body, aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and its capacities and goes beyond it into the domain of the mental life, so Rajayoga, operating with the mind, aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence. But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on abnormal ...

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... will is the ideal of a true culture and the beginning of an accomplished humanity. We get then by elimination to a positive idea and definition of culture. But still on this higher plane of the mental life we are apt to be pursued by old exclusivenesses and misunderstandings. We see that in the past there seems often to have been a quarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition... self-discipline, self-mastery. Its limitations at once appear, when we look back at its prominent examples. Early Rome and Sparta were barren of thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental life, all the amenity and pleasure of human existence; their art of life excluded or discouraged the delight of living. They were distrustful, as the exclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
[exact]

... convinced that one was sincere. ( Silence ) It is probable that perfect sincerity can only come when one rises above this sphere of falsehood that is life as we know it on earth, mental life, even the higher mental life. When one springs up into the higher sphere, into the world Page 329 of Truth, one will be able to see things as they truly are, and seeing them as they are, one will ...

[exact]

... life and body aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and its capacities and goes beyond into the domain of the mental life. Rajayoga operating with the mind aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of spiritual existence. The path of knowledge (Jnana Yoga) aims at the realisation ...

... So life is a mid-term between the inconscient and the conscient. Life seems to begin with the inconscient matter and ends in mind-consciousness. Life is present in matter as submental life, not mental life, a submental operation of an intelligence and will in material form, in atoms, in molecule and particles and elements. And it leads from there to a gradual awakening of consciousness. It seems to... process, to seek the Infinite. In the first process Nature was, as it were, putting out a point of consciousness from this vast inconscience. And now when she has created a mental being, a mental life, she wants to reverse the process. She reverses the process when the ego is formed. From the infinite, the first labour was to create, to manifest or to bring about this individual into being. When ...

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... when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself..." 5 There are three rungs in the ladder of life - bodily life, mental life, divine life - which God and Nature have provided for man's ascent towards self-perfection culminating in a "trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight (Sachchidananda).... could therefore be the mould for the further divine perfection to come. The distinctive feature of bodily life is not so much progress as persistence through the perpetuation of the species. In mental life, the keynote is continual enlargement, improvement and the pull towards endless change and variability. In spiritual life or divine existence, the mind longs for a self-existent perfection and ...

... the Mother's Light" in 2 Page 18 mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities... also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions ...

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... to come out of that, they don't understand anything any more. So there's nothing to do but let them go on. But I don't see why one should be bothered to read their stories. No, really, the mental life seems... to go round in circles. There's a mixture!... (an Ashramite read it to me last evening). All of a sudden there's a sentence from Sri Aurobindo followed by another sentence by [the author ...

... origin. What does "its origin" mean? Its starting point. Just as the spring is the source of the river. Are there many sources for everything? All physical life has the vital and mental life as its origin. The mental and the vital reality have themselves another origin, and so on. Nothing can be manifested physically upon earth that has not a higher truth at its origin, otherwise the ...

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... minds, one the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial mentality created by us in our emergence out of Matter, another a subliminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives ...

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... Austerity is usually confused with mortification. When austerity is spoken of, one thinks of the discipline of the ascetic who seeks to avoid the arduous task of spiritualising the physical, vital and mental life and therefore declares it incapable of transformation and casts it away without pity as a useless burden, a bondage fettering all spiritual progress; in any case, it is considered as a thing that ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   Compilations   >   On Education
[exact]

... which appeared on earth. Man is essentially a mental being; and if his possibilities do not stop there, if he feels in himself other worlds, other faculties, other planes of consciousness beyond his mental life, they are only as promises for the future, in the same way as the mental possibilities are latent in the monkey. It is true that some men, very few, have lived in that world beyond, which we may ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Words of Long Ago
[exact]

... attain, of the goal that will be attained: an assurance, yes, a certainty. But it would be something that would have the power to eliminate all error, all deformation, all the ugliness of the mental life—and then a humanity very happy, very satisfied with being human, not at all feeling the need of being anything other than human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony. It was very charming ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Notes on the Way
[exact]

... the culture of the world, because they have no native culture, because by the fact of their speech they are and must be mere provinces of England. Whatever peculiarities they may develop in their mental life tend to create a type of provincialism and not a central intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual life of their own with its distinct importance for mankind. For the same reason the whole of America, in ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
[exact]

... what our mind and senses declare it to be; life is what our mentality determines that it shall become. The question is asked by the Upanishad, what then are these mental instruments? what is this mental life which uses the external? Are they the last witnesses, the supreme and final power? Is mind all or is this human existence only a veil of something greater, mightier, more remote and profound than ...

[exact]

... sacredness of tradition. In small villages the old tyranny of society might be possible, in great towns it must necessarily become increasingly lax and ineffective. Above all, as the individual's mental life became enriched and vigorous, society found itself baffled by an insurmountable difficulty; it could control his outward acts by its rigour, but it could not ultimately control his mental and spiritual ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... supramental future. The mental being can develop a spiritual interest or preoccupation and may evolve perhaps in consequence a spiritual as well as an intellectual mentality, a fine soul-flower of his mental life. The spiritual may become a predominant trend in some men just as in others there is a predominant artistic or pragmatic trend; but there can be no such thing as a spiritual being taking up and ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... law of evolutionary capacity or an overstress that misses the reconciling equation which must exist somewhere in a divine dispensation of our nature. But, finally, there must open in us, as our mental life deepens and subtler knowledge develops, the perception that the terrestrial and the supraterrestrial are not the only terms of being; there is something which is supracosmic and the highest remote ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... possibilities of its own separative process and enjoyment. The soul when it dwells in the principle of mind, not yet subject to but user of life and body, knows itself as a mental being working out its mental life and forces and images, bodies of the subtle mental substance, according to its individual knowledge, will and dynamis modified by its relation to other similar beings and powers in the universal ...

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... transformed existence in space- Page 127 time as an expression of its eternal archetype of all that is to be worked out by evolution. If, as you hold, the full exceeding of embodied mental life can come only after death, Sri Aurobindo differs radically from whatever significance one may read in the reported resurrection of Jesus and in the "new creation" it is said to herald. Now ...

... in the last throes of an enormous experiment, the thought of a whole nation concentrated for centuries upon the pure spiritual existence to the exclusion of all real progress in the practical and mental life of the race. The entering stream of Eastern thought found in Europe the beginning of an era which rejected religion, philosophy and psychology,—religion as an emotional delusion, philosophy, the ...

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... readers may consider them as naive and mythical types of representation; some may see in them a mere reflection of various physical forces, figures and symbols at work; some may see here an absurd mental life of an individual, yet some may regard these visions as a spiritualised journey of a highly developed soul. We feel that these visions are not just a series of imaginative descriptions. They are ...

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... in order to realize the urge in Nature to exceed the level of the primates, a response from the worlds of the mind was needed, and not only an answer but a participation, an incarnation of the mental life in the life of the primates. The human is that being that has in him the mental characteristics from the worlds of the mind incarnated in the material unfolding of the terrestrial evolution. Human ...

... cannot be the highest status of Life. So Life has to proceed on its path of ascension and Hunger to evolve into a more glorious form. In the third status of Life, the status of developed mental life, we reach a condition where mutual devouring is more and more replaced by an urge to mutual help, mutual adaptation, conscious joining and interchange. Hunger changes into the principle of love ...

... condition gets veiled. You must have a persistent will to regain it. 14 September 1935 What do You mean by becoming like a child? In the child the psychic life is not veiled by the mental life. Because the child is not fully moulded, he has a great capacity for growth and is able to progress with sufficient plasticity. 16 September 1935 I would like to know about the childlike ...

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... that it gives to the thoughts—return and appear to you as if they were coming from outside and give you dreams. Most dreams are like that. Some people have a Page 308 very conscious mental life and are able to enter the mental plane and move about in it with the same independence they have in physical life; these people have mentally objective nights. But most people are incapable of doing ...

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... began and a very acute feeling of separation, and also a kind of impression, more or less precise, of freedom of choice—all that, all these psychological states are the natural consequences of mental life and they open the door to everything we see now, from aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Mind has the impression that it can choose between one thing and another, but this impression is ...

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... reached, of the goal that WILL be reached—an assurance, you know, a certitude. But it 1 would be something that had the power to eliminate all the errors, all the distortions and ugliness of mental life, and then a very happy humanity, quite satisfied with being human, feeling no need whatsoever to be anything but human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony. It was very charming, it was ...

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... difficulty." And she said: "Read Sri Aurobindo more and more and you will find out how it is possible." Again, a very great difficulty   Page 14 — the supreme crisis of my mental life — came when I began to think of the problem of Freewill: have I freewill or not? I read all the philosophers; they could not enlighten me. Even in Sri Aurobindo I could not fasten upon a clear-cut ...

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... the being; at a highest intensity of this life-impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds, the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become ...

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... Mayavada (Illusionism), 373, 374, 375, 377 See also Shankara Mind, 61, 193, 337 cannot integrate the being, 19 and consciousness, 8-9, 41-43 evolution of mental life, 256-58 Higher Mind, 143-46, 352 an Ignorance consciousness, 54-61 Illumined Mind, 146-49, 353 inner, see Subconscious mind an instrument, 259 and Matter, 6 ...

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... self-experience, memory and ego, and although its limits can be expanded indefinitely, it remains ordinarily limited and confined to demands of physical life which admit a large gamut of emotional and mental life, farthest reaches of which fall short of the awareness that is normal to the dwelling in the subliminal consciousness, higher consciousness, and the subconsciousness. The inner or subliminal con ...

... Austerity is usually confused with mortification. When austerity is spoken of, one thinks of the discipline of the ascetic who seeks to avoid the arduous task of spiritualizing the physical, vital and mental life and therefore declares it incapable of transformation and casts it away with out pity as a useless burden, a bondage fettering all spiritual progress; in any case, it is considered as a thing that ...

... the existing state of things. The World State could not have afforded to tolerate for long this criticism or even its possibility. Ultimately, the State would have imposed strict regulation of the mental life and extended it to the totality of life. The necessary consequence would have been a static order of society, since with out the freedom of the individual, a society cannot remain progressive ...

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... exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic ...

... consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. 1 Book VII: Canto 4: p. 590. 2 Book VII: Canto 4: p. 591. Page 272 From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation ...

... or scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythoposic thinking. These two lines of mental movement mark off two definite stages in the cultural history of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and coloured by his libido— desire soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to free his mind from the libido and transfer and transform the libido into non-egoistic and realistic ...

... exclusively or predominantly vital nature into :;tn increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic ...

... suffering is, don't you? Fever or toothache? Well, just as the body has aches and pains, so does the mind. You don't understand what I mean, just now, since you are all too young still to have a mental life. But all the same, imagine yourself shut up in a room, completely alone. No one to talk to, not even a story-book, nothing at all to help you pass the time. You will then find yourself in a state ...

... not concern ourselves with physical life any more, the reality as we Page 417 see with outward eyes is no longer our business; we want instead to express the vital life, the mental life. Hence came a whole host of reformers and rebels – cubists, surrealists, futurists and so on – who sought to create art with their head. They forgot the simple truth that in art it is not the head ...

... from consciousnes to higher reaches of consciousness. ¹ Book VII: Canto 4: p. 590. ² Book VII: Canto 4: p. 591. Page 252 From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation depends ...

... things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity. This 'spiritual revolution' implies verily a breakthrough in the province of mental life comparable to the revolutionary breakthroughs in atomic physics and molecular biology. Crack the mould of the ego, and the waters of consciousness will flow together; and all soul-division and all ...

... On 7 October, Mirra starts with the sad observation that most people are only concerned with the material life, "Heavy, inert, conservative, obscure"; there are also people with an awakened mental life, but they too are "restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic", and alas! "Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy ...

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... of the reports of the senses, and an induction from them of the general laws which govern the operations of Nature, it has armed man with great material powers and extended the horizons of his mental life. The reason has two aspects: pragmatic and idealistic. The pragmatic reason is bent upon life; the will in it is predominantly a will to creation and formation in terms of life—it drives straight ...

... are its first signs. The idea of the poet who is also Rishi has made again its appearance". (P.P.) This new poetic departure will not necessarily be the old, ordinary, outer vital emotional and mental life of man but will contain, even when it deals with these fields, the deeper and the higher strains from the regions of the intuitive, the inspirational, the revelatory and the spiritual consciousness ...

... with many steps. At each step a vast self-extension of the Infinite or the One takes place. Each step is a world or a universe. On the plane of mind there is a mental world. On the earth there is a mental life. So that mind is not limited to human beings only. On each step a vast self-extension of the One seems to take place,—the more subtle, the more powerful, more penetrating, more effective. Each step ...

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... accessible to us—us thinking men solidly installed in our cultivated molecules? Decomposition is something we can see, but if it be that our interest goes beyond the narrow or large round of our mental life in its search for political, economic or aesthetic panaceas in the midst of small collapsing minerals, how can we hope to participate in or collaborate with this supramental life that, after all ...

... forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses. We renounce ourselves in order to find ourselves; for in the mental life there is only a seeking, but never an ultimate finding till mind is overpassed. Therefore there is behind all our mentality a perfection of ourselves which appears to us as an antinomy and contrast ...

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... also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... formations made by the mind—the actual “forms” that it gives to the thoughts return and appear to you as if they were coming from outside and give you dreams.... Some people have a very conscious mental life... these people have mentally objective nights. But most people are incapable of doing this; it is their mental activity going on during sleep and assuming forms, and these forms give them what they ...

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... which becomes free in some measure to control and dire Page 258 what has hitherto bound it is flagrantly contradictory of the idea of correlation between the material and the vital-mental. Life correlated to a system of physico-chemical events may be manifested as a property not to be found directly in the parts of the system but it cannot be anything else than a version in perceptibly ...

... whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation ...

... dominate, compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange and harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even reduce them to a minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or pull it down from its ideative or idealising movement. It is more difficult because life and body are the first powers and, if they are in the least strong, can impose themselves with an almost ...

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... to me that this was what the supramental consciousness could make of humanity … It would be something that would have the power to eliminate all errors, all deformations, all the ugliness of the mental life, and [that] then [would be] a very happy humanity, totally satisfied with being human, not at all feeling the need of being anything else than human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony. It ...

... opening centres in France or French-knowing countries? Are life and mind to be governed only by material utility or outward practicality? Spiritual life would then be inferior even to ordinary mental life where people learn for the sake of acquiring knowledge and culturing the mind and not only for the sake of some outward utility. 24 March 1937 Reading Newspapers and Yoga Is it very important ...

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... seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right movement and true order. The moment this notion becomes powerful in man, he begins to escape from the engrossing vital and material into the mental life; he climbs from the first to the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. His needs and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light of purpose and the mental need, the aesthetic ...

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... the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument. Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation ...

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... desire with its pervading immiscence in all our instruments by a mental soul of calm delight and its clear and limpid possession of ourselves and world and Nature which is the crystal basis of the mental life and its perfection. The psychical prana interferes in all the higher operations to deform them, but its defect is itself due to its being interfered with and deformed by the nature of the physical ...

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... minds, one the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial mentality created by us in our emergence out of Matter, another a subliminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... dominate, compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange and harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even reduce them to a minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or pull it down from its ideative or idealising movement. It is more difficult because life and body are the first powers and, if they are in the least strong, can impose themselves with an almost ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... those planes, for if we did we could very soon arrive at the conscious control of the body by the life-power and of both by the sovereign mind; we should then be able to determine our physical and mental life to a very large extent by our will and knowledge as masters of our being and with a direct action of the mind on the life and body. By Yoga this power of transcending the physical self and taking ...

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... custom and contract. It justifies the mass of social institutions and habitual ways of being which it thus creates by the greater satisfaction and efficiency of the physical, the vital and the mental life of man, in a word, by the growth and advantages of civilisation. A good many losses have indeed to be written off as against these gains, but those are to be accepted as the price we must pay for ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
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... or living, and attempt to let that grow in the individual and govern his nature, grow in the collective life and govern its formations. Or it would place the development and organisation of the mental life of man as the primary consideration and life and society as a convenience for this true aim of human existence. A new civilisation no longer vitalistic or mainly political and economic, but intellectual ...

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... the god-in-us, let not those of an evil movement attain up to the higher bliss. (9) By thee perfectly increasing we, O Brahmanaspati, take to ourselves the desirable possessions of the human (mental) life; those who oppress us from near or from far do thou crush, those who do not the work and take not the delight. (10) By thee we hold in our minds that highest wideness, O Brihaspati, by thee yoked ...

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... not express anything that has happened in his outer personal life is too obvious to be made so much of; the real point is how far his work can be supposed to be a transcript of his inner mind or mental life. It is obvious that his vital cast, his character may have very little to do with his writing, it may be its very opposite. His physical mind also does not determine it; the physical mind of a romantic ...

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... the peace, the liberation a necessity—with that one opens to a higher Force of a new consciousness which puts an end to the vital interchange and creates a new poise for the vital as well as the mental life. If one stops with the increased sensitivity and does not go farther, then of course there is no proper use of it. There are some people like X and Y who got so absorbed in the "occult" knowledge ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
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... spiritual release. All that is possible to the mind is a constant absorption in itself and an ignoring or forgetfulness as much as possible of the body. That one finds often in people who live a retired mental life (scholars, thinkers etc.) without the need to trouble themselves about their livelihood, family etc. The Physical and the Mind The physical consciousness has its own reactions—separate from ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
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... grievance with respect to the intellectuals is that he is cut off from all discussion of mental things and mental stimulus and so his mental energies are becoming atrophied. But a man who has a mental life ought surely not to be dependent on others for it, since that life is found within—there ought to be springs Page 17 within that flow by their own force. The Intellectual Man and the ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
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... So far as I know very few good writers ever bothered about learning that subject. I am not aware that by learning logic one gets freed from physical things. A few intellectuals lead the mental life and are indifferent to physical needs to a great extent, but these are very few. Common sense by the way is not logic (which is the least common-sense-like thing in the world), it is simply ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
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... of existence that, even when left to themselves and outside the body, they are still solely occupied with these material contingencies that are yet so harassing and painful.... Those in whom the mental life is awakened are restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic. Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy everything without ...

... 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 of a little baby—it is neither a sensation nor a feeling, but something of both; it is a spontaneous ...

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... that—but it was conventional, artificial and without any true life, so the reaction was to the very opposite, and naturally to another absurdity: "art" was no longer to express physical life but mental life or vital life. And so came all the schools, like the Cubists and others, who created from their head. But in art it is not the head that dominates, it is the feeling for beauty. And they produced ...

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... accept any dogma whatever without discussion; they feel that nothing can prevent them from having this inner urge which will put them in contact with the Divine. But generally they do not have a mental life: it is very much restricted. Do castes have any importance in the spiritual life? Castes? What has that got to do with spiritual life? Absolutely nothing. It is merely a social organisation ...

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... attain, of the goal that will be attained: an assurance, yes, a certainty. But it would be something that would have the power to eliminate all error, all deformation, all the ugliness of the mental life-and then a humanity very happy, very satisfied with being human, not at all feeling the need of being anything other than human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony.     ...

... began and a very acute feeling of separation, and also a kind of impression, more or less precise, of freedom of choice—all that, all these psychological states are the natural consequences of mental life and they open the door to everything we see now, from aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Mind has the impression that it can choose between one thing and another, but this impression is ...

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... confused with self-mortification, and when someone speaks of austerities, we think of the discipline of the ascetic who, in order to avoid the arduous task of spiritualising the physical, vital and mental life, declares it incapable of transformation and casts it away ruthlessly as a useless encumbrance, as a bondage and an impediment to all spiritual progress, in any case as something incorrigible, as ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   On Education
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... of existence that, even when left to themselves and outside the body, they are still solely occupied with these material contingencies that are yet so harassing and painful.... Those in whom the mental life is awakened are restless, tormented, agitated, arbitrary, despotic. Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ready to destroy everything without ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Prayers and Meditations
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... dry, crumpled up—it's violent, it's aggressive. Even goodwill is aggressive, even affection, tenderness, attachment—all of that, it's all terribly aggressive. Like the blows of a stick. All mental life is harsh, actually. ( silence ) That's it, that's what we must catch hold of—a sort of cadence, a wave movement, and it has such vastness, such power! It's tremendous, really. And it doesn't ...

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... the mind came individualization, an acute sense of separation and a more or less precise feeling of a freedom of choice—all of that, all these psychological states, are the natural consequences of mental life and open the door to everything we see now, from the worst aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Man's impression of being free to choose between one thing and another is the deformation of ...

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... not to be), undisputed, but without any idea that there were other beings on earth and that it was necessary to look after them or make a "demonstration"—nothing of the sort, absolutely nothing of mental life, nothing. A life just like that, like a beautiful plant or a beautiful animal, but with an inner knowledge of things, perfectly spontaneous and effortless—an effortless life, perfectly spontaneous ...

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... revenge by drying up the fountains of poetry. This theory is psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis is the investigation into one's suppressed impulses and the interpretation of all phases of one's mental life in terms of what is thrust into or lurks in the subconscious. Psychoanalysis even goes further and traces all the higher mental manifestations to the mind's interest in one's physio-logical processes ...

Amal Kiran   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Talks on Poetry
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... indulging, so... And if you try to get them out of it, they no longer understand anything. So the best is to let them. But I don't see why we should bother to read their stories. No, really, mental life seems to... go round in circles. There's such a mixture!... (It's Pavitra who read it out to me yesterday evening.) Suddenly there's a sentence from Sri Aurobindo, then a sentence from Y. [the ...

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... 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. Rarely do these founts deliver not only the significance but also the very word and rhythm native to their greater inwardness and secrecy. Poetic integralism would lie in an expression springing ...

... which must exist in the ultimate reality and without which we would Page 12 never feel in ourselves that urge for perfection which is the mainspring of all our mental life. But. can mind realise wholly its archetype without the other parts of our being doing the same? No: if, as experience teaches us, we cannot rest finally in mind and, for the sake of a harmonious ...

... something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of ...

... narrow enquiry. The special subject of the Kena is restricted to the relation of mind-consciousness to Brahman-consciousness. The question that is asked is: What are mental instruments? What is this mental life which uses the mental instruments of senses and speech and others? Is mind the last witness, the supreme and final power? And the Upanishad replies that there is a greater existence behind, just ...

... wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe. Page 54 A Vision of Culture The higher mental life has been democratized, sensationalized, activized with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but an enormous change has begun. Thought and ...

... to this movement said: we do not concern ourselves with physical life any more, the reality as we see with outward eyes is no longer our business; we want instead to express the vital life, the mental life. Hence came a whole host of reformers and rebels—cubists, surrealists, futurists and so on—who sought to create art with their head. They forgot the simple truth that in art it is not the head that ...

... dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. But there are intermediaries. The fullness of the realisation ...

... dawns whose beginning no one knows, nor the end, that creation proceeds from light to light, from consciousness to higher reaches of consciousness. From the material life through the vital and the mental life he first reaches the spiritual life and finally the Life Divine. From the animal he rises to manhood, and in the end to Godhood. 29.Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 29, p. 520. ...

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... or scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythopoeic thinking. These two lines of mental movement mark off two definite stages in the cultural history of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and coloured by his libido – desire soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to free his mind from, the libido and transfer and transform the libido into non-egoistic and realistic ...

... or scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythopoeic thinking. These two lines of mental movement mark off two definite stages in the cultural history of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and coloured by his libido —desire-soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to free his mind from the libido and transfer and transform the libido into non-egoistic and realistic ...

... or sensible forms. Page 35 Only forms exist. These forms are only falsehoods that give us some conviction of Reality. There is no doubt that such lies are necessary for our mental life. By them, we attain the aesthetic point of view of life. 6.People complain that they do not understand Cubism. But Cubism is based upon other paintings. What does it matter if people do not ...

... emerge from this imperfect state and the different schools of today may find their reconciliation in the more comprehensive science of the future. It can be safely affirmed that a true basis of our mental life does not _______________________ ² Commemorative Symposium Page 123 seem to have been grasped by these groping contemporary schools of psychology. It reminds one of the ...

... helped man to attain to any abiding harmony and happiness in life, it has only made him more ego-centric, as Aldous Huxley rightly insists, and restless and unhappy. Speaking of those in whom the mental life is awakened, the Mother says that they are "restless, tormented,, agitated, arbitrary, despotic. Caught altogether in the whirl of the renewals and transformations of which they dream, they are ...

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... secret potentiality which can be evoked into a dynamic movement in life. So man has to start with the idea, with the concept that he is a spirit and then he can evoke that spirit into movement in his mental life, in his vital life and in his physical life; then the determinism of Page 33 Nature will eventually change. This means that the present constitution of man is not ...

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... —how to express it?—something known. And no idea at all that there were other beings upon earth and you had to mind them, or 'demonstrate' to them; nothing of the sort, absolutely nothing of mental life, nothing. A life like . . . like a pretty plant or a fine animal, but with an inherent knowledge of things, fully spontaneous and effortless — an effortless life, purely spontaneous. I don't even ...

... There is an occult order which is behind the material and mental order known to man. And it is that unseen and unknown occult world which governs from behind this outer material, vital and mental life. Faculties of the inmost, i.e. subliminal mind disclose the knowledge of the world's mystery. An ascending and a descend- ing order of worlds from Eternity into Time and from Time back to Eternity ...

... their ability to express the supramental world or to be in contact with it.... In one way, we are in contact, in another way, we are sealed off. An ape swinging in the trees is quite sealed off from mental life; a man wearing moral and mental spectacles is quite sealed off, too. It was so unbelievably different, sometimes even so contrary to our ordinary appreciation of things! Quite obviously, our appreciation ...

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... The Sunlit Path There are two paths, Sri Aurobindo used to say, the path of effort and the sunlit path. The path of effort is well known. It is the one that has presided over our entire mental life, because we try to reach for something we do not have or think we do not have. We are full of wants, of painful holes, of voids to be filled. But the void never gets filled. No sooner is it filled ...

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... vocabulary mentalizes everything. It sees everything as an "object." It sees everything as something "different" from itself. It's a constant cinematic performance. It is never IN the thing.... In mental life as we know it, we are never in things. We are always in our ideas about things or in our perception of them. While the beginning of true life – the truly human life – is something one no longer ...

Satprem   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   My Burning Heart
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... following list of significances: Poetry — Pale Blue (Sky Blue) Painting — Rainbow Sculpture — Red Music — Green Dance — White Thought — Yellow Physico-vital life — Red Mental-vital life — Deep Blue Spiritual life — Pearl Gray Life Divine — Golden ...

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... the part of the being "which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations ..." 20 The vital being or life-nature is made up of desires, feelings, instincts and impulses. The life-energy which animates the body (Prana) is an aspect of the vital. The body too has its own... The Outer Being There are three main parts in the outer or surface being: the mind (the mental), the life-nature (the vital) and the body (the physical). Each part has its own distinct type of consciousness, though in our ordinary awareness we are unable to distinguish among the mental, vital and physical constituents of our consciousness, and tend to regard all these diverse elements... that is intermixed with the physical, and partakes of the characteristics of the physical consciousness such as inertia, obscurity and mechanical repetitiveness which manifest in the physical mind as mental torpor and conservatism, doubt, and obsessive thoughts. The part of the mind which is closest to the physical is called the mechanical mind; its characteristic is that of a machine that goes on turning ...

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... but for the body, it's difficult, because its rhythm... The whole rhythm of ordinary life is a mentalized one; even people who live in vital freedom are at odds with the whole social organization—it's a mentalized life: there are clocks that strike the hour and it is agreed that things must be that way.... Mentally, you can be perfectly free: you leave your body in the cogwheels and stop bothering about... met in my life and with whom I lived for a certain time: for what reasons, with what aim, for what purpose they were there and what action they had and how they did the Lord's work (unknowingly, God knows!) to lead this body to prepare itself and be ready for the transformation.... It's astonishingly perfect in its conception! It's wonderful! And so "inhuman"! Opposed to all moral and mental notions... vital world, of the vital influence. There isn't just Inertia: there is a sort of perverted ill will. You can easily (relatively easily) drive it out and eliminate it entirely from conscious mental and vital life; that work, which in the past was considered as, oh, a tremendously difficult thing—changing an individual's nature—is relatively easy; all in the nature that depends on the vital or the mind ...

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... the vital physical, and the physical proper or material. Mind has its own realms and life has its own realms just as matter has. In the mental realms life and substance are entirely subordinated to Mind and obey its dictates. Here on earth there is the evolution with matter as the starting point, life as the medium, mind emerging from it. There are many grades, realms, combinations in the co... above it the mental, above the mental are other planes. There is a psychic plane behind the emotional which influences all the others. The physical is not the only world; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital... develop or manifest in themselves within their own formula something that corresponds to the superior power and its action. The material world has evolved life in obedience to a pressure from the vital plane, mind in obedience to a pressure from the mental plane. It is now trying to evolve supermind in obedience to a pressure from the supramental plane. In more detail, particular forces, movements, powers ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - I
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... the divine consciousness and the soul be made free to unite with the divine Being. The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowledge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a God-directed seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the greatest... although even there it is in the end evident; for all material energy contains hidden the vital, mental, psychic, spiritual energy and in the end it must release these forms of the one Shakti, the vital energy conceals and liberates into action all the other forms, the mental supporting itself on the life and body and their powers and functionings contains undeveloped or only partially developed the... psycho-physical, the Rajayogic mental and psychic, the way of knowledge is spiritual and cognitive, the way of devotion spiritual, emotional and aesthetic, the way of works spiritual and dynamic by action. Each is guided Page 610 in the ways of its own characteristic power. But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power. In the ordinary process of life, body and mind this truth ...

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... truth of that which they are. Consequently, the triple world that we live in, the world of Mind-Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished evolution. Life involved in Matter has emerged in the form of thinking and mentally conscious life. But with Mind, involved in it and therefore in Life and Matter, is the Supermind, which is the origin and ruler of the other three, and this also must... merely a rapid disintegration subservient to life's necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic Page 188 energy,... signs and operations of life are suspended, but the mentality is there self-possessed and conscious although unable to compel the usual physical responses. Certainly, it is not the fact that the man is physically dead but mentally alive or that life has gone out of the body while mind still inhabits it, but only that the ordinary physical functioning is suspended, while the mental is still active. So ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is... we live physically on the material plane and in normal outward-going life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with Prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or... whole mental being a clear mirror in which the divine reality can be reflected, a clear vessel and an unobstructing channel into which the divine presence and through which the divine influence can be poured, a subtilised stuff which the divine nature can take possession of, new-shape and use to divine issues. For the mental being at present reflects only the confusions created by the mental and physical ...

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... has tried in diverse ways to solve this insistent problem. The best of all his attempts so far has been to try to govern his life with the enlightened reason. But life is not entirely rational, and human vital nature and ego are too strong to be subordinated by the mental reason. And this is not all. Our surface existence is not the whole of our existence. It is only the summit of an iceberg... For the terrestrial evolution is essentially an evolution of Consciousness-Force and the oestrus of evolution has by no means stopped with the emergence of man, the mental animal. Life emerged in Matter; Mind has followed Life. But Mind is not the highest possible Power of the Spirit and in the inevitability of things Supermind, the supremely dynamic Gnosis, is bound to emerge in terrestrial... integralising and harmonic consciousness, the supramental being, in contrast with the present mental being, will succeed in founding all his living, whether Page 223 individual or collective, on an innate sense and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group life. All other beings would be to him his own selves. He will realise himself to be a soul ...

... towards the Perfect, the Divine, the Un-enslaved. Precisely on that power is based Sri Aurobindo's appeal to us to choose the life divine instead of the life human. He² states: "The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called 'man' to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading: how else can any real spiritual evolution be done?" ... te and argue and weigh, in beings that have enough detachment from Nature to at least enable them to reflect on themselves and to study and judge Nature. On that pin-point the whole of mental human life is fulcrummed for activity, and the conceding of it is implied in the Aurobindonian outlook which holds our intelligent will to be a ray, deformed though it may be, of the Gnosis, the Supermind... openly concordant or apparently divided. We have thus in the realm of evolutionary existence a mental being facing mental Nature, a vital being fronting vital Nature, a physical being opposite physical Nature: these beings are experienced by us according as our consciousness assumes a mental or vital or physical poise. And all of them are representative of the true psychic Purusha. When ...

... realise; I am identified with my mental activities or involved in them, not free and separate. I do not yet directly become aware of myself apart from my becomings and my perception of them, apart from the forms of active consciousness which I assume in the waves of the sea of conscious force which is the stuff of my mental and life nature. It is when I entirely detach the mental person from his act of se... gs 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 or other emotion, hunger or other vital craving, impulse or inner life reaction or some form of sensation, perception or... another person, or as when one who has forgotten the past events of his life and perhaps even his name, still does not change his ego-sense and personality. And there is possible too a state of consciousness in which, although there is no gap of memory, yet by a rapid development the whole being feels itself changed in every mental circumstance and the man feels born into a new personality, so that, if ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... that everything has been done by this energy, my own physical being is constituted by it and it is at the base of all my mental and life energies. But that is not concrete to me. I never felt my being constituted by electricity, I cannot feel it working out my thoughts and life-processes—so how can I believe in it or accept it? The force I use is not a sweet blessing—a blessing (silent) certainly is... in any direction; it can inspire the poet, set in motion the soldier, doctor, scientist, everybody. (2) The Force is not a mental Force—it is not bound to go out from the Communicator with every detail mentally arranged, precise in its place, and communicate it mentally to the Recipient. It can go out as a global Force containing in itself the Page 490 thing to be done, but working out... out the details in the Recipient and the action as the action progresses. It is not necessary for the Communicant to accompany mentally the Force, plant himself mentally in the mind of the Recipient and work out mentally there the details. He can send the Force or put on the Force, leave it to do its work and attend himself to other matters. In the world most things are worked out by such a global ...

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... submental nervous consciousness and not mentality. Life supplies certain biological conditions and certain physiological processes which physically underlie the operations of conscious mental being. Life gives the intermediate dynamic link between mind and body. Life has two operations which serve the purpose of mentality, a necessary life power in a nervous apparatus and a capacity Page... instrumentation, life seems able indefinitely to refine in some subtle way its action of nervous power so as to support a more and more fine and complex action of mentality. How far this development of mentality can go and how far it is dependent on the physical apparatus and the nervous action is one of the capital questions of psychology. Mental being, power and operation of mental consciousness... 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 of mind, its operations and its relations to life and body with intuitive and experimental knowledge of the nature of mind ...

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... are taken up by the mental stuff, life becomes dynamic sentience and Matter is transformed into the grey substance of the brain. Matter thus has passed through a first transformation in Life and a second transformation in Mind; it awaits other transformations on other levels beyond Mind. Likewise, Life has passed through a first transformation in Mind and there are stages in this transformation. In the... personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a Page 49 conscious 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... when Matter yields Life, Matter is not destroyed: it means Life has appeared in Matter and exists in and through Matter and Matter thereby has attained a new mode and constitution, for it is no longer merely a bundle of chemical or mechanical reactions, it is instinct with life, it has become organic matter. Even so, when Life arrives at Mind, it is not dissolved into Mind but both Life and Matter are ...

... are taken up by the mental stuff, life becomes dynamic Page 33 sentience and Matter is transformed into the grey substance of the brain. Matter thus has passed through a first transformation in Life and a second transformation in Mind; it awaits other transformations in other levels beyond Mind. Likewise, Life has passed through a first transformation in Mind and there are stages in this... human personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a conscious 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... when Matter yields Life, Matter is not destroyed: it means Life has appeared in Matter and exists in and through Matter and Matter thereby has attained a new mode and constitution, for it is no longer merely a bundle of chemical or mechanical reactions, it is instinct with life, it has become organic matter. Even so, when Life arrives at Mind, it is not dissolved into Mind but both Life and Matter are ...

... the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised in the fully developed man and thence into the perfect consciousness which is beyond the mental, into the supramental Consciousness and the supramental being.... 8 The Outer Being The three major divisions in the outer being consist of the mind (the mental), the life-self (the vital) and the body (the... self-conception and world-conception. But the conception is in fact an error. However sharply he individualises himself in mental idea and mental or other action, he is inseparable from the universal being, his body from universal force and matter, his life from the universal life, his mind from universal mind, his soul and spirit from universal soul and spirit. 31 Thus each part of the... being or the psychic (Fig.l). The outer being and the inner being have three corresponding parts — mental, vital, physical. Thus "There are, we might say, two beings in us, one on the surface, our ordinary exterior mind, life, body consciousness, another behind the veil, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner physical consciousness constituting another or inner self." 6 Figure 1. ...

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... are taken up by the mental stuff, life becomes dynamic sentience and Matter is transformed into the grey substance of the brain. Matter thus has passed through a first transformation in Life and a second transformation in Mind; it awaits other transformations on other levels beyond Mind. Likewise, Life has passed through a first transformation in Mind and there are stages in this transformation. In the... personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a Page 50 conscious 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... when Matter yields Life, Matter is not destroyed: it means Life has appeared in Matter and exists in and through Matter and Matter thereby has attained a new mode and constitution, for it is no longer merely a bundle of chemical or mechanical reactions, it is instinct with life, it has become organic matter. Even so, when Lire arrives at Mind, it is not dissolved into Mind but both Life and Matter are ...

... in order to be possessed, whether in action or in inaction, in withdrawal from life or possession & mastery of life, by this outer consciousness which we call our waking self as it is eternally possessed in our wide & true effulgent spiritual being which lives concealed behind the clouded or twilit shiftings of our mental nature and our bodily existence. Page 505 ... are two fundamental aspects or faces in which existence presents itself to our ultimate mental perceptions, first, self-conscious, self-governing existence, secondly, mechanical Force. According to our view of the mutual relation of these two grand entities will be the nature of our philosophy and our outlook on life. If we hold the self-conscious, self-governing existence to be subordinate to mechanical... mechanical process by which the soul-state shadows out or symbolises itself in material life. It has no essential value of its own, but only the value of what it expresses; it can therefore have no binding power upon the soul which originates & determines it. What it does and can help to alter, are merely the mental & emotional values & terms in which soul-state expresses itself and even this function ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... Daiunji temple – and people she met, such as Rabindranath Tagore. ‘The art of Japan is a kind of a direct mental expression in physical life. The Japanese use the vital world very little. Their art is extremely mentalized; their life is extremely mentalized. It expresses in detail quite precise mental formations. Only in the physical do they have spontaneously the sense of beauty.’ 23 ‘It was... environment in which she was moving. This time she lived the Japanese life, dressed in a kimono, as shown in several photographs, learned to speak and write the Japanese language, took a Japanese name. ‘These people have a wonderful morality, live according to strict moral rules, and have a mental construction even in the least detail of life: one must eat in a certain way and no other, one must bow in a... world’s life it is no longer sufficient to give birth to a being in whom our highest personal ideal is manifested; we must strive to find out what is the future type whose advent Nature is planning. It is no longer sufficient to form a man similar to the greatest men we have heard of or known, or even greater, more accomplished and gifted than they; we must strive to come in touch mentally, by the ...

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... realisation, the key to the perfection of life, difficult to arrive at on the mental plane, difficult even when realised to dynamise or organise, would be naturally dynamic, spontaneously self-organised in all gnostic creation and gnostic life. This much is easily understandable if we regard the gnostic beings as living their own life without any contact with a life Page 1047 of the Ignorance... the supramental change must be in its parts of life action and outward behaviour or lay down for it what forms it shall create for the individual or the collective existence. For the mind acts by intellectual rule or device or by reasoned choice of will or by mental impulse or in obedience to life impulse; but supramental nature does not act by mental idea or rule or in subjection to any inferior impulse:... between these two terms, an outer world of Life and Matter that has made us and a remaking of the world by ourselves in the sense of the evolving Spirit. Our present way of living is at once a subjection to Life-Force and Matter and a struggle with Life and Matter. In its first appearance an outer existence creates by our reactions to it an inner or mental existence; if we shape ourselves at all, it ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level, as a life of spiritual and supramental superman hood. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of supermanhood; for supermanhood in the mental idea consists... index of that revelation and effectuation. But life also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind... in ourselves an inner life of the spirit, it is obvious that no outer divine living can become possible. Unless, indeed, it is a mental or vital godhead that we perceive and would be,—but even then the individual mental being or the being of power and vital force and desire in us must grow into a form of that godhead before our life can be divine in that inferior sense, the life of the infraspiritual ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... The more evolution progresses, the deeper the layers it seeks to touch: the principle of Life barely colonized the material crust of the world; the mental principle narrowly colonized its immediate past, the mental subconscient and Life's old profligacies; the Supramental principle confronts not only the mental and vital subconscients, but an even more remote past, the physical subconscient and the... enough willpower to impose our mental or moral rules upon it, we may prevail, but at the cost of drying up the life-force in ourselves, because the frustrated vital will go on strike and we will find ourselves purified not only of the evil but also of the good in life: we will have become colorless and odorless. What is more, morality works only within the bounds of the mental process; it does not have... subconscient behind each level of our being – a mental subconscient, a vital subconscient, and a physical subconscient, opening onto the material Inconscient. 221 There we will find, respectively, all the elementary and crude mental forms or forces that first appeared in the world of Matter and Life; all the aggressive impulses of the beginnings of Life, its reflexes of fear and suffering; and finally ...

... difficult to explain in a mental form, for the mental reasons are on the surface and can be counter-argued. However, I shall perhaps try to do so on Sunday. On Sunday also I shall look at the Urvasie. 100 It is a poem I am not in love with—not that there is not some good poetry m it, but it seems to me as a whole lacking in originality and Page 253 life. However, I may be mistaken;... physical life, sensation, body experience. Usually it is the psychic light in the mind that is first lit of the three, but not always—for sometimes it is the psycho-vital flame that takes precedence. In ordinary life also there is no doubt an action of the psychic—without it man would be only a thinking and planning animal. But its action there is very much veiled, needing always the mental or vital... them, e.g., in the typical description of the Paramahamsa. The ideal I put before our Yoga is one thing but it does not bind all spiritual life and endeavour. The spiritual life is not a thing that can be formulated in a rigid definition or bound by a fixed mental rule; it is a vast field of evolution, an immense kingdom potentially larger than the other kingdoms below it, with a hundred provinces, a ...