... Mental or Physical Mind and the Mental Physical or Mechanical Mind The physical mental or externalising mind is part of the mental consciousness, not part of the physical consciousness. But it is Page 182 closely connected with the mental physical—so that the two usually act together. The automatic or mechanical mind is called by us the mental physical—and distinguished from the physical... reactions etc. Repetition is the habit of the mental physical—it is not the true thinking mind that behaves like this, it is the mental physical or else the lowest part of the physical mind. But the main error here is in your description of the physical part of the mind—what you have described there is the mechanical mental physical or body-mind which when left to itself simply goes on... distort it. As the vital Mind is limited by the vital view and feeling of things (while the dynamic Intelligence is not, for it acts by the idea and reason), so the mind in the physical or mental physical is limited by the physical view and experience of things, it mentalises the experience brought by the contacts of outward life and things and does not go beyond that (though it can do that much ...
... The vital-physical is below the mental-physical, but above the material. However, they interpenetrate each other. The body-energy is a manifestation of material forces supported by vital-physical energy which is the vital energy precipitated into matter and conditioned by it. Mental-Physical and Material Mind (Mind of the Cells) 31 The mental-physical (which is the same as the physical... operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life-processes and automatic responses. The mind of the cells is distinguishable from the mental-physical (which is the same as the physical mind). The mental-physical is the mind at the service of the physical, whereas the mind of the cells is the consciousness working in the cells themselves. It is something like the submerged... These three, the mental, the vital and the physical, are interrelated in the complexity of our being. As a result, there is in us what Sri Aurobindo calls the mental-vital (vital mind), mental-physical (physical mind), vital-mental, vital-physical and physical-vital; all these distinctions are necessary because the aim of total transformation implies detailed working in every nook and corner ...
... which Sri Aurobindo designates "the true physical mind" (p. 328), as the high part of the physical mind, and the "mental physical" at its best operation as the low one. Page 63 Another "part of the physical mind" (p.329), a "much' lower action of the mental physical" (p.327), is "the mechanical mind...which, left to itself, would only repeat customary ideas and record the natural... which "does not belong to the physical" but "is a separate power" (p. 327) - into the physical formula. This prolongation he labels as "the physical mental" (p. 373) as distinguished from "the mental physical" or "mind in the physical" (p. 326). The latter is the second aspect of "physical mind" (ibid.) insofar as a certain functioning which is not too distant from the former is concerned. In this... mind is also called "body-mind" (p.328). A turn of phrase similar to "body-mind" occurs when Sri Aurobindo says: "Everything has a physical part - even the mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material..." (p.351). It is evidently the "mind of the body and the material" that he speaks of in writing of "the gross material part" thus: "it must be remembered ...
... mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material. So the emotional being has a physical part. It has no location separate from the rest of the emotional. One can only distinguish it when the consciousness becomes sufficiently subtle to do so. The Mental Physical or Mechanical Mind That is the nature of the mental physical to go on repeating without use the... usually know that we are going to be ill until the symptoms of the malady declare themselves in the body. But if we develop the inward physical consciousness, we become aware of a subtle environ mental physical atmosphere and can feel the forces of illness coming towards us through it, feel them even at a distance and, if we have learned how to do it, we can stop them by the will or otherwise. We sense... mind is not developed and has besides a narrow range of interests. Afterwards it becomes an undercurrent in the mental activities. It must now have risen up with the other characteristics of the mental physical because it is in the physical that the action has come down. Sometimes also when there is silence of the mind, these things come up till they also are quieted down. The mechanical mind is ...
... pleasure on the physical plane. The vital-physical is below the mental-physical, but above the material. However, they inter-penetrate each other. The body-energy is a manifestation of material forces supported by a vital-physical energy which is the vital energy precipitated into matter and conditioned by it. The mental-physical or the physical Mind is the mind at the service of the physical.... which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life-processes and automatic responses. The mind of the cells is distinguishable from the mental-physical or the physical mind. The mental-physical is the mind at the service of the physical, whereas the mind of the cells is the consciousness working in the cells themselves. It is something like the submerged sense-mind... These three, the mental, the vital and the physical, are interrelated in the complexity of our being. As a result, there is in us what Sri Aurobindo calls the mental-vital (vital mind), mental-physical (physical mind), vital-mental, vital-physical and physical-vital. The mental-vital or the vital mind is the mind which is at the service of vital desires and vital emotions. It is a sort of mediator ...
... vital mind and a physical mind, in the vital there is a mental vital and a physical vital. So, in the physical too there are these three grades: (l) physical physical, (2) vital physical and (3) mental physical. Page 292 We will now better understand the process of contact in sense perception. The purely material contact, physical vibration touching the physical nerves of the particular... vibration is not at issue, it is the vital vibration in the physical touching the vital physical of the receiver. The elephant finding the water or sensing the hollow road is an instance in point. The mental physical, the last of the three is a kind of intuition in the physical, that is what is usually called "instinct". A cat, for example, put in a sack and banished miles away from its home, will find its... back; a dog will go round the world almost and find and recognise its master even many years after (the first to recognise Ulysses was his dog). In man too the vital physical, more especially the mental physical not unoften finds room for play, although his physical physical i.e. purely material sensibility is extremely limited. This limitation of the physical sensibility in general, to whatever sphere ...
... pleasure on the physical plane. The vital-physical is below the mental-physical, but above the material. However, they inter-penetrate each other. The body-energy is a manifestation of material forces supported by a vital-physical energy which is the vital energy precipitated into matter and conditioned by it. The mental-physical or the physical Mind is the mind at the service of the physical... which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life-processes and automatic responses. The mind of the cells is distinguishable from the mental-physical or the physical mind. The mental-physical is the mind at the service of the physical, whereas the mind of the cells is the consciousness working in the cells themselves. It is something like the submerged sense-mind ...
... mind and a physical mind, in the vital there is a mental vital and a physical vital. So, in the physical too there are these three grades: (1) physical physical, (2) vital physical and (3) mental physical. We will now better understand the process of contact in sense perception. The purely material contact, physical vibration touching the physical nerves of the particular organ is an instance... vital vibration in the physical touching the vital physical of the receiver. The elephant finding the water or sensing Page 115 the hollow road is an instance in point. The mental physical, the last of the three is a kind of intuition in the physical, that is what is usually called 'instinct'. A cat, for example, put in a sack and banished miles away from its home, will find its... a dog will go round the world almost and find and recognise its master even many years after (the first to recognise Ulysses was his dog). In man too the vital physical, more especially the mental physical not unoften finds room for play, although his physical physical i.e. purely material sensibility is extremely limited. This limitation of the physical sensibility in general, to whatever sphere ...
... gets caught? That is the physical mind. The physical and the mechanical mind are closely connected. Repetition is the habit of the mental physical — it is not the true thinking mind that does like that, it is the mental physical or else the lowest part of the physical mind. From this morning to this evening, I was in a somewhat passive condition — one part of me receiving... dislike etc.)? It is to record the divine or true appearance of things and return to them the reaction of an equal Ananda without dislike or desire. What does the mental physical contain? Habitual thoughts and thoughts that are reflexes to the touch of external things. The physical mind can deal only with outward Page 23 ...
... heart or a higher faculty & threw out his vision into experience with a power of realisation of which modern men have long ceased to be capable; thus living everything to its full conclusion of mental & physical experience his soul opened more & more to knowledge, to direct truth, to the Satyam in things, until the depths hid nothing from him & the heights became accessible to his tread. He first has... inextricably yet harmoniously one in experience, even as they are shown to us in Veda & Vedanta. All that at the time still governed our spiritual life he took typically into his soul & into his mental & physical experience, swallowed up its defects & Page 589 imperfections in the infinite abyss of his personality and brought out through these masks & forms always the something beyond that ...
... contrary, thought from 1965 onwards that it could be transformed and she described on several occasions how the mental physical, the housing of the residue, got more and more involved in the process of transformation. But later she was again confronted with the untransformability of the mental physical: ‘[There is] a residue that remains unconscious … What will be the fate of this residue? … One has the ...
... not even a Brahmacharin. The Yoga I am practising has not the ghost of a connection with Sannyasa. It is a Yoga meant for life & life only. Its object is perfection of the moral condition & mental & physical being along with the possession of certain powers—the truth of which I have been establishing by continuous practical experiment,—with the object of carrying out a certain mission in life which... on that score. If I were a Sannyasin, there would indeed be no money difficulty to solve. The question about the cult to answer precisely. There are four parts of the siddhi, roughly, moral, mental, physical & practical . Starting from December 1908 the moral has taken me three years and a half and may now be considered complete. The mental has taken two years of regular sadhana and for the present ...
... world & in human nature, Agni stands in two relations. Divine force in us is purity & to the soul that is pure both mental & physical nature become harmonious, amical, like two friends and helpful playfellows. Divine force in us is also mastery & enjoyment; to the strong soul mental & physical nature become like wives submitted to its command for action and demand on their delight. They are his common wives ...
... Subconscient and Inconscient. The most obstinate resistance to the descent of the Supramental was shown by the mental gradation of matter, called the ‘mental physical’ in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. How far the transformation of the mental-physical in his own body had progressed was demonstrated by the transmission of the supramental force it contained into the Mother’s body each time she came into ...
... 13-8-1926 Disciple : I want to know the distinction between the various psychological parts of the being : e.g., 1. The mental – 1. mental proper, 2. mental vital, and 3. mental physical. 2. The vital – 1. vital mental (desire mind), 2. vital proper, and 3. vital physical or physic vital. 3. The. physical – 1. physical mental, 2. physical vital and 3. physical proper... sense. While Buddh i in the Vedanta generally means the intelligence with the will. It finds out the truth or tries to find it out and then decides to act according to it. Then there is the mental-physical which is not the same thing as the physical-mind. It is not this which is behind matter and supports it. It is certain habitual, mental movements repeating themselves without any act of pure reasoning ...
... St Francis, a higher physical type than the Greek athlete or to give modern examples, a Sandow or a Ramamurti. She may seek to bring about a better combination of mental & moral, or of moral, mental & physical energies; but is she likely to produce anything much above the level of Confucius or Socrates? It is more probable & seems to be true that Nature seeks in this field to generalise a higher level ...
... certain reluctance, a preference of forms that have been often repeated, a tendency to deny those, eg quadrupeds, which it has been in the habit of denying. Formerly, the principle was to form by mental-physical pressure images out of akashic material, the material being of seven kinds,—chhaya, dhuma, tejas, jyoti, varna, agni, prakasha. The result was a blur of material shaping itself into forms. A second ...
... cannot attain to It because It goes always in front. For the mind served by the senses is the instrument which men use to grasp & measure the world & the gods are the presiding powers of all mental & physical functions, but neither the mind nor the senses, neither sensation nor reason can attain to the Brahman. It always goes far in front of any swiftest agency by which we can pursue It. What is ...
... a certain way; when speaking with others, one must express oneself in another way … Not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organized mental-physical domain … If one does not submit to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon as intruders; but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese ...
... we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical construction of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature—this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive ...
... sustain it. Strong activity of tivra & raudra anandas. The attack of the fever & its force of entry was less powerful & prolonged. It is notable that the means on both sides was really mental, physical means being entirely inoperative either to check or increase the fever, except to a slight extent sweating. The latter was brought about by the will, not by remedies or external appliances. ...
... last. The legs, knees, feet—these indicate the physical consciousness—it was therefore into the obscure layers of the physical consciousness that you went down. Page 374 The Mental Physical and the Vital Physical And how is it possible to perfect the mind and vital unless the physical is prepared?—for there is such a thing as the mental and vital physical, and mind and vital cannot ...
... working of the Power as he can bear and assimilate. Power can be everywhere, on any plane. What descends from above is power of the higher Consciousness—but there is a Power of the vital, mental, physical planes also. Power is not a special characteristic of the psychic or of the spiritual plane. The Descent of Fire The fire is the divine fire of aspiration and inner tapasya. When the fire ...
... followed as commands of the Mother. You received a pressure of a force so strong that it made your head shake for a long time; if the head shook like that, it is a sign that the mind or at least the mental physical was not able yet to receive all the force and assimilate it; if it had done so, there would have been no movement of the head, all would have been perfectly at ease, calm and still. But your mind ...
... the Divine Will, instruments pure, surrendered, expressing nothing but that Will. The Blue Light coming below the level of the Muladhara means that it has entered into the physical (physical mental, physical vital, material) consciousness. The two main obstacles here are the mechanical mind with its memories and desires of the past and the most outward sex movements; these have to be overcome (especially ...
... for you to sit upon and a cup of tea to drink. And everything is like that. However, not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! Their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. If one does ...
... comes to it it puts into the machine and goes on turning it round and round—no matter what it is. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Physical Consciousness That is the nature of the mental physical to go on repeating without use the movement that has happened. It is what we call the mechanical mind—it is strong in childhood because the thinking mind is not developed and has besides a narrow ...
... almost entirely subconscient to our experience. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Physical Consciousness Everything has a physical part—even the mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material. So the emotional being has a physical part. It has no location separate from the rest of the emotional. One can only distinguish it when the consciousness ...
... is behind. Well, there is a vital mind, a vital vital, a vital physical and also a vital psychic which is behind, hidden. And there is a mental mind, a mental vital, and Page 316 a mental physical and a mental psychic which is hidden behind. And each one corresponds to a particular kind of activity, and also to a particular region, a zone of consciousness and being. And these zones or inner ...
... feels as if something wants to tear the life out of the body. It takes that form. ( silence ) It is quite evident that X and I are not on the same plane. His power and his action are on a mental-physical plane ( gesture below ), and this may bring me some complications by making me do a work I usually have nothing to do with. You have often told me that each time he comes it stirs up lower ...
... and recognize the exceptional. This disbelief is the bedrock of the consciousness. And it comes Page 491 with a ... ('thought' is too big a word for such an ordinary thing) a mental-physical activity which makes you... (I am forced to use the word) 'think' things and which always foresees, imagines or draws conclusions (depending on the case) in a way which I myself call DEFEATIST ...
... other. That is not so. They powerfully affect each other. Moreover in mind there is a vital mental, a physical mental - in vital there is a mental vital, a physical vital - in physical there is a mental physical, a vital physical. How do you imagine then that vital can have no effect on the physical? Inertia is mental, vital, physical, subconscient. Physical inertia can produce mental inertia ...
... (Her breathing stopped), 223 Matter, real, 185 Mother, 2-3, 25, 30, 31, 33-6, 37-41, 45, 47, 49, 50, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63-5, Mayavada,10-1 Mental-physical, 133, 254-5 Mental-vital, 254-5 Mind, bodily, 212 . Mind of the cells, 133, 180, 256 Mind, dynamic, 253-5 Mind, externalising, 253-4 ...
... mutation of 25 matter 15, 23, 25, 36, 37, 43, 57, 79, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100; modifications of 24 matter planes, subtle 54 M ā y ā v ā da 9 meditation, intensive 9 mental-physical (physical mind) 56,57, 58 mental-vital (vital mind) 56 mind 11,98,99,100; dynamic 55, 56,57; externalising 55; higher 23, 33, 66, 67; illumined 23, 33, 66, 67, 68; intuitive 23-4, 33 ...
... system of Yoga which I have formed ... not only to me, but to the young men who are with me". 32 To another correspondent he wrote, perhaps in June 1912, about the fourfold Siddhi (moral, mental, physical and practical) he was trying to accomplish. The moral aspect had been completed and the mental too "for the present purpose", but the physical siddhi was still only on its way to full fruition ...
... social behaviour were precise and exacting, but they could go no deeper: ... not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. ...
... Bhawani Mandir Page 264 (temple to Bhawani, one of the manifestations of Goddess Kali)" ran the Report, "exalt Bhawani as the manifestation of Sakti. Indians must acquire mental, physical, moral and spiritual strength.... They must draw strength from religion. How this is to be done is described in moving and powerful terms. The book is a remarkable instance of perversion of religious ...
... youthful delight & youthful strength, yuváná pitará, always young yet fathers of men, (purudansasá, abundantly creating), as they are described in another sukta. They have a brilliant strength mental & physical, nará, a bright, strong & eager understanding, śavírayá dhiyá, full hands of bounty and strong fertility of creation, dasrá, purudansasá; an insatiable enjoyment, purubhujá; a swift speed and ...
... Brahman, the others approaching and feeling the touch of it, yet it is only by coming into contact with the supreme consciousness and reflecting its nature and by the elimination of the vital, mental, physical egoism so that their whole function shall be to reflect the One and Supreme that Brahman can be known by the gods in us and possessed. The conscious force that supports our embodied life must ...
... peace or knowledge with power. It is not always accompanied by Ananda. What was meant [ in the preceding letter ] was that it is possible to have some kind of Ananda on all the planes, vital, mental, physical; but if one wants to live securely in the highest divine Ananda it can only be done by bringing down the (supramental) Truth and living first in the supramental Light. But this is the eventual ...
... but there are minor centres everywhere. The leg indicates the physical (material) consciousness. All below the Muladhara is the range of the physical consciousness proper including the mental physical, vital physical, material physical. This [ aspiration rising from the legs ] would indicate therefore an aspiration from Matter (bodily Matter). The Sides of the Body The two sides of the ...
... the Sat of Mind; in Yoga no sadhan, but only the acceptance of the self-organising movements of the anandamaya vijnanamaya Prakriti as it progressively takes entire possession of this inferior mental & physical kingdom. Today's news are mostly confirmative of the trikaldrishti or aiswarya; the running down of a sailing-vessel, confirming yesterday's perception; the rumour of the Karachi bomb-find ...
... ordinary freshness, energy, enthusiasm of the nature comes either from the vital, direct when it is satisfying its own instincts and impulses, indirect when it cooperates with or assents to the mental, physical or spiritual activities. If the vital resists, there is revolt and struggle. If the vital no longer insists on its own impulses and instincts but does not cooperate, there is either dryness or ...
... Sudarshan ] Chakra symbolises the action of Sri Krishna's force. The chakra is the energy at work and it brings the first opening of the consciousness in the gross physical plane, i.e. of the mental physical, psychic physical, vital physical and the material. Yes, the circular movement and the Chakra are always signs of energy in action, generally creative action. Page 185 Bow and ...
... itself the mental, vital, physical life transformed and spiritualised, but it will give them a much wider and fuller play than was open to them so long as they were living on their own level. Our mental, physical, vital existence need not be destroyed by our self-exceeding, nor are they lessened and impaired by being spiritualised; they can and do become much richer, greater, more powerful and more perfect: ...
... universe. There is not only this material plane of being that we see, there is a physical life plane proper to the vital physical operation of Nature. There is a physical mind plane proper to a mental physical operation of Nature. There is a physical supermind plane proper to the supramental physical operation of Nature. There is too a plane of physical spirit power or infinite physical Being-Consci ...
... is attempting to develop variety and partially succeeding, but it is a variety of imperfect forms. Spontaneous manifestation out of the chidakash is beginning entirely to replace development by mental-physical pressure in the subtle physical ether. In this development lies the surety of a perfect siddhi 15 May 1918 The programme for the second week of May has been fulfilled in all its parts; but ...
... of it. I told you I've often seen it with X. I also saw it with another tantric who came here (someone said to be greatly renowned in the North)—this sort of very well organized mental power, a mental-physical power. But it was always vibrating or intermittent or partial, passing flashes or fluctuating formations. Here it wasn't that; it was a feeling of eternity. Normally one would have said that ...
... it has spiritual experiences, it forgets them easily, loses the impression and result and finds it difficult to believe. Letters on Yoga, pp. 347-48 That is the nature of the mental physical to go on repeating without use the movement that has happened. It is what we call the mechanical mind — it is strong in childhood because the thinking mind is not developed and has besides a ...
... we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive ...
... such appropriatenesses are very common once the inner consciousness is working. Things seem then to be designed so as to help to "illuminate". Certainly, the overcoming of these little mental physical grappling hooks of attachment is helpful so I cannot object Page 129 to your proposal, especially as you propose not to overdo it. I would only begin to be alarmed if I saw ...
... Sri Satya Sai Baba, 'Education is for man-making, nation building and promotion of peaceful world order'. The man making includes a five fold aspects of personality growth which are at the mental, physical, emotional, psychic and spiritual levels; and include the human values of truth, righteous conduct, peace, love and nonviolence. *The first objective of higher education should be to turn ...
... posture without tremors. This can be acquired through yoga exercises or specialized exercises. You cannot have a champion who is only physical: there has to be a balance between physical and mental. Physical fitness is not merely Physical: it should be a state of complete physical and mental well Page 329 being of an individual in which the parameters for health are fully met. Health c ...
... our mentality which is entirely at the service of the physical, which is rooted in the physical, which makes our perception of sensations possible. It is also called sometimes by Sri Aurobindo mental-physical, since it subserves the physical, and it is as mechanical and repetitive as the physical. The cellular mind is the mind of the cells, the mind which is overtly active in the animals, but which ...
... from living in the Mother and feeling her force. If there is tamas, does it still allow one to work as usual? Yes, in this case it is not a tamas of the vital but a tamas of the mental physical which remains inert and passive. The adverse forces have pushed up the whole of my lower nature in its naked form. It is through inertia, sex, ego etc. that their attack is directed ...
... in the primaeval forests. The physical mental or externalising mind is part of the mental consciousness, not part of the physical consciousness. But it is closely connected with the mental physical - so that the two usually act together. It is not by a general descent that people come out of the physical mind. If one chooses to remain in the physical mind, one million descents can ...
... come from the spiritual consciousness from above... Power can be everywhere, on any plane. What descends from above is power of the higher Consciousness—but there is a Power of the vital, mental, physical planes also. Power is not a special characteristic of the psychic or of the spiritual plane. February 16, 1937 So you also fail to tell the precise meaning of the poem! Who the ...
... and finally, the physical vital, which is the field of outward impulsion and drive, the push towards physical act and execution. Last, the physical too has the same threefold knots, first in the mental physical, second in the vital physical and thirdly in the physical physical, that is, the physical proper. The mind in the physical is the purely brain operation, the primitive original percepts that b ...
... effect on the physical body, not visions and experiences, etc., — all that belongs to the mental or rather to the vital, you understand? The visions, etc. belong to the vital-physical or the mental-physical plane and have a somewhat subtle and vague effect and are not so direct. They come and pass and leave a small imprint and that’s all; whereas the vibrations work for concrete results and penetrate ...
... ought to be no difficulty on that score. Page 332 "The question about the Siddhi is a little difficult to answer precisely. There are four parts of the Siddhi, roughly, moral, mental, physical and practical. Starting from December 1908, the moral has taken me three years and a half and may now be considered complete. The mental has taken two years of regular Sadhana and for the present ...
... ourselves. On the surface in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge... and sole consecration to the Divine alone and the power to change the nature and discover the true mental, the true vital, the true physical being in oneself. Both realisations are necessary for this Yoga. The “I“ or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When... The ego is a formation of Nature; but it is not a formation of physical nature alone, therefore it does not cease with the body. There is a mental and vital ego also. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Jivatman in the Integral Yoga In a certain sense the various Purushas or beings in us, psychic, mental, vital, physical, are projections of the Atman, but that gets its full truth only ...
... is the opening of the whole third plane of our existence which was before as a fortified city with its gates closed to the soul embodied in Matter. By this new action of the Divine Force the mental and physical consciousness are wedded to the high supramental which was till now separated from them and the life-force blazing in its works with the heat of the divine Sun is harmonised with the play of... × The all-creating and self-sufficing Supermind high and remote and separated in our consciousness from the mental and physical planes; yet it is really there behind their action and reaction upon each other and in the liberated state of man the separation is abolished. ...
... Chit ###July 25, 1932 Q. What is the difference between "Chitta" and "Chit"? A. Chit is the pure consciousness—as in Sat-Chit-Ananda. Chitta is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness, out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse, etc. It is these that in Patanjali's system have to be stilled altogether so that, the consciousness ...
... the body, the physical Prana, and the life-energy as it acts in support of the mental activities, the psychical Prana. For we lead always a double life, mental and physical, and the same life-energy acts differently and assumes a different aspect according as it lends itself to one or the other. In the body it produces those reactions of hunger, thirst, fatigue, health, disease, physical Page 348... the normal operations of physical Nature for the greater mastery of Nature by man. Suffice it to say here once for all that a change of mental and physical state and of relations between the mind and body which increases the Page 346 purity and freedom of the being, brings a clear joy and peace and multiplies the power of the mind over itself and over the physical functions, brings about... contrary habit and new relation to a minimum without the mental or vital vigour being in any way reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious development they can be trained to a greater potentiality of vigour by learning to rely on the secret fountains of mental and vital energy with which they are connected more than upon the minor aid of physical aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is however ...
... ion or of the cosmic consciousness or if there is the emptiness which is preliminary condition for these things, there comes an automatic tendency for a Unity with all — their affections, mental, vital, physical may easily touch. One has to keep oneself free. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III: The Universal or Cosmic Consciousness ...
... confidence in the Mother and the surrender that goes with it, i.e. “Whatever she wills is best for me” and the vastness which you feel now, — it is the wideness of the true self of the true mental, vital, physical being also, from which such things fall like dust, for they are of no importance to it whatever.... It is the one thing to do, to get permanently into the wideness, peace and silence and ...
... of the general mental and physical faculties and experiences attainable by humanity through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral ^ method. Nor would these have any raison d'être unless employed for an integral mental and physical life. Such a mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. Thus we would... of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the mental life, our intermediate instrument. Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation... attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind. The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect Page 49 spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike of our individual and of our ...
... On the surface in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, Page 111 veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get... exists after the dissolution of the physical body for some time only; afterwards it passes away into the vital plane where it remains till the vital sheath dissolves. Next one passes in the mental sheath, to some mental world; but finally the soul leaves its mental sheath also and goes to its place of rest. If the mental is strongly developed, then the mental being can remain and so also can the strongly... opposed to the mental, vital and physical planes. The Psychic or Soul and Traditional Indian Systems It appears the Maharshi at the time supposed that by the psychic being I meant the enlightened ego! But people do not understand what I mean by the psychic being, because the word psychic has been used in English to mean anything of the inner mental, inner vital or inner physical or anything abnormal ...
... and beliefs about life in the universe. However, if life is so simple as to be understood through the surface existence only, why do we see so much of inner conflict, divided personalities, mental and physical breakdown of individuals? There is, often, an opposition between logical analysis by the mind and actual experience. This opposition usually deprives a person of having a sense of harmony between ...
... own unillumined knowledge and soulless organisation. The safety of Asia lies in the recognition of the material mould and mental conditions in which that aim has to be worked out, otherwise she will sink deeper into the slough of despond, of a mental and physical incompetence to deal with the facts of life and the shocks of a rapidly changing movement.... The message of the East to... of man out of the merely animal and economic life or the merely intellectual and aesthetic into the glories of the spiritual existence; the pouring of the power of the spirit into the physical mould and mental instrument so that man may develop his manhood into that true supermanhood which shall exceed our present state as much as this exceeds the animal state from which Science tells us that ...
... spiritual and psychological evolution itself determines and in a way prepares its own mental and physical body. The soul prepares its own body, the body is not prepared for it without any reference to the soul. Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own fit mental and physical body according to the needs and pace of the human evolution and so appearing from... importance for this great spiritual manifestation. The consummation in the mental and physical symbol assists the growth of the inner reality; afterwards the inner reality expresses itself with greater power in a more perfect symbolisation of itself through the outer life. Between these two, spiritual reality and mental and physical expression, acting and returning upon each other constantly the manifestation... that the body is always created by the hereditary evolution, by inconscient Nature and its immanent Life-spirit without the intervention of the individual soul, the matter becomes simple. A physical and mental body is prepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great heredity and the descending Godhead takes possession of it. But the Gita in this very passage applies the doctrine of reincarnation ...
... testing me at every moment? This idea of tests also is not a healthy idea and ought not to be pushed too far. Tests are applied not by the Divine but by the forces of the lower planes—mental, vital, physical—and allowed by the Divine because that is part of the soul's training and helps it to know itself, its powers and the limitations it has to outgrow. The Mother is not testing you at every moment ...
... it is the 'mental being' which is put forth from life to life—that it is the reincarnating soul But would not the mental being be a part of the personality—the mental, nervous and physical composite—which in the popular conception is the thing that is carried over or which takes a new body in the next life? And the 'Self' here is quite different from the 'mental being'....Is the 'mental being' then... then the same thing as the 'psychic being' which is carried over to the next life?" The mental being spoken of by the Upanishad is not part of the mental-nervous-physical composite—it is the manomaya purusha prana-sharira-neta, the mental being leader of the life and body. It could not be so described if it were part of the composite. Nor can the composite or part of it be the Purusha,—for the composite... composite is composed of Prakriti. It is described as manomaya by the Upanishads because the psychic being is behind the veil and man being a mental being in the life and body lives in his mind and not in his psychic, so to him the manomaya purusha is the leader of the life and body,—of the psychic behind supporting the whole he is not aware or dimly aware in his best moments. The psychic is represented ...
... weight of her own unillumined knowledge and soulless organisation. The safety of Asia lies in the recognition of the material mould and mental conditions in which that aim has to be worked out, otherwise she will sink deeper into the slough of despond of a mental and physical incompetence to deal with the facts of life and the shocks of a rapidly changing movement. It is not any exchange Page 143 ... the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of the Self so that it shall re-embrace, permeate, dominate, transfigure the mental and physical life; Page 145 to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its own richness, power... and we accept it entirely; but its application has been erroneous. For the Law and Truth that has to be discovered is not that of the material world—though this is required, nor even of the mental and physical—though this is indispensable, but the Law and Truth of the Spirit on which all the rest depends. For it is the power of the Self of things that expresses itself in their forms and processes. ...
... Purusha who consents to the Mother's Force acting in the whole being? Yes. If the Purusha does not consent to the working of the Mother's Force, does it mean that the other beings (mental, vital, physical and psychic) also cannot come to the front to enable the sadhak to receive the Mother's Grace? No. The Purusha often holds back and lets the other beings consent or reject in his place ...
... roses nor a path of joyous Light. It is a difficult journey, a battle and struggle, an often painful and chequered growth, a life besieged by obscurity, false- hood and suffering. It has its mental, vital, physical joys and pleasures, but these bring only a transient taste- which yet the vital self is unwilling to forego - and they end in distaste, fatigue or disillusionment. What then? To say the Divine ...
... psychic being. The light, colours and flowers are seen when there is a working of forces. The light indicates an illumination of the consciousness, the colour indicates the play of forces—mental, vital, physical—for the enlightenment of various parts of the being. The flowers indicate psychic activity, a blossoming of the consciousness. It is, therefore, evident that during this vision a very active... pink (psychic love), blue (higher-mind at work, spiritual consciousness of Divine Truth), white (the force of purity and the power of Divine Truth), gold (knowledge). Here, this means that as the mental consciousness grows higher and higher it finally meets the golden light of the Divine Truth as “gold at its most intense indicates something from the supramental”. It gets modified according to the ...
... find out his highest self, the real man or highest Purusha in him, which is free and master in its own inalienable power. He must cease to be the mental, vital, physical ego; for that is always the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature. This ego is not his real self, but an instrumentation of Nature by which it has developed a sense of limited and separate individual being... Self-Perfection The Synthesis of Yoga Chapter IV The Perfection of the Mental Being The fundamental idea of a Yoga of self-perfection must be, under these conditions, a reversal of the present relations of the soul of man to his mental, vital and physical nature. Man is at present a partly self-conscious soul subject to and limited by mind, life and body, who... different from mind, life and body. This sense of difference from the vital actions and the physical being is very marked; for although the Purusha feels his mind to be involved in life and body, yet he is aware that even if the physical life and body were to cease or be dissolved, he would still go on existing in his mental being. But the sense of difference from the mind is more difficult and less firmly ...
... ourselves. On the surface, in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of the Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge... true in different ways not only of the Self and the psychic but of the mental, vital and physical Purushas — has to be grasped and accepted before the experiences of the yoga can be fully understood. Letters on Yoga, pp. 284-85 In a certain sense the various Purushas or beings in us, psychic, mental, vital, physical are projections of the Atman, but that gets its full truth only when... discovery of the eternal truth of our being and a passing above the limited truth of the mental, vital and physical to the full truth of our spiritual nature. But when we look, not at external mechanical Nature to the exclusion of our personality, but at the inner subjective experience of man the mental being, our nature takes to us a quite different appearance. We may believe intellectually ...
... when, in response to its aspiration, the Supramental descends to give it a consistent personality. The exterior being of man is a perishable formation out of the stuff of universal Nature—mental, vital, physical— and is due to the complex interplay of all kinds of forces. The psychic absorbs the essence, as it were, of the experiences of the various formations behind which it stands; Page 78... fore that it carries and preserves definite memories, but certainly not of all the details of life unless it is constantly in front and one with the exterior being. For, as a rule, the physical mind and the physical vital dissolve Page 79 with the death of the organism: they disintegrate and return to the universal Nature and nothing remains of their experiences. Not until they have ...
... consciousness—physical, vital, mental, etc. All of consciousness is experienced simply as mental consciousness. In Sri Aurobindo's words: For human beings who have not got deeper into themselves, mind and consciousness are synonymous. Only when one becomes more aware of oneself by a growing consciousness, then one can see different degrees, kinds, powers of consciousness, mental, vital, physical, psychic... separate consciousness which feels itself quite apart from the surface play of the mind and the vital and physical Nature. 6 Implied in the passage just quoted is the yogic psychological concept of two centers or parts of consciousness at each level of our being— physical, vital, mental. One part, the Purusha, is a witness; the other, Prakriti, is the active part. The separation of the witness... mind, vital, body, saying continually "I am not the mind", I am not the viral", I am not the body", seeing these things as separate from one's real self—and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalized, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which ...
... when, in response to its aspiration, the Supramental descends to give it a consistent personality. The exterior being of man is a perishable formation out of the stuff of universal Nature—mental, vital, physical—and is due to the complex interplay of all kinds of forces. The psychic absorbs the essence, as it were, of the experiences of the various formations behind which it stands; but not being in... fore that it carries and preserves definite memories, but certainly not of all the details of life unless it is constantly in front and one with the exterior being. For, as a rule, the physical mind and the physical vital dissolve with the death of the organism: they disintegrate and return to the universal Nature and nothing remains of their experiences. Not until they have become united with the ...
... Three Planes of the Lower Hemisphere and Their Energies There is a vital plane (self-existent) above the material universe which we see; there is a mental plane (self-existent) above the vital and material. These three together,—mental, vital, physical,—are called the triple universe of the lower hemisphere. They have been established in the earth-consciousness by evolution—but they exist in themselves... the mental thought energies (intelligence, dynamic mind, physical perceptive mind); the vital—1st emotional vital with all the emotional movements in it; 2nd the central vital (the larger desires, passions, ambitions, forces of work, possession, conquest); 3rd the lower vital (all the small egoistic movements of desire, enjoyment, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, vanity etc. etc.); 4th the physical energies ...
... Fruits The fruits are the results of the sadhana. Flowers Flowers indicate a blossoming in the consciousness, sometimes with special reference to the psychic or the psychicised vital, mental and physical consciousness. Page 177 The vision of flowers is a symbol usually of psychic qualities or movements whether a potentiality or promise or an actual state of development. ... consciousness towards the Truth. The red lotus signifies the presence of the Divine on the Earth. Page 179 It [ the blue lotus ] can be taken as the (Avatar) incarnation on the mental plane. Other Flowers The red rose is the flower of love and surrender, the white is the purity of psychic love. Reddish pink rose = psychic love or surrender. White rose = pure spiritual... Consciousness. It is the awakening of the psychic consciousness and its activity under the Divine Influence. Red flowers would ordinarily indicate an opening of the consciousness either in the physical or some part of the vital according to the shade. Lotus A lotus flower indicates open consciousness. A lotus signifies the opening of the (true) consciousness. The lotus is always ...
... exclusion and aggression in order to have among all the dependences of things in the world upon each other a possibility of independent mental and physical experience. But there can be no absolute independence upon these planes; impersonality which rejects all mental and physical becoming is therefore the only possible culmination of this exclusive movement: so only can an absolutely independent self-experience... simply that our sense of separate existence disappears into a consciousness of illimitable, undivided, infinite being in which we no longer feel bound to the name and form and the particular mental and physical determinations of our present birth and becoming and are no longer separate from anything or anyone in the universe. This was what the ancient thinkers called the Non-birth or the destruction... possibility of mental or bodily living and annihilate the individual existence for ever in an impersonal infinity. These ideas derive their strength from a certain justification in experience and a sort of necessity or upward attraction felt by the soul when it shakes off the compelling ties of mind and matter. It is felt that these ties are inseparable from all earthly living or from all mental existence ...
... other than oneself, to a Divine Person." This statement may be elaborated and set forth step by step as follows. Even when the Atman is realised in a universal poise free from the mental-vital-physical nature and there is no sense left of the ego in the inner consciousness, the ego still keeps colouring one's thoughts and impulses and activities. To erase that colour there must be in wake... its intense movement of love for the Personal Divine takes charge of one, the dynamic freedom from the ego occurs. Even if the Atman is not realised, the Psychic Being in full play in the mental-vital-physical nature can remove the twisting and turning ego by its spontaneous self-surrender to the Supreme Lord, the Eternal Mother. And this self-surrender will be most genuine, complete and effective... employed means in general a sudden shift of an individual's habitual poise from the outer to the inner being and it signifies in particular, as it did in Nirod's case, such a shift from the mental-vital-physical complex to the true soul. I have known Nirod and held him in great affection ever since he fell willynilly into the Divine's snare. I have seen him supervising the Carpentry "godown" ...
... reasons which are stated,—due to certain mental and physical circumstances—if these are changed, death is not inevitable any longer. Obviously the alteration can only come "if" certain conditions are satisfied—all progress and change by evolution depends upon an "if" which gets satisfied. If the animal mind had not been pushed to develop speech and reason, mental man would never have come into existence... are of a "plus haute origine", they must belong to the higher worlds. Does this mean that the hostiles exist in the higher worlds up to the Supramental? I believe the Mother was referring to the mental Asuras as opposed to the vital hostiles. There are no hostiles above the mind and cannot be, for it is with the mind that the opposition begins. When the Conversations were translated, Mother ...
... does not stray outside the strict boundaries of its subject. The material world and the physical life are taken for granted, they are hardly mentioned. But the material world and the physical life exist for us only by virtue of our internal Page 15 self and our internal life. According as our mental instruments represent to us the external world, according as our vital force in obedience... rise beyond the mind and its instruments, enter into himself, attain to the Brahman becomes then the supreme aim for the mental being, the all-important problem of his existence. For given that there is a more real existence than the mental existence, a greater life than the physical life, it follows that the lower life with its forms, and enjoyments which are all that men here ordinarily worship and... eternal. Otherwise he feels that he has lost himself, has fallen from his true salvation. But this Brahman-consciousness is not represented by the Upanishad as something quite alien to the mental and physical world, aloof from it and in no way active or concerned with its activities. On the contrary, it is the Lord and ruler of all the world; the energies of the gods in the mortal consciousness are ...
... on Yoga - IV Chapter III The Power of Expression and Yoga Verbal Expression It is the thinking mind that works out ideas, the externalising mental or physical mind that gives them form in words. Probably you have not developed this part sufficiently—the gift of verbal expression is besides comparatively rare. Most people are either clumsy in expression... the widening of the consciousness into the cosmic Consciousness, the Self one in all, the psychic and the spiritual transformation of the nature. If these things are neglected and only poetry and mental development and social contacts occupy all the time, then that is not sadhana. Also the poetry must be written in the true spirit, not for fame or self-satisfaction, but as a means of contact with ...
... Flower — A blossoming in the consciousness, sometimes with special reference to the psychic or the physical vital, mental and physical consciousness. Usually indicates a psychic activity. Red flowers ordinarily indicate an opening of the consciousness either in the physical or some part of the vital according to the shade . About the triangle, Sri Aurobindo has written: In ...
... × To turn thought and word into form and expression of the superconscient Truth which is hidden beyond the division and duality of the mental and physical existence was the central idea of the Vedic discipline and the foundation of its mysteries. × ... sense of active or moving. × The plane of the superconscient Truth or world of Swar beyond mental Heaven and physical earth in which all is accomplished that here we strive after; it is described as the wide habitation and the wide and fear-free pasture of the shining cows. ...
... (Ibid.) A collective spiritual life - the goal of our Ashram - is meant to express the spiritual and not merely the physical, vital, or even the mental being of man; it has, therefore, to found and maintain itself on greater values than the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human groupings. If it is not so founded, our Ashram will be merely the normal human collectivity with... reign of harmony and the growth of a spiritually conscious community. To quote Sri Aurobindo: "Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental... There alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental spirit which is at once the secret source and goal of our mind and life... Aurobindo Ashram we should never lose sight of the following words of Sri Aurobindo: "An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed for the new life to Page 51 appear; only such a transformation of the general mind, life, body nature can bring into being a new worthwhile collective ...
... mind falling into silence and then imposing the same silence on the vital nature. Page 437 Chit is the pure consciousness—as in Sat Chit Ananda. Chitta is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse etc. It is these that in Patanjali's system have to be stilled altogether so that the consciousness may... passion. What is needed is a patient increasing of the power of concentration and steady aspiration so that the silence you speak of may fix in the heart and spread to the other members. Then the physical mind and subconscient can be cleared and quieted. The asanas are one means for control of the body, as is Pranayam for the life-forces, but neither is indispensable. Mother thinks that... health by mistakes in the method, (2) rising of the vital forces, especially lust, egoism and wrongly directed strength and force, (3) the awakening of Page 439 concealed sanskaras of the physical nature or latent karma from past lives. Tell him it is not safe to do Pranayam without guidance by one who is expert in Rajayoga or Hathayoga. Pranayam is not a part of the sadhana here. ...
... helping the idea, the error of the modern or European mentality which so easily confuses the mentalised vital or life being with the soul and the idealising mind with spirituality. The poet imaging mental or physical beauty is for the outer mind something more spiritual than the seer or the God-lover experiencing the eternal peace or the ineffable ecstasy. Yet the Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught... that which they conceive to be the summit of human achievement. The poet indeed lives still in the mind and is not yet a spiritual seer, but he represents to the human intellect the highest point of mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words its intuition of things, though that stands far below the vision of things that can be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is ...
... widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by humanity. These results are envisaged to be employed for an integral mental and physical life, and the mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right mental and physical values. As a result, a synthesis is accomplished of the three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of human existence... reality. We are mental beings and our highest state of the mind, even though golden, is composed of the concepts and percepts of the mind, which are indeed a means of knowledge, rays of the Truth, but not in their nature integral Truth of existence. According to the Isa Upanishad, we can only arrive at the true Truth, if Surya works in us to remove this brilliant and golden but mental formation that... descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo; and there, the work is immense. The thing can still be brought down as far as the mental and vital planes (although Sri Aurobindo said that thousands of lifetimes would be needed merely to bring it down to the mental plane, unless one practiced a perfect surrender). With Sri Aurobindo, we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even ...
... 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 to be... 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 the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence;... not vitiated by a too earthward tendency, tends to refine, to subtilise, to purify the being. In proportion as we become more mental, we attain to a subtler action of our whole nature which becomes more apt to reflect and receive higher thoughts, a purer will, a less physical truth, more inward influences. The power of ethical knowledge and the ethical habit of thought and will to purify is obvious ...
... foreign to the body of the “real” Germany and resented from the very beginning, and above all the food shortage undiminished because of the continuing Allied blockade – all this contributed to the mental and physical disarray. Like Eisner and his political amateurs the young communist leaders proved too small for their boots. At first it was an enjoyable game for them to scare and steal from the clergy, the ...
... desires of the vital. The physical mind is the part of the mind which is intermingled with and partakes of the characteristics of the physical consciousness. Some of the chief characteristics of the physical, namely, inertia, obscurity, mechanical repetitiveness, automatism, constriction and chaotic activity are reflected in the physical mind in the form of mental torpor, doubt, mechanical reactions... Behind the outer mind and the inner mind, the outer vital and the inner vital, the outer physical and the inner physical, lies the true being, the Purusha, in the form of "an inmost Page 345 mental, vital, physical, more specifically called the true mind, the true vital, the true physical consciousness". 23 The psychic being behind the outer being and the inner being and supporting... The three major divisions in the outer being consist of the mind (the mental), the life-self (the vital) and the body (the physical). Each of these parts has its own distinct type of consciousness, though in our ordinary awareness they are all mixed up. Each plane of our being — mental, vital, physical — has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected and interacting; ...
... representation of our secret greater existence. The immobile self in us is found only when the outer mental and vital activities are quieted; for since it is seated deep within and is represented on the surface only by the intuitive sense of self-existence and misrepresented by the mental, vital, physical ego-sense, its truth has to be experienced in the mind's silence. But also the dynamic parts of... and our physical energisms and can see clearly the pure operations, the distinct powers, the composing elements of each and their interplay in a clear light of self-vision. We find that the contradictions and the struggles of our surface consciousness are largely due to the contrary or mutually discordant tendencies of our mental, vital and physical parts opposing and unreconciled with each other... true support of our individualisation; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ego is a superficial construction of Nature. It is only when we have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as well as on the surface, that we can acquire ...
... Purusha Purusha is the conscious Being who supports all the action of Nature. There is no fixed place, but as the central being he usually stands above the adhar—he becomes also the mental, vital, physical, psychic being. The word being is used with all kinds of significances—it is a very imprecise word and can embrace everything. Purusha has a precise significance. It is the Soul or Spirit... identify the Mother with the lower Prakriti and its mechanism of forces. Prakriti here is a mechanism only which has been put forth for the working of the evolutionary Ignorance. As the ignorant mental, vital or physical being is not itself the Divine, although it comes from the Divine—so the mechanism of Prakriti is not the Divine Mother. No doubt something of her is there in and behind this mechanism maintaining... which is the law of Intelligence. Page 42 Prakriti Prakriti is a name given to the Force that works out everything in the person and in the world; it takes the form of mental, vital, psychic, physical and other forces, of all sorts of powers and qualities, movements, forms, thoughts, sensations, feelings, actions—all that is the result of Prakriti. It is as when a machine is moved by ...
... proper begins or becomes possible when one rises above the mind and lives there governing all from above. Even in the psychic transformation one can rise above by a sort of going above of the mental, vital, physical being and a return, but one does not yet live above in the summit consciousness where Overmind has its seat with the other planes that are above the human Mind. The supramental transformation... y by merely being aware of the higher consciousness or attaining it in the ordinary limited sense. The physical is of course the basis—that of the Overmind is in between the two hemispheres. The lower hemisphere must contain all the mind including its higher planes, the vital, the physical. The upper hemisphere contains the Divine existence-consciousness-bliss, with the Supermind as its means of... does not necessarily transform the other parts of the nature. The bringing down of the Force and Light of the higher consciousness, the opening of the psychic and the centres of the mind, vital and physical, the consent and receptive opening of the nature to the workings of the psychic and the higher consciousness, finally the opening to the supramental are the conditions of transformation. What do you ...
... or of the cosmic consciousness or if there is the emptiness which is the preliminary condition for these things, there comes an automatic tendency for a unity with all — their affections, mental, vital, physical may easily touch. One has to keep oneself free. What is the meaning of the word "affections" used by you here with regard to people? "Affections" here has not the... release in the silence empty of all mental or other activities, for in that silence it becomes self-aware. For the blankness to be real one must have got into the Purusha or Witness Consciousness. If you are looking at it with your mind or vital, then there is not blankness, for even if there are not distinct thoughts then there must be a mental attitude or mental vibrations — e.g. the not Page... Page 145 Or could it rather be the physical? As a result of the fatigue I was getting mechanical thoughts. The physical does not get tired of the blankness. It may feel tamasic because of its own tendency to inertia, but it does not usually object to voidness. Of course it may be the vital physical. You have only to reject it as a remnant of the old movements ...
... self-sacrifice, reachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself, come from the psychic. If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, physical, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reflection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life. But even some imperfect ... call that an emotion... obviously it is an emotion. But usually, it comes from one thing: the physical being has a not very conscious but very intense longing for a contact with the psychic life. It feels poor, destitute, isolated and abandoned when it is not in contact with the psychic being. Not one physical being in a million is aware of this. But this kind of impression of being lost, left hanging ...
... What is the outer consciousness? Is it connected with the inner being? The outer consciousness is that which usually expresses itself in ordinary life. It is the external mental, vital, physical. It is not connected very much with the inner being except in a few — until one connects them together in the course of the sadhana. Is it not true that our vital lays bare... will to guide. What is this part which feels like opening to the Mother through writing, even when it is the same thing that goes on being repeated? It may be the inner mental, it may be the psychic. The year 1934 It means that you feel a consciousness within you which is calm and silent, not disturbed by external thoughts, grief or disturbance... Page 68 The inner being is not usually unquiet but it can be quiet or unquiet like the outer. The psychic can have peace behind it — but the inner mind, vital and physical are not necessarily silent — they are full of movements. It is the higher consciousness that has a basis of peace. My inner concentration and quietude seem to be extending outwards ...
... place of the ordinary will and knowledge of man, from the mortal and physical consciousness to the immortality of the Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak of five births for man, five worlds of creatures where works are done, pañca janāḥ, pañca kṛṣṭīḥ or kṣitīḥ . Dyaus and Prịthivī represent the pure mental and the physical consciousness; between them is the Antarikṣa, the intermediate or... always to find the word of right self-expression aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying in all its workings the secret of the divine knowledge, kavikratuḥ , befriends or builds up the mental and physical consciousness in man, divaḥ pṛthivyāḥ , perfects the intellect, purifies the discernment so that they grow to be capable of the "knowings of the seers" and by the superconscient Truth thus made... it assumes are universal forms, masses of the vast and infinite consciousness. As a result, the fostering rivers in the lower world are nourished by this descending higher sweetness and the mental and physical consciousness, the two first mothers of the all-effecting Will, become in their entire largeness perfectly equal and harmonised by this light of the Truth, through this nourishing by the infinite ...
... accomplished. You become a true instrument for the Divine's work. But the instrument must be built up first. Page 8 You are sent to school, you are asked to do exercises (both mental and physical); do you think it is just to put you to trouble? No, it is because a surrounding is absolutely necessary where you can learn to form yourself. If you tried by yourself this work of individualisation... means that the child lacks sufficient vitality. The vital is not strong enough to take care of external objects. Another reason may be that he does not find interest in the physical life; his interest may lie in the direction of mental occupation, imagination or dreaming etc. Or again it may be a lack of self-control and discipline. Anyway the result is the same. That is to say, confusion. There... character that is not methodical; it shows that not only in the outside but internally too the person is disorderly. There are people, perhaps considering themselves big, who even have a contempt for physical objects. But Sri Aurobindo says, people who cannot take care of things do not deserve to have them, have no right to ask for them. As I say, it shows a kind of acute egoism, much inner confusion. ...
... often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal. What he [ a correspondent ] has written about the subconscient... these impressions rise up most in dream in an incoherent and disorganised manner, they can also and do rise up into our waking consciousness as a mechanical repetition of old thoughts, old mental, vital and physical habits or an obscure stimulus to sensations, actions, emotions which do not originate in or from our conscious thought or will and are even often opposed to its perceptions, choice or dictates... whatever has impressed itself upon the body consciousness. But this subconscient must be clearly distinguished from the subliminal parts of our being such as the inner or subtle physical consciousness, the inner vital or inner mental; for these are not at all obscure or incoherent or ill-organised, but only veiled from our surface consciousness. Our surface constantly receives something, inner touches, ...
... heterogeneous compound consists of temporary mental, vital, physical personalities; each has its own distinct nature, its influence, its action on the whole of us; there is a constant confusion and even a conflict in our members; often it is by our mental reason and will that we are moved to control and harmonize confusions and conflicts; it is in the mental being to which we look up for some kind of... factor in Page 41 our normal make-up is not yet dominant and has only a limited action. Our soul is not the overt guide and master of our thought and acts; it has to rely on the mental, vital, physical instruments for self-expression and is constantly overpowered by our mind and life-force: but if once it can succeed in remaining in constant communion with its own larger occult reality, —... discovery, the Mother has given a few general indications: "The starting-point is to seek in yourself that which is independent of the body and the circumstances of life, which is not born the mental formation that you have been given, the language you speak, the habits and customs of the environment in which you live, the country where you are born or the age to which you belong. You must find ...
... which continues the action of the mind and body has been exhausted. On the other hand if he attaches himself to the Birth, the ego-principle in him seeks continually to clothe itself in fresh mental and physical forms. THE EVIL OF THE EXTREMES Neither attachment to Non-Birth nor attachment to Birth is the perfect way. For all attachment is an act of ignorance and a violence committed upon the Truth... us to the NonBirth. Therefore the Non-Birth is also called the Dissolution (Vinasha). Page 60 Birth and Non-Birth are not essentially physical conditions, but soul-states. A man may break the knot of the ego-sense and yet remain in the physical body; but if he concentrates himself solely in the state of dissolution of ego, then he is not born again in the body. He is liberated from birth ...
... and sole consecration to the Divine alone and the power to change the nature and discover the true mental, the true vital, the true physical being in oneself. Both realisations are necessary for this Yoga. The "I" or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When... movements which leave one unmoved and unidentified with them. The true inner being—the true mental, the true vital, the true physical represent each on its plane and answer to the central being, but the whole of the nature and especially the outer nature does not nor the ordinary mental, vital or physical personality. The psychic being is the central being for the purposes of the evolution—it grows... true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear—the true being is felt in its place. The psychic is the true being here—the ego is simply a mental, vital, physical formation of the mobile consciousness in Nature which is wrongly taken for our true being so long as the psychic is veiled and the consciousness is in the Ignorance. As to the change ...
... that one can see the surroundings and the things happening through him. It is the physical that becomes nervous at these experiences and this must be overcome; as the inner mental, vital, physical consciousness opens to things behind the thick physical veil all kinds of experiences may happen that are strange to the physical mind and its tendency to be apprehensive or nervous at these things must disappear... anything physical (the Doctor, as you say, found nothing). When this movement of the consciousness is more normal, the feeling will probably disappear. You must have gone out of your body leaving it unprotected and there was an attack which you got rid of after coming into the body. This part of the head from the ears down to the neck is the seat of the physical mind—the centre of the physical or... inkstand. When the vital being goes out, it moves on the vital plane and in the vital consciousness, and, even if it is aware of physical scenes and things, it is not with a physical vision. It is possible for one who has trained his faculties to enter into touch with physical things although he is moving about in the vital body, to see and sense them accurately, even to act on them and physically move ...
... always seen when there is a working of the forces within at a certain stage of the sadhana. The light of course indicates an illumination of the consciousness, the colour the play of forces mental (yellow), physical and vital, but forces making for enlightenment of these parts of the being. The flowers usually indicate a psychic activity. Different Forms of Light One sometimes sees the Light in... light or else a sort of warm exhilaration of a luminous kind. Two Visions Explained (1) The lid of the skull opening means that the mental being has opened to the Divine Light and the flames indicate aspiration filled with the Light arising to join the mental part to what is above Mind. Page 120 (2) The Divine Light from above is of various colours. White is the Divine Power of purity... people see when they meditate. There is no imagination in the seeing of these lights—it is when the inner vision is open or active that one sees them—for they themselves are subtle and not physical lights. A concentrated mind is not always necessary for seeing the light—if there is an opening anywhere in the consciousness, that is sufficient. It is not necessary to have the mind ...
... Mental, vital, physical, the lower "births" all the knowledge of which the Divine Will, knower of our Births, possesses and through which it has to lead the ascending sacrifice to the supramental. × The peace, joy and full satisfaction in the mental, vital and physical being. ... grows into immortality. It destroys the enemy, the assailants, the powers of evil, enriches the soul with all they try to withhold, gives the triple peace and the triple fulfilment of the mental, vital and physical being and, labouring in the light of the supramental Truth, leads beyond, creating in us the world of immortal felicity.] त्वामग्ने वसुपतिं वसूनामभि प्र मन्दे अध्वरेषु राजन् । त्वया... × Not only the physical body, but the vital and mental sheaths, all the embodied states or forms of the soul. × The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant ...
... genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits, a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature. Man is a being from the mental worlds whose mentality works here involved, obscure and degraded in a physical brain, shut off from its own divinest powers and impotent to change life beyond certain narrow... supermind in him even in its evolutionary beginnings will appear as a ray of the eternal omniscience and omnipotence. Sovereign and irresistible Page 158 it will lay hands on the mental and physical instruments, and, standing above and yet penetrating and possessing our lower already manifested parts, it will transform mind, life and body into its own divine and luminous nature. Man in... then and then only can man exceed himself and know divinely and divinely act and create; he will have become at last a conscious portion of the Eternal. The superman will be born, not a magnified mental being, but a supramental power descended here into a new life of the transformed terrestrial body. A gnostic supermanhood is the next distinct and triumphant victory to be won by the spirit descended ...
... worked out, everything accomplished. You become a true instrument for the Divine's work. But the instrument must be built up first. You are sent to school, you are asked to do exercises (both mental and physical); do you think it is just to put you to trouble? No, it is because a surrounding is absolutely necessary where you can learn to form yourself. If you tried by yourself this work of individualisation... means that the child lacks sufficient vitality. The vital is not strong enough to take care of external objects. Another reason may be that he does not find interest in the physical life; his interest may lie in the direction of mental occupation, imagination or dreaming etc. Or again it may be a lack of self-control and discipline. Anyway the result is the same. That is to say, confusion. There are... character that is not methodical; it shows that not only in the outside but internally too the person is disorderly. There are people, perhaps considering themselves big, who even have a contempt for physical objects. But Sri Aurobindo says, people who cannot take care of things do not deserve to have them, have no right to ask for them. As I say, it shows a kind of acute egoism, much inner confusion. ...
... or its present achievement and refuse mental or physical commerce and interchange or spiritual or actual commingling with the rest of the world. For so it cannot grow or perfect itself. As the individual lives by the life of other individuals, so does the nation by the life of other nations, by accepting from them material for its own mental, economic and physical life; but it has to assimilate this... self-expression of the universal Being in His cosmic self-unfolding; he expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence. All mankind is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures... our development and the entire object of our social existence can only become clear to us when we have discovered not only, like modern Science, what man has been in his past physical and vital evolution, but his future mental and spiritual destiny and his place in the cycles of Nature. This is the reason why the subjective periods of human development must always be immeasurably the most fruitful and ...
... Ego which knows itself obscurely to be the Lord, although owing to the limitations of its relativity, it is unable to realise its true existence. The result is discord with others and oneself, mental and physical suffering, the sense of weakness and inability, the sense of obscuration, the straining of energy in passion and in desire towards self-fulfilment, the recoil of energy exhausted or disappointed... of the term of physical life are part of its completeness. For the active Brahman fulfils Itself in the world by works and man also is in the body for self-fulfilment by action. He cannot do otherwise, for even his inertia acts and produces effects in the cosmic movement. Being in this body or any kind of body, it is idle to think of refraining from action or escaping the physical life. The idea... contains is the object of world-existence, but renunciation of all in desire is the condition of the free enjoyment of all. The renunciation demanded is not a moral constraint of self-denial or a physical rejection, but an entire liberation of the spirit from any craving after the forms of things. The terms of this liberation are freedom from egoism and, Page 18 consequently, freedom ...
... confidence in the Mother and the surrender that goes with it, i.e. "whatever she wills is best for me", and the vastness which you feel now,—it is the wideness of the true self, of the true mental, vital, physical being also, from which such things fall off like dust, for they are of no importance to it whatever. It is the one thing to do, to get permanently into the wideness, peace and silence and... for that helps the growth of one's consciousness. The blow you wince at seems to you so hard because it is a blow the world of your mental formation has sustained. Such a world often becomes a part of our being. The result is that a blow dealt to it gives almost physical pain. The great compensation is that it makes you live more and more in the real world in contradistinction to the world of your i... Indecision and Instability The first [ case ] is vital indecision—the other is vital instability. 1 Those who can't choose, have the vital indecision and it is usually due to a too active physical mind, seeing too many things or too many sides at a time. The other rises from a lack of control and too much impulse. It [ failure in whatever one tries to do ] usually comes from a certain ...
... begins or becomes possible when one rises above the mind and lives there governing all from above. Even in the psychic transformation one can rise above by a sort of going above of the mental, vital, physical being and a return, but one does not yet live above in the summit Page 99 consciousness where overmind has its seat with the other planes that are above the human Mind... transformation. The power of concentration above the head is to bring peace, silence, liberation from the body sense, the identification with mind and life and open the way for the lower (mental, vital, physical) consciousness to rise up to meet the higher consciousness above and for the powers of the higher (spiritual nature) consciousness to descend into mind, life and body. This is what is called... realities of Nature. ... But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic spiritual outcome 1 would be a flowering 1. The psychic and the spiritual opening with their experiences and Page 106 of the soul in mind and ...
... never allowed it to reach maturity. (“Most Western occultism is long on text and short on practice – contrary to forms of occultism found in the East, which rely on strict discipline, rigorous mental and physical exercises, and the constant supervision of a teacher or ‘guru’.” Peter Levenda 648) Paradoxically, the Age of Reason was also one of the most active occult periods. “No historical period is so... needs of the whole person. Man does not live by bread alone, and neither does he live by the intellect alone. In him there are the realms of the life-forces, impulses and feelings; there is the physical body with its hunger, its need of movement, sexual satisfaction and health; and there is the soul at the centre of the being, the place where one feels connected with the soul of the Volk, with nature ...
... hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges. Complex political, social, administrative, economic and cultural machinery have been built for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. It is clear that the system of civilization that the modern man has created is too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more... of the egoistic consciousness and dividing mind, a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, in the absence of a creative harmonizing light of the spirit, must welter in a universalized confusion and discord out of which it is impossible... having created the bewildering situation which is irreversible, and which none the less must be remedied, there is no other alternative for man but to tap the potentialities and capacities of a higher mental and Page 12 supramental range. This would mean an evolutionary step to transgress the limits of the human species leading eventually to an evolutionary mutation. There is, indeed ...
... NIRODBARAN: Dilip's friend, the scientist. I think it is your terminology that he finds difficult to grasp—mental, vital, physical. SRI AUROBINDO: It is a demarcation which is not rigidly fixed. Each overflows into the others. In man, all are differentiated aspects or states of the mental consciousness in general. EVENING The Mother came in with a telegram for Sri Aurobindo, smiled and said... shoulder, after which he felt calm. He didn't know whose hand it was! SRI AUROBINDO (after laughing) : He seems to be receptive. NIRODBARAN: He doesn't understand what is meant by the mental, vital, and physical consciousness. As for his wife, she says the intensity of pain and pleasure seems to have diminished in her. But at the same time she feels disinclined to do any work. SRI AUROBINDO: Does... is replaced by another energy. CHAMPAKLAL: How to know whether or not it is Tamas? SRI AUROBINDO: There is a certain element of Tamas in it. The physical is being driven by the rajasic vital energy and when that energy is not there the physical may fall into Tamas or inactivity. NIRODBARAN: What to do in such cases? SRI AUROBINDO: It depends on circumstances.. If one has no work to do, he ...
... forces playing in it, etc. He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts. He finds it all to be one with his larger or universal self. There is the universal mental, the universal vital, the universal physical Nature and it is out of a selection of their forces and movements that the individual mind, vital and physical are made. The soul comes from beyond this nature of mind, life... not know for the most part whence they come. * There is a vital plane (self-existent) above the material universe which we see; there is a mental plane (self-existent) above the vital and material. These three together, - mental, vital, physical, - are called the triple universe of the lower hemisphere. They have been established in the earth-consciousness by evolution - but they exist in ... individual evolution, supporting the mental, vital and physical being. The psychic being is the spark growing into a Fire, evolving with the growth of the consciousness. The psychic being is therefore evolutionary, not like the Jivatman prior to the evolution. But man is not aware of the self or Jivatman, he is aware only of his ego, or he is aware of the mental being which controls the life and ...
... immortality of the psychic. The soul gathers the essential elements of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for further experience. It is really for the vital part of the being that śrāddha and rites are done—to help the being to... Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: Rebirth (1) The psychic being stands behind mind, life and body, supporting them; so also the psychic world is not one world in the scale like the mental, vital or physical worlds, but stands behind all these and it is there that the souls evolving here retire for the time between life and life. If the psychic were only one principle in the rising order of body... popular beliefs even when they have some foundation are seldom enlightened and accurate. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: Rebirth The psychic does not give up the mental and other sheaths (apart from the physical) immediately at death. It is said that it takes three years on the whole to get clear away from the zone of communicability with the earth—though there may be cases of slower or ...
... governing but still too hampered essence of its psychological structure. It is possible for man to awaken to this higher mental consciousness, to become this mental being, 1 put on this mental nature and live not only in the vital and physical sheaths, but in this mental body. If there were a sufficient completeness in this transformation he would become capable of a life and a being at least... materialised soul lives bound to the physical body and its narrow superficial external consciousness, and it takes normally the experiences of its physical organs, its senses, its matter-bound life and mind, with at most some limited spiritual glimpses, as the whole truth of existence. Page 466 Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in physical Nature; he is to his own self... He can concentrate in mind and develop the mental part of his being, usually at the expense of the fullness of his vital and physical life and in the end the mind predominates and can open to the Beyond. He can concentrate this self-liberating mind on the Spirit. Here too usually in the process he turns away more and more from his full mental and physical life; he limits or discourages their possibilities ...
... , the taking up of an altogether new subtle vehicle along with the physical by the psyche? Sri Aurobindo's answer is that, while a person with "a strong spiritual development" could certainly retain his vital-mental being, the carrying-over is possible also to "one like Shelley or like Plato for instance" who has a developed mental Page 11 personality centred around the psychic individual... accept the process of evolution within a Platonic cosmology we have not only to think of a divine counterpart to the whole triple strain of mental-vital-physical being: we have also to think of a divine mentality, a divine vitality and even a divine physicality as forming the covert nature of the Platonic "chaos" and unfolding on earth in answer to their counterpart in the Supermind. For, the fluctuant... sees standing between the Supermind and our sphere of ignorance a delegate power of the Truth-Consciousness, an inferior or diminished supramental Knowledge-Will from which a lapse into the mental-vital-physical diffusion and division can occur. This is the Over-mind. "The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-d ...
... always seen when there is a working of the forces within at a certain stage of the sadhana. The light of course indicates an illumination of the consciousness, the colour, the play of forces mental (yellow), physical and vital, but forces making for enlightenment of these parts of the being. The flowers usually indicate a psychic activity. The light is often seen in front before the centre of inner... necessary in other planes. This figure may have belonged to the subtle physical plane. The many-headed or many-armed figures belong usually to the vital plane.... The world you see is in some subtle physical plane where men see the gods according to their own idea and images of them. It is the vital plane—probably the vital physical. It is mostly there that the beings of the vital world appear with... because they give the meaning or interpretation they wish to give according to their desires, hopes and prepossessions. And then, too, there are many different planes in which you can see. There is a mental seeing, a vital seeing, and there are some visions that are seen in a plane very close to the most material. The visions that belong to the last category appear in forms and symbols that seem to be ...
... persistence of the subjective and objective relations of our consciousness with its objects. These are the necessary powers of the field; all these are common and universal powers at once of the mental, vital and physical Nature. Pleasure and pain, liking and disliking are the principal deformations of the kshetra. From the Vedantic point of view we may say that pleasure and pain are the vital or sensational... grow more and more aware of this eternal, we put on our own eternity and are for ever. We identify ourselves with the eternity of the self and no longer with the limitation and distress of our mental and physical ignorance. Then we see that all our works are an evolution and operation of Nature and our real self not the executive doer, but the free witness and lord and unattached enjoyer of the action... its rays. In the light of that sun of knowledge the eye of knowledge opens in us and we live in that truth and no longer in this ignorance. Then we perceive that our limitation to our present mental and physical nature was an error of the darkness, then we are liberated from the law of the lower Prakriti, the law of the mind and body, then we attain to the supreme nature of the spirit. That splendid ...
... all his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its Page 342 powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand... indispensable in order to manipulate them. As for spiritual philosophy, only the few who have a fairly complete mental development and are fully conscious on the intellectual plane, can usefully adopt this method; otherwise it is a dead letter for all those who don't have an ability for mental gymnastics and so cannot follow all the acrobatics of the mind. And finally, Sri Aurobindo has told us somewhere... experience or built its structures as Page 341 an approach to it: but it has also rejected all aid,—or all impediment,—of religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all ...
... sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word [subconscient], I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal. Letters on Yoga, p. 354 The real subconscious is a nether... p. 557 The Inner Being; the Psychical Consciousness The inner being means the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical with the psychic behind as the inmost. Letters on Yoga, p. 373 There is an inner mental, an inner vital, an inner physical which connects the psychic and the external being. Letters on Yoga, p. 1113 Most people live in their ordinary... starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of Page 74 entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and ...
... This ego or “I” is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought-centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are... his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical “I” that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only worker. Sri Aurobindo The Synthesis of Yoga - I: The... and how can it be recognised by our deluded instruments and our blind prisoned intelligence? Ordinarily, we conceive of ourselves as a separate “I” in the universe that governs a separate body and mental and moral nature, chooses in full liberty its own self-determined actions and is independent and therefore sole master of its works and responsible. It is not easy for the ordinary mind, the mind that ...
... have miserably failed to provide with a harmonising -light of the spirit that would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life-unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. "All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for ... all his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material... spiritual vision, positive and dynamic, "all man's age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour... and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense or foundation". 9 Spirituality Reconciled ...
... Man lives in the physical being; Varuna brings the light of the gnosis into it and measures it out, that is, shapes and plans out our earth-existence in the measures of the Truth by means of the mind enlightened by the sun of gnosis: he takes his stand as the Asura in our vital plane, the link between mental and physical, there to receive the light and pass it on to the... Varuna as the Lord of infinite purity and wisdom who opens our earthly being to the unclouded light of the sun of knowledge, pours out the waters of the Truth upon all our triple existence mental, vital and physical and by its power removes all sin and evil and falsehood from our lives. He creates the free wideness of our vital being above our broken search for the delightful objects of our desire, sets... and omnipotent lord and creator, the Godhead in his creative wisdom and might forming the world and maintaining the law of things in the earth and mid-air and heavens. In the esoteric, in which the physical phenomena of the exoteric become symbols, the infinite Godhead is hymned in his all-pervading wisdom and purity opening the three worlds of our being to the Sun of knowledge, pouring down the streams ...
... when you have that, I assure you that you can pass through everything without difficulty... The best is when the word comes to you spontaneously: you call in a moment of great difficulty (mental, vital, physical, emotional, whatever it may be) and suddenly that springs up in you, two or three words, like magical words. You must remember these and form the habit of repeating them in moments when di... Naturally, the effort to keep the consciousness at a high level is tiring in the beginning, like the exercises you do to develop your muscles. But you do not give up gymnastics because of that! So mentally also you must do the same thing. You must not allow your mind to stoop low: gossiping degrades you and, if you want to do Yoga, you must abstain from it, that's all. Source Widening Your... not only no right but no capacity to judge the state which others are in. And to pronounce a judgment on someone without having this vision spontaneously, effortlessly, is precisely an example of the mental presumptuousness of which Sri Aurobindo always spoke.... And it so happens that one who has the vision, the consciousness, who is capable of seeing the truth in all things, never feels the need to ...
... used, but still there is the ascent of the consciousness from and through the different levels to join the higher consciousness above; there is the opening of the centres and of the planes (mental, vital, physical) which these centres command; there is also the descent which is the main key of the spiritual transformation. Therefore there is, I have said, a Tantrik knowledge behind the process of tr... The ascent of the Kundalini—not its descent, so far as I know—is a recognised phenomenon; there is one that corresponds in our Yoga, the feeling of the consciousness ascending from the vital or physical to meet the higher consciousness. This is not necessarily through the chakras but is often felt in the whole body. Similarly the descent of the higher consciousness is not felt necessarily or usually... the Brahman in the thousand-petalled lotus. A mere ejection from her uniting with the higher consciousness would hardly lead to a radical change. Of course she need not abandon connection with the physical centre altogether; but she is no longer coiled there: if she were, the great occult force residing there would not be liberated. The usual image of her risen and awake is, I believe, that of a serpent ...
... consciousness with mentality and mental awareness. Mind identifies itself to a certain extent with the movements proper to physical life and body and annexes them to its mentality, so that all consciousness seems to us to be mental. But if we draw back, if we separate the mind as witness from these parts of us, we can discover that life and body—even the most physical parts of life—have a consciousness... would seem more properly to be a province? We are aware of our body and know that we have a physical existence, even very largely identify ourselves with it, and yet most of its operations are really subconscious to our mental being; not only does the mind take no part in them but, as we suppose, our most physical being has no awareness of its own hidden operations or, by itself, of its own existence;... repetitions of all kinds, in untraceable impulsions and motives, in mental, vital, physical perturbations and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our obscurest parts of nature. But the subliminal self has not at all this subconscious character: it is in full possession of a mind, a life-force, a clear subtle-physical sense of things. It has the same capacities as our waking being, a subtle ...
... births one after the other but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it—it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in action. If it does not exercise... results of certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being—inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical—knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The psychic... own organisation; only, this organisation is the product of the action of a central divine spark. But the day an external being (physical, mental, vital) enters into direct and constant contact with the psychic being, one may say in the same way that the physical being of this person is organised by the central divine consciousness. The Mother Questions and Answers (1950 - 1951): 24 February ...
... hundreds of sadhaks in all times have had the realisation of the Atman on the higher mental plane, buddheḥ parataḥ , but the supramental realisation was not theirs. One can get partial realisations of the Self or Spirit or the Divine on any plane, mental, vital, physical even, and when one rises above the ordinary mental plane of man into a higher and larger mind, the Self begins to appear in all its... this wideness of the Self that cessation of mental activity becomes possible; one gets the inner Silence. After that this inner Silence can remain even when there is activity of any kind; the being remains silent within, the action goes on in the instruments and one receives all the necessary indications and execution of action whether mental, vital or physical from a higher source without the fundamental... transformation is not the same as the spiritual-mental. It is a change of mind, life and body which the mental or overmental-spiritual cannot achieve. All whom you mention were spirituals, but in different ways. Krishna's mind, for instance, was overmentalised, Ramakrishna's intuitive, Chaitanya's spiritual-psychic, Buddha's illumined higher mental. I don't know about B. G. [ Bijoy Goswami ]—he seems ...
... is put the "I" attaches itself to that, so that one thinks of oneself as a mental being or physical being or whatever it may be. The consciousness in me can be utterly free of any sense of an individual "I" and yet dispose its stress in this way or the other way—it may go down into the physical and work there in the physical nature keeping all the rest behind or above for the time or it may go up into... can see different degrees, kinds, powers of consciousness, mental, vital, physical, psychic, spiritual. The Divine has been de scribed as Being-Consciousness-Ananda, even as a Consciousness (Chaitanya), as putting out a force or energy, Shakti, that creates worlds. The mind is a modified consciousness that puts forth a mental energy. But the Divine can stand back from his energy and observe... one has to concentrate the consciousness in heart or mind in order to go within or go above. It is the disposition of the consciousness that determines everything, makes one predominantly mental, vital, physical or psychic, bound or free, separate in the Purusha or involved in the Prakriti. Good heavens! what a magnificent muddle [ in the correspondent's response to the preceding letter ]! The ...
... for this to happen would be for man to break out of his ego into the larger freedom of union with the universal Divine: He must cease to be the mental, vital, physical ego; for that is always the creation, instrument and subject of mental, vital, physical Nature... While the identification lasts, there is a self-imprisonment in this habitual round and narrow action.... The liberation from an e... instruments for the Mother's play of manifestation. Such an inner relation certainly transcends Page 693 the mere physical nearness, and it is continuous and creative, and facilitates the desired integral change and transformation of the mental, vital and physical consciousness. We have only to look up to the Mother in total trust and love, and she will unfailingly respond with her Grace... Aurobindo's main point is that what really matters is an inner relation, not the physical nearness to the Mother; and this can be established whether one is physically near her or not. To be able to see the Mother with ones physical eyes is indeed much, but always the aim should be to transcend Page 692 the physical and learn to see with the inner consciousness and establish thereby a total ...
... usually expresses itself in ordinary life. It is the external mental, vital, physical. It is not connected very much with the inner being except in a few—until one connects them together in the course of the sadhana. The exterior being is the physical which is connected in an ignorant way with the physical universe. It is this physical being which has developed an external mind and vital. The inner... because the true mental or the true vital or even the true physical being is much wider in consciousness than the external consciousness which is limited by the body. If the external parts seem to occupy the whole consciousness, it is when one comes down into the physical and feels all the activities of Nature playing in it—even the mental and vital movements are then felt through the physical and not as... 93 Mother. I was speaking of the inner mental, inner vital, inner physical; in order to reach the hidden seat of the psychic one has first to pass through these things. When one leaves the outer consciousness and goes inside, it is here that one enters—some or most entering into the inner vital first, others into the inner mental or inner physical; the emotional vital is the most direct road ...
... Purusha, the highest ( uttama ), called also the Paramatma or Supreme Spirit, Page 52 who enters into the three worlds, (the worlds of suṣupti, svapna, jāgrat , otherwise the causal, mental and physical planes of existence), and sustains them as their imperishable lord." And in the thirteenth chapter, while drawing the distinction between the lower Purusha and the higher, Sri Krishna defines ...
... 4-31.) Insomnia is not considered an illness, and most insomniacs are able to live normal lives. However, the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation are well known: a loss of efficiency in mental and physical functioning, irritability, and tendencies toward perceptual distortions and ideational confusion. When laboratory animals have been deprived of sleep, they die after ten sleepless days. The... movement around us than might otherwise be the case. The child reading with avid interest may not hear his mother calling. In other words, insensitivity to external stimulation is not always indicative of mental lethargy; to the contrary, it may reflect a high degree of attentiveness. Narcolepsy, Insomnia and Sleep Deprivation Pity the poor narcoleptic. He is likely to fall asleep at the peak... periods when it even lost the knowledge of its own existence, when an intelligence without the need for reason had replaced it. "Over and over again on the second day of my flight, I would return to mental alertness sufficiently to realize that I had been flying while I was neither asleep nor awake. My eyes had been open. I had responded to my instruments' indications and held generally to compass course ...
... calm, desireless, griefless fixity of the Buddhi, and self-poise is called Samadhi. (The sign of the seeker in Samadhi is not that he loses consciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental and physical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning or torture of the body. These things happen in a trance, and people ordinarily call this state of trance as Samadhi. But while trance is a particular... external asceticism, it is not physical renunciation. This withdrawal does not mean the austerities of the rigid ascetic with his fasts, his maceration of the body, his attempt to abstain even from food. (c) This withdrawal has to be inner withdrawal, inner renunciation. For the embodied soul, having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normal physical action. If one abstains ... Page 303 from food, one removes the physical contact with the food, but that does not get rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful. One still retains the pleasure of the sense in the object, the rasa, the liking and the disliking. The solution is that one must learn to endure the physical contact without suffering inwardly the sensuous reaction. (d) A stage will ...
... Tantric age takes up the outward life of the human being into a deeper mental and psychical living and brings human beings more directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him. This stage was followed by the third stage which attempted to render the human being capable of taking up the whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life... can be discovered by the process of Yoga. Page 86 The Vedic Yoga gave rise to various systems of Yoga, and all of them led or hoped to lead through many kinds of psycho-physical, inner vital, inner mental, and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aims of all Indian spirituality,-- a greater consciousness and a more or less complete union with the One and Divine or full emergence of... fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by the temple; the karmic ritual of sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple ritual. In the Veda, Vedic gods figured in the mantras conveying the mental shifting images; in the Puranas they yielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and all their Shaktis and their offshoots. It has been argued that ...
... men are not usually model characters. What is this "overflow of energy" in the great men you spoke of the other day? We usually associate energy with the vital. Mental, vital, physical, all kinds of energies. Because great men have an overflow of energy, does the Divine never care if they use it in virtues or in vices? Why should he care? Is... vices. When one goes beyond there are no virtues and vices; — for these things do not belong to the Divine Nature. If an overflow of energy in great men is merely of the mental, vital or physical kind what is new in it? There are plenty of people in the world who are not great and yet have a lot of energy in themselves. But they don't throw it out always in vices. The great men ought... nothing to do with darkness or light, truth and falsehood. The spiritual man rises above vice and virtue, he does not rise above truth and light, unless you mean by truth and light, human truth and mental light. They have to be transcended, just as virtue and vice have to be transcended. If He does not care for vices, how will the world be divinised? Are not these things supposed to ...
... from moment to moment and equally impossible to arrest. But we see that the mental being only regards all this mutation so far as it produces effects upon its own mental consciousness, generates impressions and changes in its mental experience and mental body, because only through the mind can it be aware of its changing physical habitation and its changing world-experience. Therefore there is, as well... representation of our secret greater existence. The immobile self in us is found only when the outer mental and vital activities are quieted; for since it is seated deep within and is represented on the surface only by the intuitive sense of self-existence and misrepresented by the mental, vital, physical ego-sense, its truth has to be experienced in the mind's silence. But also the dynamic parts of our... subtle-physical substance with a larger and finer receptivity are building out of themselves our surface evolution. A psychic entity is there behind these occult activities which is the true support of our individualisation; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ...
... the Divine and when this inward fact is recognised the genuine spiritual life has begun and one is aware of one's soul directly and not only of the reflection or rather emanation of it in the mental-vital-physical complex. I may add that no matter how much the psychic being grows, it still remains a child - simple, straight, trusting, humble. But this child is at the same time an extremely wise one, with... and the word-posture. (22.6.1974) Your mention of loneliness and aloneness calls forth a few distinctions in my mind - from the Yogic standpoint. The former involves a strong sense of the physical absence of Page 123 loved ones, the latter the feeling of freedom from bondage even to these and at the same time the glad recognition of their ever-presence of soul along with oneself... Eternal's breast Unrolls the form and sign of being. Seated above in the omniscient silence. Your medical curiosity about the effect the rending of the heart's knot would have on the physical cardiac organ finds me somewhat at a loss. I may only surmise that in the long run one may echo the Aurobindonian state: Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's - Page 124 ...
... life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into... light of the supermind; the mind, the vital, the physical itself have lights of their own, as yet hidden, which can be very inspiring, exalting, informative, powerfully executive. A breaking out into the cosmic consciousness may also bring in an immense enlargement of the consciousness and power. An opening into the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical, any range of the subliminal consciousness, can... takes up the nature and the life, the power of the One acting through the spiritual individual; it is not an aggrandisement of the personal force, not the last crowning fulfilment of the separative mental and vital ego. Self-fulfilment is a result of the Yoga, but its aim is not the greatness of the individual. The sole aim is a spiritual perfection, a finding of the true self and a union with the Divine ...
... of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya puruṣa , on the vital plane the true vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , on the physical plane the true physical being, annamaya puruṣa . Each being, therefore is, so long as the Ignorance lasts, centred round his mental, vital or physical Purusha, according to the plane on which he predominantly... births one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it—it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not exercise... results of certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being—inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical—knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The psychic ...
... elements.” The Subconscient is the builder of most of our dreams, the source of our mechanical, repetitive habits and idiosyncrasies, and the seed-bed of most of the obstinate ailments, physical or mental, to which we are all too prone. It is the repository of all our life-impressions which it throws up pell-mell from time to time, either in dreams or in the waking state, to cloud or confuse our... Subconscient in a sort of cryptic notations which are jumbled up to form fantastic patterns and thrown up in our dreams and even in the waking state. Modern psychotherapy tries to trace many of the mental and physical illnesses to this obscure action of the Subconscient. Most of the strange and stubborn symptoms of psychoneurosis can be safely attributed to it and successfully grappled with by one who has... Subconscient is above the Inconscient and just below our surface physical consciousness, below the threshold, as it is called. It is, to quote Sri Aurobindo, "the extreme border of our inner existence where it meets the Inconscient; it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient struggles into a half-consciousness; the surface physical consciousness also, when it sinks back from the working level ...
... culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes. But these changes themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not in any other, not in the spirit of America or ...
... presence of all that that the body had... never, never in all its life had it felt such pain, and even now... Is that, is that the lever?... I do not know. But the salvation is physical —not at all mental, but physical . I mean to say that it is not escape, it is here . This I felt very strongly. Page 179 But the body had a few very difficult hours. And always, for it, it is all the... there was art, there was even cooking! But all that was very symbolic. And I was explaining to him as though on a table, in front of a vast landscape. I was explaining to him the principle on which physical exercises and games were going to be organised. It was very clear, very precise, I was giving as though a demonstration, and it was as though I was showing on a very small scale a miniature representation... from all that... ( After some hesitation ) No... it was right there, it did not seem to be "foreign" to earth. It was a harmony: a conscious harmony behind things; a conscious harmony behind the physical exercises and the games; a conscious harmony behind the decoration, the art; a conscious harmony behind the food... I mean that all this seems to be at the opposite pole of what is now upon earth ...
... But the urge cannot be fully successful — labouring as it does under conditions antithetical to the Divine — unless the free and un-involved and eternally expressed Supermind from beyond the mental-vital-physical complex comes down in response to the call of that complex, a call centrally spurred by what Sri Aurobindo names the psychic being, the true soul which is the immortal spark in us of the Eternal... "I am physically immortal." Then he gives us his own adverse reflections on the possibility of physical immortality. Nowhere in the voluminous writings of the Master can we find the statement attributed to him or even any approximation to it. The actual Yogic situation related to the question of physical immortality is entirely missed by Rajneesh. According to Sri Aurobindo, what he termed Supermind... have used a master-intellect to build the thought-system have not been felt at all. One who feels them would know that the "logical" and "philosophical" books were written, first, to employ fully the mental instrument which is a powerful means of manifestation and which for a world-accepting Yoga is a valuable help in establishing that Yoga's hold on the world. Secondly, the usual jibe that mysticism ...
... to call on all his mental and physical faculties to learn and teach the Mass Exercises. This was a year-long passion, from the day the Mass Exercises book was out, around the 16th of December till the 2nd of December the following year, the day of Demonstration at Sports Ground. It (the Mass Exercises) was at once a challenge, a mantra, a ritual that guided and shadowed his physical activities in the... away on 18 July 1989. Bholanath left our shores — leaving an emptiness behind not easy to fill, nor forget. Where has he gone? What was he? When he was amongst us, it was difficult to place him. Mentally he lagged behind us. But, if we see him without the mind — maybe he is ahead. Whatever the debate, his simplicity and innocence were enough to see him safely on that last journey, to land him on vaster ...
... the consciousness behind the veil of the outer being, the mental or vital or physical within, which is in direct touch with the universal mind, the universal life forces, the universal physical forces. Sometimes, on the other hand, we mean an inmost mental, vital, physical, more specifically called the true mind, the true vital, the true physical consciousness which is nearest to the soul and can most... visible projection of a greater and subtler invisible physical consciousness which is much more complex, much more aware, much wider in its receptiveness, much more open and plastic and free. If you understand and experience this truth, then only you will be able to realise what is meant by the inner mental, the inner vital, the inner physical consciousness. But it must be noted that this term “inner”... outer mind, a surface mental action, instrumental for the partial expression of a larger mind behind of which we are not ordinarily aware and can only know by going inside ourselves. So too what we know of the vital in us is only the outer vital, a surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by going within. Equally, what we call our physical being is only a visible ...
... practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification... of the world from the universal Inconscience. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or Page 156 their perversions and reveal... knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and Page 141 forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical ...
... and Sadhana For one who wants to practise sadhana, sadhana must come first—reading and mental development can only be subordinate things. I don't know that it [ mental development ] helps the sadhana and I don't quite understand what is meant by the phrase. What is a fact is that mental like physical work can be made a part of the sadhana,—not as a rival to the sadhana or as another activity... the more physical to the more mental part of the external consciousness. If the power to meditate long is there, a sadhak will naturally do it and care little for reading—unless he has reached the stage when everything is part of the Yogic consciousness because that is permanent. Sadhana is the aim of a sadhak, not mental development. But if he has spare time, those who have the mental turn will... that you cannot separate yourself from your mental consciousness in its activity. Naturally, if you take your mental consciousness off the reading, you can't understand what is being read, for it is with the mental consciousness that one understands. You have not to make the mental consciousness separate from the reading, but yourself separate from the mental consciousness. You have to be the Witness ...
... live in that. One has at the same time to be aware—it becomes possible when one lives in the cosmic consciousness, cosmic Self and cosmic Nature,—of the different beings in oneself, psychic, mental, vital, physical, and then there appears also the central being which stands above all of them and is the source of all the surface personalities. It is only then that one can know the aspect or bhava one is... psychic being to effect in that freedom the full transformation of the nature. All your former experiences were preparing for this, but the physical consciousness came across. Now that you have had the glimpse of the self separate from the body, this physical difficulty may soon be overcome. Page 393 The experience you have is the experience of the true self. Untouched by grief and... 396 that you were both moving in the formless Infinite as spiritual beings and so it was easier to feel the presence than to see any physical form. Not that the form cannot be there, but it is less insistent and therefore not so soon seen as on the physical plane. The silence in the head and heart and the emptiness are both necessary and desirable. When they are there, the consciousness finds ...
... that one enters into the inner planes of consciousness, it may be the subconscient, it may be the mental, vital or subtle physical plane. From there one goes into the corresponding worlds or else one rises up into higher planes superconscious to us—to the ranges above our mind or to the spiritual mental plane in which one can unite with the Sachchidananda consciousness or to the Supramental. What you... you describe seems to be the subconscient, but that may be only a first step in the going inside. In samadhi it is the inner mental, vital, physical which are separated from the outer, no longer covered by it—therefore they Page 249 can freely have inner experiences. The outer mind is either quiescent or in some way reflects or shares the experience. As for the central consciousness... has ] depends on the nature of the physical consciousness you keep. When there is the descent of consciousness into the body one becomes aware of a subtle physical consciousness and that can remain in samadhi—one seems to be aware of the body, but it is really the subtle body and not the outward physical. But also one can go deep within and yet be aware of the physical body also and of working upon it ...
... Page 137 power attempting to follow certain mind-made rules of ethics. The ethical endeavour has considerable value, but it cannot eradicate the evil from the roots. Our present mental-vital-physical status lacks the light and the force by which alone suffering and conflict can be avoided. We have to explore our deeper ranges of being, bring into the forefront the inner self, the true soul... "this world." What is the nature of this world? It seems to start in brute matter without consciousness. It develops the quivering of life. It attains the level of mind. It keeps straining beyond the mental. It is a world of evolution in which the initial stage is an apparent negation of the Divine. The open affirmation of the Divine is therefore its evolutionary aim. But such affirmation cannot stop ...
... regards man always as a mental, vital and physical being and it aims at a human perfection well within these limits, a perfection of mind, life and body, an expansion and refinement of the intellect and knowledge, of the will and power, of ethical character, aim and conduct, of aesthetic sensibility and creativeness, of emotional balanced poise and enjoyment, of vital and physical soundness, regulated... spiritual being may not be something vague and indefinable or else but imperfectly realised and dependent on the mental support and the mental limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life, but takes account of the... By personal effort a precursory change, a preliminary conversion can be effected; it amounts to a greater or less spiritualising of our mental motives, our character and temperament, and a mastery, stilling or changed action of the vital and physical life. This converted subjectivity can be made the base of some communion or unity of the soul in mind with the Divine and some partial reflection ...
... are stated,—due to certain mental and physical circumstances—if these are changed, death is not inevitable any longer. Obviously the alteration can only come "if" certain conditions are satisfied,—all progress and change by evolution depends upon an "if" which Page 308 gets satisfied. If the animal mind had not been pushed to develop speech and reason, mental man would never have come into... Yoga—they were there all the time. What is meant by the mental control being removed is that the mental simply kept them in check but could not remove them. So in Yoga the mental has to be replaced by the psychic or spiritual self-control which could do what the vital cannot, only many Sadhaks do not make this exchange in time and withdraw the mental control merely. "The strength of such impulses as... unaided effort—it is the latter that is meant in the "two paths of Yoga". But Agni as the fire of tapasyā can burn in either case. The Mother says that the first effect of Yoga is to take away the mental control so that the ideas and desires which were so long checked become surprisingly prominent and create difficulties. 7 They were not prominent because they were getting some satisfaction ...
... the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself in the human creature.... The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek... explained patiently in letter after letter the genesis and the development of physical culture in the Ashram. He even wrote two long highly luminous articles on physical education and justified its appearance in his spiritual Ashram: These articles were published at that time in the Ashram Journal, Bulletin of Physical Education. Interested readers may look through these two articles and gain much... , but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga ...
... 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 of His manifestation. We do not become perfect... g and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the 1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother —Nov. 19, 1912 2 For further details on the subject, refer to my book, "In 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... attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, entrenched in its obscurity and inert conservatism, and reluctant to open or respond to the higher light. Most initiates of Eternity have, therefore, sought to enjoy the transporting bliss of the divine union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity ...
... Page 391 and infinite and the same in the individual and in the universe. And at first his blindness, his treatment of this Divine as the mere outward man, his seeing of only the mental and physical relation seems to him a sin against the Mightiness that was there. For the being whom he called Krishna, Yadava, comrade, was this immeasurable Greatness, this incomparable Might, this Spirit ...
... overmind view. When one is in the mind, life or physical plane, then it is the overmind Influence that comes down and modifies the mind, life or physical workings in greater or less degree according to the possibilities or the thing to be done at the moment. It is not the sole power as it is in its own plane but works under mental, vital or physical conditions. Its power is more subjective than ob... wideness of opening to the universal mental, vital, physical existence and, if the sadhak responds more to these than to the higher consciousness, then he does not get free. Sometimes even the ego gets aggrandised. But if the psychic is awake, then there is not this danger; one finds one's true being in place of the ego. She has had experiences but on the mental and vital plane. It is only a real... subtle penetrates everywhere the gross physical, the physical body also feels like that. But then it does not feel disturbed by the pains or motions of the illness—they do not affect its peace or Ananda. Degrees in the Higher Consciousness The plane makes a considerable difference in the power and luminosity and completeness etc. of the experience. A mental realisation is very different from an ...
... will of the Purusha to get rid of the defect and its causes. There are four things that he must have; first, equality in the most concrete practical sense of the word, samatā , freedom from mental, vital, physical preferences, an even acceptance of all God's workings within and around him; secondly, a firm peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble, śānti ; thirdly, a positive inner spiritual... a while in a diminished form, but as the calm of equality increases, deepens, becomes more essential and compact, ghana , they disappear, cease to colour the mental and vital substance or occur only as touches on the most external physical mind, are unable to penetrate within, and at last even that recurrence, that appearance at the outer gates of mind ceases. Then there can come the living reality... the very ground of the divine spiritual nature. The mental being in the body tries to compel and conquer life, but is at every turn compelled by it, because it submits to the desire reactions of the vital self. To be equal, not to be overborne by any stress of desire, is the first condition of real mastery, self-empire is its basis. But a mere mental equality, however great it may be, is hampered by ...
... body had... never, never in its whole life had it felt such a sorrow, and even now... ( Mother touches her heart ). Is this, is this the lever?... I don't know. But salvation is PHYSICAL—not at all mental, but PHYSICAL. I mean it's not in escape: it's... HERE. That I felt very strongly. But the body had a few very difficult hours. And to it, that's always indifferent, it says, "All right," it's... There were games, there was art, there was even cooking! But all that was very symbolic. I explained it to him as if on a table, in front of a large landscape; I explained the principle on whose basis physical exercises and games were going to be organized. It was very clear, very precise, I even did a demonstration, as if showing him on a very small scale: a representation on a very small scale of what... conditions on earth seem very far from all that.... No... It was just there, it didn't seem "foreign" to the earth. It was a harmony A conscious harmony behind things: a conscious harmony behind physical exercises and games; a conscious harmony behind decoration and art; a conscious harmony behind food... I mean that all this looks poles apart from what is now on earth. Not... No? ...
... invited to peace and cannot receive it, it Page 53 brings up inertia instead. Does the mental tamas remain till one realises the supermind? No. The mental tamas need not remain—the physical can only disappear altogether by the supra-mental descent. Does not the whole nature get transformed only when the Supramental descends? Yes—but there... drive out the mental or physical tamas by their intensity? For the time being only. It must be a higher power that will take them away permanently. When there is intensity in the vital it always brings down a lot of energy. What does the intensity in the physical give? Solidity or stability. You wrote: "Get rid of the tamas of the physical which makes it... The year 1934 There is a doubt in the physical mind whether, when the mental proper and the vital are not totally quieted, the purification of the physical can begin. Does it imagine that everything is done by sections? All the parts of the being react upon each other. The purification of the physical being is long but the mind and the vital are thoroughly and p ...
... 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 of His manifestation. We do not become perfect... divine self-expression. Attuned to the same key, ring Sri Aurobindo's words : "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... attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, en- trenched in its obscurity and inert conservatism, and reluctant to open or respond to the higher light. Most initiates of Eternity have, therefore, sought to enjoy the transporting bliss of the divine union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity ...
... to the cosmic Inconscience not near enough to the original Superconscience; he has to find himself as the mental and vital ego before he can find himself as the soul or spirit. 38 The 'I' or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true... representative below in the manifestation — the psychic being — supports from within the evolution of the individual, standing behind and guiding the parts of the outer instrumental being — mental, vital and physical, receiving the essence of all their experiences and growing by these experiences, carrying the consciousness from life to life. When the psychic being realises its oneness with the Jivatman... so that at no time is there any real self or conscious reason of existence behind all the flux.... There is a real and stable power of our being behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His ...
... भोगसामर्थ्यमिति प्राणशक्तिः । Purnata, prasannata, samata, bhogasamarthyam, iti pranashaktih. Page 11 When in the physical sensations we are conscious of a full and steady vital force which is clear and glad and bright and undisturbed by any mental or physical shock, then there is the siddhi of the prana, the vital or nervous system. Then we become fit for whatever bhoga God imposes on... vaster than any attack of the world, is the attitude of titiksha. Udasinata Udasinata is indifference to the dwandwas or dualities; it means literally being seated above, superior to all physical and mental touches. The udasina, free from desire, either does not feel the touch of joy & grief, pleasure and pain, liking and disliking, or he feels them as touching his mind and body, but not himself... sattwic light and ease. Hasya Hasyam is the active side of sukham; it consists in an active Page 5 internal state of gladness and cheerfulness which no adverse experience mental or physical can trouble. Its perfection is God's stamp and seal on the siddhi of the samata. It is in our internal being the image of the smile of Srikrishna playing, bálavat , as the eternal balaka and ...
... 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 of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect... of the Transcendence would be logically its supreme conclusion. The integral view of the unity of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment... the truth that these two conceptions disfigure. It is true that for this world of form in which we are set for our self-realisation, nothing is entirely valid until it has possessed itself of our physical consciousness and manifested on the lowest levels in harmony with its manifestation on the highest summits. It is equally true that form and matter asserting themselves as a self-existent reality ...
... the cells. (2) When one comes in contact with the Divine Power, one at once can start thinking that he is an Avatar or Messiah. The human vital rushes up to capture the Divine by his vital, mental and physical power instead of giving oneself completely to that Divine Power — he wants to possess the Divine with his Asuric ego. This is the case of many seekers who have fallen from the Divine path. They... all will manifest itself outwardly and inwardly — even the feeling, seeing, dealing, etc. that every human being possesses will be changed completely. A society free from all imperfection mental, vital and physical in which all human beings will embody the Truth of the One, individual and universal and transcendental. (4) Hostile Maya is difficult to surmount. Careful not to be dazzled by anything... forward with Divine Truth. None will be able to hinder the work that is destined. (11) Ultimately I found the truth that to argue with the mind, to discuss a matter with it and try to teach others by mental reasoning is not the right way, — because the mind cannot bring out the underlying spiritual idea. I have noted many times while arguing with friends or others, that either they do not understand ...
... to fight for one’s convictions on the battlefields of the mind. “Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of mental and physical tortures.” He himself suffered continuously from migraines, bad eyesight and paralysis progressiva . “Change has required its innumerable martyrs … Nothing has been bought more dearly than that ...
... insight into this truth gets expressed variously. Of course, a certain central mould of soul-personality persists throughout a life-time, but it is not a rigid cast either. Always the outer mental-vital physical being is a constantly changing mixture, and according as the sun-white rainbow-shimmered soul looks out or not, the Mother responds with compliments or criticisms, while keeping always the ...
... attachment of the soul to the physical get rid of the body-sense. We say again "I am not the life" and by concentration on this knowledge and renunciation of attachment to the vital movements and desires, get rid of the life-sense. We say, finally, "I am not the mind, the motion, the sense, the thought" and by concentration on this knowledge and renunciation of the mental activities, get rid of the ... to concentrate on the thought of the Brahman and shut out from us all other ideas, so that this dynamo of mind shall cease to work upon our external or varied internal existence; by mental cessation the vital and physical play also shall fall to rest in an eternal samadhi, some inexpressible deepest trance of the being in which we shall pass into the absolute Existence. This discipline is evidently... becomes conscious of the current of persistence of mental personality, it thinks of itself as a mental soul occupying the body whether Page 337 once or repeatedly and returning from earthly living to mental worlds beyond; the persistence of this mental being mentally enjoying or suffering sometimes in the body, sometimes on the mental or vital plane of Nature it calls its immortal existence ...
... constant intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, brings the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by past... psychic ordinarily is deep within. Very few people are aware of their souls—when they speak of their soul, they usually mean the vital + mental being or else the (false) soul of desire. The psychic remains behind and acts only through the mind, vital and physical wherever it can. For this reason the psychic being except where it is very much developed has only a small and partial, concealed and mixed... nce to live there. For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternately—but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable. The other side of discipline is with regard to the activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord ...
... land of its birth. The genius of India can never be satisfied with a sort of agnostic spirituality and negative mysticism; nor with an endeavour at dissolving the variety and diversity of her mental and physical existence; nor, again, with setting at a discount the urge to realise a dynamic divinity, a spiritual and mystical light turned towards the flowering of noble and beautiful world-values. Non-violence ...
... consciousness, missioning upwards much futile or perilous stuff of which the origin is obscure to us, in dream, in mechanical repetitions of all kinds, in untraceable impulṣions and motives, in mental, vital, physical perturbations and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our obscurest parts of nature." 3 This subconscient evolutionary basis of our being is the root cause why things and... are but planes of sleep to our ignorant physical mind which is not at all at home in these planes ? 1 As a matter of fact, our apparent waking from a physical slumber is not a true waking at all; it is merely a full emergence into a gross external and objective sense of reality of the apparently stable but yet transient structures of the physical consciousness. According to a powerful and... self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit." 1 Also, "if the subliminal and subconscient may be compared to a sea which throws up the waves of our surface mental existence, the superconscience may be compared to an ether which constitutes, contains, overroofs ...
... so sure, after all, of this inner indication; it does not assert itself with sufficient force for me to trust it." But if you were quite indifferent, that is, if you had no desire, either mental or vital or physical desire, you would know with certainty that it is that which must be done and nothing else. What comes and gets in the way is preference—preferences and desires. Every day one may have hundreds... trembling there like a leaf; no, you must do it entirely, sincerely, then it is all-powerful. The best is when the word comes to you spontaneously: you call in a moment of great difficulty (mental, vital, physical, emotional, whatever it may be) and suddenly that springs up in you, two or three words, like magical words. You must remember these and form the habit of repeating them in moments when di... same thing—you must sincerely want it. The first condition is not to begin thinking about the subject and building all sorts of ideas: opposing ideas, possibilities, and entering into a formidable mental activity. First of all, you must put the problem as though you were putting it to someone else, then keep silent, remain like that, immobile. And then, after a little while you will see that at least ...
... it supporting and moving or pouring into the system and giving the energy needed for the work whether it be mental, vital or physical. There is naturally a higher Energy above the present universal forces and it is that which will transform the nature and take up the mental, vital, physical energies and change them into its own likeness. If you mean by failure the weakness of the body, it... contact remains, the Force is felt supporting or doing the work and the sadhana progresses. The Force from above is the Force of the Higher Consciousness. That from behind works as a mental, vital or physical force according to need. When the being is open to it and there is a certain passivity to its working, it takes the place of the personal activity and the Person is a witness of its action... receptive silence of the mind, an effacement of the mental ego and the reduction of the mental being to the position of a witness, a close contact with the Divine Power and an openness of the being to that one Influence and no other are the conditions for becoming an instrument of the Divine, moved by that and that only. That there was no mental expectation was all to the good; if there had been ...
... the whole of knowledge; it must appear that man is a mental as well as a physical and vital being and even much more essentially mental than physical or vital. Even though his psychology is strongly affected and limited by his physical being and environment, it is not at its roots determined by them, but constantly reacts, subtly determines their action, effects even their new-shaping by the force of... need is to progress to a larger fulfilment in which, if the old is taken up, it must be transformed and exceeded. For the underlying truth of things is constant and eternal, but its mental figures, its life forms, its physical embodiments call constantly for growth and change. It is this principle and necessity that justify an age of individualism and rationalism and make it, however short it may be... clear and potent physical Science: it has proceeded by the discovery of the laws of the physical universe and the economic and sociological conditions of human life as determined by the physical being of man, his environment, his evolutionary history, his physical and vital, his individual and collective need. But after a time it must become apparent that the knowledge of the physical world is not the ...
... itself with the infinity of universal Mind. When we break out of the narrow limits of the external physical mind we begin to see inwardly and to feel this wideness, in the end this universality and infinity of the mental self-space. Thoughts are not the essence of mind-being, they are only an activity of mental nature; if that activity ceases, what appears then as a thought-free existence that manifests... the retreat of the thought-forms beyond the horizon of the wide space of mental Nature. You felt this horizon to be in yourself somewhere, but evidently it was in that larger self-space which even in its more limited field just between the eyebrows you felt to be bigger than the corresponding physical space. In fact, though the inner mind spaces have horizons, they stretch beyond those horizons—illimitably... —not the unborn Self above, the Atman of the Upanishads, for that is differently experienced through the silence of the thinking mind, but the inner being, the psychic supporting the inner mental, vital, physical being, of which I have spoken. A time must come for every seeker of complete self-knowledge when he is thus aware of living in two worlds, two consciousnesses at the same time, two parts of ...
... mother that are indicated, but the two sisters, Rodasi, feminine forms of heaven and earth, who symbolise the general energies of the mental and physical consciousness. It is their dark states—the obscured consciousness between its two limits of the mental and the physical,—which by the happy movement of the nervous dynamism begin to labour in accordance with the movement or under the control of Vayu and... thousand and let thy movement arrive in the utter mass of its entire potential energy. 6 It is the completely varied all-ensphering, all-energising mental illumination with its full perfection of being, power, bliss, knowledge, mentality, vital force, physical activity that he desires. For, this attained, the subconscient is compelled to yield up all its hidden possibilities at the will of the perfected... of sensational existence with its undelivered burden of unrealised delight climbing full of the "Ghrita" and the "Soma", the clarified mental consciousness and the illumined Ananda that descends from above, to the heaven of Immortality. The "secret Name" of the mental consciousness, the tongue with which the gods taste the world, the nexus of Immortality, is the Ananda which the Soma symbolises. For ...
... Synthesis of Yoga Chapter VIII The Liberation of the Spirit The purification of the mental being and the psychic prana—we will leave aside for the time the question of the physical purification, that of the body and physical prana, though that too is necessary to an integral perfection,—prepares the ground for a spiritual liberation. Śuddhi is the condition... and because even with regard to ourselves, to our own psychological existence it is a false centre of unity; for it tries to find the unity of our being in an identification with a shifting mental, vital, physical personality, not with the eternal self of our total existence. Only in the spiritual self can we possess the true unity; for there the individual enlarges to his own total being and finds himself... the spirit. We have already had to speak of purification from the psychic desire of which the craving of the prana is the evolutionary or, as we may put it, the practical basis. But this is in the mental and psychic nature; spiritual desirelessness has a wider and more essential meaning: for desire has a double knot, a lower knot in the prana, which is a craving in the instruments, and a very subtle ...
... and non-reception of slumber. Subliminal consciousness opens itself up to larger worlds of the subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds, but the experiences of these worlds are similar to the experiences which come under the scope of our ordinary physical, vital, Page 40 mental consciousness. Hence, the experiences of subliminal consciousness can be said to be experiences of yogic... the process of evolution starting from the inconscience. The material existence has only a physical, not a mental, individuality. It is only when evolution proceeds to develop forms of life and forms of mind that individuality begins to appear. This individuality takes the form of the mental, vital and physical ego-sense. Developing from inconscience to self-conscience, from nescience of self and things... "The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind-faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain-memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflections which ...
... the subtle body than the physical, but connected with the corresponding parts in the gross physical body also) there are centres proper to each level of the being. There is a centre at the top of the head and above it which is that of the above-mind or higher consciousness; a centre in the forehead between the eyebrows which is that of the thinking mind, mental will, mental vision; a centre in the throat... without being involved in these things. You have to separate yourself from the mind also. You have to feel yourself even in the mental, vital, physical levels (not only above) a consciousness that is neither mind, life, nor body. For the buzz of the physical mind, reject it quietly, without getting disturbed, till it feels discouraged and retires shaking its head and saying, "This fellow... g mind: these are the mental centres. Below comes the vital—the heart (emotional), the navel (the dynamic life-centre), another below the navel in the abdomen which is the lower or sensational vital centre. Finally, at the bottom of the spine is the Muladhara or physical centre. Behind the heart is the psychic centre. If one concentrates in the head as many do it is a mental-spiritual meditation one ...
... which feels itself quite apart from the surface play of the mind and the vital and physical Nature. 79 Similarly, Jnana Yoga, based on the Advaita (nondualist) school of Vedanta, arrives by the same means at the right discrimination of the true nature of the Self and of the imposition on it of the mental illusion that leads to egoic identification and attachment. In the Advaita process of... mind, vital, body, saying continually "I am not the mind", "I am not the vital", "I am not the body", seeing these things as separate from one's real self—and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalised, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens... Describing the "very powerful method" of the Sankhyas for the separation of Purusha and Prakriti, Sri Aurobindo says: One enforces on the mind the position of the Witness—all action of mind, vital, physical becomes an outer play which is not myself or mine, but belongs to Nature and has been enforced on an outer me. I am the witness Purusha; I am silent, detached, not bound by any of these things. There ...
... reasons which are stated,—due to certain mental and physical circumstances—if these are changed, death is not inevitable any longer. Obviously the alteration can only come "if" certain conditions are satisfied—all progress and change by evolution depends upon an "if" which gets satisfied. If the animal mind had not been pushed to develop speech and reason, mental man would never have come into existence... by imposing siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life—like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after... thing and with out it there can be no physical siddhi. But the fullness of the supramental change is not possible if the body remains as it is, a slave of death, disease, decay, pain, unconsciousness and all the other results of the ignorance. If these are to remain the descent of the supramental is hardly necessary—for a change of consciousness which would bring mental-spiritual union with the Divine, ...
... Aurobindo says that illness comes from outside, what exactly is it that comes? It is a kind of vibration made up of a mental suggestion, a vital force of disorder and certain physical elements which are the materialisation of the mental suggestion and the vital vibration. And these physical elements can be what we have agreed to call germs, microbes, this and that and many other things. It may be accompanied... yes, you mean you did not understand the difference between yogic forces and the supramental nature. But Sri Aurobindo explains it. I did not understand. In the outer consciousness, mental and physical—corporal—in order to get a result like the one we were speaking about just now (for example, to have a protective personal atmosphere which can keep you safe from any undesirable contact), you... obliged to drive away with a similar force in your thought all suggestions that after all, the physical world is full of illnesses, and these are contagious, and because one was in contact with somebody who is ill, one is sure to catch it, and then, that the inner methods are not powerful enough to act on the physical, and all kinds of stupidities of which the air is full. These are collective suggestions ...
... human consciousness, the mental, vital, physical consciousness, one must concentrate in order to find the psychic. It is only if you have soared up out of the human consciousness and entered consciously the higher regions above the mind, far above the mind, that you no longer need to concentrate in the psychic because you will naturally find it. But to rise above the mental consciousness, not into... is... it is more a physical action—preparing oneself for the physical action. It is more a way of opening oneself to the energy, the universal energy, to prepare for the action. It is a contact with the energy, the universal energy which is there, it is to help the body to participate in the work. At that moment it is something very physical. This is truly the basis of physical culture: to prepare... it is no longer altogether material... It's because you have a skin that you don't enter into one another like that; otherwise even the subtle physical, you see... like a kind of almost perceptible vapour which goes out from bodies, which is the subtle physical, it intermingles terribly, and it produces all kinds of reactions, constantly, of one person upon another. One may without knowing why, without ...
... and well poised; indeed they said that in ill health or physical weakness they could do nothing—it impaired their power. These certainly had no lack or deficiency of the red aura. The woman you speak of was evidently under a vital Influence. A vital Influence always acts by disorganising the system and by disturbing the mental, vital or physical balance. But such cases of phenomena in the vital mind... Yoga is to establish direct contact with the Divine above and bring down the divine consciousness from above into all the centres. Occult powers belonging to the Page 573 mental, vital and subtle physical planes are not our object. One can have contact with various Divine Forms and Personalities on the way, but there is no need to establish them in the centres, though sometimes that happens... give erring suggestions and impulsions and pervert the inner life. Many are those who, attracted by these powers and beings of the vital plane, have ended in a definitive spiritual fall or in mental and physical perversion and disorder. One comes inevitably into contact with the vital plane and enters into it in the expansion of conscious ness which results from an inner opening, but one ought never ...
... multiplicity which we see everywhere as the two opposite, yet companion poles of all existence. For every individual being is the Self, the Divine in spite of the outward limitations of the mental and physical form through which it presents itself at the actual moment, in the actual field of space, in the actual succession of circumstances that make up the web of inner state and outward action and... reason of existence behind all the flux or none except that Quiescent who cares for none of these things. There is a real and stable power of our being behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His eternal... the condition of right living. But rightly to know and express the Highest is not easy for man the mental being because the highest Truth and therefore the highest modes of existence are supramental. They repose on the essential unity of what seem to the intellect and mind and are to our mental experience of the world opposite poles of existence and idea and therefore irreconcilable opposites and ...
... the Divine and when this inward fact is recognised the genuine spiritual life has begun and one is aware of one's soul directly and not only of the reflection or rather emanation of it in the mental-vital-physical complex. I may add that no matter how much the psychic being grows, it still remains a child - simple, straight, trusting, humble. But this child is at the same time an extremely wise one, with... say, the adjective "impeding". Another epithet, "obstructive" has a better effect because of the cluster of the consonants - b,s,f,r -which tend to hold back the voice, but the meaning is primarily physical. "Reluctant", over and above having ct and nt in close succession, bears a subjective shade, an emotional attitude lurking in it, in tune with the poefs entering into a hidden life of natural ...
... possible breadth of universality and infinity. All man's age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion, all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour of Nature and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense or foundation. For the individual to arrive... find himself is his great necessity. In his complete surrender and self-giving to the Supreme it is he who finds his perfect self-finding in a perfect self-offering. In the abolition of the mental, vital, physical ego, even of the spiritual ego, it is the formless and limitless Individual that has the peace and joy of its escape into its own Page 723 infinity. In the experience that he is... as his body has developed something unique and recognisable in the common physicality. He has, even, in the end to retire into himself in order to find himself, and it is only when he has found himself that he can become spiritually one with all; if he tries to achieve that oneness in the mind, in the vital, in the physical and has not yet a sufficiently strong individuality, he may be overpowered ...
... births one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it — it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not exercise... of certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being — inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical — knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The psychic... find the psychic being. The rest of the universe is formed in quite a different way. The universe contains all the domains higher than the physical: there is a global physical comprising the mental, the vital, etc., and all the domains above the mental are domains of a spiritual order, domains which are, for us, domains of the spirit, and it is this "spirit" which little by little, progressively ...
... The image evidently refers to the purified mental and emotional consciousness, the conscious heart, cetas , whose thoughts and emotions are the threads or fibres. Dyaus or Heaven is the pure mental principle not subjected to the reactions of the nerves and the body. In the seat of Heaven,—the pure mental being as distinguished from the vital and physical consciousness,—the thoughts and emotions become... sacrifice which is the progress of man from the physical to the superconscient. He enters into it and encompasses it wearing the cloud of the heavenly ether, nabhas , the mental principle, as his robe and veil. Havir haviṣmo mahi sadma daivyaṁ, nabho vasānaḥ pari yāsi adhvaram . The divine delight comes to us wearing the luminous-cloudy veil of the forms of mental experience. In that march or sacrificial... the precious liquid. So the physical system of the man who drinks this strong wine of Ananda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heats of life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of the Soma; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to hold it; it will spill and lose it as soon as or even before it is tasted or it will break down mentally and physically under the touch ...
... travail and struggle and labour grows full of a divine delight. As it is said in the Veda that by Truth is the progress towards the Truth, that is to say by the growing law of the Truth in the mental and physical consciousness we arrive finally beyond mind and body to the superconscient Truth, so here it is indicated that by Ananda is the progress towards the Ananda,—by a divine delight growing in all... satisfactions and by the fourth, the delight pouring from the Truth. The cleansed hands of the Sacrificer, niktahastaḥ , are possibly symbolic 7 of the purified physical being; the power comes from a fulfilled life-energy; the force of clear mental vision, vicakṣaṇa , is the sign of the truth-illumined mind. These are the conditions in mind, life and body for the overflowing of the honey over the triple... contain it; that unconquerably abundant and infinite sweetness breaks out and overflows everywhere drenching with delight the whole of our existence. With that honey the three pairs of satisfactions, mental, vital, bodily are impregnated by this all-pervasive overflowing plenty and they become full of its sweetness, madhumantaḥ . And so becoming, at once they begin to move upward. Touched Page 330 ...
... another of what we ordinarily regard as our self. The general nature we take to be our own is the ego-formation which demarcates each of us from his fellows and stamps on certain shades of mental, vital and physical being the sense that we are those shades. Then when we turn inward and realise a finer being as our own we have the impression that the ego has made the choice. And we may ask why Sri Aurobindo... consciousness fixing itself on another psychological state than the ego-bound outer one. And what has guided the consciousness is a projection of the true soul, the psychic being, into the mental-vital-physical complex accompanied by the ego-sense. While the ego directs this complex into the common ways of individual existence with its barbaric or polished self-regard and possessiveness, the psychic... opening an inner eye to strange glorious scenes or to a play of forces seeming to affect the very body although actually the occult or spiritual phenomena have the subtle-physical part of us as their field and the gross-physical form experiences no more than a mirror-effect. The mirror-effect can be productive of happy results in our nerves and even organs but essentially there is no transformation ...
... by his vital and physical impulsions, his mental being is not dynamic enough to make its will prevail over them. His will is not "free" because it is not strong enough to be free, it is the slave of the forces that act on or in his vital and physical nature. In the case of Socrates the will is so far free that it stands above the play of these forces and he determines by his mental idea and resolve... all is foreseeable; if there is a divine Omniscience and Omnipotence it must be so. Even then what is foreseen has to be worked out, actually is worked out by a play of forces,—spiritual, mental, vital, physical forces—and in that plane of forces there is no absolute rigidity discoverable. Personal will or endeavour is one of those forces—Napoleon when asked why he believed in Fate, yet was always... him into the world. Each has his own destiny and his entering into a particular family in one life is only an incident. Obviously, neither Nature nor Destiny nor the Divine work in the mental way or by the law of the mind or according to its standards—that is why even to the scientist and the philosopher Nature, Destiny, the way of the Divine, all remain a mystery. Nature is very ...
... association or identity of result of virtue with some getting of his interest and pleasure and result of sin with some loss of materially or vitally desirable things and the infliction of mental, vital or physical pain. Human law proceeds on this principle by meeting the grosser more obvious offences with punishment and avenging pain or loss and on the other hand assuring the individual in some degree... emerge. This correspondence is, still, more essentially true in the inner field, in the spiritual, mental and emotional result and reaction of the good or the evil or of the effects of its outgoing action. But where is the firm link of correspondence between the ethical and the more vital and physical hedonistic powers of life? How does my ethical good turn into smiling fortune, crowned prosperity,... of the boomerang and cycles back towards the will that has cast it on the world. The stone we hurl rashly against the universal Life is cast back at us and may crush, maim or injure our own mental and physical being. But this mechanical rebound is not the whole principle of Karma. Nor is Karma wholly a mixed ethical-hedonistic order Page 372 in its total significance, for there are involved ...
... universal in its light of knowledge or its movements, no inner sense or power which would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life... hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organized collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilization which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited... insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental supernatural that can effect this evolutionary miracle. At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being ...
... change, the putting away of the old mind, vital, physical consciousness and the emergence of a new consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth-becoming from the true being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true... the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow concreteness leads more often, not to a darkness, but to a wide emptiness and silence which begins afterwards to fill with the light of a deeper greater truer consciousness ...
... recover and be as if it had not happened. These things, hard forms of speech, anger etc., are habits formed by the vital-physical consciousness and, as they are supported by the subconscient, very difficult to change. If one can conquer or change them by force of will or mental or spiritual control, so much the better. But if one cannot do this at once, one must not be upset or think oneself unfit... things that trouble you. In fact all these ignorant vital movements originate from outside in the ignorant universal Nature; the human being forms in his superficial parts of being, mental, vital, physical, a habit of certain responses to these waves from outside. It is these responses that he takes as his own character (anger, desire, sex etc.) and thinks he cannot be otherwise. But that is... the going inward that most helps to deliver the nature. If the anger did not come, it must be because the vital force of the attack is diminishing and it must be more in the physical mind and the external (physical) vital that it acts. You have a great strength for action; as for the inner growth and action of the sadhana you have a strength there too of the psychic and the vital,—it is only ...
... the attack is violent, at once if it is of a lesser character. Page 767 If there is temporary physical inability, one can take rest, but solely for the purpose of recovering the physical energy. The idea of giving up physical work for mental self-development is a creation of the mental ego. The inertia gives room and power for the hostile forces to act. The Hostile Forces and Universal... that arise to justify it are of no value—it is not true that physical work is of an inferior value to mental culture, it is the arrogance of the intellect that makes the claim. All work done for the Divine is equally divine, manual labour done for the Divine is more divine than mental culture done for one's own development, fame or mental satisfaction. This inertia, numbness, pain should be thrown... knowledge. This idea of tests also is not a healthy idea and ought not Page 760 to be pushed too far. Tests are applied not by the Divine but by the forces of the lower planes—mental, vital, physical—and allowed by the Divine because that is part of the soul's training and helps it to know itself, its powers and the limitations it has to outgrow. The Mother is not testing you at every moment ...
... realise. Involved in mind, possessed by the ordinary phenomenon of mental thought, sensation, emotion, reception of the vital and physical impacts of the world and mechanical reaction to them, the soul is subject to Nature. Even its will and intelligence are determined by its mental nature, determined even more largely by the mental nature of its environment which acts upon, subtly as well as overtly... Therefore in proportion as the soul becomes again the knower, it gets the capacity of becoming also the controller of the action whether by spiritual force alone or by that force figuring itself in mental and physical activities. There may be in our soul life a perfect spiritual knowledge and understanding Page 433 not only of all our internal activities but of all the unrolling of things, events... Absolute which the true possession of Nature by the soul in its divine existence offers to the eternal seeker in man. Uplifted into the Spirit the soul is no longer subject to Nature; it is above this mental activity. It may be above it in detachment and aloofness, udāsīna , seated above and indifferent, or attracted by and lost in the absorbing peace or bliss of its undifferentiated, its concentrated ...
... all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual—this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice"—to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence... ss. The ordinary existence of man is not only an individual but an egoistic consciousness; it is, that is to say, the individual soul or Jivatman identifying himself with the nodus of his mental, vital, physical experiences in the movement of universal Nature, that is to say, with his mind-created ego, and, less intimately, with the mind, life, body which receive the experiences. Less intimately, because... of Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of the all-mastering Spirit. All this is when the mental being takes its station in its own spiritual planes, in the mental planes of Sat, Chit, Ananda, and casts down their light and delight upon the lower existence ...
... subconscient in Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology. The subconscient proper is entirely below the mental, vital and physical consciousness, but the mind, the vital and the physical are also partly submerged in the subconscient. Thus there is a subconscient mental, a subconscient vital and a subconscient physical. What Freud called the unconscious is related mainly to the subconscient vital. Remarking on... where all the worlds meet, mental, vital, subtle physical, pseudo-spiritual - but there is no order or firm foothold - a passage between the physical and the true spiritual realms. 17 The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of... psychology deal with. The three parts of the being just mentioned - mental, vital, physical - which yoga aims at changing, constitute what in Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology is called the outer or surface being which is distinguished from the inner being, composed of the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical, with the psychic or the soul as the innermost part of the being supporting ...
... mind's dreams and designs as well as its own hungers. But it is our most intractable part: its lust for pleasure and power appears to be endless and it can easily dictate its desires to its mental and physical companions. In the Rigveda the ultimate goal, figured as the dawn, is the outbreak of the Divine Consciousness upon our ignorance. And the final problem of Yoga is the turning of the vital energy... be taken in from outside. I have used the epithet "material" for the sweet secretion, but truly speaking the tongue reflects, as it were, a sensation in the subtle-physical body which is ours behind the gross-physical. Were the saliva with the Soma-taste to be chemically analysed, I don't think a special sugary element would be detected. All the same, "the honey of paradise" remains a fact... realm of the thinker and the domain of the physical doer. Perhaps I may even aver that in basic matters it has brought about the consent of the vital energy to self-conversion: the horse's head has been turned irrevocably towards the Spirit's glimmering East and there is no halt in the pacing in that direction. What I await is the sweeping up of the total physical consciousness into the rhythm of the Rigveda's ...
... everything, makes one predominantly mental, vital, physical or psychic, bound or free separate in Purusha or involved in the Prakriti. "9 " Consciousness has no need of a clear individual " I" to dispose variously the centralising stress. Wherever the stress is put, the " I " attaches itself to that, so that one thinks of oneself as a mental being or physical being or whatever it may be. The... in direct touch yyj, the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind H vital being and the physical nature. "² "The psychic being has always been valid, consenting to the play of mind, physical and vital, experiencing everything through them in the ignorant mental, vital and physical way." ³ " Atma is not the same as psychic-Atma is the self which is one in all, calm, ever at... exist without that. But it is quite possible to have a vital and physical being without a clearly evolved psychic being behind it. Still, one cannot make general statements that no aboriginal has a soul or there is no display of soul anywhere. "8 " The inner being is composed of the inner mental, inner vital, inner physical, but that is not the psychic being. The psychic is the inmost being ...
... understand rightly. 34 In the pursuit of the Divine, one has to abandon all mental conceptions and transcend Thought; and one of the common mental conceptions is that microbes cause illnesses. But there is also the inner condition of the body, for any disharmony within - in the physical, vital or mental - can equally father ailments. This problem was to come up again for discussion on... open the way to fear - mental, vital, physical- then we fall ill, or meet with an accident. While there are both internal and external causes of illnesses, the former are the more crucial: ... all illnesses, all, whatever they may be (I would add even accidents) come from a break in equilibrium .... ... you must have a triple equilibrium - mental, vital, physical- and not only in each of... money power, its true role and its current misuse; diseases, microbes and sanitary arrangements; universal will and individual initiative; love human and divine; the nature of religion; mental aberrations and physical ailments; Yogic consciousness; Yoga and Art; repulsion towards snakes and scorpions; surrender and sacrifice; and so on. Informative, friendly and revelatory, these intimate talks gently ...
... ignorant and mechanical, cannot be a power of God; for divine Power must be free in its workings, spiritual in its origin, spiritual in its greatness. The soul bound and egoistic in Nature, mental, vital, physical only, cannot be a portion of the Divine and itself a divine being; for such a divine being must be itself of Page 307 the very nature of the Divine, free, spiritual, self-developing ...
... Page 44 Godhead and here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of . his being, a consciousness of his consciousness, a nature of ,his. nature, but in the obscurity of avidya, of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. Hence, there is the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original nature in which it is one with its own... brought utterly under control; for only by an absolute control of the senses can the wise and calm intelligence be firmly established in its proper seat. It is by the act of intelligence and by mental self- discipline, that the first step can be taken. The second Page 40 important step is contained in the famous prescription that __ "Thou hast a right to action, but only to action, never... champions of unrighteousness whom he had to meet and conquer and slay, the revelation of the meaning of a civil and domestic war came home to him. He was then overcome suddenly by a violent sensational, physical and moral crisis. "What after all," he asked himself in effect, "is this fight for justice when reduced to its practical terms, but just this, a fight for the interests of oneself, one's brothers ...
... remarry, sexual infirmities turn him towards aphrodisiacs or self-abuse, sense of sin converts him to church-going or charity. When none of these steps are taken nor any "sublimating" mental or physical activity initiated to pull him somewhat out of himself, there is a smouldering despair which renders him a pest or a drunkard or a listless melancholic or at the worst a suicide. Sometimes ...
... sections of human society, and all ranges of the potentialities so that God can manifest in all His aspects in man's physical life. The Vedic stage prepared the natural external man for spirituality. The Second stage which covers the Puranic period takes up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical living and brings Page 100 him more directly into contact with the spirit and... and divinity within him. The post-Puranic age aimed at rendering him capable of taking up his whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life. This work had already begun, and this was signified by the outburst of philosophies, great spiritual movements of saints and bhaktas and an increasing resort to various paths of Yoga. But before this task... symbolism is constructed in terms of physical images and observances each with its psychical significance. The geography of the Puranas is expressly explained in the Puranas themselves as a rich poetic figure; it is a symbolic geography of the inner psychical universe. As in the Vedas, so in the Puranas, the cosmogony which is expressed sometimes in terms proper to the physical universe has a spiritual and ...
... and all our Mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. "Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowl- Page 259 edge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve... nor by the animal appetites of his blind physical consciousness but by a pure and free and enlightened reason. This reason is not the debating calculating reason of common men but the aspiring intelligence which seeks the truth and truth alone and yearns to know the Divine's Will at any price. The quietening of the turmoil of the unregenerate mental and the vital and the establishment in oneself... psychic centre. With a view to neutralise this nefarious interference, if the sadhaka takes some effective steps to free himself from the egoistic preferences and antipathies of his vital and the mental, he will find to his happy surprise that his secretly dwelling psychic being has started sending to his outer consciousness, in an unimpeded and regular way, its sacred injunctions and prohibitions ...
... one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it — it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not... certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being — inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical — knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The... all, the inner mental, vital and physical, and the outer, quite external nature of mind, life and body which is their instrument of expression. But above all is the central being (Jivatma) which uses them all for its manifestation: it is a portion of the Divine Self; but this reality of himself is hidden from the external man who replaces this inmost self and soul of him by the mental and vital ego ...
... Yogas but simply as a matter of fact pointing out the difference of aims. The aim of the other Yogas is, in one way or another, liberation - the freeing of one's self from the workings of physical, vital, mental nature. No doubt, a degree of purification of one's nature was considered essential but no radical change of it was demanded. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga seeks to go beyond liberation and achieve... the head. In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, after reaching this level, one has to go further and get the light, consciousness, force and bliss of the highest "overhead" level to work in our mental-vital-physical levels with the collaboration of our psychic being in order to transform them into the Supermind-nature. Therefore Sri Aurobindo names his Yoga the Yoga of supramental descent and transformation... of shining steel which could make one dizzy. But usually the divine power suits itself to the needs and capacities of the sadhak. In any case the Yoga proves to be a physical no less than a psychological working. But whether physical or psychological it will miss its aim if it does not bring about a change of one's Page 245 common outer character as a consequence of a working on one's ...
... subordination of the ego to the progress and happiness of the human race is now a governing idea in the world's thought and ethics; but this is a mental and moral and not a spiritual ideal. For that progress is a series of constant mental, vital and physical vicissitudes, it has no firm spiritual content, and offers no sure standing-ground to the soul of man. The consciousness of collective humanity... philosophy, Jiva or Jivatman, the living entity, the self of the living creature. This Jiva is not the Page 360 mental ego-sense constructed by the workings of Nature for her temporary purpose. It is not a thing bound, as the mental being, the vital, the physical are bound, by her habits, laws or processes. The Jiva is a spirit and self, superior to Nature. It is true that it consents to... the whole consciousness into the being of the Supreme. In the beginning when the restless confusion and obscuring impurity of our outward nature is active, when the mental, vital, physical ego-sense are still powerful, this new mental outlook, these experiences may be found difficult in the extreme: but once that triple egoism is discouraged or moribund and the instruments of the Spirit are set right ...
... playing in it etc. He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts. He finds it all to be one with his larger or universal self. Page 269 There is the universal mental, the universal vital, the universal physical nature, and it is out of a selection of their forces and movements that the individual mind, vital and physical are made. The soul comes from beyond this nature of... n or of the cosmic consciousness or if there is the emptiness which is the preliminary condition for these things, there comes an automatic tendency for a unity with all—their affections, mental, vital, physical may easily touch. One has to keep oneself free. Affections here [ in the preceding letter ] has not the ordinary sense—it means "ways in which they are affected by things", e.g. joy... between, but that you were both moving in the formless Infinite as spiritual beings and so it was easier to feel the presence than to see any physical form. Not that the form cannot be there, but it is less insistent and therefore not so soon seen as on the physical plane. The silence in the head and heart and the emptiness are both necessary and desirable. When they are there, the consciousness finds ...
... the mental, vital and physical movements, empty of ego and limited personality,—this is what you have described in your letter. Secondly, the Divine Power descends through this silence and freedom of the Self and begins to work in the Adhara. This is what you felt as a pressure; its coming through the top of the head, the forehead and eyes and nose meant that it was working to open the mental cent... two higher centres of thought and will and vision in the inner mental being. These two centres are called the thousand-petalled lotus and the ājñā-cakra between the eyebrows. Thirdly, by this working the inner parts of the being are opened and freed; you are liberated from the limitations of the ordinary personal mind, vital and physical and become aware of a wider consciousness in which you can be... saying continually "I am not the mind", "I am not the vital", "I am not the Page 328 body", seeing these things as separate from one's real self—and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalised, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens ...
... immense force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness. In all forms of this religion, there is one common recognition of the supreme truth of all that is or of an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. They admit that beyond mind, life and body, there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute... Lastly, they were led to provide, for those not yet ready for the higher steps, an organization of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct, of mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his or her own limits and according to his or her own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready for the greater existence.... living rather than doctrines subscribed to, with praxis rather than belief. And he argues that spiritual practice is temporally, heuristically, psychologically and morally prior to theoretical or meta- physical understanding of religious questions. But even then, he points out that gates to spiritual experiences are many, and one is called upon to answer the question as to which of the various gates of spiritual ...
... them. While the Mother devotes separate chapters to the different disciplines - psychic, mental, vital, physical - here she sees them really as a single integrated discipline. But it often becomes necessary to stress, now this and now another aspect. With children, and at school generally, physical, mental and vital education may have to take precedence, but psychic discipline is truly the heart... On The Mother CHAPTER 37 Mother on Education I In her series of essays on education, the Mother discourses on its divers aspects - physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual - which together constitute the unified spectrum. Integral education is the inclusive white ray which, when seen through a prism, reveals the rainbow-colours. The Mother's... becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquility, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. IV When the best has been achieved through physical, vital and mental education, there will be a cardinal insufficiency still: for, firstly, they cannot by themselves be integrated, and, secondly, even their sum will only be a frustrating incompleteness. It ...
... buddhi in self-poise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name of Samadhi. The sign of the man in Samadhi is not that he loses consciousness of objects and surroundings and of his mental and physical self and cannot be recalled to it even by burning or torture of the body,—the ordinary idea of the matter; trance Page 101 is a particular intensity, not the essential sign. The test... which I mean, for I speak of an inner withdrawal, a renunciation of desire. The embodied soul, having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normal physical action; by abstention from food it simply removes from itself the physical contact with the object of sense, but does not get rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful. It retains the pleasure of the sense in the object... therefore, a right will, fixed in the One, aware of the one self in all and acting out of its equal serenity, not running about in different directions under the thousand impulses of our superficial mental self, is the Yoga of the intelligent will. There are, says the Gita, two types of intelligence in the human being. The first is concentrated, poised, one, homogeneous, directed singly towards the ...
... all and the soul is a portion of that universal Divinity. The fulfilment of the individual is not the utmost development of his egoistic intellect, vital force, physical well-being and the utmost satisfaction of his mental, emotional, physical cravings, but the flowering of the divine in him to its utmost capacity of wisdom, power, love and universality and through this flowering his utmost realisation... method which prepares it; for peace between nations is only a covert state of war. And as war is the means of physical survival and domination, so commerce is the means of economic survival and domination; it is in fact only another kind of war, another department of the struggle to live, one physical, the other vital. And the life and the body are, so Science has assured us, the whole of existence. Thirdly... al, the battle of ideas still goes on, but there were from the beginning ominous signs; 8 and now after the physical war with its first psychological results is well over, we are already able to see in which direction the tide is likely to flow. War is a dangerous teacher and physical victory leads often to a moral defeat. Germany, defeated in the war, has won in the after war; the German gospel ...
... e of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya puruṣa , on the vital plane the true vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , on the physical plane the true physical being, annamaya puruṣa . Each being therefore is, so long as the Ignorance lasts, centred round his mental, vital or physical Purusha, according to the plane on which he predominantly... after the other but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it—it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental Page 58 being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in action. If it... results of certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being—inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical—knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The psychic ...
... consciousness, its influence fills, dominates, transforms the mind and vital and their movements, even the physical. One is aware of one's soul, feels the psychic to be one's true being, the mind and the rest begin to be only instruments of the inmost within us. The inner mental, vital, physical are also veiled, but much nearer to the surface and much of their movements or inspirations get through... nature. It is true that nothing can give so much inner happiness and joy—though peace can come by the mental and vital liberation or through the growth of a strong samata in the being. It is the action of the psychic being, not the being itself, that gets mixed with the mental, vital and physical distortions because it has to use them to express what little of the true psychic feeling gets through... psychic ordinarily is deep within. Very few people are aware of their souls—when they speak of their soul, they usually mean the vital + mental being or else the (false) soul of desire. The psychic remains behind and acts only through the mind, vital and physical wherever it can. For this reason the psychic being except where it is very much developed has only a small and partial, concealed and mixed ...
... itself readily with a vital desire in the body. This physical element may be purified of that subjection to physical desire which is called lust, it may become love using the body for a physical as well as a mental and spiritual nearness; but love may, too, separate itself from all, even the most innocent physical element, or from all but a shadow of it, and be a pure movement to union of soul with soul... long as his present mental, vital, physical being is not liberated from its actual inferior working. This purification is the first necessity. In other words, purification must not be understood in any limited sense of a selection of certain outward kinetic movements, their regulation, the inhibition of other action or a liberation of certain forms of character or particular mental and moral capacities... mechanical body. Prana and physicality together make the gross body, sthūla śarīra . This is only the outer instrument, the nervous force of life acting in the form of body with its gross physical organs. Then there is the inner instrument, antaḥkaraṇa , the conscious mentality. This inner instrument is divided by the old system into four powers; citta or basic mental consciousness; manas , the ...
... constant companion Sri Aurobindo's small book, The Mother and the Mother's Prayers and Meditations. I am enclosing a blessing-packet. By turning to the Mother you will surely get out of the mental and physical deterioration you have marked, particularly after taking a mantra from someone who has nothing to do with our Ashram. (29.9.1993) You say you are torn between two pulls. On... Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 3) 19 On November 25,1993, my eighty-ninth birthday, I visited Sri Aurobindo's room after nearly fourteen years. My physical disability had deterred me from becoming a burden to friends who would have had to carry me in a chair. They said it would be a pleasure, but I had no heart to impose on them such pleasure. Now my... Secrecy awaits, according to Sri Aurobindo, the godlike original of every part of us. Not merely are an ideal mind and life-force there, ready to descend, but a perfect body exists as well - a super-physicality which will transfigure the present "vesture of decay" in which the soul has had to play its role on the terrestrial stage in life after life for millennia. While I sat-in Sri Aurobindo's ...
... shall get out of the grip of the world of life-problems. To effect the change, one's personal effort is required, but it must mainly be directed towards putting one's various personalities- mental, vital, physical - more and more into the Divine Mother's ever-stretched-out hands of help. In other words, the effort is towards becoming free of effort - towards getting those hands to draw closer and closer... to flow in the direction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Now one feels thrown out into one's physical stuff and called upon to realise its own divine inwardness, so to speak, its own soul-dimension. The stress of the Yoga is put on the most external consciousness - on one's very feeling of having physical limbs. This stress does not make for much comfort in the being, but when the response of the external... of the world's life: we may record that Sri Aurobindo at 78 was in full career not only as a master Yogi but also as the mighty poet of Savitri and, though his eyes had grown somewhat hazy in the physical sense, the subtle seeing behind them was supreme: one could well quote his own epic - A universal light was in his eyes - or His wide eyes bodied viewless entities - and assert that ...
... hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, and organized collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilization which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more... of whole life." 1 If human existence were of one piece, solely material-vital, or solely mental, or solely spiritual, problems of human life would not have reached the kind of criticality that we are facing today. But the human being is a triple web, a thing mysteriously physical-vital, mental and spiritual at once, and not knowing what are the true relations of these things, we have been led... elements, the vital, the mental and the psychic. We shall again find that all these ____________________ 1. Sri Aurobindo: Centenary Edition, Vol. 18, pp . 8- 9 Page 17 elements have a constitutional relationship among them; they do not stand in relation of juxtaposition. The physical and the vital can, to a great extent, be controlled and guided by the mental, and up to a certain ...
... itself beyond the limits of the personal mind, the personal life, the body, so that it feels itself more and more a universal being no longer limited by the existing walls of our too narrow mental, vital, physical existence. This widening can extend itself to a complete entry into the consciousness of cosmic Mind, into unity with the universal Life, even into a oneness with universal Matter." 1 ... world-possessing descents? For, in the actually elaborated evolutionary status of human consciousness, mind represents the highest cosmic principle and power of consciousness so far organised in man the mental being. But this mind-consciousness, even in its highest flights, is no more than a movement in the Ignorance: it is not inherently Truth-Conscious. And hence it is altogether incapable of possessing... nature allow of the supreme workings native to the divine Consciousness-Force. "The mind spiritualised, purified, liberated, perfected within its own limits may come as near as possible to a faithful mental translation, but...this is after all a relative fidelity and an imperfect perfection....The mind...can take its [the Infinite's] suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way always fragmentary ...
... infusion of past developments into that trifling vehicle, a particular mental and physical stamp to the new individual mind and body thus strangely created. What remains after death is the same material energy or life-force persisting in the seed transmitted to the children and active for the farther development of the mental and physical life carried with it. Nothing is left of us except what we so transmit... may take as the result of his life and works into its subsequent action; whatever may help by chance or by physical law to build the mental and vital constituents Page 777 and environment of other individuals, that alone can have any survival. Behind both the mental and the physical phenomena there is perhaps a universal Life of which we are individualised, evolutionary and phenomenal becomings... ready-made life and personality not prepared by it, prepared perhaps by a physical, vital and mental heredity, it must itself be something quite independent of that life and personality, something which is only fortuitously connected with the mind and body and cannot therefore be really affected by what is done or developed in this mental and bodily living. If the soul is real and immortal, not a constructed ...
... what we hold to be necessary is that the mixture should disappear and that the consciousness should be established on a purer level (not only spiritual and psychic but a purer and higher mental, vital, physical consciousness) in which there is not this mixture. There one would feel the true Ananda of oneness and love and sympathy and fellowship, spiritual and self-existent in its basis but expressing... self-sacrifice, reachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself come from the psychic. If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, physical, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reflection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life. But even some imperfect ... perfectly correct. It creates an unnecessary interchange and comes in the way of a complete turning to the Divine. Relations after taking up Yoga should be less and less based on a physical origin or the habits of the physical consciousness and more and more on the basis of sadhana—of sadhak with sadhaks, of others as souls travelling the same path or children of the Mother than in the ordinary way or ...
... What happens to the mental personality in rebirth? (A. 6): "As long as the mind is... fluid, unorganised, with no cohesive life of its own and without personality, it cannot survive. What made up the mental being dissolves in the mental region when the body, the substance which made up the body, dissolves in the physical substance. "But as soon as the mental being is formed, organised... develops, must get sufficient power over its own nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental and vital individuality to persist without the Page 155 support of the material body, as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the physical plane and the physical life. (Ibid., p. 797) If the conditions are not fulfilled, there would be immediate rebirth... the nature and evolves with it." (Ibid., p. 452) "The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences, - not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that is gathered from them, what might be called the ...
... occult planes as understood in so-called "psychic phenomena" but to the inmost soul which Sri Aurobindo terms "the psychic being", indicating the true spiritual individual behind the apparent mental-vital-physical personality ruled grossly or subtly by what he dubs "the ego". The emergence and activity of the psychic being are the key to the special process that constitutes Sri Aurobindo's "Yoga of... psychic is that which opens the rest of the nature to the supramental light and finally to the supreme Ananda.... If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this Yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible."¹ Again, we have the words: "No Sadhak can reach... make a harmonious system of superhumanity. All of us talk of our souls — and not always vainly, for most of us have some feel of it in general, but we are apt to confuse it with our vital-mental self. Neither the mind's ethereal abstractions nor the life-force's ecstatic sensations are an index to the real psyche. They certainly have a veiled touch of it, for all extreme intensities of ...
... these planes. All the centres above the Muladhara are connected with the higher worlds above the physical, with the vital, mental, psychic and still higher worlds—the Muladhara and below with the physical and subconscient worlds (subconscient physical and sub-physical). The whole physical body of course belongs to the earth-world, but it is connected through these centres with the other worlds... expression, the power to deal mentally with physical things etc. Its opening brings the power to open the physical mind to the light of the divine consciousness instead of remaining in the ordinary outward-going mentality. Yes, it is so—it is the physical mind that acts like that [ rising up from the throat centre to cover the mind ]. The centre of the physical mind or externalising mind is... reason or the mental will. It is only by bringing the higher light and force into it that it can change. The Muladhara is the centre of the physical consciousness, but the legs below represent the special field governed by it—as distinct from the mental and vital parts in the body. So when there is working there, it means a working in the physical proper itself. Of course the physical is half-s ...
... because it is the inmost part of our being, supporting all other parts—mental, vital, physical. Though in theory the psychic is the true master of the being who puts forth and uses the instruments of mind, life and body, in actuality in most human beings the psychic is entirely veiled and overshadowed by its mental, vital and physical instruments. The outer consciousness of the human being "lives amongst... 2) What gets mixed with and contaminated by the mental, vital and physical defects is not the psychic being itself but the action of the psychic being as it comes up from the depths to the surface of the being. It is only as the psychic being emerges more and more in front that it gets clear of the distorting mental, vital and physical mixture. Influence of the Psychic Though... them 4. From the viewpoint of yoga, true faith is not a mental belief but a dynamic intuitive conviction in the soul about something for which there is no outward proof. xxi according to its bent or turn at the moment." (pp. 2-3) Thus, though the psychic always exerts an influence on our mental, vital and physical being, the influence is almost always hidden, and is not seen ...
... stream? The truer and deeper things that Sri Aurobindo's lines deem of death may be said to represent the after-life destiny of the essential psyche in us, our soul proper hidden within a mental-vital-physical complex and often obscured by its integument. Whatever be the Karmic reward or punishment of the all-too-human personality, the psychic being which is an evolving delegate in us of the Divine... Aurobindo always uses 'surprised' in its original sense 'to be caught from behind'. At the stage of philosophical and spiritual development, when he wrote the poem, he could not have said that by mere physical death the true life could start." According to this view, both the words "life" and "death" have no longer to be construed in their ordinary opposite drifts but must be interpreted with the old Vedic ...
... major difficulty of the present modes and structures of life is the machinery of standardisation, mechanisation, and dehumanization. A structure has been raised up in the services of the mental, vital, physical claims and urges and this structure has Page 44 become so huge that it is unmanageable; it is a structure of great complexity meant to provide political, social, administrative... cultural machinery; and its focus is on providing collective means for intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfactions. This system of civilisation has become too big for the limited mental capacity and understanding and for the still more limited spiritual and moral capacity; it has become a too dangerous servant of the blundering ego and its appetites. At a time when an upward... the local field of a large but still local battle, the present world has become, since the outbreak of the First World War, a global field of global war, whether that War breaks out in world-wide physical configuration or it remains simmering in conditions of a cold war, or else burning in the minds of men, as it is today, with huge piles of nuclear warheads that have the potentiality of destroying ...
... honeyed plenty of the Father of things and pours them out on our life. He bears and becomes the son, the pure Kumara, the pure Male, the One, the soul in man revealed in its universality; the mental and physical consciousness in the human being accept him as their lord and lover; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifold movement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies. In the next four verses... deficiency". At the next higher stage, the sevenfold Waters become the pure mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven: They then reveal themselves as the first eternal ever-young energies — separate streams but of one origin, the seven words, sapta Vanih. There is a further ascent. The Force, Agni, rises into the womb of mental clarity where the waters flow as streams of the divine sweetness (sravathe... the Veda by the Horse, ashwa. Knowledge is the illumination of the activities of thought, understanding and intellect, and the secret of the Yoga of knowledge is the sacrifice or surrender of our mental activities by means of intensities of clarities, symbolised in the Veda as ghrita or ghritasya dharah. In the Yoga of Love or Delight, joy is the ecstatic transmutation of pleasure that is ordinarily ...
... worry about anything. She will arrange everything.” Remain like this, without thinking of anything. Wait patiently and you will see that everything will be arranged as it should be without your mental or physical intervention. With this attitude you will see how the divine force works to establish peace and happiness in you as well as in the surroundings, and that part which was in revolt and was in conflict... indirectly direct. But I would say it is more effective and total, because it is with the truth of his being that I communicate. There is no resistance there, I don’t have to pass through these mental, vital and physical layers ( gesture ), or the psychological formations, habits, the social customs or spiritual deviations, nor the resistance of matter, of ignorance, of inconscience or even of nature which... progress of the persons whom I see. There are all sorts of methods that I use according to the individual cases. Sometimes when I hear from far a prayer, a call, a sentiment, an ardent devotion, even a mental formation, a sincere aspiration or a vibration, then I concentrate deep within myself to distinguish better and judge the magnitude of this aspiration or this vibration and when it appears in my inner ...
... of the Truth and the Immortality, that Swar called also the great heaven, bṛhat dyauḥ , is the plane of the Truth above the ordinary heaven and earth which can be no other than the ordinary mental and physical being; that the path of the great heaven, the path of the Truth created by the Angirases and followed by the hound Sarama is the path to the Immortality, amṛtatvāya gātum ; that the vision (... Dawns for her children; the Ruddy One is the divine Dawn and the herd or rays are her dawning illuminations. The first name of the Mother with her thrice seven supreme seats, that which the dawns or mental illuminations know and move towards, must be the name or deity of the supreme Deva, who is infinite being and infinite consciousness and infinite bliss, and the seats are the three divine worlds, called... stood wide for them by the greatness and by the Great Ones, the mother Aditi with her sons came (or, manifested herself) for the upholding" (I.72.9). 1 That Page 199 is to say, the physical being visited by the greatness of the infinite planes above and by the power of the great godheads who reign on those planes breaks its limits, opens out to the Light and is upheld in its new wideness ...
... power a ray of the supreme Soul and Godhead, here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of his being, a consciousness of his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in the obscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation,—the original nature in which it is one with... sufficient machinery of salvation. The divine subjective becoming on which the mind has to be fixed firmly in the moment of the physical death, yaṁ smaran bhāvaṁ tyajati ante kalevaram , must have been one into which the soul was at each moment growing inwardly during the physical life, sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ . "Therefore," says the divine Teacher, "at all times remember Me and fight; for if... the gods and the path of the fathers in the Upanishads, and the Yogin who knows them is not misled into any error. Whatever psycho-physical fact or else symbolism there may be behind this notion, 2 —it comes down from the age of the mystics who saw in every physical thing an effective symbol of the psychological Page 299 and who traced everywhere an interaction and a sort of identity ...
... man's endeavour to find that light and support in a rationalised knowledge and a rationalised way of life? An ordered knowledge of the powers, forces, possibilities of physical Nature and of the psychology of man as a mental and physical being is then the only true science. An ordered use of that knowledge for a progressive social efficiency and well-being, which will make his brief existence more efficient... purpose, if an insistent living culture were not there in the world to challenge this lesser ideal and insist on the true life of the spirit. It may well be that both tendencies, the mental and the vital and physical stress of Europe and the spiritual and psychic impulse of India, are needed for the completeness of the human movement. But if the spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant... of sound thought and spiritual reflection and may strain to bursting-point the old Indian cultural and social system, and shatter this ancient civilisation before India has had time to readjust her mental stand and outlook or to reject, remould or replace the forms that can no longer meet her environmental national necessities, create new characteristic powers and figures and find a firm basis for a ...
... where all the worlds meet, mental, vital, subtle physical, pseudo-spiritual—but there is no order or firm foothold—a passage between the physical and the true spiritual realms. The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the... gets beyond the barriers of his own embodied personal mind he enters into a wide range of experiences which are not the limited solid physical truth of things and not yet either the spiritual truth of things. It is a zone of formations, mental, vital, subtle physical, and whatever one forms or is formed by the forces of these worlds in us becomes for the sadhak for a time the truth—unless he is guided... only some front or small part of it or some larger Mind, Life-Power or subtle physical ranges with which they have entered into dynamic connection. Or they feel themselves to be in an entirely illumined consciousness, while in reality they are receiving imperfectly things from above through a partial illumination of some mental or vital plane; for what comes is diminished and often deformed in the course ...
... begin to rise or draw Page 709 near, most often unseen, and when he is quite off his guard, surge up suddenly or make a sudden irruption. This continues until the whole nature, mental, vital, physical down to the very subconscient is enlightened, conscious, full of the Divine. Till that happens, one must always remain watchful in a sleepless vigilance. It is perhaps that the attitude... the being that it needs for its work. The Power can do everything, change everything and will do that but it can do it perfectly and easily and permanently only when your own will mental, vital and physical has been put on the side of the Truth. If you side with the vital ignorance and want to fight against your own spiritual change, it means a painful and difficult struggle before the work... consciousness have been experienced. Page 723 Letting the Force Work The way in which the pains went shows you how to deal with the whole nature,—for it is the same with the mental and vital as with the physical causes of ill-ease and disturbance. To remain quiet within, to hold on to the faith and experience that to be quiet and open and let the Force work is the one way. Naturally, to be wholly ...
... transition from Matter to Spirit. These makeshifts have a relative imperativeness so long as we rest satisfied in the stages of transition, content with the physical and vital life, attached to the mental movement, or even fixed in the ranges of the mental plane that are touched by the spiritual lustres. But beyond is the unwalled wideness of a supramental infinite consciousness and there all temporary structures... "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this... This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought-centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are ...
... life-energy other than the subtlest forms of material substance and its physically sensible force-currents. Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a pure spiritual perceptive knowledge in which the subject becomes its own object, that is to say, in which the Timeless and Spaceless is aware of itself in a pure... Man may for a long time quiet himself by seeking to be satisfied with his limitations or by confining his struggle to such mastery as he can gain over this material world he inhabits, some mental and physical triumph of his progressive knowledge over its inconscient fixities, of his small, concentrated conscious will and power over its inertly-driven monstrous forces. But here, too, he finds the ... be the first aspect of Life. And when the mental principle manifests in Matter, it has to accept from the mould and material in which it works the same principle of limitation, of seeking without secure finding, the same constant association and dissociation of its gains and of the constituents of its works, so that the knowledge gained by man, the mental being, seems never to be final or free from ...
... of our temporary mental, vital, physical personality—that passing experimental and structural self which has been made for us by an interaction between our being and the pressure of a lower cosmic Nature. In proportion as we are purified, the true being within declares itself more clearly; our will is less entangled in suggestions from outside or shut up in our own superficial mental constructions. Egoism... spiritual motive. Undoubtedly a release from the limitations of the mind and body into an eternal peace, rest, silence of the Spirit, makes a higher appeal than the offer of a heaven of mental joys or eternised physical pleasures, but this too after all is a lure; its insistence on the mind's world-weariness, the life-being's shrinking from the adventure of birth, strikes a chord of weakness and cannot... spontaneous law of Nature. Even man constantly does work of various kinds by a spontaneous impulse, intuition, instinct or acts in obedience to a natural necessity and law of forces without either mental planning or the urge of a conscious vital volition or emotional desire. Often enough his act is contrary to his intention or his desire; it proceeds out of him in subjection to a need or compulsion ...
... a ray of the supreme Soul and Godhead and here a veiled manifestation of him, a being of his being, a consciousness of his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in the obscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original nature in which it is one with... was that of the attainment of widening of physical consciousness so that the body could become the vehicle of receiving the supermind. Sri Aurobindo also points out that the reception of the supermind resulted in the breaking of the limits of the physical being and its opening out to supramental light. It was this attainment of the wideness of the physical being which the Vedic Rishis termed as the... and the Mother, what is aimed at by the evolutionary force in the human species is the accomplishment of fixing of the supramental consciousness in the physical being and not merely of attainment of the universalisation or vastness of the physical being. In this connection, the following statements of the Mother, in an answer to a question of a disciple (Satprem), are both pertinent and important: ...
... The major difficulty of the present modes and structures of life is the machinery of standardisation, mechanisation, and dehumanisation. A structure has been raised up in the Services of the mental, vital, physical Claims and urges and this structure has become so huge that it is un- manageable; it is a structure of great complexity meant to provide political, social, administrative, economic and cultural... cultural machinery; and its focus is on providing collective means for intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfactions. This System of civilisation has become too big for the limited mental capacity and understanding and for the still more' limited Spiritual and moral capacity; it has become a too dangerous servant of the blundering ego and its appetites. At a time when an upward effort... the local field of a large but still local battle, the present world has become, since the outbreak of the First World War, a global field of global war, whether that War breaks out in world-wide physical configuration or it remains simmering in conditions of a cold war, or else burning in the minds of men, as it is today, with huge piles of nuclear warheads that have the potentiality of destroying ...
... penetrated by the action of the vital and physical parts, and in those parts themselves are lower formations of mind, a vital mind, a physical mind, and these have to be changed before there can be an entire transformation of the mental being. The higher transforming power has, therefore, to descend, as soon as may be and without waiting for an integral mental change, into the heart so as to occupy and... intuitive mental intelligence of this kind and its control would be the rule, is conceivable; but in our plane of being, owing to the original intention and past history of the evolutionary plan, such a rule and control could with difficulty be stabilised and it is not likely that it could be complete, final and definitive. For an intuitive mentality intervening in a mixed mental, vital, physical consciousness... subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go ...
... creator of earth Page 325 and heaven, born as a cosmic godhead between the mental and physical worlds and recreating their powers in man, we shall see that the image is not only a powerful but in fact a true and revealing figure, and in the Vedic technique it does not matter that it outrages the physical imagination since it expresses a greater actuality as no other figure could have done... their substance. The physical and the psychical worlds were to their eyes a manifestation and a twofold and diverse and yet connected and similar figure of cosmic godheads, the inner and outer life of man a divine commerce with the gods, and behind was the one spirit or being of which the gods were names and personalities and powers. These godheads were at once masters of physical Nature and its principles... cannot either be interpreted or judged by the standards of a reason and taste observant only of the canons of the physical existence. The invocation "Play, O Ray, and become towards us" is at once a suggestion of the leaping up and radiant play of the potent sacrificial flame on the physical altar and of a similar psychical phenomenon, the manifestation of the saving flame of a divine power and light ...
... "mind" and "mental" connote specially that part of the nature 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, mental vision and will, etc. that are part of man's intelligence. The ordinary mind has three main parts: mind proper, vital mind, and physical mind. ... all-creative self-awareness of the Absolute. Chitta — the basic stuff of mental consciousness; the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse, etc. "Chitta really means the ordinary consciousness including the mind, vital and physical — but practically it can be taken to mean something central in the consciousness... Circumconscient — the subliminal has a formation of consciousness which projects itself beyond the mental, vital, subtle physical and gross physical sheaths and forms a circumconscient, an environing part of itself, through which it receives the contacts of the world outside us. cittākāś a — mental ether. Consciousness-Force, the Force — the Conscious Force that builds the worlds; ...
... would have no chance of being Piyush Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities contributing to the new lila—but I am speaking of the new visible personality, the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person. It is therefore to be expected that the Avatar should take on a new personality... it seems to me that Krishnaprem is fundamentally right in what he says of the symbols. To the physical mind only the words and facts and acts of a man matter; to the inner mind it is the spiritual happenings in him that matter. Even the teachings of Christ and Buddha are spiritually true not as mere mental teachings but as the expression of spiritual states or happenings in them which by their life... doing things is a mental convention; they see things and do things with the mind and what they want is a mental and human perfection. When they think of a manifestation of Divinity, they think it must be an extraordinary perfection in doing the ordinary human things—an extraordinary business faculty, political, poetic or artistic faculty, an accurate memory, not making any mental mistakes, not undergoing ...
... clearness. It rests on the common experience of all seekers of self-knowledge that there are two different natures and as it were two selves in us. There is the lower self of the obscure mental, vital and physical nature subject to ignorance and inertia in the very stuff of its consciousness and especially in its basis of material substance, kinetic and vital indeed by the power of life but without... that belongs to the dynamics of the ignorance and to convert the soul into a pure spiritual existence. That is what is called becoming Brahman, brahma-bhūya . It is to put off the lower mental, vital, physical existence and to put on the pure spiritual being. This can best be done by the intelligence and will, buddhi , our present topmost principle. It has to turn away from the things of the lower... significance of disgust of life or distaste for the world action, but renunciation of rāga , as also of its opposite, dveṣa . There must be a withdrawal from Page 534 all mental and vital liking as from all mental and vital disliking whatsoever. And this is asked not for extinction, but in order that there may be a perfect enabling equality in which the spirit can give an unhampered and unlimited ...
... There is a state in which the Sadhak is conscious of the Divine Force working in him or of its results at least and does not obstruct its descent or its action by his own mental activities, vital restlessness or physical obscurity and inertia. That is openness to the Divine. Surrender is the best way of opening; but aspiration and quietness can do it up to a certain point so long as there is not... vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this Yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible.... If there is a refusal of the psychic new birth, a refusal to become the child new born from the Mother, owing to attachment to intellectual knowledge or mental ideas or to some vital desire, then there will be a failure in the Sadhana. * ... continually "I am not the mind", "I am not the vital", "I am not the body", seeing Page 37 these things as separate from one's real self - and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalised, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens ...
... , so I say, this is my own dear niece who complains. That puts me on my guard, I feel inclined to tell her. I ask my young friends here: please pacify my home front. (Laughter) She is my mental and physical health 165Young fellow-teachers who were the audience for these talks. 166Knowledge, in French. Page 115 inspector, I mean instructor. (Laughter) So if something ...
... dispositions: it is the omnipotent Idea in the spirit which invents and makes use of these devices. And in the vital and mental existence quality at once openly appears as the primary power and amount of energy is only a secondary factor. But in fact the mental, the vital, the physical existence are all subject to the limitations of quality, all are governed by its determinations, even though that truth... of the Divine, if it were not in its secret essence imperishably one with the Divine and part and parcel of his divinity: it could not be or become immortal if it were merely a creature of mental, vital and physical Nature. All existence is a manifestation of the divine Existence and that which is within us is spirit of the eternal Spirit. We have come indeed into the lower material nature and are under... receives it into this infinite substance of being made pregnant with his illimitable, yet self-limiting Idea. He receives into this Vast of self-conception and develops there the divine embryo into mental and physical form of existence born from the original act of conceptive creation. All we see springs from that act of creation; but that which is born here is only finite idea and form of the unborn and infinite ...
... intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, brings the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method Page 7 is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us... nce to live there. For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternately—but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable. The other side of discipline is with regard to the activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord... sees mind and its activities as not oneself, life and its activities as not oneself, the body and its activities as not oneself, one becomes aware of an inner Being within us—inner mental, inner vital, inner physical—silent, calm, unbound, unattached which reflects the true Self above and can be its direct representative; from this inner silent Being proceeds a rejection of all that is to be rejected ...
... other forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact and physical indication; it conceives too a mental figure of unity, and in its activity and its will it can create and possess more directly—not only indirectly as in the ordinary physical life—and in other minds and lives as well as its own. But still even... body after body and not created separately in each body and ending with it; for it is only the physical impress of mind on matter, only the corporeal mentality that is so created, not the whole mental being. This corporeal mentality is merely our surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to physical experience. Behind, even in our terrestrial being, there is this other, subconscious or subliminal... supramental life which the divine soul possesses securely in the being of Sachchidananda, but which the human soul has to manifest in this body of Sachchidananda formed here into the mould of a mental and physical living. But so far as we have been able yet to envisage this supramental existence, it does not seem to have any connection or correspondence with life as we know it, life active between the ...
... limited realisations of our present mental and physical existence the very status and dynamis of a perfection final and absolute. And it is a true perfection, such as nothing before it has yet been in the ascension of the spirit. For even the highest spiritual realisation on the plane of mentality has in it something top-heavy, one-sided and exclusive; even the widest mental spirituality is not wide enough... infinite within and without by the happy, natural and unregulated play of the mind-Nature. But since the mental being is capable of receiving the gnosis in a way in which the life soul and physical soul cannot receive it, since he can accept it with knowledge though only the limited knowledge of a mental response, he may to a certain extent govern by its light his outer action or, if not that, at least... free physical mind or the free vital mind's divine madness and carelessness of all rules, proprieties, harmonies and colour or disguise with them the ecstasy of the saint or the solitary liberty of the wandering eremite. Here again there is no mastery, no Page 500 sublimation of the Nature by the soul in the world, but a double possession, by the freedom and delight of the mental-spiritual ...
... nidra supported by a strong tendency to physical and mental laxity which has reigned for the last two or three days. Rupa and drishya and vishaya have for the time being suspended their advance and are in a state of comparative suspension. The physical siddhi is advancing in the K.A, but under the difficulty of the laxity and distraction. The other physical siddhis are in a state of suspension. ... brief perfect converse. K.A has suddenly developed the highest seer logistic character in the mental body and when it so acts forms a sea of ananda around the body, but when the body itself is penetrated by the ananda this tends to cease. The Shakti is working to combine the Anandas of the mental and physical bodies. Ananda recurred with spontaneity in the Samadhi, but could not endure against the nidramaya... September 1919 Absolute finality is not yet gained in the first chatusthaya, for the fragments of external touches of asamata are able to touch the physical parts of the physical mentality, nor in the second for the Devi Bhava is pushed down to the old mental form and that survives in the sense of the body even when the rest is in the ideal Devibhava. The ideality is founded in the highest seer ideality ...
... culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes. But these changes themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not in any other, not in the spirit of America or... intellectual curiosity, the scientific development, the creative literary and artistic greatness, the noble fecundity of the classical age he would be amazed by the extent of a later degeneracy, its mental poverty, immobility, static repetition, the comparative feebleness of the creative intuition, the long sterility of art, the cessation of science. He would deplore a prone descent to ignorance, a failing... void. A feeling of its illusion and unreality because that which is greatest in man and raises him beyond himself had been neglected, would oppress them at every step. The discovery of the laws of physical Nature would not compensate in their eyes for the comparative decline—for a long time it was the almost absolute cessation—of a greater seeking and finding, the discovery of the freedom of the spirit ...
... beyond this relative aspect of status and kinesis, we find that we have the power to arrive at what seems to us an absolute passivity or immobility of our consciousness in which we cease from all mental and physical activity. There seem, then, to be an active consciousness in which consciousness works as an energy throwing up knowledge and activity out of itself and of which therefore Tapas is the character... of its own total self, of other embodied consciousnesses and of universal being. It is here that we must look for the secret of the apparent ignorance of the embodied mental being as well as of the great apparent inconscience of physical Nature. We have to ask ourselves what is the nature of this absorbing, this separating, this self-forgetful concentration which is the obscure miracle of the universe... something, to use the words of the Upanishad, which being known all is known. The Unknowable—not absolutely unknowable, but beyond mental knowledge—can only be a higher degree in the intensity of being of that Something, a degree beyond the loftiest summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given us by our ...
... this trinity arrive at a perfect union, one, satisfying and complete. But the Divine Consciousness can manifest itself through any and every plane, on the mental, on the vital, on the physical, or on those which are higher than the mental[.] 155 All Yoga done through the mind alone or through the heart or the will or the vital force or the body ends in some one aspect of the infinite... matter of fact physical positivism draws back bewildered from the attempt to touch the Real and Ultimate. It is the nature of Mind to arrive at this result of uncertain certainty; our experience is true but it is not and cannot be the sole possible integral experience. 157 All human Yoga is done on the heights or levels of the mental Page 362 nature; for man is a mental being in a... integral Divine Reality is its consequence. There is too implied in it a radical change and transformation of the whole being and of every part of the nature. Our being is a nexus of the human mental-vital-physical nature of Ignorance, it is transmuted into a spiritual and supramental consciousness: it becomes a divine unity in a harmony of the infinite and universal and integrated will, love, bliss and ...
... many-walled existence of the mind, life and body which form the lower being. That is the wideness of the higher being to which we have to ascend breaking beyond the two enclosing firmaments of the mental and physical; it is described as a divine existence free and large in its unbounded range; it is a wideness where there is no obstacle nor any siege of limitation; it is the fear-free pasture of the luminous... by the greatness of His energy. But in the world of our darkened mortal view of things there reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which envelops heaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physical consciousness and our vital being. It is here that Dawn the daughter of Heaven rises with the radiances of her Truth, with the bliss of her boons; putting off the darkness like a black woven... and make us free from the sin. For he is the creator of the Right, he is the creator who creates the Truth. That Truth he shall create in a great wideness and force of our physical being, in a rich abundance of our mental and by its undiminishable vastness he shall uphold all the worlds of our existence. Thus in the working of Savitri whose creation is the Truth and of Mitra and Varuna the gods ...
... his two wives." The soul's enjoyment of its divinised mental and bodily existence upheld in the eternal joy of the spiritual being could not be more clearly and beautifully imaged. These ideas and many of the expressions are the same as those of the hymn of Gritsamada. Nodha says of the Night and Dawn, the dark physical and the illumined mental consciousness that they new-born ( punarbhuvā ) about... of the earthly hill into wideness and upholds the higher world of heaven. For the result of the opening up of the higher planes of consciousness is to increase the wideness of the physical, to raise the height of the mental. "This, indeed," says the Rishi Nodha, "is his mightiest work, the fairest achievement of the achiever," dasmasya cārutamam asti daṁsaḥ , "that the four upper rivers streaming honey... Vala, the possession of our complete divine consciousness delivered from all falsehood by the free descent of the truth, gives us the secure possession of the world of Swar and the enjoyment of mental and physical being lifted into the godhead above darkness, falsehood and death by the in-streaming of our divine elements. This victory is won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented by the ...
... been made in modern psychology - the distinction between the physical, the vital and the mental aspects which characterise not only the ordinary waking consciousness but also the subconscient and the subliminal. Regarding the prevailing lack of such a distinction, Sri Aurobindo writes: "Each plane of our being - mental, vital, physical - has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected... in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions of the vital and physical formula of being. But even this is not all that man is or can be: he has in him the power to evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being... in 1916: "Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the ...
... life and body. We may, therefore, turn to the three domains of mental education, vital education, and physical education as expounded and experimented upon at Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and subsequently at the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research at Auroville. Mental Education: In regard to mental education, the processes and methods can best be determined... New education insists on the development of the mind, life and body, it aims at development of these instruments for the discovery of the inner psychic being; it proposes to utilise mental, vital, physical perfection as instruments of the perfect manifestation of the inner and higher realities. The effort is to make the body supple, strong, agile and beautiful; the vital is to be trained to become... of the individual and to encourage the exercise of the will in which what is valued most is not the result but application and doing one's best. Physical Education: On the subject of physical education, it must be mentioned that the physical is our base, and even the highest spiritual values are to be expressed through the life that is embodied here. Sariram adyam khalu dharmasadhanam, ...
... due to the mental control being removed — what is acting in the things you mention is not the mind but the vital and physical consciousness. What should take the place of the removed mental control? The psychic or spiritual control. What is meant by the spiritual control? The control from the higher Consciousness above the ordinary mental. ... (sahasradal padma). It must be the physical mind interfering and preventing the free ascension. Page 224 Why is my physical mind not happy with your answers to what I write? Something in your physical mind stiffens and begins to defend its views. It is better to wait till it is more supple and plastic. Mental discussions are not good for sadhana but... You have to feel yourself even in the mental, vital, physical levels (not only above) a consciousness that is neither mind, life nor body. Up to the last year the Mother's Force had to continue its pressure on my lower nature to change. But now a mutual understanding seems strangely to emerge between the higher and the lower. Through my mental Purusha the higher consciousness points ...
... regarded as sub-planes of the physical with a vital and a mental character; these are at once surrounding and penetrating strata through which the interchange between the higher worlds and the physical world takes place. It might then be possible for the mental being, so long as its mentality is not sufficiently developed, so long as it is restricted mainly to the more physical forms of mind and life activity... in some region of subtle-physical experience whose surroundings may seem to it a prolongation of the circumstances of physical life, but in freer conditions proper to a subtler medium and in some kind of happy perfection of mind or life or a finer bodily existence. Beyond these subtle-physical planes of experience and the life-worlds there are also mental or spiritual-mental planes to which the soul... and a sufficient self-expressive mental and vital individuality to persist without the support of the material body, as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the physical plane and the physical life: it would be sufficiently evolved to subsist in the subtle body which we know to be the characteristic case or sheath and the proper subtle-physical support of the inner being. It is ...
... premise of Vedanta, its “integral affirmation,” is that all is That. “Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.” 15 “All action, all mental, vital, physical activities in the world are the operation of a universal Energy, a Consciousness-Force which is the power of the Cosmic Spirit working out the cosmic and individual truth in things.” Therefore... n, physically as the imperishability of matter, mentally as the sense of immortality which attends the formed existence through all its phases of self-development.” 8 “We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being; so also when we... material out of which the highest animal evolves the ethical impulse.” (Evolutionary psychology will agree with this.) Ethics is a matter of the mind and therefore a stage in evolution. It is “man the mental being” who evaluates God as obligatorily “good” – an attribute which is not there in the Vedantic trinity. 11 It is only from the human standpoint that the world has three layers: infra-ethical ...
... embedded in firm soil, otherwise his growth becomes top-heavy." A still more suggestive remark soon follows: "Just as in the physical plane the germ of man works in the background while woman carries it within her and nurses it into life, so in the mental plane the inspiration of woman must first implant its seed in man's subconscious in order that his creative impulses may bear fruit... function. In essence this pressure is a highly evolutionary factor. We tend overmuch to see man and woman in relation to each other and in the way their natures manifest commonly on the mental, vital, physical levels. What we often forget is that Page 106 either is an expression ultimately of a soul, a spiritual self, and that the destiny of both is not so much... much in relation to each other as in relation to the single Godhead they have to evolve side by side and co-operatively on earth. Transcendent of the sex-differentiations and of the physical-vital-mental formula is the more-than-human nature they bring as their basis: Considered in the light of that nature, their finest development would appear to lie in a large equality of status and function ...
... including physical things, partakes of this triple character. Our food, for example, the Gita tells us, is either sattwic, rajasic or tamasic according to its character and effect on the body. The sattwic temperament in the mental and physical body turns naturally to the things that increase the life, increase the inner and outer strength, nourish at once the mental, vital and physical force and increase... lawless or terrible action contrary to the Shastra, opposed to the right rule of life and works and afflicting to oneself and to others, or if it is of the nature of self-torture and hurts the mental, vital and physical elements or violates the God within us who is seated in the inner subtle body, then too it is an unwise, an Asuric, a rajasic or rajaso-tamasic tapasya. Sattwic tapasya is that which... speech, and that consists in the study of Scripture, kind, true and beneficent speech and a careful avoidance of words that may cause fear, sorrow and trouble to others. Finally there is the askesis of mental and moral perfection, and that means the purifying of the whole temperament, gentleness and a clear and calm gladness of mind, self-control and silence. Here comes in all that quiets or disciplines ...
... commonly on the mental, vital, physical levels. What we often forget is that either is an expression ultimately of a soul, a spiritual self, and that the destiny of both is not so much in relation to each other as in relation to the single Godhead they have to evolve side by side and co-operatively on earth. Transcendent of the sex-differentiations and of the physical-vital-mental formula is the m... be strongly embedded in firm soil, otherwise his growth becomes topheavy." A still more suggestive remark soon follows: "Just as in the physical plane the germ of man works in the background while woman carries it within her and nurses it into life, so in the mental Page 176 plane the inspiration of woman must first implant its seed in man's subconscious in order that his creative... trickery to exploit the supra-physical phenomena, therefore - they will argue - all such phenomena are frauds and stagecraft." Page 179 Having himself been - as he admits - an agnostic at one time, it is extremely interesting to read what he writes in a letter to our author about the demand for the Divine as a concrete certitude, quite as concrete as any physical phenomenon caught by the ...
... practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification... utter dedication and strictness in training, and widest comprehension in student-teacher relationship - these will, in brief govern the methods of learning. There are aspects of the mental, vital and physical education which contribute to the yogic education. They can be briefly mentioned: (i) In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding... Yoga: Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Tantra Yoga, the Synthesis of Yoga Analysis of Personality; Parts of the Being; Inconscient, sub-conscient, physical, vital, mental, subliminal, psychic, superconscient Ego, Memory, Self-consciousness, Concept of dynamic nature of Prakriti and static Purusha The Jivatman and Psychic Entity, Psychic ...
... "Our true beings - subtle-physical, vital, mental - remain the same for us from life to life down the ages. They, no less than our psychic being, have continuous survival. And the psychic being picks them up while acquiring new subtle-physical, vital and mental sheaths to accompany the physical body into which it is born."? When I turn to Sri Aurobindo I don't get quite the same picture. He 2 ... dissolution of the vital and mental sheaths? A: The outer form only dissolves, unless that too is made conscious and is organised round the divine centre. But the true mental, the true vital and even the true subtle-physical persist: it is that which keeps all the impressions received in earthly life and builds the chain of Karma. Now, wouldn't this answer by the Mother mean; "Our... analogous vein: 'The soul gathers the essential elements of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for further experience" Here there is no pointer to where the Karma resided and to any compulsive chain of Karma: the soul picks ...
... life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into... are dependent on awakenings of the basic mental ignorance to mental figures and representations of truth that may be quite valid in their own field and for their own purpose but are not necessarily and by their very nature reliable. They are dependent for their emergence on the suggestions given by mental and sense data or on the accumulation of past mental knowledge. They search for the truth as a... there is also what can be called the inspired action of the imaginative intelligence; and there is also something like purely mental seizing of the truth and experience. All these mental operations may appear to be intuitive, but they are, according to Sri Aurobindo, mental representations of the higher movements of the intuition. The true intuitions differ from these effective but insufficient co ...
... being means the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical with the psychic behind as the inmost? How can there be one centre for all that? Is it true that the point between the eyebrows is the centre of the will as well as of the inner vision? It is the centre of the inner mind - therefore also of the inner mental will and inner mental vision. I sometimes feel as if... acts through the inner being that is just behind the outer. Is there any substance in my statement? It is correct as a distinction between the true mental, vital, physical beings and the outer layers of the inner mind, vital and physical. The inner parts in everybody remain vulgar or become high according as they are turned to the outward forces of the Ignorance or towards the higher... veiled or half-veiled influence) over mind, vital and physical. Especially that is the psychic discernment which at once lights up the thoughts, emotional movements, vital pushes, physical habits and leaves nothing there obscure, substituting the right movements for the wrong ones. It is this that is difficult and rare. More often the discernment is mental and it is the mind that tries to put all in order ...
... it takes in them different but cognate forms. There is for instance the series of the outer physical light, another higher and inner light which is the vehicle of the mental, vital and psychic consciousness and a highest inmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-God, was the lord of the physical Sun; but he is at the same time to the Vedic seer-poet the giver of the rays of knowledge which... preparation of the natural external man for spirituality; the second takes up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical living and brings him more directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him; the third should render him capable of taking up his whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life. This endeavour has manifested... Christian discipline was not only to despise the physical and vital way of living, but to disparage and imprison the intellectual and distrust and discourage the aesthetic thirsts of our nature. It emphasised against them a limited spiritual emotionalism and its intense experiences as the one thing needful; the development of the ethical sense was the sole mental necessity, its translation into act the sole ...
... naturally approachable to man and most easily, widely, intimately seizable. This seeing is not after all the largest or the truest truth that the Supreme is without any relations with the mental, vital, physical existence of man in the universe, avyavahāryam , nor that what is described as the empirical truth of things, the truth of relations, vyavahāra , is altogether the opposite of the highest... realisation. Man, the mental being, approaches the Infinite through his finite mind and has to open some near gate of this finite upon that Infinite. He seeks for some conception on which his mind is able to seize, selects some power of his nature which by force of an absolute self-heightening can reach out and lay its touch on the infinite Truth that in itself is beyond his mental comprehension. Some... fourfold character. These also, as their name implies, are mental beings. Creators of all this life that depends on manifest or latent mind for its action, from them are all these living creatures in the world; all are their children and offspring, yeṣāṁ loka imāḥ prajāḥ . And these great Rishis and these Manus are themselves perpetual mental becomings of the supreme Soul 2 and born out of his spiritual ...
... by a will in the subconscient to wake before the emission comes. Page 122 What are mental sex imaginations? Mental sex imaginations are a form (the most subtle) of subtle indulgence. But if it is accompanied by sensation, then either the vital or physical must also be responding. I told Dr. R that I get discharge of semen at night, mostly in connection... then one can see different degrees, kinds, powers of consciousness, mental, vital, physical, psychic, spiritual. The Divine has been described as Being-Consciousness-Ananda, even as a Consciousness (Chaitanya), as putting out a force or energy, Shakti that creates worlds. The mind is a modified consciousness that puts forth a mental energy. But the Divine can stand back from its Energy and observe it... consciousness is separated from the vital and physical, it is not easy to separate it from the mind. Even to make it realise that it is not the mind but something deeper and higher takes years of sadhana. It is because man is a mental being and therefore closely identified with his mind. When we try to separate ourselves from the mental activities we can't understand them properly ...
... use ordinary means, that is, go through the mind, the vital and the physical. One of them may be skipped but surely not the last, otherwise one is no longer conscious of anything at all. Page 15 It is the action of the psychic being, not the being itself, that gets mixed with the mental, vital and physical disabilities because it has to use them to express what little of the... Not in the physical heart, not in the organ. It is in a fourth dimension. an inner dimension. But it is in that region, the region somewhat behind the solar plexus, it is there that one finds it most easily. The psychic being is in the fourth dimension as related to our physical being. You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living... intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, brings the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by ...
... spiritual and not the mental, vital and physical being must found and maintain itself on greater values than the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human society; if it is not so founded, it will be merely the normal human society with a difference. An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed... our self out of its mental, vital, physical wrappings and disguises, extricated it with patience from our own body, as the Upanishad puts it, until we have built up 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... normal physical humanity, a joy of being which is larger and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital man or the surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence. A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind ...
... all his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material... rapture. His far reaching contributions in many fields of human knowledge fill me with wonder. As an apologist for the Aurobindonian world-view he stands second to none. And behind all this protean mental activity the sadhak - ever cheerful, never complaining, complete in his surrender to the Mother, alive to his human limitations; all this makes me feel that I am in the presence of a great soul. I... I dedicate my article on logic in the light of Sri Aurobindo to this "Clear Ray" which has issued forth from the sun of Sri Aurobindo's supramental splendour. * * * The three mental functions of man, viz. thinking, willing and feeling when purified have each their corresponding object, which they seek after. For thought, the Truth that underlies appearances, for will, the pursuit after ...
... sits down to write. Is it due to resistance? I suppose—if it is on the neck—that is the place of the expressing physical or externalising mind. As yet probably there is a strong resistance there—perhaps the result of something there that still expects or desires to write mentally, not mystically. She was lying in bed trying to concentrate when she saw something like a thin wire coming towards... he said—ask Mother! Nonsense! It is implied. Mother doesn't send him to the Dispensary for a promenade or to dance. It seems J's irregularity of periods has been caused by excessive mental and physical strain due to poetry. Good Lord! If poetry is to be the parent of irregular menses! August 31, 1936 × ... of the vital plane"—what does it mean? Are all happenings there as true as on the physical plane? Yes, except that sometimes the record is imperfect—but the happening is true. Are they intimations of what would happen on the physical plane? No—the vital plane has an independent life of its own; the physical also. My being meets you or the Mother in dreams, and receives your blessings ...
... carrying out the actions as if I was a second person! That is quite as it should be. Regarding the mental work, at least I feel the study is being done in the silent consciousness. Is that true? Yes, if you feel so. During the physical work the Purusha is often separate. But the Prakriti, though it wants to separate itself from the action, finds it rather... Prakriti, therefore they are unattached, is to talk nonsense. Attachment is attachment in whatever part of the being it may be. In order to be unattached one must be unattached everywhere, in the mental, vital, physical action and not only in the silent soul somewhere inside. Does not the usual action of the gunas bring attachment, desire and bondage? If not, why should we bother so much about... talking, mixing, flirting with women and similar occupations. Mental work during the meditation - is that what you have written? How is that? The condition of meditation (Yogic concentration) is mental quietude, there can be no mental "work" during meditation. Unless you mean meditation of the mental kind, i.e. thinking about things, but that is a different matter. ...
... unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited... found that the idea of the spiritual individual was dominant in ancient India, although the society was of extreme importance and the individual had to pass first to the social states of the physical, vital, mental being with satisfaction of interest, desire, pursuit of knowledge and right living - kama, artha and dharma - before he could reach fitness for the truer state of free spiritual existence... member of the collectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the common aims and total interest of the organised Page 118 society, and much less or not at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power of existence. Again, under the same circumstances, the modern State erects its godhead and demands his obedience, subjugation, and self-immolation. The ...
... principle of oneness. The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating... religious discipline. Lastly, for those not yet ready for these higher steps it provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct, of mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his own limits and according to his own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready for the greater existence. The first three... But where our religion eludes his fixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation and supercilious condemnation come at once to his rescue. The Indian mind on the contrary is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of intuition and inner experience had given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,—the cosmic ...
... itself beyond the limits of the personal mind, the personal life, the body, so that it feels itself more and more a universal being no longer limited by the existing walls of our too narrow mental, vital, physical existence. This widening can extend itself to a complete entry into the consciousness of cosmic Mind, into unity with the universal Life, even into a oneness with universal Matter. That, however... intelligence; a pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity: for what we call by the name is usually a point of direct knowledge which is immediately caught and coated over with mental stuff, so that it serves only as an invisible or a very tiny nucleus of a crystallisation which is in its mass intellectual or otherwise mental in character; or else the flash of intuition is quickly replaced... inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of Page 287 mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit. He has no sufficient means of communication even with the animal who is his mental congener, though not his equal, and he is even capable of denying mind or real consciousness to it because ...
... hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited... 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... rational against which Reason had declared an open revolt at the very commencement of its march into the modern age. Or else, it may be argued that the deliverances of the supra rational create for the mental thought antinomies which are insoluble and therefore unacceptable. We, therefore, hear the cacophony of declarations that the supra rational is non existent or unreal and that the best counsel for ...
... nothing more. I don't contend that his madness made him a genius, though it would agree with the immortal theory of Lombroso that genius is madness or at least always tied to abnormality and mental and physical unsoundness. It may have been the result of our constant pouring of Force into him to keep his mind bright and coherent and clear. Page 19 MYSELF: It is said that Buddha died... preparing my confession! Perhaps tomorrow! SRI AUROBINDO: Very good. Shall await the revelation. MYSELF: Guru, this is the month when your thrice blessed disciple came into the physical world. But thinking again— what will the poor Guru do if the big disciple doesn't fulfil the conditions? Is that so? SRI AUROBINDO: The one hope is then that he may last on to fulfil the ...
... happiness, goodness “Oh, here it is,” and then pfft! It shows itself, and hop! it’s gone. And Mother asked herself: Is this, is this the lever?... I don’t know. But SALVATION IS PHYSICAL—not at all mental, but physical. I mean it’s not in escape: it’s HERE. There’s only ONE way out of all that, only ONE—ONLY one, not two, there’s no choice, there aren’t a few possibilities, there’s only one: it’s... Or a new state. A state of consciousness that changes the physical world and the physical nature⎯resolving that eternal contradiction of life and death, of pain and bliss, of escaping to heaven or into Nirvana and the earth that rots. Truly a new evolution. Salvation is physical. So it is obvious that, if we find that, the physical transformation begins a natural, spontaneous consequence, as... seemed to be) dying. A state that seemed to be the exact opposite of what we call the natural state, the state of the world of Nature, and yet which belonged to the physical world. Perhaps a new physical Nature? It is obvious that the physical Nature that controls the fish and that which controls man are very different, and yet they are the same. All the functions that worked naturally—that is, in accord ...
... Why is it that whenever one thinks of You one feels a need for physical closeness? What is the value of this physical contact? (1) When one is more conscious in the physical than in the vital and mental, the physical relation seems more real and tangible. (2) For those who have seriously begun the yoga in the body, the physical relation is of course a powerful aid. Page 347 I ask... as there is a methodical progression of exercises for mental and physical education, isn't there a similar method to progress towards Sri Aurobindo's yoga? It should vary with each individual. Could you make a step-by-step programme for me to follow daily? The mechanical regularity of a fixed programme is indispensable for physical, mental and vital development; but this mechanical Page 315... conscious of it) but also a mental and vital relation, which makes the outer relation less indispensable. I try to teach the others to widen their physical consciousness so as to be able to benefit from my physical presence even at a distance. 22 March 1967 Sweet Mother, When one goes away from here, one feels a sort of emptiness inside. Even if one has all the physical comforts, there is ...
... struggle is to rise above these formations which prevent his progress as the mental being. मायाः । This means mental formation, consciousness that creates forms. Both Indra & Vritra are मायिनः which does not mean deceitful; but the formations of Indra are mental & of the Truth, those of Vritra non-mental, sensory, physical & therefore full of illusions & falsehoods. Loud roared the lightning of... satisfaction go with thy two horses to the drinking of the wine offered. त्रिकद्रुकेषु । कद्रुक means variegated = the three worlds of different hues, त्रिषधस्थे; the dark physical, the red vital-dynamic & the bright mental. Elsewhere Indra is represented as drinking the human being’s three lakes of Soma (V.29.[7]). The symbol is changed, but the sense is the same. प्रदोधुवत् । Sayana’s interpretation... host. This device is as awkward & clumsy as it is unnecessary. जनासः O Asuras, says Sayana. Grit. is explaining to the Asuras that he is a poor weak mortal & not Indra! Heaven & Earth, the physical & mental consciousness become subject to the divine Mind or are shaken with the grandeur & awe of this mighty advent. For he is full of an aggressive heroic force that subjects all things by its attack ...
... Science. A mental activity has always without exception a personal reference. It is somebody's. How can one understand a mental process divested from value ? Value is created by the "subject." A physical object such as a table, a chair or a plant does not possess such a persona point of reference. Mind and mental phenomena belong to the cultural development of society to which mutual mental inter-action... and Vishnu maintains it by His dynamic presence. Rig Veda speaks of " Dyawa Prithivi" Heaven and Earth symbolising the Mental and the Physical planes of consciousness. It mentions ' Antariksha '—-the intermediate vital plane between Earth and Heaven—the physical and. mental. Veda mentions three shining summits of the Mind " Trini Rochana". Surya, the sun, is the symbol of the Truth-Consciousness... psychology. Hormism of McDugall making purposiveness of the mind its pivot belongs to the same class. Hormism believes that the difference between the mechanical operations of physical nature and those of mental nature is that all mental operations work towards some purpose, en conscious or unconscious. This " purposiveness " explains the manifold activities of human mind and its behaviour. C ...
... stands behind the evolution of the nature and evolves with it. The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences,—not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that it gathered from them, what might be called the... immortality of the psychic. The soul gathers the essential element of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for farther experience. It is really for the vital part of the being that śrāddha and rites are done—to help the being to... psychic is in front at the time, this immediate transition is possible. It does not depend on the acquisition of a mental and vital as well as a psychic immortality—those who have acquired that would rather have the power to move about in the different planes and even act on the physical world without being bound to it. On the whole it may be said that there is no one rigid rule for these things; manifold ...
... is not supported by the Purusha or the personal Prakriti, but has been able to produce asamata in the outward physical mentality. These things are still possible because of the persistence of intuitive mentality in the stuff of the physical consciousness; that can only be secure against mental suggestions by a partial personal siddhi cut off from the external Nature or by complete idealisation. 17... the system by the external mind armed with all that has been cast out; but this comes now no longer in the shape of the old intellectual mind, but a semi-idealised intuivity translating into mental and physical terms all the rejected suggestions of the partial ideality which supports the lower order of things, drawing from a perversion of ideal intuitions their justification. For everything in the lower... pervasion, slightly interrupted continuity by the sadhana tapas. The thick recurrent masses of tamas of oblivion in the physical being are being attacked and dissipated, spontaneous recurrence enforced, sahaituka Page 1132 Ananda brought into occasional activity. The mental tamas masses of oblivion, while writing etc are also being attacked, dissipated, set aside or illumined by light of ideality ...
... gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them – they act as beings that are at least semi-independent. One can form a thought which then travels, goes out to someone, spreads the idea it contains. There is a mental substance just as there is a physical substance, and on [its own] plane the mind can emanate innumerable... of progression and inspired with the conscious will to impose a higher and higher law on her own processes of life and being. In subhuman life there is a vital and physical struggle, but no mental conflict. Man is subjected to this mental conflict and is therefore at war not only with others but with himself; and because he is capable of this war with himself, he is also capable of that which is denied... hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited ...
... middle term to put them in harmony. And then, at times, if you add to the physical the vital and mental (I do not speak of the speculative mind or the independent vital, I am speaking of the mental and vital parts of the body , because there is a physical vital and a physical mind; there is a physical mind and this physical mind is the worst of all, it is that which goes on all the time and you have... the kind of fear that he felt seeing someone else's wound. He really got it. What is the difference between mental, vital and physical fear? If you are conscious of the movement of your mind, the movement of your vital and the movement of your physical, you know it. The mental, it is very simple: thoughts come. You begin thinking, for example, there is this illness and this illness is very... stops and you become cold. Physically, well... When you do not any longer have the other two fears, you can become aware of the physical fear. Generally, the other two are much more conscious. They hide the physical fear from you. But when you have no longer any mental or vital fear, then you become aware of it. It is a curious little vibration that gets into your cells and they begin shivering that ...
... hundreds of sadhaks in all times have had the realisation of the Atman in the higher mental planes, buddheh paratah, but the supramental realisation was not theirs. One can get partial realisations of the Self or Spirit or the Divine on any plane, mental, vital, physical even, and when one rises above the ordinary mental plane of man into a higher and larger mind, the Self begins to appear in all... intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, brings the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by past... wideness of the Self that cessation of mental activity becomes possible; one gets the inner Silence. After that this inner Silence can remain even when there is activity of any kind; the being remains silent within, the action goes on in the instruments, and one receives all the necessary initiations and execution of action whether mental, vital or physical from a higher source without the fundamental ...
... haste; go several times through what you have written and see whether it accurately represents the spirit of the original, and whether the language cannot be improved. In all things, in the mental and physical plane, it should be your aim, at present, not to go fast and finish quickly, but to do everything carefully, perfectly, and in the right manner. We wish you to understand and keep henceforth... stopped fasting altogether. You cannot come till you have descended into the ordinary physical consciousness and remained there for months together. You cannot see me again at Pondicherry until you are ready to meet me on the physical plane and that can only be when you have accepted the physical consciousness and the physical life. This is definite. 6) If you refuse to do what I tell you, you cannot have... they pressed you to eat. All these things we have told you are necessary for your being in the physical consciousness and having the right relations with physical life. In our next letter we will write to you in detail what we mean by being in the physical consciousness and meeting us on the physical plane. But today there is no time and we want this letter to go by today's post. [9] March ...
... inner being is composed of the inner mental, the inner vital, the inner physical. The psychic is the inmost—supporting all the others. Usually it is in the inner mental that this separation first happens and it is the inner mental Purusha who remains silent observing the Prakriti as separate from himself. But it may also be the inner vital Purusha or inner physical or else without location simply the... the consciousness, no longer limited by the body and the habits of the external nature, to go within, to enter the inner mental depths, the inner vital, the inner (subtle) physical, the psychic, to become aware of its inmost psychic self or its inner mental, vital and subtle physical being and, it may be, to move and live in the domains, the planes, the worlds that correspond to these parts of the nature... simply a mechanical continuation of the impetus of Nature in the physical man and will drop away with the body so that one can depart into Nirvana. In fact all these ignorant vital movements originate from outside in the ignorant universal nature; the human being forms in his superficial parts of being, mental, vital, physical a habit of certain responses to these waves from outside. It is these ...
... to them. Inertia is mental, vital, physical, subconscient. Physical inertia can produce mental inertia, mental inertia can produce physical inertia, vital inertia almost always makes the physical lifeless and lustreless and dull, and that is inertia. Vital inertia can also infect the mind, unless the mind is very strong and clear. I have always said that the physical consciousness is the main... strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible. Mind and vital nature are on the contrary all for will and initiative and so when one is in mind or vital or acting under their influence will feels itself always ready to be active. When the mental will acquiesces in the inertia... and you are free. What you describe is what the Gita means by the realisation that all action is done by the Prakriti. You feel it mechanical because you are in the physical consciousness where all is mechanism. On the mental and vital plane one can have the same experience, but of the actions as a play of forces. What is lacking at present to you is the other side of the experience, viz. that ...
... spiritual evolution as in the physical; and so all-important are they that all activity of any kind whatsoever, all life mental, vital, physical are said to be merely the natural operation of the three gunas interacting upon each other. These three gunas are called in the Sankhya terminology sattwa, rajas, tamas ; comprehension, activity, passivity, or as they manifest in physical substance, retention... stimulus he is profoundly indolent, even inert. His sensibility, physical or mental, is small, for sensibility depends on and increases with Page 286 rajas, the power of reaction and this power is in the savage comparatively undeveloped. His emotional reactions are also weak and primitive; in their predominantly physical character and in the helpless spontaneousness of their response to... 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 life, yet this inner life psychical and spiritual tended irresistibly to master and mould outer physical actions. No sanction by which society could ...
... spiritual, mental, vital, physical even, becomes universalised: it is seen as a power of his universal force and cosmic spirit, or else it contains the universe in that ineffable wideness which comes to the individual consciousness when it breaks its bonds and flows upward towards the Transcendent and on every side into the Infinite. In a Yoga lived entirely on the spiritualised mental plane it... the ego is subjected but not eliminated, we may indeed be engines of the Divine Work, but we shall be imperfect tools and deflect or impair the working by our mental errors, our vital distortions or the obstinate incapacities of our physical nature. If this ego disappears, then we can truly become, not only pure instruments consciously consenting to every turn of the divine Hand that moves us, but... works in its extreme wideness, if not yet on its most luminous heights; for we perceive no longer merely Nature or the modes of Nature, but become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves ...
... in the primitive and mainly physical human stage) becomes afterwards ParasuRama ("Rama of the Axe", the Divine in the kinetic or vitalistic phase of humanity) and then Rama, son of Dasaratha (the Divine as the mental Man, the embodiment of Dharma, the perfect Moral Consciousness) and, again, Krishna (the Divine as the "Overman", openly exemplifying a more-than-mental Consciousness, what Sri Aurobindo... undergoing a process similar to the natural one through which the life-series of each of us passes. The Avatar is not simply a descent from above; there is an evolution of a soul-centred mould, physical-vital-mental, in which at certain critical points the descending Avatar Self is revealed. The letter¹ runs: "...each being in a new birth prepares a new mind, life and body — otherwise John Smith... have no chance of being Piyush Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities contributing to the new life — but I am speaking of the new visible personality, the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person. It is therefore to be expected that the Avatar should take on a new ...
... vital and physical functions operated only in gross matter, and they determined accordingly that his physical life was the result of consciousness working in the Waking-State on gross matter. His mental and intuitional processes were found to operate freely and perfectly in subtle matter, but in gross matter with a hampered and imperfect activity; they considered therefore that man's mental life belonged... the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received without intelligence or coordination, wildly distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain-memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world. In the Yogic dream-state, on the other hand, the mind is in clear possession of itself, though not of the physical world... ess and to turn into the normal experience, powers, mental status of the waking life. The subtle mind which is normally eclipsed by the insistence of the physical being, Page 217 becomes powerful even in the waking state, until even there the enlarging man is able to live in his several subtle bodies as well as in his physical body, to be aware of them and in them, to use their senses ...
... this subconscient that becomes active in ordinary dreams. But in profounder dreams in which one goes out into other planes of consciousness, mental, vital, subtle physical, it is part of our subliminal inner being — inner mental, inner vital or subliminal physical - that is usually active. (What we mean by the subconscient, subliminal, circumconscient and superconscient part s of our being will be... worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the Page 313 soul's home; others above with which we have little contact.... It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into connection with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all... repetitions of all kinds, in untraceable impulsions and motives, in mental, vital, physical perturbations and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our obscurest parts of nature." (The Life Divine, p. 559) The 'subliminal' proper in us comprises our inner being, that is to say, our inner mind and inner life and inner physical with the soul or the psychic entity supporting them. It is of ...
... nature of the child, to the range of activity of which he was capable, to the stage of his development and to his individual needs. The basic elements of instruction he wished to educe from the physical, mental, moral, and religious nature of the child, from its elemental appearances. The course of instruction had to be brought into complete harmony with the stages of development of human nature. ... Pestalozzi's view of the influence of heredity on the one hand and environment on the other corresponds, to the modem assessment of their relative roles. Heredity does have a vital influence on mental, personal, and physical characteristics — but this influence can be almost completely annulled if during the first years of life the child's environment represses his capacities. The belief that talents... insisted that it was the whole personality which had to be educated: Page 280 Nature forms the child as an indivisible whole, as a vital organic unity with many-sided moral, mental, and physical capacities. She wishes that none of these capacities remain undeveloped. Where nature has influenced and the child is well and truly guided by her, she develops the child's heart, mind, and ...
... & convey, the intellect has only to receive & understand. Experience by the mind & body is necessary not for confirmation, but for realisation in the lower plane of consciousness on which we mental and physical beings live. We see a truth self-existent above this plane, self-existent in the satyam ritam brihat of the Veda, the True, the Right, the Vast which is the reality behind phenomena, but we have... lise the primitively imaginative and sensational religious concepts of the Veda. I hold this theory to be an error caused by the reading of our own modern mental processes into the very different mentality of the Vedic Rishis. The higher mental processes of the ancient world were not intellectual, but intuitive. Those inner operations, the most brilliant, the most effective, the most obscure, are our... can discover the preparation of the same result obscurely outlining itself behind the deceptive appearances of the moment. The first effect on the West from this impingement of the mental atmosphere of Europe on the mental atmosphere of Asia and the breaking down of the walls that separated them has been the Page 560 revival of the invincible intuitionalism of the Aryan or Aryanised races ...
... ions. A physical explanation of the precognitive experience is really ar1 impossibility. It would be an impossibility even if the telepathic experience were physically explicable. But that experience, too, defies physical explanation. Mrs. Knight is honest enough to concede about telepathy: "The upholders of mental causation must be granted their point, that belief in a physical cause of telepathy... and fallible senses, to triumph mentally over physical space and have the possibility of exceeding the prison-house of the ego- mentality - do these implications of telepathy look like implications of "a relic of a more primitive function" than the human mind? And, remember, ESP is not confined to telepathy: there is precognition which mentally triumphs over physical time over and above including telepathic... delusions of the in- sane." Hence, on her own admissions, the "colossal prima facie improbability" involved in precognition must be far smaller-if E2 and El are mental than if they are physical events. To refuse to believe they are physical events is not to strain at a gnat but to avoid swallowing a second camel on top of the first. How big this camel may be can be gauged still more if in addition ...
... n. Unlike the mental and the vital planes of the being which are relatively more conscious, the physical plane is largely below the level of awareness. Therefore we become better aware of the characteristics of physical consciousness Page 86 when these manifest through the "physical mind" (part of the mind interfused with physical consciousness) or through the "physical vital" (part of... hidden and veiled by the activities of physical, vital and mental consciousness. The reason for dwelling at some length on definitions of the mental, the vital and the physical lies in the fact that in Integral Yoga, psychological disturbances are seen as springing from various inherent characteristics of physical, vital and mental consciousness and of their subdivisions made up of their int... Mental Health and Yoga Mental Health and Yoga Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga "There is a psychological health just as there is a physical health." The Mother "It is only by a change - not a mere readjustment - of man's present nature that it can be developed, and such a change is not possible except by yoga" Sri Aurobindo Psychological ...
... still normally take our first secure stand on the lowest sub-plane of the intelligence, which we may call the physical-mental, because it depends for its evidence of fact and sense of reality on the physical brain, the physical sense-mind, the physical sense-organs; there we are the physical man who attaches most importance to objective things and to his outer life, has little intensity of the subjective... herself while she attempts her higher human developments; but in this mental formation there is no power for progress or only for a material progress. It is our first mental status, but the mental being cannot remain always at this lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder. Above physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation, there is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind... principle of existence,—apparently new at least in the world of Matter,—mentality. Animal being is mentally aware of existence, its own and others, puts forth a higher and subtler grade of activities, receives a wider range of contacts, mental, vital, physical, from forms other than its own, takes up the physical and vital existence and turns all it can get from them into sense values and vital-mind values ...
... heaven, the physical and mental being, attain their full, all-embracing wideness, विश्वमिन्वे and by that wideness give full scope to the increase of the Seer-Will. सौमनसाय. Perfect or right mentality including मनीषा, right thought enlightened by the दक्ष and not only the emotional part of the मनः. The सौमनस is vast, महे, as a result of the wideness of the Rodasi, the mental and physical being, which... of the godhead, रथं न, a robe that he wears, वासः, a dwelling he inhabits, ओकः. So long as the Word is not heard by the god, does not call him into itself to manifest his status and working in the mental realisation it produces, it is not effective, nor is the realisation a true seeing. Sayana's rendering. Approaching and carrying on the sacrifice let us speak the hymn to Agni who hears us... obviously a continuation of the statements वेषि, कृणोषि, and now आवहासि. प्रशस्तये. The प्रशस्ति is the expressing or manifesting of the god by the word, not yet his birth or creation, but a temporary mental realisation by the thought. It is not merely praise; there is no need for the gods to be carried to the sacrifice to be praised; but certainly the word must be an assertion of the powers, functions ...
... answering to English "that". "He, the same Yajna whom you surround as the individual soul, is also beyond that relation and universal." देवेषु । The gods, as masters of the forces and functions, physical, mental and spiritual which surround with their activities and minister to the individual knowledge and action of the Jiva. गच्छति । The secondary root गच्छ् from ग is used to form certain tenses... root कृ expresses action, work, mastery, strength, rule or any strong, violent or mastering activity, to cut, pierce, slaughter, hurt etc. ऋतुः meant strength, action, force, power of any kind mental or physical. It often meant the Will or any activity of the will. Cf Greek χράτος, χάρτος, χαρτερóς. The word शतऋतु as a name of Indra meant not "he of the hundred sacrifices", but he whose force was that... burn etc. In the word कवि the sense of perfect creative action is dominant. कवि meant a poet, artist, scientist, craftsman, sage, anyone who was कोविद, who could deal perfectly with his material physical or intellectual. It also meant the art or science itself and so, wisdom, skill, mastery, proficiency. It is in this latter sense that it is used in the compound कविॠतुः, "whose strength is in the ...
... does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first... belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered... realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore ...
... in different levels of existence. For instance, there is in the Veda the series of the outer physical light, another higher and inner light which is a vehicle of the mental, vital and psychic consciousness, and a highest inmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-god, was the lord of the physical Sun, but he is at the same time the giver of the rays of Knowledge which illumines the mind... of the physically minded man;18 the second stage took up man's outward life as also a deeper mental and psychical life, and it brought man more directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him. But now in the third stage, there was an attempt to take up man's whole mental, psychical, physical living so as to arrive at a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual Page 98 ... message of the third stage is that the spiritualisation of the collective life cannot be achieved if only the physical mind of man is trained or even if a greater effort is made to train the psychic- emotional part of man's nature. What is needed is to turn the entirety of mental, psychical and physical living of the individual and the collectivity to divinise the whole of human life and nature. It is significant ...
... of a new level of consciousness became necessary. We find this confirmed in Sri Aurobindo. “Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own mental and physical body according to the needs and the pace of the human evolution and so appearing from age to age, yuge yuge ? In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in... then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic , sattwic , nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages,... and Answers ), the Mother explained the significance of Sri Aurobindo’s birth on the various levels of existence. Physically, she said, the consequences of his birth will last as long as the Earth; mentally, it is a birth the memory of which will last eternally; psychically, it is a birth which will recur eternally, from age to age, in the history of the universe; spiritually, it is the birth of the ...
... does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the... belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered... realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore ...
... roses nor a path of joyous Light. It is a difficult journey, a battle and struggle, an often painful and chequered growth, a life besieged by obscurity, falsehood and suffering. It has its mental, vital, physical joys and pleasures, but these bring only a transient taste—which yet the vital self is unwilling to forego—and they end in distaste, fatigue or disillusionment. What then? To say the Divine... above of a great spiritual stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart, on the life stimuli, on the physical reflexes. A sudden descent of this kind or a series of descents accumulative in force and efficacy is a well-known phenomenon of spiritual experience. Or again one may start a mental process of one kind or another for the purpose which would normally mean a long labour and yet may pull down... e by an inner sense as any movement of material energy or substance by the physical senses. The stillness of the mind means, first, the falling to rest of the habitual thought movements, thought formations, thought currents which agitate this mind-substance. That repose, vacancy of movement, is for many a sufficient mental silence. But, even in this repose of all thought movements and all movements ...
... sudden attacks on the health during samadhi which could not be successful during the waking. This is because a certain physical depression or even disintegration seems to take place in samadhi which is not possible when the tapas is concentrated on the physical world as the mental. Although this has been greatly reduced, it is still sufficient to leave the room open for attacks, eg yesterday of violent... determined by the subconscient. This rises out of the realised sat in the mental, vital, physical prakriti (pradhana elementalised) and is therefore satyam. It is not yet ritam, Page 991 but prepares to be. It will be brihat by the large assimilation of the circumconscient under the law of the ideality. Physical tamas has been for some days dominant. It is now being violently thrown... Fear of disease and death is practically abolished; touches only come from outside. The physical shrinking from intense pain is still able to affirm itself in a subdued, but effective fashion. The prana is touched by it, but not the mind. Complete unification of all the anandas of darshana on their mental basis. Frequent affirmation of chidghana, intense or less intense. Its universalisation ...
... happen to me, the Divine is my guide, I must have confidence in Her,” then She will pull you out even through all these misfortunes, all your weaknesses, yourself, your small fears and your mental, vital and physical misconceptions. Moreover, each one has his own way and his own load of difficulties to surmount and to conquer. It depends exclusively on his attitude towards the Divine, and also on himself... impulses, your so-called difficulties and the obstacles on the path which trouble you are things which fall on you from outside, which come from outside. Nothing is within you, only your vital, mental and physical invite them and make you believe that it is within yourself that this misfortune exists and has its origin. But no, — you are outside all this admixture, above all these circumstances and their... mind, the inner vital and the inner physical, — and the activities of their outward manifestation around the psychic being, harmonises them, coordinates them, classifies them, and to each part delegates its work and its mode of execution and controls all the activities by its influence. Or we may say that it infuses or infiltrates its consciousness into the mental to make it act as it should, into the ...
... only the mental, or ordinary spiritual forces on the plane of mind, to support one's progress. If you look closely, you will see that when these Forces work now it is in a perfectly irrational, instinctive way, repeating always the same movements without any intellectual or higher vital power behind them. Theirs is now an irrational mechanical method which obscures more in the lowest physical and su... they come to disturb it—a fact known to the Yogis and Rishis from early times. Forced opening by a vital or a hostile force means a forced opening and entering of the same force in our mental, vital, physical body. If you mean an invasion of the consciousness by a hostile force, that happens—but it cannot succeed unless something in the sadhaka either welcomes the invasion or is somehow attracted... supermind, then I have nothing to do here and will leave it to greater Minds to solve the problem in their own way. When did the hostile forces begin their work of perversion—at the time of mental, vital or physical manifestation? As soon as Life was to appear, they intervened in it. A converted Asura, i.e. one who has consented to be God's ally and undergo transformation, may easily change colour ...
... be dispelled; there is a keener mental vision, a clearer and more accurate mental feeling of our subjective becoming, a vision which at once knows, commands and controls the whole nature. If the psychic and mental parts in us are strong, the vital comes under mastery and direction to an extent hardly possible to the surface mentality; even the body and the physical energies can be taken up by the inner... and our physical energisms and can see clearly the pure operations, the distinct powers, the composing elements of each and their interplay in a clear light of self-vision. We find that the contradictions and the struggles of our surface consciousness are largely due to the contrary or mutually discordant tendencies of our mental, vital and physical parts opposing and unreconciled with each other and... enters into the cosmic consciousness. The subliminal is separated from the cosmic through a limitation by the subtler sheaths of our being, its mental, vital, subtle-physical sheaths, just as the surface nature is separated from universal Nature by the gross physical sheath, the body; but the circumscribing wall around it is more transparent, is indeed less a wall than a fence. The subliminal has besides ...
... to restate the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of the Self so that it shall re-embrace, permeate, dominate, transfigure the mental and physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its own richness, power and ... Aurobindo's feet and closed her eyes, only her mind was open to him. A great silence now encompassed her and flooded her soul. There was a breaking of past intellectual moulds, a dissolution of arduous mental constructions, followed by a new crystallisation in the image of total identification with the incarnate Divine. When she took up her pen after the usual meditation next morning, this was the entry... engine of Power to serve the ends of Purusha or Krishna, the mere ego being now eliminated: a progressive heightening of the power of consciousness through the influx of the higher knowledge till the mental becomes the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, the grand lever of change and transformation - such was the strategy of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. This was the real "work" on which he was engaged, but ...
... both mental and physical. According to Epicurus, the yardsticks for good and bad were sensations of pleasure and pain, therefore the experience of pain was bad and the experience of Page 40 pleasure was good. He gave great importance to the presence of good friends for attaining a happy and tranquil life. However, he counselled restraint and moderation with respect to physical desires... total synthesis of all the parts of the being. In the fullness of integrality, the highest spiritual consciousness manifests itself fully on all the planes of the being, including the mental, the vital and the physical. However, there are subordinate meanings of integral aims, and these aims, even while integrating all the parts of the being, may not find it possible to manifest the highest consciousness... desires as unbridled desire and over-indulgence in pleasure could lead to dissatisfaction, ultimately to pain. According to him, man should aim at the absence of pain (both physical and mental) and a state of satiation and tranquility that was free from the fear of death and the retribution of the gods. In other words, when man is free from pain, he no longer desires pleasure, and when he is free from fear ...
... for the future. If a sadhak can call down the force to cure him without need of medical treatment, that is always the best, but it is not always possible, so long as the whole consciousness mental, vital, physical down to the most subconscient is not opened and awake. There is no harm in a Doctor who is a sadhak carrying on his profession and using his medical knowledge; but he should do it in reliance... overcome inertia or physical tamas? It is quite true that physical exercise is very necessary to keep off the tamas. I am glad you have begun it and I trust you will keep it up. What should I do when I descend into physical tamas or when there is an attack of inertia? Physical tamas in its roots can be removed only by the descent and the transformation, but physical exercise and regular... death in the Ashram and a death outside? Does one get more benefit in the form of development of the mental, vital etc. on their own planes so that one may get a better new birth? I am not aware of any "development" of the mental etc. in their planes; the development takes place on earth. The mental and other planes are not evolutionary. The one who dies here is assisted in his passage to the psychic ...
... But the supra-physical planes are not bound to the forms like the physical. The forms there are expressive, not determinative. What is important on the vital plane is the force or feeling and the form expresses it. A vital being has a characteristic form but he can vary it or mask his true form under others. What is primary on the mental plane is the perception, the idea, the mental significance and... Ignorance, vitals and mentals have no go"—it can refuse to go farther. Because the soul wants more fun in the mud of Ignorance, people follow their "round of pleasure and pain". That is contrary to experience. The psychic has always been veiled, consenting to the play of mind, physical and vital, experiencing everything through them in the ignorant mental, vital and physical way. How then can it... particular sheath—mental, vital etc.—and upon that choice depend the evolutionary consequences. Is that correct? What is this central being you are speaking of—the Jivatma or the psychic being? or an amalgam of both? I don't quite understand. The psychic being is supposed not to choose, but rather to form in accordance with its past and future evolution a new mental, vital and physical sheath each ...
... is because the seat of the physical energy is there which supports and reinforces all the rest. Voronoff's selection is perfectly logical and intuitive at the same time. What does supramentalisation mean exactly? We know by your own statement that you have achieved that. Is it then supramentalisation in parts? You want transformation of everything—mental to physical? Achieved what? What statement... itself out in matter it must go through a process of transforming the immediate mental, vital and other connections, must it not—so why should not the process be in parts? Immortality also can come by parts. First the mental being becomes immortal (not shed and dissolved after death), then the vital, while the physical comes only last. That is a possible evolution, recognised by occult science. ... have died—some by violence, some by cancer, some of indigestion etc., etc. You yourself say that they were all failures. How do you reconcile these self-contradictory arguments? You say, "A physical and mental body is prepared fit for the divine incarnation by a pure or great heredity and the descending Godhead takes possession of it." 72 Like my heredity? It was "pure"? But of course I am ...
... the ignorance and assumes the forms of ignorance, — physical, vital, mental, — which are presented to it by the Ignorant Prakriti. Hence, the individual in the Ignorance has three poises of the Purusha corresponding to three currents of the formations of Prakriti. In the physical formation of Prakriti, the individual takes the poise of the physical Purusha (annamaya purusa), in the vital formation... in matter and Mind in Life. And on the same basis, it would become intelligible why Supermind can evolve in Mind. In this process of evolution, we find that the material existence has only a physical, not a mental individuality. But as the evolution proceeds farther, the phenomenon of individuality becomes more and more visible, and it is in evolution of human consciousness that the body, life and mind... to what is experienced as the true eternal individual or individual soul or individual self. Pointing out that the true individual is nothing of the kind that obtains as individualized mental, vital, and physical being separate from all other beings and incapable of unity with them by its very ego-sense, Sri Aurobindo states that by the true individual is meant "a conscious power of being of the Eternal ...
... and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised physical existence.” 54 “In the untransformed part of humanity itself there might well arise a new and greater order of mental human beings; for the directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not yet gnostic mental being, the directly or partly illumined mental being, the mental being in direct or part communion with the higher-thought... births one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it – it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic [antaratman], whichever may happen to be the most in front or most powerful in nature... times in countries like Greece, 7 where all sides of human activity were equally developed and the gymnasium, chariot-racing and other sports and athletics had the same importance on the physical side as on the mental side the Arts and poetry and the drama, and were especially stimulated and attended to by the civic authorities of the city state. It was Greece that made an institution of the Olympiad ...
... (hail Supra-mental!!), all sorts of physical troubles will be rampant now. Rubbish! You repeat always this imbecile absurdity that the Supramental is descending into the sadhaks—as P thought it had descended into him! The sadhaks are miles away from the supra-mental. What I spoke of was not the descent of the Supramental into the sadhaks but into the earth-consciousness. If the Supra-mental had descended... possible that some part of D.L. is, after all, hovering over the Asram and trying to create some mental, vital or nervous havoc? Or some other force taking D.L.'s shape or voice trying to push in? D.L. does not call him; it is not she at all. When she got ill something possessed her body and physical consciousness and turned everything against her recovery. When she died the Mother separated this... nothing more. I don't contend that his madness made him a genius, though it would agree with the immortal theory ,of Lombroso that genius is madness or at least always tied to abnormality and mental and physical unsoundness. It may have been the result of our constant pouring of force into him to keep his mind bright and coherent and clear. His touchiness seems to have come from an inferiority complex ...
... public shareability, the situation is more difficult. But if a serious study is made, and if it is admitted that all truth, supra-physical or physical, must be founded not on mental beliefs alone, but on experience, and that in each case experience must be of the kind, physical, subliminal or spiritual, which is appropriate to the order of the truths into which we are empowered to enter, and further, if... support or factor. In this stage, one is mostly preoccupied with the utilization of such contact as one can get or construct with something transcendental that can help or serve mental ideas or moral ideals or vital or physical interests. Morality too can become a starting-point and one can even arrive at a stage of consciousness which can be judged to be a state of justice in the light of certain ethical... body, life and mind without any reference to their original source or self. Again, morality is that part of ordinary life which seeks to regulate and guide the various aspects of the physical and vital life or of mental or rational thought in the light of standards of conduct erected by moral or normative conscientiousness, hedonistic, altruistic, or utilitarian or else in the light of standards of ...
... al finites with a different and more subtle mode of operation of their own, and no dependence on the physical parts for instrumentation can annul their intrinsic character; there is something more and other in our vital and mental being and vital and mental forces than the functioning of a physical body. But, again, each finite is in its reality or has behind it an Infinite which has built and supports... indulgence or, it may be, acting upon its agitation to quiet, enlarge, transform it. So too we can rise to a consciousness above and observe the various parts of our being, inner and outer, mental, vital and physical and the subconscient below all, and act upon one or other or the whole from that higher status. It is possible also to go down from that height or from any height into any of these lower... the embodied being. If the Purusha in us is passive and allows Nature to act, accepting all she imposes on him, giving a constant automatic sanction, then the soul in mind, life, body, the mental, vital, physical being in us, becomes subject to our nature, ruled by its formation, driven by its activities; that is the normal state of our ignorance. If the Purusha in us becomes aware of itself as the ...
... when you wrote to me that I was in the physical consciousness? Did you mean that I am living like an animal or vegetating like a plant and did you suggest that I should come out of the physical consciousness and live on the mental level? I am myself living in the physical consciousness and have been for several years. At first it was a plunge into the physical—into all its obscurity and inertia, ... afterwards it was a station in the physical open to a higher and higher consciousness and slowly having fought out in it the struggle of transformation of the physical consciousness with a view to prepare it for the supramental change. It is possible to go back to the mental level where one receives all the mental realisations readily enough if the mind is Page 334 open and bright. But... sadhana is now taking place directly on the physical plane, where the force of a habit or habitual movement once formed is very great. When the sadhana is taking place on the mental or vital plane, it is more easy to control or change, because the mind and vital are more plastic than the physical. But on the other hand if something is definitely gained on the physical plane, there is a more lasting and complete ...
... but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and Page 893 its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material... machinery for the convenience and welfare of his vital and physical parts and a field and medium for his mental growth, but they cannot take him beyond his present self or serve as a machinery to transform him; his and their perfection can only come by his farther evolution. Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make... action it may still depend upon the mental, vital, bodily instruments, or it may allow them to act according to their own nature and itself remain satisfied with self-experience and self-knowledge, with an inner liberation, an eventual freedom: but it may also and usually does exercise a certain authority, governance, influence on thought, life movement, physical action, a purifying uplifting control ...
... to look after the mental, vital and physical health of the green ones, both boys and girls. Along with the necessity, means also came forward to meet the demand. Sisirkumar Mitra from Vishwabharati, with a long teaching experience, and Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya from Calcutta, an expert in physical culture, came and were given charge of the two wings of education, mental and physical. Particularly in... physically. She used it not only for her physical fitness, but as in everything else, as a medium for her spiritual action on the players. It was this inner movement that interested her as much as the outer one. For, playing with the Divine meant an aspiration, opening, right attitude, reception of her force through the game, as through other means like physical and mental activity. Here, of course, the manner... in young Pranab, the Mother found an excellent instrument for physical culture and with his help she quickly built up the centre of physical education. I don't need to discuss the place and raison d'etre of physical education in our Ashram life when Sri Aurobindo has done it so well in his essay on The Divine Body. 6 My vision being more earthly, I can see that it has served the most important ...
... the physical support—in that physical support the ojas produced by Brahmacharya counts greatly. The transformation of retas into ojas is a transformation of physical substance into a physical (necessarily producing also a vital-physical) energy. The spiritual energy by itself can only drive the body, like the vital and mental, but in driving it it would exhaust it if it has not a physical support... but still vital love. There may too be a physical love, the attraction of beauty, Page 492 the physical sex-appeal or anything else of the kind awakening the emotions of the heart. If that does not happen, then the physical need is all and that is sheer lust, nothing more. But physical love is possible. In the same way there can be a mental love. It arises from the attempt to find one's... absolute mastery of the sex-movements and an entire abstention from the physical (animal) indulgence are first conditions, because this way aims not only at a mental and vital but a physical transformation. A psychic purity is demanded in all the consciousness and there is needed a transformation of all the vital and physical energies which in the absence of these conditions is impossible. The ...
... is your physical mind that brings in wrong ideas, I correct. Formerly you had to correct hardly anything I wrote! Why this difference between now and then? It is because you have come down from the mental into the physical - therefore the physical mind comes across the knowledge. Page 202 If I am not able to answer my own mental questions... even when the physical mind is quiescent and there is only silence, still the knowledge does not come. It is still the stuff of the physical mind which must receive it and, as that physical mind is too obscure, it does not come. I feel somewhere a dark veil which keeps the knowledge from descending. Is it a strain of inertia? It must be a mental inertia or tamas... centre. It seems to be very slow in coming through. It has to come down to the heart centre and below before it can begin to be fully effective. Probably there must be something either in the physical mental (throat) [or] the emotional vital that obstructs the descent. That may be the reason of the union of the upper Agni and the psychic fire and the push in the psychic centre - something is trying ...
... form is or seems to be in man the mental being or mental person which the Upanishads speak of as the mental leader of the life and body, manomayaḥ prāṇa-śarīra-netā." 14 Would not the mental being be part of the human personality—the mental, nervous and physical composite? The mental being spoken of by the Upanishad is not part of the mental nervous physical composite—it is the manomayaḥ puruṣaḥ... carries with it a highly developed mental or vital being, or does it mean that it is taken up in the psychic as a seed-saṁskāra or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state? Page 128 It is only meant that the separative ego is not a creation of birth in the physical body; the mental and the vital have it also. So long as the mental and vital are subject to ignorance... of forces or spiritual beings who surround you and live upon your experiences and enjoyments" [ p. 1377 ]. What are these "spiritual beings"? They are powers, forces or beings of the mental, vital or subtle physical worlds. There are some that simply want to utilise, there are others that want to possess, oppose or destroy and are known by us as "the hostile forces". 14 April 1936 What does ...
... vital and physical functions operated only in gross matter, and they determined accordingly that his physical life was the result of consciousness working in the Waking State on gross matter. His mental and intuitional processes were found to operate freely and perfectly in subtle matter, but in gross matter with a hampered and imperfect activity; they considered therefore that man's mental life belonged... extraordinary disturbances of the physical instruments; such as the development of delusions, hallucinations, eccentricities, mania and disease side by side with the development of genius or exceptional mental & spiritual powers in family or individual. Man has not yet discovered his soul; his main energies have been directed towards realizing and mastering the physical world in which he moves. Page... can then retire into the subtle world and operate with perfect freedom and detachment from physical matter. Here again we see that just as Prana, differentiated and working physically, was the basis of all physical activity, so Prana, intermediate and working psycho-physically, is at the basis of all mental activity, and Prana, pure and working psychically is at the basis of all psychical activity ...
... discontinued after some time. Page 383 spiritual truth of Self so that it shall re-embrace, permeate and dominate the mental and physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its own riches, power and complexity;... knew about it and they informed others saying: 'This gentleman must be ill; he will not live long!' Though my physical strength was diminishing, I was able to raise a pail of water above my head which I could not do ordinarily. "At Pondicherry, while fasting, I was in full mental and vital vigour. I was even walking eight hours a day and not feeling tired at all. And when I broke the fast... forward as a subsequent eventuality in a yet distant vista of things. To possess securely the Light and the Force of the Supra- mental being, this is the main object to which the power is now turning. But the remnant of the old habits of intellectual thought and mental will come so obstinate in their determination to remain that the progress is hampered, uncertain and always falls back from the ...
... then they slowly begin to rise or draw nearer, most often unseen, and when he is quite off his guard, surge up suddenly or make a sudden irruption. That continues until the whole nature, mental, vital, physical down to the very subconscient is enlightened, conscious, full of the Divine. Till that happens one must always remain watchful in a sleepless vigilance.” (26.5.32) Many things, which... “The decision was not a mental choice, not at all. Quite naturally, spontaneously the group formed and asserted itself as an imperative necessity. There was no choice to be made. “And once you start that way, it is done, you have to go right through to the end. “If you want to do the work all alone, it is absolutely impossible to do it in a total way, for the entire physical being, however complete... experience that when the resistance in the body is too strong and persistent, it can help to take some aid of physical means as an instrumentation for the Force to work more directly on the body itself; for the body then feels itself supported against the resistance from both sides, by means both physical as well as supraphysical. The Mother’s Force can work through both together. It is surprising that you ...
... establishing mental silence, we observed that several mental layers had to be silenced: a thinking mind , which makes up our regular reasoning process; a vital mind , which justifies our desires, feelings and impulses; there is also a far more troublesome physical mind , whose conquest is as important for physical mastery as the conquest of the thinking mind and the vital mind are for mental and vital... external frontal being disintegrates; the array of mental vibrations that clustered around us through habitual repetition and formed our mental ego, or mental body, disintegrates and returns to the universal Mind; similarly, the vital vibrations that made up our vital ego, or vital body, disintegrate in the universal Page 86 Vital, just as the physical body disintegrates into its natural constituents... yield, because just as the thinking mind is an obstacle to the widening of our mental consciousness and the vital mind is an obstacle to the universalization of our vital consciousness, the physical mind puts up a massive wall against the expansion of our physical consciousness, an expansion that is the basis of all physical mastery. In addition, it jams all communications and invites all disasters; a ...
... had stood behind the personalities of Horace and Hector. The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences,—but not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that it gathered from them, what might be called... roses nor a path of joyous Light. It is a difficult journey, a battle and struggle, an often painful and chequered growth, a life besieged by obscurity, falsehood and suffering. It has its mental, vital, physical joys and pleasures, but these bring only a transient taste—which yet the vital self is unwilling to forego—and they end in distaste, fatigue or disillusionment. What then? To say the Divine... believe in and perceive the Divine Will in things which men cannot perceive—nor the meaning in them—because they are perplexed not so much by their mental limitations—though that is one cause—but by the claims and recoils of the vital ego. The mental difficulty would become much less if the vital mind were once pacified, submitted, attentive to the intimations of a higher Light. So I wish you all ...
... and a seeker of beauty through these things. There is the mental-vital personality which when it saw the vital standing in the way insisted on a grim struggle of Tapasya, and it is no doubt that also which approves Vairagya and Nirvana. There is the physical-mental personality which is the Russellite, extrovert, doubter. There is another mental-emotional personality all whose ideas are for belief in... different from the dream experiences that one has on the vital or mental plane which are themselves not ordinary dreams but actual experiences on the mental, vital, psychic or subtle physical planes. You have had several dreams which were vital dream experiences, those in which you met the Mother and recently you had one such contact on the mental plane which, for those who understand these things, means that... is always, of course, behind that the modern or European mentality which confuses the vital with the soul and the mind with page-154 spirituality . The Poet imaging mental or. physical beauty is for physical something more spiritual than the seer or the God lover experiencing the eternal peace or the ineffable ecstasy. The Rishi or Yogi can drink of a deeper draught of Beauty ri Delight ...
... truth in the physical, in what state the physical must be so as TO BE the Truth. It's something unshakeable, which PHYSICALLY does not budge. (Mentally, it's nothing, it's easy.) It is like a physical magnet for the true physical vibrations — it doesn't go through the mind or even through the vital: it's physically a sort of magnet that attracts the physical truth.... The “physical truth” is precisely... of a dog that has been beaten so much that it expects nothing but blows. It's sad. And this physical substance feels a sort of anxiety towards mental force; the moment a mental force manifests, it cries out: “Oh, no! Enough of that, enough!” As though it were the cause of all its torment. It feels the mental force as something so hard, dry, rigid, implacable — above all dry, empty: empty of the true... of the mental fishbowl. But branchial respiration was of course not a “falsehood” — only, when you discover sunlight and pulmonary respiration, it is something else. And Mother added this: ... And all the methods — which we may call artificial, Nirvana included — all the methods of getting out of it are worthless. I don't know. But salvation is PHYSICAL — not at all mental, but physical. I mean ...
... said that they could not digest the Dining Room food. It is an irony that now I am finding some difficulty with the reformed food. I request you to adjust my body to the changes. It is more mental than physical. When some problem arises in the Bakery or Blanchisserie, it is put before me. I have found a trick: I postpone deciding and inwardly leave the matter in your hands. Automatically a solution... weighing about 30 kilos, and I forgot to call you even once. From this you can decide which condition is better!! This is one more proof that in your case, the physical contact (this time in writing) is more effective than the purely mental one. Love and blessings. 7 April 1966 Mother, When I came here you gave me work in the Dining Room. Thus I was working on the last Darshan day... little in my consciousness, I get a great setback and it seems to fall instead of rise. When I give up the effort, it becomes normal. As for the progress, it is because you are trying mentally and the mental is always a limitation to the consciousness. It is only the aspiration from the heart and the psychic that can be effective. (And when you stop trying, you let me work in you and I know the ...
... of harmony; to restate the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of the Self so that it shall reembrace, permeate and dominate the mental and physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion ¹ Sri Aurobindo, Supplement... things done quickly, on the physico-vital and physical planes. But this has very violent reactions and therefore the mental and the vital being, instead of seizing upon the higher light and power, should surrender themselves to the higher Power. We have not to rest satisfied with partial transformation. We have to bring down the higher Power to the physical plane and govern the most external details of... sadhana as follows: "When I was doing sadhana on the mental plane things came so easily. It was child's play. With the vital being, though it was not easy, yet it was interesting. But this physical is absolutely hard. It has been left untried by the ancient Yogis, it has been neglected. Of course, it is not that no effort was made, – but the physical and the physico-vital were neglected. All the accumulated ...
... your brain. They want to have a fixed mental formation there, so that whenever you make the attempt there will be in the physical mind an expectation of difficulty, a dwelling on the idea of difficulty and unsuccess and incapacity, if not always in the front of the mind, yet at the back and by that they hope to prevent the experience from coming. It is these mental formations that you must reject, for... nerves, vital forces, embodied mental forces can become filled with a thousandfold Ananda, capable of an intensity of bliss which passes description and which need not fade away. How aloof, repellent and undesirable! The supramental love means an intense unity of soul with soul, mind with mind, life with life, and an entire flooding of the body consciousness with the physical experience of oneness, the... unexplained phenomena. Page 173 There is, as I have told you, a whole range or many inexhaustible ranges of sensory phenomena other than the out ward physical which one can become conscious of sep hear, feel, smell, touch, mentally contact—to use the new established Americanism—either in trance or sleep or an inward state miscalled sleep or simply and easily in the waking state. This faculty ...
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