... that merely by a little practice; anybody who observes his own thoughts, feelings, actions, has begun doing it already. In yoga we make the division complete, that is all. It is the inner mind—the mental Purusha—that can stand back as a witness and observe the outer being, which, as previously stated, is chiefly ruled by the viral nature (desires and emotions), and thereby arrive at detachment ...
... of will? No, it is a mental deformation. There is not much will in this. If the will intervened, it would become less absurd, perhaps. No, they are mental movements, the formation of the mind, the mental force which moves all the time, which comes and goes, like a squirrel in a cage which runs round and round and does not know why. Then, is it a universal play? No, not very universal; ...
... closely connected with the physical mind; its nature is to go on repeating without use whatever has happened—recent events, impressions, old habitual thoughts or ways of thinking and feeling. mind (the mental) —"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 ...
... 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 which is ...
... cultivation of the mind. The cultivation of the mind, however, means not only storing it with information on various kinds of subjects, the study of books: it means a purification and clearance of the mind, the mental stuff itself, an Page 6 elevation of consciousness to seek and recognise the new light. I have said that you are to receive the new light through the head at first, but through ...
... 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 sense-mind which is ...
... start the work of purification from that level, from the consciousness identified with the body; we must try to do the cleansing of the body and the vital. Mind? Oh, mind too, the higher levels of mind, the mental proper, that is too high for us. We may think of it much later. As for the way of purification, we should start from the very beginning. The very first lessons, as advised by Rajayoga, ...
... partial light and play of mind and senses, ego-centric life subject to dualities on to the superconscient All which is the realm of Light. And this higher Light can penetrate and come down into mind—the mental being of man. When it comes to man's mind, it first takes the form of intuition. That is how the penetration of Light also takes you in the other direction partly. This is the intuition of Self ...
... inner physical — the physical part of the inner being. inner vital Intuition — see under spiritualised mind. Ishwara — Lord, the Divine. Page 123 mind (the mental) — "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 ...
... Inner mind see under Mind Intuition 18 Joy xxvii-xxviii, 52 Liberation xxxi Love 7,9 aspiration for, 37 Memories of past lives xxviii-xxix, 60, 60- 61,66-67 Mind (the mental) XVI, 6,81, 107 inner 99, 103 leader of life 80 progress from life to life 71-72 Nature 6, 106fn Overmind 22, 26, 100, 104, 107, 109, 112 Peace 52 ...
... Introduction Our Many Selves The Outer Being There are three main parts in the outer or surface being: the mind (the mental), the life-nature (the vital) and the body (the physical). Each part has its own distinct type of consciousness, though in our ordinary awareness we are unable to distinguish among the mental, vital and physical constituents of our ...
... truth on which the philosophies of the supracosmic Absolute take their stand; Illusionism itself, even if we contest its ultimate conclusions, can still be accepted as the way in which the soul in mind, the mental being, has to see things in a spiritual-pragmatic experience when it cuts itself off from the Becoming in order to approach and enter into the Absolute. But also, since the Becoming is real and ...
... and which may even by an eventual development bridge over the gap of physical memory created by death and birth of the body. Even as it is, even in the present imperfect development of embodied mind, the mental being is conscious in the mass of a past and a future extending beyond the life of the body; he becomes aware of an individual past, of individual lives that have created his and of which he is ...
... × What the Mother means here is, as she said many times, that animal-man was so enthralled by the new capacities bestowed on him by his acquisition of the mind, the mental consciousness proper to the human being, that he has played with it and tried it out to its possible limits. For it was this mind which equipped him with the capacities of abstraction, mental ...
... consists in the predominance of one factor over the rest. In the principle of matter, the material factor rules the vital and mental: in that of life, the vital rules the remaining two: in that of mind, the mental is the ruler of its pair of companions. And so, when we speak of matter as involved life and W6 as involved mind, we do not resort to a reductionism from the higher level corresponding ...
... which is beyond the mental, into the supramental Consciousness and the supramental being.... 8 The Outer Being The three major divisions in the outer being consist of the mind (the mental), the life-self (the vital) and the body (the physical). Each of these parts has its own distinct type of consciousness, though in our ordinary awareness they are all mixed up. Each ...
... the mental heavens he reaches the Self of Mind. The Self of Mind 65 This is where "the climbing hierarchy of worlds" paused. At this summit space alone with an enormous Self of Mind (The Mental Purusha) Aswapati now stood. This is a realm of total withdrawal from the world Which has sprung from it: Omnipotent, immobile and aloof, In the world which sprang from it, it took ...
... cultivation of the mind. The cultivation of the mind, however, means not only storing it with information on various subjects, the study of books; it also means a purification and clearance of the mind, the mental stuff itself, an elevation of consciousness to seek and recognise the light. Page 27 I have said that you are to receive the new light through the head at first, but through ...
... only to the physical body, then it seems that the veinous blood collects in the brain and brings about a sort of anaesthesia of the brain. When the brain is thus completely quieted down then the mind – the mental consciousness – is released from the entanglement of body. It can then experience more freely the other levels of consciousness.) Disciple : What is the veinous blood? Disciple : ...
... what you say. I am afraid, the difficulty with him is that his vital being drags him into all sorts of activities and he begins to say : "You must do this, you must not do that," Then his mind – the mental being – comes in and says : "You may do what you like. I am nothing, you are free to do what you like." This kind of double movement renders the activity ineffective. If he had only worked with ...
... thus lies at the summit of and beyond mental consciousness which begins with the physical mind and ends with the purely mental or sattwic mind with the rajasic development in the middle. This, in short, is the course of evolutionary development of human mental consciousness. We regard the sattwic or the religious men as' the highest manifestation of mental consciousness. And they represent a fairly... of the mind. They can glimpse the truth from afar and even point! Page 34 the way to reach it but for that another consciousness is needed and that is the spiritual .consciousness. When the mind and mental consciousness is completely exceeded, the spiritual or truth-consciousness begins. The spiritual is in effect the reversal of the mental consciousness, for, where the mind sees things... similar to one another, there is always a great difference in their mental and moral consciousness so much so that at the lowest end of the human mental development, men represent more or less animal consciousness and are almost on the same mental plane with the animals of developed intelligence. These men represent the physical mind and belong in the terminology of the Gita to the class of tamasic type ...
... the Ordinary Mind The different parts of the ordinary mind (the thinking mind, the vital mind, and the physical mind) have been previously alluded to (Chapter 1, p. 12, fn. 17; and Chapter 5, p. 85, fn 21). Eckhart regards any and all activity of the mind as mental noise. One gets the impression that, according to Eckhart, when one rises to the realm of no-mind and stillness, the mind ceases to... activity, particularly of the mechanical mind, that is closely connected with the physical mind. Silence, he says, has to be established in all parts of the ordinary mind so that the higher consciousness may manifest. However, he considers the mind to be as indispensable an instrument as the physical body for life on earth, every part of the ordinary mind having its own useful functions; these functions... functions can be carried out in a state of silence, so the activity of the mind is not incompatible with silence. ...
... repeated in each of the statuses of being or consciousness. Thus the mind has a mental being, a vital being and a physical being. So the mind has mental limitations and vital limitations and also physical limitations. The mind's mental limitations are its notions and concepts, constructed ideas and fabricated comprehensions. The mind bound by its reasoning faculties, its deductive system, its syllogistic... The mind has Page 19 also a vital element, when it moves according to its inspiration, as it is called sometimes, but it is only an ignorant inspiration, it is only another name for "mood," for fancy. True inspiration is not a blind mental rush but something clear and steady and yet forceful and self-poised. Again, the mind has its physical element too: the physical mind is the... constitute it. First, there is a mind in the vital, it is called mental-vital, there is a vital in the vital, it is the vital proper, and there is a physical vital. The mental-vital means the field of sentiment and feeling and emotion, the vital proper is the field of passion, the intensity and even ferocity of its urge, and finally, the physical vital, which is the field of outward impulsion and drive ...
... repeated in each of the statuses of being or consciousness. Thus the mind has a mental being, a vital being and a physical being. So the mind has mental limitations and vital limitations and also physical limitations. The mind's mental limitations are its notions and concepts, constructed ideas and fabricated comprehensions. The mind bound by its reasoning faculties, its deductive system, its syllogistic... consciousness. The mind has also a vital element, when it moves according to its inspiration, as it is called sometimes, but it is only an ignorant inspiration, it is only another name for "mood," for fancy. True inspiration is not a blind mental rush but something clear and steady and yet forceful and selfpoised. Again, the mind has its physical element too: the physical mind is the mind controlled by... physical mind embodies the pattern of the movements of the higher consciousness, not of the sense-dominated consciousness. Even like the mind, the vital too has its threefold knots according to the three elements that constitute it. First, there is a mind in the vital, it is called mental-vital, there is a vital in the vital, it is the vital proper, and there is a physical vital. The mental-vital means ...
... action on the externalising mind (physical mental) whose centre is in the throat. The neck and throat and the lower part of the face belong to the externalising mind, the physical mental. The forehead to the inner Mind. Above the head are the higher planes of Mind. The organ of speech is an instrument of the physical mental or expressive externalising mind. The Chest, Stomach and Abdomen... indicate for this purpose different parts of the nature. The head is the seat of the mind (buddhi) and the lower part of the mouth, chin, neck are the seat of the external or physical mind. It indicates that the force is working there to change and prepare this part of the mind and get rid of resistance and wrong mental habits. The Cerebellum Yes, it [ the cerebellum ] has some connection with the... The ear is the passage of communion between the inner mind centre and the thought-forces or thought-waves of the universal Nature. It sounds like a sensation of opening and enlarging of this passage. The nose is connected with the vital dynamic part of the mental—a man with a strong nose is supposed to have a strong will or a strong mental personality,—though I don't know whether it is invariably ...
... ce. 2."Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3."Intuitive with Overmind touch. 4."Intuitive. 5."Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6."Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch. 7."Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch. 8."Ditto. 9."Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind... other was more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur." On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch." This comment came when, considerably after the comment on the whole poem, the lines concerned were separately submitted for classification. We may suppose that the rest... independent of its source." (I should like to know whether you intend any important distinction when you speak of "Overmind touch" and "mental Overmind touch".) "Yes—the Overmind proper has some gnostic light in it which is absent in the mental Overmind." * (From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare ?— ...the prophetic soul ...
... turn back upon the world and bring to bear upon it the force of his progress and establish the progress more generally. This power which in the inferior human consciousness appears as mind or mental discernment is the image or delegate here below of that very force of consciousness that originally separated the world from the Divine, created the ego and placed it as an objective reality... The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 6 MIND, ORGAN OF SEPARATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS The world is one, indissolubly and solidly one: no part can be separated from any other. Any action anywhere affects the whole and nothing can be moved even a hair's breadth without changing the entire balance. Each element literally lives, moves and has its being in every other... the name. It need not be so however. Man is solidly one with the universe, true; but he has a faculty in him by which he can separate, isolate himself from the rest of the world. It is the mind's power of self-division and dissociation. Through this faculty man can put the world Page 70 aside and outside himself (for a time, at least), cut away from it and concentrate upon ...
... world and bring to bear up on it the force of his progress and establish the progress more generally. Page 262 This power which in the inferior human consciousness appears as mind or mental discernment is the image or delegate here below of that very force of consciousness that originally separated the world from the Divine, created the ego and placed it as an objective reality against... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 Mind, Origin of Separative Consciousness THE world is one, indissolubly and solidly one: no part can be separated from any other. Any action anywhere affects the whole and nothing can be moved even by a hair's breadth without changing the entire balance. Each element literally lives, moves and has its being... worth the name. It need not be so however. Man is solidly one with the universe, true; but he has a faculty in him by which he can separate, isolate himself from the rest of the world. It is the mind's power of self-division and dissociation Through this actually man can put the world aside and outside himself (for a time, at least), cut away from it and concentrate upon his own being, his inner ...
... called a psychic mind—it is something formed by the influence of the psychic being on the mental plane. Psychic mind and mental psychic are the same thing practically. When there is a movement of the mind in which the psychic influence predominates, it is called the psychic in the mind or the psychic mind. The Mind Proper Above the physical mind and the vital mind is the mental intelligence... The Physical Mental or Physical Mind and the Mental Physical or Mechanical Mind The physical mental or externalising mind is part of the mental consciousness, not part of the physical consciousness. But it is Page 182 closely connected with the mental physical—so that the two usually act together. The automatic or mechanical mind is called by us the mental physical—and dis... Yoga - I Chapter VI The Mind Mind in the Integral Yoga and in Other Indian Systems The "Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this Yoga, the words mind and mental are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to ...
... life ; they have ever done since the creation arrived at mental consciousness culminating in the creation of a mental humanity. But mind and mental humanity though they have been taken in the forefront of our life for over many millions of years have long been weighed in the balance and found wanting. That is how at the peak of human mental development we find ourselves no better than primitive... political and economic levels. This is only a beginning on the mental level and cannot be realised in practice till the selfishness, inherent in ordinary human viral being is not eradicated by a new spiritual and supramental orientation. This is a very difnculttonerous task and may take even centuries for preparation, for even, if the mind is prepared to shed off its limits and ignorance because it is... in its operation of consciousness and can only change when there is a spiritual orientation of the Being : but I hope, the widespread interest now shown all over the world for spirituality even on mental levels will one day succeed in changing the selfish nature of the vital. Then the real work will be accomplished and there will be an end to fighting between men and Page 88 men and ...
... between the mind and the vital. Explaining the distinction, he writes: ... in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature Page 89 which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions. ... The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element... the vital, Sri Aurobindo regards the mind as having a useful and indispensable function in growing out of the vital consciousness. For mind, according to yogic psychology, is endowed not only with intelligence but also with will power. Just as mental intelligence, despite its extreme limitations, is a useful tool for growth towards spiritual knowledge, so the mental will, despite its extremely limited... Because mental consciousness represents a higher or more evolved level of consciousness than that of the vital, which human beings have still not fully outgrown, the mind is regarded in yoga as not only a useful but also, in some respects, an indispensable tool until it can be replaced by a higher or deeper consciousness. Thus, in Page 85 various spiritual disciplines, mind has generally ...
... the supramental which is far above the head but can be communicated with through the seventh centre, the Sahasradala padma. The Over mind and the Supermind—are they the sixth and seventh planes? No. The Overmind is part of the mental plane. The Supermind is the fourth not the seventh plane. After attaining to the fourth centre—with the psychic behind it — does one... together. The working on the lower part of the face always indicates an action on the externalising mind (physical mental) whose centre is in the throat. An opening is felt in the central part of the head. What is this part? Is it a centre? It is the Brahmarandhra through which there is the communication between the higher consciousness and the lower in the body. It is a... What are the fifth and sixth centres? The throat centre (externalising, expressing mind, the physical mind) and the 'ajnachakra' between the eyebrows, centre of inner thought, will and vision. Are our higher levels — Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind—automatically in connection with the Divine? Of course, but you can hardly ...
... it is the mind, various mental forces, if it is the vital, Page 309 various vital forces. It is not safe to take all these for true things, to be accepted without question and 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... you had no evening meal. But your mind had got attached to its own formations and tried to justify, to put a meaning on these chaotic caprices, to explain them by the (very changeful) will of the Mother. All this is well-known to those Page 310 experienced in Yoga, and it means that these things were not intuitions, but constructions of the mind, mental formations. If there was an intuition... intuition at all, it was movements of the intuitive mind, but what the intuitive mind gives to us is the intuition of possibilities, some of which realise themselves, some do not or do it partly only, others miss altogether. Behind these mental constructions are Forces that want to realise themselves and try to use men as their instruments for realisation. These Forces need not be hostile, but they play ...
... If someone is very studious, he can 'review' all that has ever been written or taught by going through Sri Aurobindo's books. I mean this for someone who loves working. I SEE this state of mind, this mental attitude ... Oh! It's ... it's so repugnant. People are so afraid of taking sides, so afraid of appearing biased; they are so afraid of appearing to have faith, so afraid ... Oh, it's disgraceful ...
... spiritual realisation. It is a mental approach to spiritual life based upon moral and ethical and even certain aesthetic principles evolved by the human mind. It consists mostly of cre dal theology, dogma and rites and rituals of various kinds. A mental belief or conviction lies at the base of religions. All the divergences of religious belief and practice rise from this mental attitude of their respective... individual and collective collaboration for the common goal. If another 2 to 3 hundred years lapse before the manifestation of this gnostic or supramental consciousness, we have nothing to worry. Mind and mental principle have operated for millions of years without being able to check the downward trend of human consciousness. But the supreme truth consciousness will be able to achieve it in course of... much fanaticism, bigotry and war in religions. Therefore there is so much intolerance, hatred and opposition between the followers of different religions. This cannot be avoided till the ignorant mental foundation and belief in religious theology and dogma and superstition are not eliminated from the consciousness of humanity in the light of a rational religion—that is to say, a religion guided not ...
... August 21 and August 28 on the "transfer of power": ) How do you define this physical mind, the one that underwent the transfer of power? That isn't the physical mind. The physical mind, it's a long time since... It is the material mind—not even the material mind: the mind OF MATTER. 1 It is the mental substance that belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That's what was formerly called "the... This cellular mind exists in animals, and there is even a faint beginning (but very faint, like a promise) in plants: they respond to a mental action. They respond. As soon as Life manifests, there is already the beginning, like a promise of mind, of mental movement. And in animals, it's very clear. Whereas that physical mind really began to exist only in man. That's what a very small child already... people are patient, some are strong and so on–physically, I mean, not for vital or mental reasons, but purely physically everyone has a character. That's the physical mind. And it is part of any integral yoga: you discipline this physical mind. I have done it for more than sixty years. Page 229 But then, that mind, for instance, which is spontaneously defeatist, which has all sorts of fears ...
... outer being, physical, vital and mental. The being organised around the psychic: the first stage of transformation. Mental opening: the first step of the mind towards transformation. Mental prayer: spontaneous in a mind aspiring for transformation. Thirst to understand: very useful for transformation. Honesty in the physical mind: preliminary indispensable condition... n. Page 88 Integral offering of the vital: an important stage towards transformation. Renunciation of emotional desires: indispensable for transformation. Not only the mind and the vital, but the body also in all its cells must aspire for the divine transformation. Physical plasticity: one of the important conditions of the transformation. Let the physical ...
... out the mental and vital activities. It is to let Silence into you i.e., to open yourself and let it descend. The way to do this and the way to call down the higher powers is the same. It is to remain quiet at the time of meditation, not fighting with the mind or making mental efforts to pull down the power of the Silence but keeping only a silent will and aspiration for them. If the mind is active... 2) The mental attitude you are taking with regard to Lord as the Yogeshwar can be made first step towards this quietude. 3) Silence does not mean absence of experiences. It is an inner silence and quietude in which all experiences happen without producing any disturbance. It would be a great mistake to interfere with the images rising in you. It does not matter whether they are mental or psychic... psychic. One must have experiences not only of the true psychic but of the inner mental, the inner vital and subtle physical worlds or planes of consciousness. The occurrence of images is a sign that these are opening and to inhibit them would mean to inhibit the expansion of consciousness and experience without which this Yoga cannot be done. All this is an answer to the points raised in your letter ...
... Truth which already exists in the Infinite above our mental comprehension. Equally, then, must that Word be above our power of mental construction. All creation is expression by the Word; but the form which is expressed is only a symbol or representation of the thing which is. We see this in human speech which only presents to the mind a mental form of the object; but the object it seeks to express... raised up before the mind by speech. Human speech, as we see, raises up only the presentation of a presentation, the mental figure of an object which is itself only a figure of the sole Reality, Brahman, It has indeed a power of new creation, but even that power only extends to the creation of new mental images, that is to say, of adaptive formations based upon previous mental images. Such a limited... is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally—the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the Page 30 spo ...
... Poetic Intelligence. 2 "Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3 "Intuitive with Overmind ouch. 4 "Intuitive. 5 "Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6 "Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch. 7. "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch. 8. "Ditto. 9. "Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed... remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."... ss but the inner Mind has not that naturally and in its own right, yet can open to its influence more easily than the outer intelligence. All the same, between the reflected realisation in the mind and the automatic and authentic realisation in the spiritual mental planes there is a wide difference." Distinguishing the general mode and the typical turn of the Inner Mind's poetry from those ...
... mystics have spoken of a universal mind as holding in its mental stuff a full and final origin of matter and radiation they have ill-chosen their language as much as Jeans has done. A simple consideration will elucidate my point. Mentalism can describe a universal mind only by analogy with the nature of mind known to us. What is that nature? A universal mind would differ in many respects... would be by definition the universal mind which mentalism supposes to be final: it is part and parcel of a supra-mental reality. A new Page 30 projection from the archetypal mind which is in union with the supra-mental blaze of knowledge is needed to render ignorance possible. That projection is the cosmic or universal mind - mentality unliaisoned with the... may aver that the sub-mental is really the mental concealed or involved, but when we reach the mental stage and widen and intensify it to the furthest, do we come to the Page 29 ultimate? Are we not obliged to overpass the mental frontier if we speak of an omniscient and omnipotent consciousness? Are we not compelled to speak of mind at even its widest and ...
... he was enjoyed by all? That is news. It is true that dhvani (rhythmic suggestion) is an important element of poetry but it is not everything. There must be something that appeals to the mind, man being mental. Poetry to be popular must be good poetry. 2 "Video meliora probocque, deteriora sequor." 3 "...the outer nature may become the field of an apparent incoherence although all within ...
... But it is already an organised mind, you must understand. It is the most material part touching the mind.... How can one call this "mind"? You cannot even call it the bodily mind―it is the mind of the cells, it is a cellular mind. This cellular mind exists in animals, and even a little (very little, as a promise) beginning in the plants—they respond to a mental action. They do respond. As soon... If that remains, it is evident immortality. How do you define this physical mind which was made the object of the transfer of power? It is not the physical mind. It is long since the physical mind has changed.... It is the material mind—not even the material mind: it is the mind of Matter . It is the mental substance which belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That is what was once called... The cells, the whole material consciousness obeyed the inner individual consciousness—most often the psychic or the mental (but the mind has been silent since long). But now this material mind is busy organising itself like the other or rather like all the others, like the mind in all the states of being. It is, as it were, a displacement of the directing will. And there, materially, physically ...
... black or blood-red: the Olympian temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on. Page 220 set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Gr æ co-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the... of the Chinese philosopher or moralist Confucius – a triumvirate almost of mighty mental intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant. It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the intelligence, the mental Reason, buddhi. The Buddhist tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over... descending light touched the higher reaches of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality ...
... asleep, or absent, in the background, not moving. Her difficulties must be mostly of a mental order. What can save all that? It's precisely because there are too many people like this that the Page 340 earth is in difficulty! Too many, too many people are in the mind: mental difficulties mental difficulties.... You can't get through ( impenetrable gesture ) it doesn't go through... trying—she tries, and there is a Response. They are blessed not to have a mind. It was beautiful. It doesn't keep, otherwise I would have kept it to show it to you. How beautiful it was! Like this ( same gesture of ardent aspiration ): a thirst, a thirst for the Divine, a thirst for the Divine. All those mental ratiocinations and mental complications, it all goes round and round in circles. Yes, it does... faith, a psychic aspiration, a fervour, a self-giving, instead of being forever turned in on oneself, turned in on oneself.... A self-giving, that's what is needed to save the world! ( silence ) Mental faith isn't enough, psychic fervour is necessary—self-giving, self-abnegation. The body itself is learning that every time it thinks of itself, there's a small catastrophe—not "catastrophe," but ...
... it real on the physical plane, embody it in our external activity: in other words whatever you do you do the truth, whatever you speak you speak the truth; the Truth first appears in your mind, in your mental consciousness, then it realises itself in your physical activity. Number seven has a special meaning. The number seven gives the scheme of creation; it is the number of the worlds that constitute... and the Divine Delight. Below in the lower half there is the mind, the vital and the body, – manas, prana and anna. Three above, three below, in between there is another joining the two, another principle or world, it is the Supermind, Mahas. The three higher worlds are invisible, beyond the normal consciousness; they become visible mind concrete when they pass through the Page 34 ... hemisphere. Now these are the seven principles of creation. Manifestation means the expression of the higher worlds, the supreme triple principles of Sat-Chit-Ananda in the lower triple principle of mind, life, body through the intermediary Supermind. Mahas-Supermind is the manifestation, the beginning of the creation and realisatton comes when the higher trinity is realised here below and embodied ...
... when it asserts that Mind cannot be another force than Matter, but must be merely development and outcome of material energy. Indian thought at its deepest affirms on the other hand that Mind and Matter are rather different grades of the same energy, different organisations of one conscious Force of Existence. 15 Chit, the divine Consciousness, is not our mental self-awareness; that... unable to perceive in their own terms what these parts of us are doing, and receive it very imperfectly in the terms and values of the thinking and reasoning mind. 16 Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour... vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind Page 331 which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed. 18 Most people associate consciousness with the brain or mind because that is the centre for intellectual thought and mental vision, but consciousness is not limited to that kind ...
... of spirit subordinated to action of mind and body, which fulfils itself through mentality and physicality and acts as a link between them." — Sri Aurobindo Life-mind — see vital mind under mind. Manas — mind, the mind proper [as distinct from the intellect (buddhi)], sense-mind. manomaya puru ṣ a — mental Person; the mental being. manvantara — an age... mind — "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... physical mind. The mind proper is divided into three parts: the thinking mind or intellect, concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right; the dynamic mind, concerned with the putting out of mental forces for the realisation of the ideas; and the externalising mind, concerned with the expression of ideas in life. The vital mind or desire mind is a mind of dynamic ...
... millions and millions of these cells and rolls, around, above, every-where. Fortunately in the mental world you can move any-where as you like, you do not require lifts and ladders to go up. The point, however, is how to go there at all. Well, the first thing is that you must completely silence your mind. Mental cogitations, agitations you must leave behind, no thoughts must enter your consciousness,... have in this way some idea to go upon. In the silent mind you form a point of consciousness and send it out as an emissary to gather the required information. This point of conscious-ness must be absolutely detached and free to go as it likes; Page 311 for if it were in any way kept tied to the normal movements of your own mind, then you will not go further than what is in your head... head. You must be able to make your brain a blank, you must have no preconceived notion, no idea that the solution of your problem might lie in this way or that. As I say, your mind has to be a thoroughly blank page, a clean slate, with nothing written on it, no mark even. There should' be instead a sincere aspiration to know the truth, without postulating beforehand what kind of truth it might be; ...
... and millions of these cells and rolls, around, above, everywhere. Fortunately in the mental world you can move anywhere as you like, you do not require lifts and ladders to get up. The point, however, is how to go there at all. Well, the first thing is that you must completely silence your mind. Mental cogitations, agitations you must leave behind, no thoughts must enter your consciousness... However, you have in this way some idea to go upon. In the silent mind you form a point of consciousness and send it out as an emissary to gather the required information. This point of consciousness must be absolutely detached and free to go as it likes; for if it were in any way kept tied to the normal movements of your own mind, then you will not go further than what is in your head. You must... must be able to make your brain a blank, you must have no preconceived notion, no idea that the solution of your problem might lie in this way or that. As I say, your mind has to be a thoroughly blank page, a clean slate, with nothing written on it, no mark even. There should be instead a sincere aspiration to know the truth, without postulating beforehand what kind of truth it might be; otherwise ...
... to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind - but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza. "There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called 'mental' and 'gnostic' Overmind respectively — the latter in direct touch with Super-mind, the former more like a widened and massive intuition... more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur." On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch." MUKTI What deep dishonour that the soul should have Its passion moulded by a moon of change And all its massive purpose be a wave... the written one ('A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all'). In the typed version the higher mental is strongest but in the written one which is less emphatic but more harmonious, the rhythm gets in a higher influence. In the other lines the illumined mental influence lifting up the higher mental is strongest, but is itself lifted up to the intuitive - in all but the third just high enough ...
... essence as God and is other than body, life and mind. Further, Consciousness, descended into and self-hidden in the Inconscient, progressively manifests itself. Another way of stating it is that it evolves its own higher levels which brings xiii about the emergence of Matter, Life and Mind in the world. The evolution of Mind, or mental beings, is a stage in this process of the unfolding... discovered and effectuated by yoga. Sri Aurobindo has said that real psychology is the science of consciousness. But consciousness in his experience is not only xii mental intelligence and feeling. For mind is only one level of the multi-level reality called Consciousness. This brings us to the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. The basic elements of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, briefly stated... reality, it is known as Consciousness-Force. As Consciousness-Force it manifests itself on many levels. It is life in plants, instinct in insects and animals, mental intelligence, will and feeling in human beings and powers higher than mind in yogis and mystics. It has the power of self-determination and self-limitation. By the exercise of this power it becomes determinate things. By self-limitation ...
... emotional being; the throat centre -vi ś uddha- governs the expressive and externalising mind; the centre between the eye-brows - ājnācakra - governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation; the thousand-petalled lotus sahasradala - above commands the higher thinking mind, houses the still higher illumined mind and at the highest opens to the intuition through which or else by an over-flooding... free and perfect. * The "Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this Yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions... reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence. The Page 13 vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of ...
... some where. No, not in the body. My contact with him was in the jail when he was speaking with me for about 15 days, giving me the first insight into the Intuition plane (not the intuitive mind which is mental and not supramental) as the first opening to Supermind. 21 October 1934 Page 264 If it is not indiscreet would you ask Sri Aurobindo if it is true that in 1909—in Alipore jail—seven ...
... NIRODBARAN: I thought it was through the head alone that both happen. SRI AUROBINDO: It is usually through the mind, when the mental consciousness goes up, but it can happen otherwise also, the vital or physical consciousness directly going up without passing through the mental. NIRODBARAN: Sahana's experience of ascent and her feeling of nothingness and then her return with the sense of a... distinction is still not very clear. SRI AUROBINDO: In the usual experience, it is one's habitual consciousness that rises: it may be any part of the being, the mental, vital or physical, that goes up to the higher planes above the mind and stays there for a time; some organisation takes place and then the consciousness comes down with some result. In the ascent and descent about which I have written... the evolution of the mind too and so will there be for the Supermind. The forces of the Inconscience are too strong. That is why the intervention is needed. Otherwise in the ordinary course of evolution it would take a very long time. The forces of the Inconscience are there to prevent any premature evolution and they exert a strong downward pull. There is also an upward pull. Mind and Supermind are involved ...
... Mind and the Mental World THE world of the mind is a vast field, even vaster it seems than the physical world. The physical world extends, science tells us, to millions of light-years. We may say practically, it is an infinite extension and mind is a thing which surrounds, envelops this measureless extension. Mind surpasses the physical on another count... thoughts and settling them in an ordered way in his consciousness. We must note, however, that mind and matter are two different categories and have different dimensions. Material space is not the same as mental space and the speed of light and the speed of thought are not commensurable. The mental world, the world of thoughts, is a world in itself. It is autonomous. It moves in its own way with... in reality it is not so. Thoughts, ideas, notions, all movements of the mind are self-existent realities. They go about or flow on like the waves of a vast sea. Human beings are mere instruments, receptacles that capture or seize some undulations of this vast ocean. Man is man, that is to say, Page 186 a mental being, because in him the brain has developed to such an extent and in such ...
... But there is in man side by side with his physical growth, a vital growth and a mental growth as well. The mental especially can progress long after the body has ceased to progress. The body does not grow; even when it is declining, the mind still can continue to grow, to rise to higher heights. There is a mental ascension contrariwise to the physical descent. But they who do Yoga, who become... It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences—external and emotional—are then needed to strike open the doors within, to... comes a time when one reaches the summit and one changes the direction or the plane of progress. At the outset there is the purely physical progress, like that of the child; then there comes the mental progress, later on the psychic progress and the spiritual progress, so that unless progress changes its direction, when it has reached its limit on a particular level, one has to come down the curve ...
... especially in the higher species. What is there is the instinct of self-preservation, obscure and violent reactions, but not the kind of evil that human will shows in the perverse human mental. I believe it is the human mind under the direct influence of vital beings that begins to work in the perverse way. Titans, Asuras are the beings of ill-will, they belong totally to the vital world and when they manifest... easily go down the gullet. Where is the ill will, the wickedness in all this? When a man does anything like it, he does not do it spontaneously, through his natural instinct, but driven by his mind and mental perversions, a thing different from the healthy instinct Page 75 that he has no more. But man wanted to act freely and independently! What is instinct exactly? It is Nature's ...
... Asrams is itself a novelty. The extreme unhappiness of a mental and vital growth which does not fit in with the surroundings, of marriages imposed that are unsuitable and where there is no meeting-point between husband and wife, of an environment hostile and intolerant of one's inner life and on the other hand the innate tendency of the Indian mind to seek a refuge in the spiritual or religious escape... I had never a very great confidence in X 's yoga-turn getting the better of his activism—he has two strong ties that prevent it, ambition and need to act and lead in the vital and in the mind a mental idealism—these two things are the great fosterers of illusion. The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism—one has to see the real value of the things that are—which is very little, except... oneself. So long as the urge is towards philanthropy, Gandhism etc., he has to follow that—to follow the way of spiritual endeavour he must have the need, the distinct call in himself—not merely a mental recognition but the soul's call. Perhaps you could write (in Bengali) 1 something to him about the true object of the Yoga—especially on two points: (1) The object is not philanthropy ...
... made so much of; the real point is how far his work can be supposed to be a transcript of his inner mind or mental life. It is obvious that his vital cast, his character may have very little to do with his writing, it may be its very opposite. His physical mind also does not determine it; the physical mind of a romantic poet or artist may very well be that of a commonplace respectable bourgeois. One who... poets and artists. It is evidently in the inner mental personality of a man that the key to his creation must be discovered, not in "his" outward mind or life or not solely or chiefly these. But a poem or work of art need not be (though it may be) an exact transcription of a Page 109 mental or spiritual experience; even, if the creating mind takes up an incident of the life, a vital impression... poetic or interpretative and not in the outward mental way. The first of these two lines conveys the pathos and tragedy of the thing and also the stupidity of the waste much more effectively than pages of denunciation or comment and the other stresses with an extraordinary power in a few words the problem as Page 108 flung by the revolting human mind and life against the Cosmic Impersonal. ...
... there is in man side by side with his physical growth, a vital growth and a mental growth as well. The mental especially can progress long after the body has ceased to progress. The body does not grow; even when it is declining, the mind still can continue to grow, to rise to higher heights. There is a mental ascension contrariwise to the physical descent. But they who do Yoga, who become conscious... It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences – external and emotional – are then needed to strike open the doors; within... there comes a time when one reaches the summit and one changes the direction or the plane of progress. At the outset there is the purely physical progress, like that of the child; then there comes the mental progress, later on the psychic progress and the spiritual progress, so that unless progress changes it direction, when it has reached its limit on a particular level, one has to come down the curve ...
... V Mind and the Mental World The world of the mind is a vast field, even vaster it seems than the physical world. The physical world extends, science tells us, to minions of light-years. We may say practically, it is an infinite extension and mind is a thing which surrounds, envelops this measureless extension. Mind surpasses the physical on another count... thoughts and settling them in an ordered way in his consciousness. We must note, however, that mind and matter are two different categories and have different dimensions. Material space is not the same as mental space and the speed of light and the speed of thought are not commensurable. The mental world, the world of thoughts, is a world in itself. It is autonomous. It moves in its own way... ideas. But in reality it is not so. Thoughts, ideas, notions, all movements of the mind are self-existent realities. They go about or flow on like the waves of a vast sea. Human beings are mere instruments, receptacles that capture or seize some undulations of this vast ocean. Man is man, that is to say, a mental being, because in him the brain has developed to such an extent and in such a manner ...
... Mind and the Mental World THE world of the mind is a vast field, even vaster it seems than the physical world. The physical world extends, science tells us, to millions of light-years. We may say practically, it is an infinite extension and mind is a thing which surrounds, envelops this measureless extension. Mind surpasses the physical on another count... thoughts and settling them in an ordered way in his consciousness. We must note, however, that mind and matter are two different categories and have different dimensions. Material space is not the same as mental space and the speed of light and the speed of thought are not commensurable. The mental world, the world of thoughts, is a world in itself It is autonomous. It moves in its own way with... reality it is not so. Thoughts, ideas, notions, all movements of the mind are self-existent realities. They go about or flow on like the waves of a vast sea. Human beings are mere instruments, receptacles that capture or seize some undulations of this vast ocean. Man is man, that is to say, Page 190 a mental being, because in him the brain has developed to such an extent and in ...
... embodied in Matter develops mind, becomes the mental being that he can know his mental self and know by that self Matter also in its reality to Mind. So also Mind does not know That which is behind it, That knows Mind; and it is only when the being involved in Mind can deliver out of its appearances his true Self that he can become That, know it as himself and by it know also Mind in its reality to that... according as our vital force in obedience to the mind deals with its impacts and objects, so will be our outward life and existence. The world is for us what our mind and senses declare it to be; life is what our mentality determines that it shall become. The question is asked by the Upanishad, what then are these mental instruments? what is this mental life which uses the external? Are they the last... that which is more real than Mind. How to 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 ...
... beginning of mental calm and some kind of psychic opening but neither of these has as yet been able to go very far. The reason probably is that he has done everything by a strong mental control and forcible stilling of the mind and emotional and vital movements, but he has not yet established the true spiritual calm which can only come by experience of or surrender to the higher being above the mind. It is... inner and outer activities. But the quieting of the mind in a mental silence or inactivity although often useful as the first step, is not sufficient. The mental must be changed first into deeper spiritual peace Shanti, and then into the supramental calm and silence full of the higher light and strength and Ananda. Moreover, the quieting of the mind only is not enough. The vital and physical consciousness... new experience but in itself it is merely negative, a mental calm without anything positive in it and if one stops there, then dullness and the inertia of which he complains must come. What he needs is, in the void and silence of the mind, to open himself to, to wait or to call for the action of the higher power, light and peace from above the mind. (3) The survival of evil habits in sleep is easily ...
... that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond mind. There is, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the unconquerable impulse in man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality, and this impulse can be seen in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond mind. The impulse of life towards the mind bears... intervening powers of Overmind and Spiritual mind would be able to found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection. They would become, according to Sri Aurobindo, a hierarchy of states of consciousness in the earth-existence rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme supramental level. In the context of this development, mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the... to the Supermini!, Descent of the Supermind and Supramental Transformation The process of ascent to the supermind from the mind and the descent of the supermind, which would transform successively the Overmind, Intuitive mind, Illumined mind, Higher mind, mind and the rest cannot be a logical series of separate segments. Sri Aurobindo has stated that while a sufficient integration of one status ...
... At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical nature. The mental man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because of the difficulty of this... our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires... they are in the least strong, can impose themselves with an almost irresistible insistence on the mental ruler. Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent Page 18 before the inconscient and subconscient ...
... there are degrees of Presence. We talked about the arising of Presence when one becomes the witness of one's mind structures. Listening to these talks is one way of deepening the Presence. Also, the more often one chooses Presence by remembering to step out of one's mind, out of mental noise into alertness and Presence, the more does Presence deepen. How long one can stay in the state of Presence... changing one's thinking, one cannot get out of the polarities or the opposites of high and low in life as long as one does not go beyond mind. One can go beyond the opposite polarities only by transcending thought and rising into a level of consciousness beyond mind. In one's external form, one will still continue to experience the polarities of pleasure and pain, but the polarities will be more benign... when reading about positive and negative thinking in a New Age book, one becomes suddenly aware of one's negative thought patterns; it is due to the arising of Presence. Becoming the witness of one's mind and its inherited conditionings is the first stage of Presence. When one becomes a witness, one also realizes that one can exercise a choice and change one's thinking through various New Age methods ...
... down to the intuitivised inner mind—it is therefore at once an overhead power and a mental intelligence power. All depends on the amount, intensity, quality of the intuition and how far it is mixed with mind or pure. The inner mind is not necessarily intuitive, though it can easily become so. The mystic mind is mind turned towards the occult and spiritual, but the inner mind can act without direct reference... immortality! Illumined Mind with mental overmind touch. ...And to the earth-self suddenly Came through remote entrancèd marvelling Of adoration ever-widening A spacious sense of immortality. Mixture of higher and illumined mind—in the last line the mental overmind touch. Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense. Illumined mind with mental overmind touch. The... silver hush" do? The second line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost ) some of the largeness and rhythm of the higher mind, but his substance except at certain heights is mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from "above". ...
... Ether. This centre of speech commands "expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces." 6.ĀJNĀCHAKRA :located on the forehead between but a little above the eyebrows. The lotus is white and has two petals. It "governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation." In a word all mental faculties . When the third eye opens, it is here; then we get the occult vision... the symbol of the supermind and the supermind is the first power of the Supreme which one meets across the border where the experience of the spiritualised mind ceases...." Let us note that there is no separate centre for the Supra-mental as it is not organized in the body. The Seven Suns of the Supermind : 1.The Sun of Supramental Truth,—Knowledge-Power originating the supramental... says that this lotus "has its head turned downward." Page 324 light around." This centre, said Sri Aurobindo, commands "the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind" and opens "upwards to the intuition and over mind." He clarified that some identify it "with the brain, but that is an error—the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and ...
... the silence. 1 That is only possible by throwing out the mental and vital activities. It is easier to let the silence get into you, i.e., to open yourself and let it descend. The way to do this and the way to call down the higher powers is the same. It is to remain quiet at the time of meditation, not fighting with the mind or making mental efforts to pull down the power of the Silence but keeping... silent will and aspiration for them. If the mind is active, one has only to learn to look at it, drawn back and not giving any sanction from within, until its habitual or mechanical activities begin to fall quiet for want of support from within. If it is too persistent, a steady rejection without strain or struggle is the one thing to be done. The mental attitude you are taking with regard to "the... in the Sadhana, the ascent and the descent. The ascent or the upward movement takes place when there is a sufficient aspiration from the being, i.e. from the various mental, vital and physical planes. Each in turn ascends above the mind to the place where it meets the supramental and can then receive the origination of all its movements from above. The Higher descends when you have a receptive quietude ...
... " At first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his normal mind and life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a life-form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly drawn, the soul-perception... turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and Page 335 exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life;... disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact ...
... not the physical instrument. Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see inanimation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or communicate itself to its surfaces for want of organs. Is the material state an emptiness... abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti. Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental Page 8 consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing... , but, as far as we can see, not of mentality. There is then a sub-mental, a vital consciousness which has precisely the same initial reactions as the mental, but is different in the constitution of its self-experience, even as that which is superconscient is in the constitution of its self-experience different from the mental being. Does the range of what we can call consciousness cease ...
... The Mental The “Mind“ in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this Yoga, the words mind and mental are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the... the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will etc. that are part of his intelligence. The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Life nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire soul in... whereas there is a mental substance as there is a vital substance and physical substance. And as there is a substance, there is a corresponding world with an autonomous existence, that is to say, there can be a mind without any physical support. The physical body may disappear and the mind can continue to exist. It is here that it is important to understand that there is a mental substance which, obviously ...
... may attempt to mark off in a rough way. Let me take a single theme and distinguish the modes of its recurrence. There is the straightforward statement, fusing the mental and the ultra-mental with a fine ease: Page 136 His mind transfigured to a rapturous seer... This seems to be what Sri Aurobindo has termed the "adequate style" at an inevitable pitch. Then there is, in my opinion... as well as imaginative sign-post to the mystical goal, we have a vibrant evocation of these states in a language that is born out of them and is no mere reflection of the profundities beyond the mind in mental terms. The process and the product of this special language are thrillingly pictured in the Savitri passage whose concluding line I have already quoted to illustrate the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo... in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of pen-ultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" under the guise ...
... which we may attempt to mark off in a rough way. Let me take a single theme and distinguish the modes of its recurrence. There is the straightforward statement, fusing the mental and the ultra-mental with a fine ease: His mind transfigured to a rapturous seer... [p. 408] This seems to be what Sri Aurobindo has termed the "adequate style" at an inevitable pitch. Then there is, in my opinion... as well as imaginative sign-post to the mystical goal, we have a vibrant evocation of these states in a language that is born out of them and is no mere reflection of the profundities beyond the mind in mental terms. The process and the product of this special language are thrillingly pictured in the Savitri passage whose concluding line I have already quoted to illustrate the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo... in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of penultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" under the guise ...
... understood, is something done by the mind, using mental effort. But what Eckhart speaks about is not a "head" attention. It is attention with the "whole energy-field of Presence"; it is "alert stillness"; it is "thoughtless awareness." One cannot understand attention with the mind, says Eckhart, because it pertains to a state of consciousness that is beyond mind. Attention spoken of by him does not... Aspiration is a call of the mind, the heart, and the physical being for Peace, Light, Force, and spiritual realization. Rejection is a refusal of the ignorant movements of one's mental, vital, and physical nature that stand in the way of spiritual realization, being contrary to or incompatible with the truth of one's being. It lies in ... rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences... the whole consciousness— physical, vital, mental—is ready and completely surrendered and receptive to the action of the Divine Force. As he explains in letters to disciples: In the early part of the sadhana—and by early I do not mean a short part—effort is indispensable. Surrender of course, but surrender is not a thing that is done in a day. The mind has its ideas and it clings to them; the human ...
... terrestrial if you like, to simplify the problem. There is a mental mind within you, there is a mental mind in the terrestrial atmosphere; and—how shall I put it?—the density of these inner and outer region is the same, the vibratory mode is identical. If you enter consciously into your mental mind, you can enter consciously the mental mind of the earth. We have explained this once, haven't we? We... 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 dimensions correspond to outer zones and dimensions, universal, or ... have silence in the mind and not have peace in the heart. It can very well happen that the mind is quite silent and immobile but that, all the same, here, in the heart something vibrates and throbs. This usually proves that one is pretty divided. But many people are divided. One can indeed have mental silence and not have peace in the heart. It can very well happen that the mind is quite silent and ...
... such are the classic terms of the Aurobindonian dialectic of spiritual evolution. Once spiritually awakened, mental man strives to exceed himself, and as he explores the ascending possibilities, he reaches stage after stage of the overhead—or above mind—consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, and beyond it—"at the end of a far-off vista"—Supermind. Sri Aurobindo devotes several... evolutionary advance, man has a body, certain vital instincts and passions, and a directing and controlling mind. Mental man is a great improvement on the mere animal, but he is also a prey to various dissatisfactions. What is the reason? Sri Aurobindo's diagnosis is pointed and clear: the mind of man, a helper in many ways, a gleaner of bits of truth and partial fragments of knowledge, is nevertheless... ve of everything and everybody. The mental man has no sense of community or communion, he is as it were by himself and for himself. Mind the efficient servant upto a point is also a weakening and defeating power, a power that divorces us from our environment and even the ultimate sources of our strength. This is because, to quote Sri Aurobindo again, the mind has lost, ...the truth of i ...
... possibilities, not truths, so it is better not to let them run free like that. One [ who is open to the cosmic Mind ] is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one's mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one's own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one. This is... is of course if one opens in the right way and does not merely become a passive field of all sorts of ideas and mental forces. The opening to cosmic mind makes the experience of the Divine everywhere for instance more easy—but it is not essentially spiritual; if there is not a coming of wider spiritual experiences, then it need not be spiritual at all. Opening to the Cosmic Life One [ who... physical. X 's ascents, I suppose, are more a going out of the body in his mind and vital than any stationing of his consciousness above. The latter would have brought a calm and peace and liberation which he does not possess as yet. This kind of ascent brings a conscious contact with cosmic forces of the Page 285 mental and vital planes (in his case more the vital) and some extraordinary e ...
... Indra in his thought consciousness; he has been seeking to exceed mind & arrive straight at Brahman, to place his mind and its activities not on the altar of the Lord of Mind, but on the altar of the unknown God.Vidma hi te yatha mano asmabhyam na ditsasi. Not so, says Indra, shalt thou attain. Through me, through the mind, through thy mental consciousness, thou shalt aspire to That which is wonderful;... directly it vanishes. Agastya seeks to pacify Indra. He perceives that through the hostility of Indra his mind refuses to work towards perfection, towards siddhi in the Yoga; in his strenuous struggling upward, samarane, it no longer helps but resists him; there is a divorce between his mental energies presided over by the Maruts & their great presiding and fulfilling devata; confusion, failure of... seek to shoot beyond us. We have seen how you are no longer willing to give the offering of your mind & its activities to us as of old, asmabhyam id, you are directing them elsewhere. This cannot be. You must not become the adashush & cease from the sacrifice decreed. Make ready the altar of the body & mind; kindle the fire of the divine force upon it in front of you, let Agni stand as your purohita. ...
... Nothing happened to you?... I was hoping it would have helped you at least a little! Nothing happened? No. Well, never mind. Still too mental. ( silence ) So if you like, we can remain quiet. Don't you have anything to ask? No news? You said "still too mental," do you mean...? It means that instead of receiving directly, you see, without thinking, thoughts come in and unsettle—they... realization means Power ( Mother stretches out her arms in a sovereign gesture ), the creative willpower. Page 184 But naturally, it would be quite disastrous if human intellectual capacities, mental capacities, were to gain control of that power—it would be terrifying! It would cause terrible havoc. Hence the need to consent in all humility to become imbecile before being able to acquire it. ... I glimpsed an "Adoration" tree 1 covered with adoration flowers. I was filled with such joy. Then, a little farther on, behind this tree, I glimpsed another plant—it was very tall and it was the "Mind" 2 ... ( Mother nods her head ) Then, I really looked, and on the branch of a tree (a coconut tree, I think, or a palm tree), I saw a bird... it was mostly white, a bird much like a pigeon ...
... vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle, 5 a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle 6 which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and reasonings, not... sees all things in Mind and the mental life as an exclusive ideal, Mind comes to be regarded as an unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine... In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the Manu, the mental being who leads the life and the body, 3 not the animal who is led by them. The true human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty ...
... seems like nothing and is perhaps the truth of everything. To those same women of Japan, Mother said, The civilization which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of the mind, a mental handling of matter and life.... Thus, man’s road to supermanhood will be open when he declares boldly that all he has till now developed, including the intellect he is so rightly and yet so vainly... philosophizing all the same. Sustained by Mother’s force, he was perhaps dreaming of becoming a mental superman, just as Theon had dreamed of becoming a vital superman. But Theon did not lack for greatness. It is a strange experience, sometimes, to realize how literally covered over we are by our mental constructions, so elegant and refined, often even wreathed in light, seeking Truth and Beauty for... certain extent, She had transformed, or neutralized, Theon and the rather formidable power he represented, but Richard was more elusive—a thunderbolt can be caught, but who can catch an octopus? The mental octopus with its thousands of tentacles slithering into everything. She could have stayed very comfortably near Sri Aurobindo— No flight out of the world! The burden of darkness and ugliness must be ...
... consciousness and a power to change the ignorant nature. Higher Mind is one of the planes of the spiritual mind, the first and lowest of them; it is above the normal mental level. Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrittis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism Page 85 etc.)... sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within. Larger mind is a general term to cover the realms of mind which become our field whether by going within or widening into the cosmic consciousness. The true mental being is not the same as the inner mental—true mental, true vital, true physical being means the Purusha of that level freed from the error and ignorant... when one gets rid of the sense of the ego as doer. Then there is the realisation of these two entities. This is quite different from the psychic being. It is felt in the mind, vital, physical—most easily in the mind where the mental being (Purusha) is seated and controls the others ( manomayaḥ puruṣaḥ prāṇa-śarīra-netā ). 3) Prajna, Taijasa etc. are a different classification and have to do, not ...
... a whole, it gives a sense of treading a very sharp ridge between two precipices. ( long silence ) It's impossible to say.... And this field of experience also includes the physical mind—all the mental constructions that have a direct action on life and on the body; there is there an almost unlimited field of experiences. And everything takes the form not of a speculation or a thought, but... and he had written to ask that question. Curious, isn't it? It's not a mental contact that lets you know he has written and so on; no, it was the experience—it always takes the form of an experience, an ACTION: something that has to be done and gets done, or that has to be known and becomes known. It is never the mental transcription of ordinary life. The Pope... I wonder why: what happened... movements, all sorts of impulses—to the Power. The Power that asserts and realizes itself. It's the transition between the two; and there is almost a swarm of experiences of all types, from the most mental part of that consciousness down to the darkest, most material part. Page 24 And when I want to say something, there immediately comes from all corners a swarm of things that want to be ...
... experience of the Absolute. SRI AUROBINDO: No, you can have an idea, even experience it, but you can't express it. When you try to express it, you limit it because expression comes from the mind and from mental ideas and thoughts. DR. MANILAL: It is like sweetness. Sir. There are so many kinds of sweetness, but we can't define it. SRI AUROBINDO: One can define it to a certain extent. DR. MANILAL:... force, peace, etc. come easily to those who begin the Yoga in the mind or vital. Those who begin in the physical mind have a tremendous tussle. Experiences don't take place in them so easily and they come only after a long time. NIRODBARAN: Then I must be in the physical mind. (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: But those who open their mind or vital first are not very safe. I have seen many Yogis, not great... Absolute. (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO (laughing): How could you have got a clear idea? If you had, all your troubles and difficulties would have been over. NIRODBARAN: I mean mentally. SRI AUROBINDO: Even mentally one can't get a clear idea. NIRODBARAN: What I mean is whether the Absolute stands for Sachchidananda, the Supreme, the Transcendent and is also beyond all of them. SRI AUROBINDO: ...
... domination. But as long as the true spiritual being remains veiled by body, feelings and mind, one is inevitably more or less identified with the physical, emotional and mental parts of the surface being. Therefore the partial disidentification one may obtain by exercising one's mental discrimination and mental will breaks down easily, causing one to fall back constantly into the common state of id... destiny." 16 In ordinary life, human beings try to control undesirable feelings, thoughts and actions with the help of mental intelligence and mental will. However, too often the mind is unable to discern what is undesirable, and even when it can so discern, the mental will is often too weak to overcome the wrong movement. The psychic, on the other hand, has an immediate perception of what is... involves not merely the negative process of distinguishing body, feelings and mind as the not-self, but rather, a positive identification with the true spiritual being. Such an identification can be achieved, not by mere mental exercise, but by an all-absorbing concentration and an all-consuming aspiration for transcendence of the mind and dissolution of the ego. Herein lies a fundamental difference between ...
... experience is full of vital visions, formations, experiences of all kinds, but there is no mental clarity or order, neither do they rise above the mind. It is only the minority of men who live in the mind or in the psychic or try to live on the spiritual plane. Of course most men live in their physical mind and vital, except a few saints and a rather larger number of intellectuals. That is why... then it is as harmful as it can otherwise be helpful. Even in ordinary life the vital has to be controlled by the mind and mental will, otherwise it brings disorder or disaster. When people speak of a vital man, they mean one under the domination of vital force not controlled by the mind or the spirit. The vital can be a good instrument, but it is a bad master. The vital has not to be killed or destroyed... living in the vital—these are physical and mental occupations merely. Living in the vital is a psychological condition. Most people live in their vital. That means that they live in their desires, sensations, emotional feelings, vital imaginations and see and experience and judge everything from that point of view. It is the vital that moves them, the mind being at its service, not its master. In ...
... or support in Life-Mind for the Supramental; initiative centre of the illumined Mind. 2) The centre between the brows in the middle of the forehead. Will, vision, inner mental formation, active and dynamic Mind. 3) The centre in the throat. Speech, external mind, all external expression and formation. 4) The heart-lotus. Externally, the emotional mind, the vital mental: in the inner heart... (aspiring, receiving, grasping, assimilating the creation; divided here into the mind and psyche, there unified in Soul-Mind, Brahman.) The Sun of Life (dynamically externalising the creation). The Sun of Everlasting Form (stabilising and containing the creation). These are the seven powers of the Truth-Mind above the body. Undated Notes - V The Sun of Truth, originating the supramental... Tantric tradition, descending and ascending from Mind (Sahasradala, Ajna[,] Vishuddha, Anahata) that takes up Life through Life in Force (Manipura, Swadhisthana) down to Life involved in Matter [(]Muladhara[)]. All these Life-Centres are in themselves centres of Truth in Life even as the seven Suns are each a flaming heart of Truth in luminous Divine-Mind-Existence; but these lotuses have been veiled ...
... still—for it is oftenest when the mind falls silent that there is the full descent of a wide peace from above and in that wide tranquillity the realisation of the silent Self above the mind spread out in its vastnesses everywhere. Only, when there is the peace and the mental silence, the vital mind tries to rush in and occupy the place or else the mechanical mind tries to raise up for the same purpose... work; when the mind is quiet and at peace, the Force can work more easily. It should be possible to see things that have to be changed in you without being upset or depressed; the change is the more easily done. Let us not exaggerate anything. It is not so much getting rid of mental activity as converting it into the right thing. Krishnaprem has mental activity, but it is a mind that has gone... it is" or "So it is not". But you can't get the inner or upper mind unless the old mental activity becomes a little quiet. A quiet mind does not involve itself in its thoughts or get run away with by them; it stands back, detaches itself, lets them pass, without identifying itself, without making them its own. It becomes the witness mind watching the thoughts when necessary, but able to turn away from ...
... vital even when it becomes a pure instrument of the spirit. Page 122 The Mind and the Vital It is evident that your sadhana has been up till now in the mind—that was why you found it easy to concentrate at the crown of the head because the centre there directly commands the whole mental range. The mind quieted and experiencing the effects of the sadhana quieted the vital disturbance, but... it is the proper course. The deficiency is not in the higher mind or mind proper; there is therefore no use in going back to establish mental peace. The difficulty is in that part of the vital being which is not sufficiently open and confident and not sufficiently strong and Page 125 courageous and in the physical mind which lends its support to these things. To get the supramental light... what you need. You may have all the mental knowledge in the world and yet be impotent to face vital difficulties. Courage, faith, sincerity towards the Light, rejection of opposite suggestions and adverse voices are there the true help. Then only can knowledge itself be at all effective. Not mental control but some descent of a control from above the mind is the power demanded in the realisation ...
... are identified with the action of mind, life and body and live Page 632 inwardly in the soul. The liberation from an externalised ego sense is the first step towards the soul's freedom and mastery. When we thus draw back into the soul, we find ourselves to be not the mind, but a mental being who stands behind the action of the embodied mind, not a mental and vital personality,—personality... sympathy and immixture of mind with mind, life with life, a lessening of the body's insistence on separateness, a power of direct mental and other intercommunication and effective mutual action which helps out now the inadequate indirect communication and action that was till now the greater part of the conscious means used by embodied mind. But still the Purusha sees that in mental, vital, physical nature... 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 has to become an entirely self-conscious soul master of his mind, life and body. Not ...
... urge: we call it the Divine Agni, the Flame of the Inner Heart, the radiant Energy of Aspiration. The fourth status or level of creation is mind or the mental world, represented by air, the Vedic Marut; finally, Vyom or space represents all that is beyond the mind, the Infinite Existeace and Consciousness. The five then give the chart, as it were, of nature's constitution, they mark also the steps of ...
... urge: we call it the Divine Agni, the Flame of the Inner Heart, the radiant Energy of Aspiration. The fourth status or level of creation is mind or the mental world, represented by air, the Vedic Marut; finally, Vyom or space represents all that is beyond the mind, the Infinite Existence and Consciousness. The five then give the chart, as it were, of nature's constitution, they mark also the steps of ...
... in her effectuation of all activities, subhagā sudaṁsāḥ , she brings into existence in us by her revelations Page 296 Swar, the concealed luminous mind, our highest mental heaven; and thus from the farthest extremities of mental being extends herself over the physical consciousness. As this divine Dawn pours out widely its light upon them, so have men by submission to the law of her... with the Truth she enters from the world above Mind, full of the delight, in a varied play of her multiple thought and activity, into the mental and bodily consciousness, those established limits between which man's action moves. It is from her, as she comes thus richly laden, vājena vājini , that Agni, the divine Force labouring here in body and mind to uplift the mortal, prays for and attains to... elevation of him to the full force of the Light and the revelation of the Truth and her pouring of the Ananda, the Amrita, the Soma Wine, the bliss of the immortal being into the mental and bodily existence. In the world of the pure mind, divi , she rises into the full force and mass of the Light, ūrdhvaṁ pājo aśret , and from those pure and high levels she establishes the sweetness, madhu , the honey of ...
... refer to Mother and Sri Aurobindo in this work. It is necessary to be careful to maintain a silent mind. Any mental agitation must be stopped. If there is a mental formation it can influence the movement of the pendulum. I began by using the circle of ABC’s from the middle of the circle. I silence the mind, then I can hear Mother softly speaking. I use the pendulum for signature readings and to check... spirit. An expansion of physical space is more helpful for the inner life. Also the Western world is burdened by an over-emphasis on mental constructions. It seems that Science drags its mental feet with no sense, yet, of exploration of the higher regions of the mind as outlined by Sri Aurobindo. Also the Western world seems to need a stronger sense of Bhakti [devotion], a deeper spiritual adoration... Enamoured, is a sensitive man with a round face and fair skin. His eyes are deep blue and though he speaks with a slight stammer he has great inner strength and possesses a highly developed capacity for mental concentration. We have been friends for many years and when I arrived he was quietly sitting in his small cottage nestled in the grounds of the paper factory. We had known one another since the ...
... 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 in the subtle... emotional being; the throat centre— viśuddha —governs the expressive and externalising mind; the centre between the eyebrows— ājñācakra —governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation; the thousand-petalled lotus— sahasradala —above commands the higher thinking mind, houses the still higher illumined mind and at its highest opens to the intuition through which or else by an overflooding directness... Page 230 the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes confused with the brain, but that is an error—the brain is ...
... the middle of the body in a line corresponding to the spinal cord. The places he speaks of are four centres—(1) crown of head = higher mental centre, (2) between the eyebrows = centre of will and vision, (3) throat = centre of externalising mind, (4) heart = (mental-vital) emotional centre with the psychic behind it (the soul, Purusha in the heart). (2) The lights he sees indicate not some mere ... it is full of mental notions and activities and it is for this reason that heat is generated in the friction between the two; when the other force withdraws and no longer tries to lay hold of the brain then the personal mind-action feels released (that is the reason for the sense of coolness) and goes about its ordinary motions. It is only in a silent (quiet—not necessarily empty) mind that the greater... This means the growth of quietude of mind which is necessary for a fully effective meditation. (2) The pressure on the head and the movements within it. The pressure is that of the Force of the higher consciousness above the mind pressing on the mind (the mind centres are in the head and throat) and penetrating into it. Once it enters there it prepares the mind for opening to it more fully and the ...
... 16,17,18; mind of 17 life planes 54 l ī l ā 91 love 26, 28, 31, 37, 73,'80, 81,85, 91 man, a transformation of 21; the 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... also mind, higher truth-vision 67 universal consciousness 60,66,95 (The) Upanishads 3, 9, 20, 45, 47,48,90 Vaishnavism 87 Vedānta 21 VedānticYoga 21 (The) Vedas 20; synthetic yogas of 48 Vedic Rishis 89, 90, 91 Vedic Yoga 46 virya 74, 75 vital, central 55,57; emotional 55,57; lower 55, 57 vital-material 57 vital-mental 56 ... (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, 66, 67, 68; thinking 55; universal 7 mind-consciousness 43 mind planes 54 moksha 49, 80 (The) Mother 12, 13, 16, 17,18 Mother or Mutation of Death 77 Mother or the Next Species 77 Mother's Agenda 77 mukti ...
... in another. Is there then no beauty of art independent of our varying mentalities? Is beauty a creation of our minds, a construction of our ideas and our senses, not at all existent in itself? In that case Beauty is non-existent in Nature, it is put upon Nature by our minds through mental imposition, adhyāropa . But this contradicts the fact that it is in response to an object and not independently... intuition of a poet like Shelley well enough. These variations must be allowed for; the human mind is not a perfect instrument, its best intuitions are veiled by irrelevant mental formations; but in these matters the truth affirms itself and stands fairly firm and clear in essence through all changes of mental weather. 6 October 1934 Contemporary Judgment of Poetry If you send your poems to five... which mar the reception, but even these have different effects on different people. But the more radical divergences arise from the variation in the constitution of the mind and its difference of response. Moreover there are minds, the majority indeed, who do not respond to "artistic" beauty at all—something inartistic appeals much more to what sense of beauty they have—or else they are not seeking ...
... 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 it at its work, it can be the Witness Purusha watching the works of Prakriti. Even the mind can do that—a man can stand back in his mind-consciousness and watch the mental energy doing things, thinking, planning, etc.; all i... wideness and freedom, it knows itself as the self and not the mind, life or body. It is this stress of consciousness that makes all the difference. That is why 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... useful to go any farther. Certainly, the mind and the inner being are consciousness. 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 Page 23 can see different degrees, kinds, powers of consciousness, mental, vital, physical, psychic, spiritual. The Divine ...
... find itself in the finite. Nor can the emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of Mind into which Mind brings its own rule of division and ignorance. Therefore within this illusion Mind can only find itself; it can only travel between the... it creates at all or why it destroys what once it has created: it does not know, for it has no mind; it does not care, for it has no heart. And if that is not the real truth even of the material universe, if behind all this false phenomenon there is a Mind, a Will and something greater than Mind or mental Will, yet it is this dark semblance that the material universe itself presents as a truth to the... being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence. Such a supramental being would, as we have seen, liberate the mind from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of mind as merely a useful subordinate ...
... It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences—external and emotional—are then needed to strike open the doors within, to bring... birth again, it puts on a new mind, a new vital or prana, and a new body in accordance with its past experiences and the fresh line of evolution it is going to pursue. Where then does the memory of past lives reside ? For, nothing, except the psychic, survives the dissolution of the constructed personality. If the psychic is not much developed and the life and mind it assumes are not purified and... dissolved. The soul then continues to live in the vital sheath, prāṇamaya koṣa, having experiences in the vital world. The vital sheath, then, dissolves in its turn, and the soul lives on in the mental sheath, manomaya koṣa, till that too is dissolved. When all the three sheaths are dissolved, the soul goes to its own plane, the psychic plane, for rest, for assimilation of its past experiences—the ...
... that you feel, all that you think. To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it... educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to... its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body ...
... and compel all to be of one mind, one sentiment, one opinion, one feeling; but this remedy will be in a rational society self-contradictory, ineffective, or if effective, then worse than the evil it seeks to combat. On the other hand, if from the first freedom of thought is denied, that means the end of the Age of Reason and of the ideal of a rational society. Man the mental being disallowed the use—except... use—except in a narrow fixed groove—of his mind and mental will, will stop short in his growth and be even as the animal and as the insect a stationary species. This is the central defect through which a socialistic State is bound to be convicted of insufficiency and condemned to pass away before the growth of a new ideal. Already the pressure of the State organisation on the life of the individual... least a necessary stage in social progress. For the vice of individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and a harmless freedom can be founded. Collectivism ...
... only secondarily through words - is seasoned mental power, and needn't have any supramental dimension. While this principle of reversal of consciousness had operated in a veiled manner all through the past processes of evolution - from matter to life-force, and from life-force to mind - it is only now, at the present stage of development from mind to supermind, that the principle of reversal or... silence in the mental region and when the spiritual force with its light and power descends through the mind and makes it act directly without its following its usual method of analysis, deduction, reasoning. 20 This would be yet another aspect of the reversal of consciousness (to which a reference has already been made in an earlier section), for even Page 671 the mind's "power of ... No wonder the struggle is acute, violent and open, but since this tempo seems also more definitive... we can hope to reach an early solution". IV Today the intervention of the mind - of mental processes - in every department of life has thrown up all kinds of cruelties, extravagances, frivolities, perversities and deformations, with the result that what passes for human life today is ...
... to transform their body before even having transformed their intelligence, and this produces a complete displacement, it unbalances them totally. One must first transform his thought, all his mind, all his mental activity, organise it with higher knowledge; and at the same time one must transform his character, all the movements of the vital, all impulses, all reactions. And finally, when these two things... has come they want to begin by what will happen; they stop eating, stop sleeping, and the result is that they fall very ill. It is preferable at first to begin by receiving the Supermind in one's mind with a sufficient knowledge, and gradually come to transforming all the rest. Sweet Mother, what is "the dynamic side"? It is the same thing. It is this side of the yoga. There are two aspects: ...
... kind, which go far beyond the reason; and these are still mental regions, they have nothing of the supramental. … it is in the mind itself, without coming out of the mind, that there are all these regions which are almost inaccessible for most human beings. … Before reaching the extreme limit of the mind, there are so many regions and mental activities which are not at all accessible to most human... this state of consciousness. On the contrary it is in what he calls the altogether ordinary mind, the mind of the ordinary man that we live. And to the ordinary consciousness the reason seems to belong to a very high region; and the reason for him is one of the average faculties of the human mind. There are mental regions very much higher than that, which he has described in detail. And it is quite certain... instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight—not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded ...
... emotional being; the throat centre, Vishuddha, governs the expressive and externalising mind; the centre between the eye-brows, Agnachakra, governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation; the thousand-petalled lotus, Sahasradala, above commands the higher thinking mind, houses the still higher illumined mind and at the highest opens to the intuitive through which or else by an over- flooding... the formations, beliefs or doubts, mental preferences and interests which are in conformity with its education and its nature. But quite apart from that, what was commanding in St. Augustine may very well have been the thinking mind or reason while what was commanded was the vital, and mind and vital, whatever anybody may say, are not the same. The thinking mind or ' Buddhi' lives, however imperfectly... latter obey the mind and not follow its own nature ? The disobedience is perfectly normal instead of being, as Augustine suggests, unintelligible. Of course, man can establish a mental control over his vital and in so far as he does it he is a man, because the thinking mind is a nobler and more enlightened entity and consciousness than the vital and ought, therefore, to rule and, if the mental will is strong ...
... governing Will, supramental, originative and determinative of all minds, lives and bodies; one Mind containing all mental beings and constituting all their mental activities; one Life active in all living beings and generative of their vital activities; one substance constituting all forms and objects as the visible and sensible mould in which mind and life manifest and act just as one pure existence is that... higher and sublime activity. This transformation cannot be complete or really executed without the awakening of the truth-mind which corresponds in the mental being to the Supermind and is capable of receiving mentally its illuminations. By the opposition of Spirit and Mind without the free opening of this intermediate power the two natures, higher and lower, stand divided, and though there may be... it can transform the half-light of our minds into a certain totality of light. It reveals the Will behind all the devious and imperfectly regulated strivings of our mental will and emotional wishes and vital effort and makes each to fall into its place in the unity of the luminous Will behind; thus it can transform the half-obscure struggle of our life and mind into a certain totality of ordered force ...
... without the help of the supra-mental planes, the planes above the human mind? There are many planes above man's mind — the supra-mental is not the only one, and on all of them the self can be realised, — for they are all spiritual planes. Mind, vital and physical are inextricably mixed together only on the surface consciousness — the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical... spiritual and has gone beyond the vital and mind, he does not need to be always "doing" something. The self or spirit has the joy of its own existence. It is free to do nothing and free to do everything — but not because it is bound to action and unable to exist without it. By my question, "What does he do?" I did not mean any physical or mental action. Rather I wanted to know if by merely... You wrote, "Those who seek the self by the old Yogas separate themselves from mind, life and body and realise the self apart from these things." How do they manage to separate themselves from mind, life and body so easily? Will not these things interfere with their realisation? In allowing them to do this, will not the mind, vital and physical have to withdraw from their ordinary movements of tamas, ...
... clearly what the humanity is which she seeks to surpass. This human symbol, this type we now are is a mental being with a mental ego, working in a vital case by mind always, but upon matter, in matter & through matter. It is limited in its higher workings by its lower instruments. Its basis of mind is egoistic, sensational & determined by experience & environment, its knowledge therefore pursues wider... d mentality to an idealised Page 120 & illuminated life, body & mind, from the symbol to reality, from man separated from God to man in God & God in man. In brief, as she has aspired successfully from matter to life, from life to mind & mental ego, so she aspires & with a fated success to an element beyond mind, the vijnana of the Hindus, the self-luminous idea or Truth-self now concealed... make any difference to the level of natural attainment. All the accumulated discoveries & varied information of the modern scientist will not make him mentally the superior of Aristotle or Socrates; he is neither an acuter mind nor a greater mental force. All the varied activities of modern philanthropy will not produce a greater moral type than Buddha or St Francis. The invention of the motor car ...
... waking consciousness; part of it is on a level with it but behind and much larger than it; part is above and superconscient to us. What we call our mind is only an 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... 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” is used in two different senses. Sometimes it denotes 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... 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 easily and directly respond to the Divine Light and Power. There is no real Yoga possible, still less any integral Yoga, if we do not go back from the outer self and become aware of all this ...
... forgotten. There are really quite interesting things .... Some of them give me the exact impression of a clothing (we might say an intellectual clothing, but it's not that, it's from a higher mind, but it's mentalized, that is to say, accessible to thought), a clothing of the experience I had of the supramental Consciousness, in which the difference between good and evil and all that looked like childishness... if I should have said that. But then, that's the mind's intervention. I don't know. It happens to me too. Sometimes I write something, send Page 473 it, and afterwards I remember what I wrote and say to myself, "Gee! I shouldn't have said that!..." And later on, I realize it's quite fine—it's the reaction that's a mental reaction. That's happened to me several times. The... That way, one can do a lot of work without getting tired! I'd like to take a leaf out of your book! Here! ( Mother gives her hands, laughing ) Because, even in a mental silence (I am used to always writing in mental silence), but still, even in that silence, I am wary of old formations or reactions coming and expressing themselves in the silence. Ah, yes. I am afraid of that. ...
... 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 and interacting; but to the outer mind and sense, in our waking... more free, magnificent and noble being; but 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... outside conscious awareness and what is therefore not accessible to introspection. Regarding this early view of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations ...
... concrete and creative world. It is not sufficiently recognised as to what a great help can be obtained in developing faculties and powers by habituating the mind to mental quietude, mental calm, mental tranquillity, mental silence and mental peace. Our ancient seers had discovered the potency of the intellect when through meditative processes of silence, the intellect can be united with the higher... vitality... In literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly... India has not only had the long roll of her great saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders, poets, creators, scientists, scholars, legists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with the strong active will, the mind that plans and the seeing force that builds. She has... time to the call of adventure and ambition. This study can be followed by stories of characters possessed of sattvic qualities so that a comparison can be made between the vital and higher vital and mental personalities. Examples can be multiplied and teachers can enrich the contents by possessing a fund of knowledge of stories of Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, stories of the life of Mohammed and ...
... of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or the supermind where the One and Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the Divine Truth and the Inspiration of the Divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which... which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the Spiritual this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Page 137 Vedic 'Sacrifice' to be converted into the terms of infinite truth of Sacchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite... Yoga has discovered and perfected certain specific methods by application of which human consciousness can be so revolutionised that the ordinary functioning of the human body, human heart, and human mind can be united with superior faculties of knowledge and action, and ultimately the human being can become permanently united with the universal and transcendental states of consciousness and knowledge ...
... trinity of Sachchidananda. Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, these are everywhere the three inseparable divine terms. None of them is really separate, though our mind and our mental experience can make not only the distinction, but the separation. Mind can say and think "I was, but unconscious"—for no being can say "I am, but unconscious"—and it can think and feel "I am, but miserable and without any pleasure... principles and by other faculties of action. There is above the mind, as the old Vedic sages discovered, a Truth-plane, a plane of self-luminous, self-effective Idea, which can be turned in light and force upon our mind, reason, sentiments, impulses, sensations and use and control them in the sense of the real Truth of things just as we turn our mental reason and will upon our sense-experience and animal nature... qualities which lifts us above the strife and surge of Nature in her eternal seeking through mind and body for the true key and secret of all her relations. And it is the ancient highest experience of mankind that only by arriving there, only by making oneself impersonal, one, still, self-gathered, superior to the mental and vital existence in that which is eternally superior to it, can a settled, because ...
... the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunar— Moon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind). To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at... has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected... creative activity. Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to Page 300 over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mental—which is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activities—serves ...
... extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunar-Moon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind). To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return... has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into :;tn increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected... man's creative activity. Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to Page 73 over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mental-which is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activities-serves ...
... waking consciousness, part of it is on a level with it but behind and much larger than it; part is above and superconscient to us. What we call our mind is only an 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... 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 surface being are similarly... and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental structure of apparent self that will serve these purposes; our mind is persuaded to present to us and to others a partly fictitious representative figure of ourselves which supports our self-affirmation, justifies our desires ...
... governing Will, supramental, originative and determinative of all minds, lives and bodies; one Mind containing all mental beings and constituting all their mental activities; one Life active in all living beings and generative of their vital activities; one substance constituting all forms and objects as the visible and sensible mould in which mind and life manifest and act just as one pure existence is that... many, as described by the Upanishad: "He, the Divine, the formless Spirit, even He is the outward and the inward and He the Unborn; He is beyond life, beyond mind, luminous. Supreme beyond the Immutable. "Life and mind and the senses are born from Him and the sky, and the wind, and light, and the waters and earth upholding all that is."¹ The utmost transcendence, the most co... brahmajñāna or knowledge of the universal and transcendent Self or Spirit, and bhagavatjñāna or knowledge of the Divine, the sole and supreme Being. It is essential to keep this distinction well in mind lest we confound the ultimate values of the spiritual life and fail to appreciate the comprehensive greatness of the aim of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Ordinarily—and this is a fairly ...
... the twelve crores of Mahomedans should be left quite out of contact with the Yoga. These things that rise in you are certainly desires of the physical vital or else ideas of the physical mind giving a mental shape to desires. The sadhak has to see them when they rise and note them for what they are, but not allow them to move him to action. If one is meant to be an intermediary between the Yogic... things, he is making a mistake and is likely to create unnecessary narrowness, clash and opposition. There is no opposition or clash between them in spiritual experience; it is only the external human mind that mistakenly puts them against each other. What we are here to make is a new creation in which there is a larger reconciling Truth than anything that went before in the past; but what will reconcile... Hindu world is quite separate, all the outside world is separate, until the Light that is growing here makes the connection. Page 698 I thought the attitude towards Mahomedans lay in the minds of the people here because of a subconscious influence and I took this to be an ignorance that can be overlooked for the time being. But if Sri Aurobindo also writes like this, I wish to know if the ...
... intellectuals reason and see what their minds show them, which is far from being always the truth, for it is generally decided by intellectual preference and the mind's inborn or education-inculcated angle of vision,—but even when they see it, they have no power to enforce it. So between blind power and seeing impotence the world moves, achieving destiny through a mental muddle. To conclude, Russell writes... controversy especially if it touches in the least on politics. Gandhi's theories are like other mental theories built on a basis of one-sided reasoning and claiming for a limited truth (that of non-violence and of passive resistance) a universality which it cannot have. Such theories will always exist so long as the mind is the main instrument of human truth seeking. To spend energy trying to destroy such theories... great confidence in Subhas's yoga-turn getting the better of his activism—he has two strong ties that prevent Page 195 it, ambition and need to act and lead in the vital and in the mind a mental idealism—these two things are the great fosterers of illusion. The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism—one has to see the real value of the things that are—which is very little, except ...
... and find control difficult and often impossible. Some have a strong mind and mental will and others are vital men in whom the vital passions are stronger or more on the surface. Some do not think control necessary and let themselves go. In sadhana the mental or moral control has to be replaced by the spiritual mastery—for the mental control is only partial and it controls but does not liberate; it is... seeks and nothing else matters. Morality is a part of the ordinary life; it is an attempt to govern the outward conduct by certain mental rules or to form the character by these rules in the image of a certain mental ideal. The spiritual life goes beyond the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit. As for the question about the ethical... belong to the mind and vital, they are different forms of the ego. The mind in its attempt to get away from the rajasic selfish ego tries to do just the opposite of what selfishness usually does and serve others, sacrifice itself for others, but in doing so it is only constructing another kind of egoism that prides itself on its own unselfishness and altruism and makes human service its mental ideal instead ...
... 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 which is that of the expressive or externalising mind: these are the mental centres. Below comes the vital—the heart (emotional), the navel (the dynamic life-centre)... regarded as things coming from outside, from Prakriti, and they must be felt as if they were passers-by crossing the mind-space with whom one has no connection and in whom one takes no interest. In this way it usually happens that after a time the mind divides into two, a part which is the mental witness watching and perfectly undisturbed and quiet and a part which is the object of observation, the Prakriti... the old habit of the mental consciousness that it goes on receiving the thoughts from outside in spite of its being a fatigue—not that it wants them, but that they Page 302 are accustomed to come and the mind mechanically lets them in and attends to them by force of habit. This is always one of the chief difficulties in Yoga when the experiences have begun and the mind wants to be always ...
... this state of consciousness. On the contrary it is in what he calls the altogether ordinary mind, the mind of the ordinary man that we live. And to the ordinary consciousness the reason seems to belong to a very high region; and the reason for him is one of the average faculties of the human mind. There are mental regions very much higher than that, which he has described in detail. And it is quite certain... very detailed description of all the mental functions accessible to man. Well, when we read this, we say that merely to traverse the mental domain to its highest limit there are so many stages which have not yet been crossed that truly we don't need to speak about the supermind for the time being. Page 415 When he speaks of the higher ranges of the mind, one becomes aware that one very rarely... reason; and these are still mental regions, they have nothing of the supramental. Mother, you said that between the supermind and the mind there are many stages, didn't you? And it is written that the next logical stage in the evolution of Nature is the superman. Why not a race which is... Intermediary? We shall see that later. Does this mean that from the mind we can go to the supermind ...
... earth-nature are to Page 31 change decisively, a 'rending' of the 'veil' is necessary, for then the Supermind or the supramental consciousness would operate here, even as Mind of the mental consciousness is already operating. Neither the denial of matter through asceticism nor the denial of the Spirit through materialism or hedonism, neither escaping into the upper hemisphere nor... Vijnana) D'. Mind C. Psyche B'. Life A. Matter The upper hemisphere or quartet of Satchidananda has, in the course of involution—or the descent of consciousness—the phenomenal lapse from undivided to divided existence—become the lower hemisphere of our terrestrial travail made up of Matter, Life, Psyche and Mind. There is a 'veil' now that separates Mind (D') from Supermind... this could be achieved. The ascent from Ignorance to Knowledge will be long and slow, and there must be many gradations on the way. In order to reach the Supermind, many levels above the Mind—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—will have to be passed. But it can be done, and will be done, leading, "inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the ...
... and the trial is like the mental gymnastics of a master gymnast. But each time, when I have finished the book, I feel that I have gained nothing, learnt nothing new, that it was a waste of time. It is not absolutely useless. You have doubtless a great deal of tamas in your mind and the mental acrobatics of the author shake up this tamas a little and awaken the mind. But this cannot last long... concentration and will. 7 April 1965 Are mental indifference and lack of curiosity a sort of mental inertia? Usually they are due to mental inertia, unless one has obtained calm and indifference through a very intense sadhana resulting in a perfect equality for which the good and bad, the pleasant and unpleasant no longer exist. But in that case, mental activity is replaced by an intuitive activity... activity of a much higher kind. 25 May 1966 How can one get out of this mental laziness and inertia? By wanting to, with persistence and obstinacy. By doing daily a mental exercise of reading, organisation and development. This must alternate in the course of the day with exercises of mental silence in concentration. 1 June 1966 Page 398 ...
... can still be touched by the adverse forces; that is, not exactly the body-consciousness itself but, one could say, material substance as it has been organized by the mind—the initial mentalization of matter, the first stirrings of mind in life making the passage from animal to human. (The same complications would probably exist in animals, but as there is no question of trying to supramentalize animals... subordinate importance for a saint or a sage. But for this supramental work, the way the body is formed has an almost crucial importance, and not at all in relation to spiritual elements nor even to mental power: these aspects have no importance AT ALL. The capacity to endure, to last is the important thing. Well, in that respect, it is absolutely undeniable that my body has an infinitely greater... it's all very well, all very well. But compared to what one must know to do this work.... Perhaps it's better not to know. Because evidently I can't say that my experiences are the result of a mental aspiration or will or knowledge—I don't know, I don't know at all. I don't know how it should be, nor what it should be, nor anything at all. I don't know what should be done, I don't know what should ...
... level or the vital or the mental, and so long as this drive is not detected and stopped, the soul cannot come forward and assume the reins of the nature. "Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.”¹ Let us first pass in brief and rapid review the characteristic traits of the human mind before we proceed to consider how we ought to deal with it in spiritual life. The mind is an instrument of analysis... the modern mind as "dazed and darkened by reading". A sort of mental indigestion is a prevailing malady of the modern intelligentsia and accounts not only for the catalepsy of its intuitive powers—intuitive thought, intuitive imagination, intuitive perception—but also for its inaptitude and disinclination for the spiritual life, and the fungus growth of doubt and disbelief choking its mind. Every part... the Mother in which the Mother points out some of the normal defects and limitations of the human mind. "The whole mental world in which you live is limited, even though you may not know or feel its limitations, and something must come and break down this building in which your mind has shut itself and liberate it. For instance, you have some fixed rules, ideas or principles to which you ...
... 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... 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. CONTRIBUTION... Since the rise of natural sciences European mind has been principally occupied in investigating the nature of the physical world and later on in the 18th century it took up the field of biology. In these investigations the attitude of the inquiring mind was objective. So, when man's eyes turned upon himself and wanted to study psychology involving mental processes he had perforce to adopt, in the beginning ...
... ordeals and satisfy all the hard conditions of the perfect spiritual success. Not only the whole mental, vital and physical nature of the ignorant human being has to be overcome and transformed, but also the three states of mental consciousness which intervene between the human and the supramental and like all mind are capable of admitting great and capital errors. Till then there may be descents of supramental... to transform the nature. Paśyataḥ 3 in the spiritual language does not mean only perception. Perception is of the mind and a mental perception is not enough—a substantial and dynamic realisation in all the being is necessary. Otherwise one of three things may happen. (1) The mind perceives oneness but the vital is not affected, it goes on with its impulses, for the vital is governed not by thought... matter what I do. Why should not I seek oneness with others in my own way?" (2) If the mind has a realisation, but the vital does not share in it or distorts it, then also the vital can insist on its own way or even carry the mind Page 424 along with it. As the Gita says, the senses (vital) carry away the mind even of the sage who sees, as the wind carries away a ship on a stormy sea. (3) The ...
... stair of Existence have been realized. Higher on there are many more ‘spiritual’ steps. As the word ‘spirit’ is often misleading, when using it and its derivations we will keep in mind the difference between the ordinary mental consciousness and the gradations above it; ‘spiritual’ is henceforth used exclusively in relation to these higher gradations. All things spiritual seem airy, insubstantial and... complex phenomenon of consciousness, and what we in ordinary parlance mean by consciousness is little more than a thin peel on the surface of an onion. ‘Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations... however physically small, that the scientists’ alleged cousinship of monkey and man looks psychologically almost incredible. And yet the difference between vital animal and mental man is as nothing to that which will be between man’s mind and the superman’s vaster consciousness and richer powers. That past step will be to this new one as the snail’s slow march in the grass to a Titan’s sudden thousand league ...
... see the Divine, it is the soul that sees. Mind and the other instruments can only share in the vision when it is imparted to them by the soul and welcome and rejoice in it. But also the mind may prevent it or at least stand long in the way of the realisation or the vision. For its prepossessions, Page 180 preconceived opinions and mental preferences may build a wall of arguments ... all outer mental or other awareness, but of an experience in a luminous silence of the mind which looks up into the boundlessness of the last illimitable silence into which it is to pass and disappear, but before that unspeakable experience of the Ultimate or disappearance into it, there is possible a descent of at least some Power or Presence of the Reality into the substance of mind along with... secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also Page 195 the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary ...
... being between the animal and the suprahuman species of the future. Man is the typical mental being, an embodiment on the Earth of the mental gradation in the universal manifestation. Keeping this in mind, let us see how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother defined Mind. 1. “Mind is not a faculty of knowledge” “Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function... knowledge is through this mental manipulation and discrimination to the point where the veil is broken and he can see; at the end spiritual knowledge comes in to help us to become what we see, to enter into the light in which there is no Ignorance.” 30 2. Mind is Substance, Thoughts are Entities “The mind is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action. Why? The mind 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 forms.” 31 ...
... at the moment.” (Russell Stannard 5 ) The problem of the whole and its parts is a problem of the mind, and hence cannot be solved by science itself as it recognizes only matter. Science is an exercise of the mind, a mental activity – a blatant truth which is often negated or overlooked. “Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that [the given objects] are things with which it can... working of the human mind and its activities, be they scientific, religious, or political. The function of the mind “is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyze the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and... proved but only disproved or “falsified.” For Kuhn, even if there is an absolute Reality, it can never be known by science; only mental conceptions, artificially composed images of it, are what science is able to accomplish. The root of the problem is, again, the human mind. “We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears ...
... Being in its dynamic process of manifestation. It is this significance that gives validity to the mind's interpretative knowledge, its subjective construction of the universe; our mind is primarily a percipient and interpreter, secondarily and derivatively a creator. This indeed is the value of all mental subjectivity that it reflects in it some truth of the Being which exists independently of the reflection... discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies,—all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations... unveils itself to anything other than its own self-light eternal and absolute. But this way of seeing things belongs to the action of the mind interpreting the relation between the Being and the external Page 672 Becoming; it is valid as a dynamic mental representation corresponding to a certain truth of the manifestation, but subject to the proviso that these symbolic values of things do ...
... 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 these he can say "my mind, life, body," he can regard them as himself, yet partly as not himself and something... entire oneness of all existence. The workings 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... the ideal mind or supermind. There the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and ...
... contact with the Absolute. 134 This method of extinction is imposed on our mind and our mental ego, because all that is eternal, infinite, absolute is superconscient to mind; mind and its ego cannot remain awake in that greater consciousness, they must disappear. But if we can change or evolve from mental into supramental beings, then the superconscient becomes our normal consciousness. We... the divine Yoga[.] Page 349 It is not a mental or moral ideal to which is turned the seeker of the Way, but a truth of the spirit, the experience of a hidden Reality living and concrete, a Light, a Power, a Joy that surpasses the mental understanding and is beyond any merely mental experience. The ideals created by the mind are constructions in the air that have no sufficient foundation... calm equality of the mind, the life soul and the spirit, annihilation of the ego, an inner quietude and expulsion or transcendence of ordinary Nature, the Nature of the three gunas and a total surrender to the Supreme are the successive steps of this preliminary change. Only after all this has been done, can we live securely in an infinite consciousness not bound like our mental human nature. And only ...
... Vital, the Life-mind, 44, 45, 55 See also vital mind under Mind Matter, 6, 121, 196, 325, 377, 400 Maya, 96 and the Self, 98 Mayavada (Illusionism), 373, 374, 375, 377 See also Shankara Mind, 61, 193, 337 cannot integrate the being, 19 and consciousness, 8-9, 41-43 evolution of mental life, 256-58 Higher Mind, 143-46, 352 an... passim, 26, 72-83, 84, 87, 337, 342-44, 363 See also Subliminal, the, Inner mind (mental), see Subconscious mind Inner senses, see Senses, inner Intellect, and spiritual truths, 179-80, 181-84, 191 See also Mind and spiritual truths under mind Intuition, 87, 353 Intuition (Plane of Intuition), 142, 149-53 fourfold power of, 152... Subconscious (inner) mind, 4, 290- 91, 337 Subliminal (being, self), the, 4, 12, 13, 23, 38, 72-83, 307, 342-44, 362-63 and psychical phenomena, 248-49 and the subconscient, 72 See also Inner being Subliminal consciousness, 291-92 See also Psychical consciousness Subliminal mind, see Subconciou (inner) mind Superconscient (su ...
... their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern... but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness... function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly – "introvert", a modern mind would term it – that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own authenticity and selfsufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought ...
... AMRITA-DA W HENEVER we try to relive the memories of these great men—or should I say great souls—the memories that they have left behind for us, we must always remember that with one's mind or outer mental perspective one cannot understand or perceive the real soul. When we meet these great beings, we look at them each with our own limited individual ignorant consciousness, that is, through our... started frequenting Sri Aurobindo's house and the work of posting letters was given to him by Bejoy Nag. He writes "Feb. 1915, a crucial stage arrived in my life. Along with this came a quietude of mind, a constant memory of something which was fundamental". He was barely twenty years old at that time. He joined the Ashram permanently in 1919. Dedicated his service to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... genuine historical age and not a mytholegendary one. Sri Aurobindo has affirmed that in the cultural process of the ages the Rama-figure stands for the establishment of the dharmic (ethical) mind over the mental titanism on the one hand and on the other the animal mentality, two trends in the path of human evolution. Sri Aurobindo also declares that in the Rama depicted by Valmiki he can feel ... of lives had to be passed through before the soul could have a human embodiment. Earth's long history amply allows time for our pre-human past. You and I are certain to have been real Manu-man (mental being) and not something like Hanuman when Rama flourished and Nolini was in his train. In fact, I believe that most disciples of Sri Aurobindo were with Sri Aurobindo each time he manifested... typewriter that there was no danger of even the savikalpa (is the word right ?) when your note came. After looking at the references I shall continue tapping the keys which will unlock my heart and mind to you. * PR: Is Amal's letter to me still swelling ? When will it reach a desirable size! Amen' (not women!!) AK: Quite a philosophical question [with an arrow pointing ...
... and life stands the principle of mind, nearer to the secret Origin of things. The Spirit poised in mind becomes the mental self of a mental world and dwells there in the reign of its own pure and luminous mental Nature. There it acts in the intrinsic freedom of the cosmic Intelligence supported by the combined workings of a psycho-mental and a higher emotional mind-force, subtilised and enlightened... consciousness and visible organism this mental soul, mental nature, mental body and a mental plane, not materialised, in which the principle of Mind is at home and not as here at strife with a world which is alien to it, obstructive to its freedom and corruptive of its purity and clearness. All the higher faculties of man, his intellectual and psycho-mental Page 470 being and powers, his... planes and worlds. 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 ...
... genuine historical age and not a mytho-legendary one. Sri Aurobindo has affirmed that in the cultural process of the ages the Rama-figure stands for the establishment of the dharmic (ethical) mind over the mental titanism on the one hand and on the Page 109 other the animal mentality, two trends in the path of human evolution.) Sri Aurobindo also declares that in the Rama depicted by... lakhs of lives had to be passed through before the soul could have a human embodiment. Earth's long history amply allows time for our pre-human past. You and I are certain to have been real Manu-man (mental being) and not something like Hanu-man when Rama flourished and Nolini was in his train.(In fact, I believe that most disciples of Sri Aurobindo were with Sri Aurobindo each time he manifested in human... for answers. All are vibrant with affectionate warmth and each has its own particular spark of inner light, showing that my friend has really been living with a sense of Sri Aurobindo tingling in his mind and a feeling of the Mother a-throb in his heart and, along with these Divine Ones, a few humans are also at home in his sincere aspiring life. I am sure nobody can say about you what my late friend ...
... say mine has it, but some sustained bliss is present. My happy state appears to have no Page 261 rhyme or reason for it. It just is. There is absolutely no attitude of the mind involved, no mental movement to be happy. I may describe it as an entire self-containment by the body, a holding together of the entire body-sense, a col-lectedness with a stilling of everything, a balanced moment... slanting boughs, swaying with trembling leaves, against a changing skyscape. The third is that somehow the body has been most peaceful and my so-called "constant cheerfulness" is not due to just a mental equanimity but to a concrete sense of physical stillness, holding some inmost gift of Divine Grace in the form of an intrinsic happiness in the very substance of the injured and immobilised body... Nursing Home was so wonderful, I would have come here much earlier!" Page 260 I wanted to know, it was important to know, why the accident had occurred. The knowledge is not to be mental, it has to come from a deeper source. Then we get a direction towards the opportunity to be taken. All the time Sri Aurobindo's hands and the Mother's are around us. Except for our follies, nothing ...
... consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the 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... ascribed to the mind. But in the language of Integral Yoga, "mind" refers to that part of the human being which has to do solely with cognitive functions and processes. Feeling or affection is regarded as pertaining to the vital, whereas will or volition can be either mental or vital. Sri Aurobindo clarifies the distinction between the mind and the vital as follows: "The 'Mind' in the ordinary... with the Mind From one viewpoint, the root cause of all psychological disturbances lies in the nature of the mind. The peculiar characteristic of mental consciousness is that it is self-reflective, that is, it can objectivise itself. One part of the mind can separate itself and observe the rest as an object. The part that stands back serves as a mirror which reflects to the observing mind its own ...
... full meaning only in mind, for it seems to have submental reactions that in us are the foundation of pleasure and pain or of attraction and repulsion; but still it is a form of life, not of mere matter, nor is it, so far as we know, at all a mind-conscious Page 738 being. Man and the animal are both mentally conscious beings: but the animal is fixed in vital mind and mind-sense and cannot exceed... 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, dynamic, vital, nervous, more open... disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become the mental adventurer, the opener of the way to new mind-formations or the fighter for an idea, the sensitive type of artist ...
... animal; there must surely be another in its future in which a higher spiritual and supramental consciousness shall emerge and be turned upon the works of the mind. But at present it is this which is at work; a self-conscious soul in mind, mental being, manomaya puruṣa , struggles to arrive at some intelligent ordering of its self and life and some indefinite, perhaps infinite development of the powers... × The ordinary mind in man is not truly the thinking mind proper, it is a life-mind, a vital mind as we may call it, which has learned to think and even to reason but for its own ends and on its own lines, not on those of a true mind of knowledge. ... a momentous self-discovery intervenes; there appears something that is hidden in matter and in the first disposition of life and has not clearly emerged in the animal in spite of its possession of a mind; there appears the presence of the Soul in things which at first was concealed in its own natural and outward workings, absorbed and on the surface at least self-oblivious. Afterwards it becomes, as ...
... the Mind and Emotional Being 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 becomes sufficiently subtle to do so. The Mental Physical or Mechanical Mind That... 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 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... of our being—mental, vital, physical—has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected and interacting; but to our outer mind and sense, in our waking experience, they are all confused together. The body, for instance, has its own consciousness and acts from it, even without any conscious Page 201 mental will of our own or even against that will, and our surface mind knows very little ...
... externalising mind or physical mental. Your difficulties are likely to cease only when you bring down the peace and wideness into the whole body or at any rate feel its effects there. If the whole mind admits the higher consciousness, that will be a definite step towards this. In dealing with the physical and subconscient the working is always slower than when it acts on the mind and vital because... 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 fulfilment than when it is on the mental or vital alone. The resistance is becoming more of a... This happens in the earlier stages also, but it is not quite complete usually then because something of the mind and vital is active in the physical still or, even if the interruption of sadhana is complete, it does not last long and so one does not so much notice it. But when from the mental and vital stage of the Yoga one comes down into the physical, this condition which is native to the physical ...
... largely directed and used by the vital urge for its life-desire and life-purpose. For as mind develops, there develops also a mental Page 641 individuality with a personal drive of mind-tendency, a mental temperament, a mind formation of its own. This surface mental individuality is ego-centric; it looks at the world and things and happenings from its own standpoint and sees them not as they... the increasing involution of consciousness in separative mind and life or only after the plunge into inconscience. This resolves itself into the question whether falsehood, error, wrong and evil exist originally in the mental and vital planes and are native to mind and life or are proper only to the material manifestation because inflicted on mind and life there by the obscurity arising from the Inconscience... misrepresentation, a complicated machinery of mental error. In all this enlightened obscurity of our mental parts a secret intuition is at work, a truth-urge that corrects or pushes the intelligence to correct what is erroneous, to labour towards a true picture of things and a true interpretative knowledge. But intuition itself is limited in the human mind by mental misprision of its intimations and is unable ...
... poetry and painting in particular belong to the vital plane. Disciple : Does not poetry – like, that of Tagore – come from the mental plane? Sri Aurobindo : No. It does not come from the mental plane; at best it is from the vital mind – or vital mental – that it comes. Page 218 22-6-1924 (An article on Modern Indian Painting by 0. C. Gangooly) Sri Aurobindo... unrestrained passion. Greek life was far from settled at the time. Sri Aurobindo : What has that to do with the arts? Disciple : He means to say that the Greek mind that found expression in the arts was such a mind. Page 221 Sri Aurobindo : On the other hand it is a sign of their control because they checked their leaders from committing excesses. When two leaders... Disciple : We have many paintings of Nandalal dealing with Puranic subjects. But I find one or two are failures Sri Aurobindo : In Nandalal's paintings you find the background of a strong mental conception; while Abanindranath's paintings are from the vital world. I would like to see some of his earlier works. My idea is that in Abanindra's case the inspiration from Ajanta is not so strong ...
... of thought come equally to the mind in its ordinary state; but if the mind and mental will are well developed, one can establish a control over one's thoughts as well as over one's acts and prevent the bad ones from having Page 334 their play. But this mental control is not enough for the sadhak. He must attain to a quiet mind and in the silence of the mind receive only the Divine thought-forces... energies ]. Some like Daudet may observe the expenditure or throwing out of forces, but not the pulling or the effect on others. The idea of mental interchange is familiar though only of the superficial kind, not the silent action of mind on Page 329 mind which is always going on, but the vital impacts are known only to a few occultists. If one becomes very conscious one can become aware of... of the mind. Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in Yoga a state of samatā , equality to all things. It is of immense importance in sadhana to be able to reach this state. It helps the mental quietude and silence as well as the vital to come. It means indeed that the vital itself and the vital mind are already ...
... the conquest. There is only one way if you cannot exert your will—it is to call the Force; even to call only with the mind or the mental word is better than being entirely passive and submitted to the attack,—for although it may not succeed instantaneously, the mental call even ends by bringing the Force and opening up the consciousness again. For everything depends upon that. In the Page... spiritual life. When that is there, it will be impossible even to think of returning to the ordinary existence. Meanwhile the mental will and the psychic aspiration must be your support; if you insist, the vital will finally yield and be converted and surrender. Fix upon your mind and heart the resolution to live for the Divine Truth and for that alone; reject all that is contrary and incompatible with... only help or enable them to do that, but it cannot replace this necessary action by a summary process. Your mind and inner being must impart their will to the whole. Yes. So long as there is not a constant action of the Force from above or else of a deeper Will from within, the mental will is necessary. You had written, "I need not bother about it—if peace is needed it will bring itself ...
... The large ideality playing on mind and mental suggestion is taking up all telepathies and showing their ideal truth by discernment of their form & limits; so also, though less largely all tapas. The principle of faultless certainty of trikaldrishti (future and, to a less extent, present) is being sought for, but is not yet perfectly found. Telepathy of pranic & mental thought & feeling in animals... 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 may now shortly be expected, since no images or objects, faces or figures... mechanical repetition of some of its old movements on the prana and sense mind by a purely physical touch. Striving constantly to recur, it failed to endure. In Samadhi much interference of nidra, but at the same time the ideality is taking hold of it and undermining incoherence. The grasp of ideal perceptive thought in mental sushupti is increasing. Especially lipi in all the four states is gaining ...
... machinery of the movements of his own consciousness. The vital mind is part of the mind. If mind (mental mind, vital mind, physical mind, subconscient mind) does not respond to Page 185 outer things, depression is impossible. The self at one end, the stone at the other never get into depression. In between them, the true mind, true vital, true physical consciousness never get depression... keep your face always turned towards the goal and the confidence that you are being led towards it even through difficulties and apparent denials, there could be no better mental foundation for sadhana. And if not only the mind, but the vital and physical consciousness can be imbued with this faith, dejection will become either impossible or so evidently an outer thing thrown from outside and not belonging... cheerful following of the vital life, but a cheerful following of the path to the Divine which is not impossible if the mind and heart take the right view and posture. At any rate if positive cheerfulness is not possible in one's case, still one should not acquiesce in or mentally support a constant depression and sadness. That is not at all indispensable for keeping turned to the Divine. In speaking ...
... essential significance. But this did not mean that they were relativists pure and simple; on the contrary, they had a task to do, and the mental formulation of this task was only part of it. It is important, especially for Westerners, to keep in mind that “mental formulation” (philosophy) is secondary to praxis, to the practical, living realisation of knowledge. For the West, as we shall see further... further on, has been one-sided and therefore fundamentally flawed in its attitude towards Existence. Its approach to things has been mental through and through, it has been an exercise of the mind; the living, the praxis, the spiritual realisation of the knowledge it gained was for many centuries limited to prescriptions by a Church and to not much more than religious ethics. “Truth of philosophy”, noted... non, the aim of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s whole effort from the beginning of their destined collaboration. The human being had appeared in evolution because of the descent of Mind, the rational level of the mental consciousness, into the earth-atmosphere. Now the condition for the appearance of the supramental being, the species beyond the human being, was the descent of Supermind. “The ancient ...
... consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the 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... Nature's evolution of mental being towards its self-exceeding, and, as thinking mind is the highest step she can now attain, the perfected mental man is the rarest and highest of her normal human creatures. To go farther she has to bring into the mind and make active in mind, life and body the spiritual principle. The Life Divine, pp. 717-20 The Physical Mind The true... 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, dynamic, vital.... The vital ...
... consciousness. Mind means the mental consciousness including the intellect and the heart, and generally the vital will-power is added to it. Sometimes the mind ascends and opens to it, or glimpses it, but then it closes; the door opens again and something comes down,—either the light of knowledge or power of it comes down and again the door closes. That is the present relation between mind, and the channel... easiest way of conveying whatever truth they see to other people. Still, mind can certainly know something about it. But when it knows something about it, it can also doubt it and ask : "Does that world really exist or are you making a mental concept and a vision out of it ? Is it only the mind's vision which has relevance only to mind without any applicability to life ? Does this Truth-Consciousness correspond... infinite is infinite. One has to bear in mind that the freedom of the Eternal is absolute,—that is to say, it is freedom beyond unity and also beyond multiplicity. Even our description of it as Sat, Chit and Ananda is the mental way of defining that which is One. If we allow the mind to arrange its intuition it would say: Satchidananda is indivisible unity and mind is essential mutiplicity. It is in the ...
... Our conception of what is miraculous is part of the false means, it is the Mind that has created the notion of the miracle, because for the mind everything obeys laws, so if something eludes the "law," it must be a miracle. But these laws are mental laws, mental creations, it is Matter as seen by the mind—outside of the Mind, everything is miraculous and a constant miracle. Or rather, everything is... perception of Matter; as if all the gods, miracles, liberations, paradises and all the rest came still from the Mind and were mental projections; perhaps the magic lantern of the mind, but a lantern nevertheless in comparison to the golden dust of Matter. The supramental is not an improved mental vision, widened, extended, and more divine: It is not something higher than the summit we can attain here,... has its repercussions throughout the whole world of beings and things. The new world is truly new. It is a world that no longer uses the Mind: it is Matter playing with itself, as it were, conscious Matter, true Matter pushing and breaking through all the mental unconsciousness that covers it. At eighty-one, Mother entered into the yoga of the cells. She entered into the why and how of Death. She ...
... At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in the mind as the others live in the vital Page 932 or the physical nature. The mental man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because of the difficulty... for the mental being to escape from itself or to refine and raise itself to a spiritual poise, it has availed for the release of the Spirit from mind and for the enlargement of the being in a spiritualised mind and heart, but not—or rather not yet sufficiently—for the self-affirmation of the Spirit in its own dynamic and sovereign mastery free from the mind's limitations and from the mental instrumentation... Impersonality that seeks to mould the whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil, impersonal; ...
... they have also acknowledged the possibility of the immortality of the mind, life, and body, if certain conditions are fulfilled. Immortality of the mind can come about only if the mental being of the individual comes to be so powerfully individualised on the surface consciousness and so much with the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the progressive action... the pace with the soul in its formation of self-expressive personality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity and the slow transformation of the mental into the divine mental of our spiritual existence. The immortality of the mind, life and the body, which can be termed as a triple immortality, would fulfil on the physical plane the realisation of the essential immortality of the Spirit... od. Sri Aurobindo, while explaining this distinction, states as follows: "...supermanhood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human level, not in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the forces of the human ...
... of Sri Krishna's disciples, but of the earth consciousness—Rama was a mental man, there is no touch of the overmind consciousness (direct) in anything he said or did, but what he did was done with the greatness of the Avatar. But there have since been men who did live in touch with the planes above mind—higher mind, illumined mind, Intuition. There is no question of asking whether they were "greater"... without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of the anarchic forces of vital Nature. Even the Russells and Bernard Shaws can only end by setting up another set of conventions in the place of those they have skittled over. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions—Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but an... an overmental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man's. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic human mind—mental, emotional, moral—and he followed the Dharma of the age and race. That may make him temperamentally congenial to Gandhi and the reverse to you; but just as Gandhi's temperamental recoil from Krishna does not prove Krishna to be no Avatar, so your temperamental ...
... pure intellectual mentality. (I I) Equality of the Thinking Mind: This is the last limb of mental sadhana, apparently most difficult for man the mental creature who is passionately proud of his mental possession. The fact is that the mind of man, because of its inherent nature, is always engaged in a mental activity whose different element s are ideations, imaginations, beliefs... functioning of our mind. And no sadhana is possible with such a restless dispersed state of our mind. The sadhaka must have to acquire sufficient power of concentration such that his mind' may remain steady and settled, as long as he wants, on one chosen field or object or idea already determined by the sadhaka' s will (2) To Make the Mind Plastic: A common weakness of our mental being is that... thinking mind is indispensable Page 282 because the objective of this progress is the greater light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual cognizance." (p. 679) Here ends our essay on the sadhana of the Mind. There are, of course, two other stages: (i) Establishment of mental silence; and (ii) Ascent of consciousness beyond normal mind into the 'spiritual mind planes'; ...
... than the earthly held his limbs, Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze." 2 What does "the triple cord of mind " mean? The cords symbolise the limitations of the mind; and there are three of them because there is a physical mind, it vital mind and a mental mind. 9.11.1968 "The days were travelers on a destined road,... its protection is constant and effective, even when it is not perceived. 15.12.1968 In order to be conscious of the constant Presence, is memory helpful? Memory is a mental faculty and helps the mental consciousness. But feeling and sensation must also participate. 17.12.1968 1 Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga (1972), p. 103. Page 63 When the Presence... good. It is a good beginning. And the body's remembrance is much more stable than ?he mind's or the vitals'. 1.12.1968 "His failure is not failure whom God leads" 1 Because it is part of the play? It is the human mind that has the conception of success and failure. It is the human mind that wants one thing and does not want another. In the divine plan each thing has its ...
... power of Page 724 your mind and mental will, calling in at most an indefinite and impersonal divine Power to aid you. It is an old difficulty which has never been truly solved because it has never been met in the true way. In the former ways of Yoga it did not supremely matter because the aim was withdrawal from life. Either the vital was kept down by a mental and moral compulsion, or it was... yourself for service to others. But leading a higher life is a vague mental phrase and the object of Yoga is not service to others. The object of Yoga is to enter into an entirely new consciousness in which you live no longer in the mind and the ego but in the divine consciousness and grow into the true inmost truth of your being above mind and life and body. The aim in most ways of Yoga is to draw back... novelty. Page 736 The extreme unhappiness of a mental and vital growth which does not fit in with the surroundings, of marriages imposed that are unsuitable and where there is no meeting-point between husband and wife, of an environment hostile and intolerant of one's inner life and on the other hand the innate tendency of the Indian mind to seek a refuge in the spiritual or religious escape ...
... problem with which we are impaled. But it is conceivable that this tendency may hereafter rise to the higher idea of man as a mental being, a soul in mind that must develop itself individually and collectively in the life and body through the play of an ever-expanding mental existence. This greater idea would realise that the elevation of the human existence will come not through material efficiency... physical, the material being, the external man our only self and spirit. Next he fixed on life as the Reality and the vital being as the self and spirit; in the third essay he penetrated to Mind and the mental being; only afterwards could he get beyond the superficial subjective through the supramental Truth-Consciousness to the eternal, the blissful, the ever creative Reality of which these are the... the life-instincts, which can only be an intensification of his present mode of existence, but through the greatening of his mental and psychic being and a discovery, bringing forward and organisation of his subliminal nature and its forces, the utilisation of a larger mind and a larger life waiting Page 251 for discovery within us. It would see in life an opportunity for the joy and power ...
... mind and a mental mind. The days were travellers on a destined road, the nights companions of his musing spirit. 8 I see the need of continuous sadhana day and night. The Mother Yes, there comes a time when nothing, absolutely nothing is outside the Yoga and the Divine's Presence is felt and found in all things and all circumstances. A last high world was seen where... triple cord of mind and freed The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze. 7 3 Ibid., p. 613. 6 Ibid.,p.28. 4 Ibid.,p.3. 7 Ibid., p. 82. 5 Ibid., pp. 30-31. Page 45 What does "the triple cord of mind" mean? The Mother: The cords stand for the limitations of the mind, and there are three of them because there is a physical mind, a vital mind... Ibid., p. 43. 10 Ibid., p. 35. 12 Ibid., p.28 . 9 Ibid., p. 89. 11 Ibid,, p. 227. Page 46 The Mother: It is the human mind that has the conception of success and failure. It is the human mind that wants one thing and does not want another. In the divine plan each thing has its place and importance. So it is not success that matters. What matters is to be ...
... the outer mental personality representative of the inner mental Purusha could be possible. It could happen if our mental being came to be so powerfully individualised on the surface and so much one with the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the progressive action of the Infinite that the soul no longer needed to dissolve the old form of mind and create... the surface mental memory is all the more certain and quite inevitable if there is a new personality of the same being and a new instrumentation which takes the place of the old, a new mind, a new life, a new body: the new brain cannot be expected to carry in itself the images held by the old brain; the new life or mind cannot be summoned to keep the deleted impressions of the old mind and life that... have broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would govern the life. Our mind nature and our life nature would then be a continuous progressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of successive formations preserved only in their essence. Our Page 99 mental personality and life personality would ...
... else is so successful this seems to justify itself also." (16.5.37) Giant Wheel "The lines marked [the second stanza ] are very fine and more of higher mind than the mental: the rest are fine-though more mental. But the poem finishes very abruptly." (26.5.1937) Bird-Keveries [In answer to the question whether the expression here was more of fancy than true insight:]... satire by apotheosis bringing into contrast the two things that are yet assimilated by what is behind them. Very effective." (1.12.36) Page 694 Wave-Break "It is a little mental as if you were constructing a thought, not seeing things. The lines marked [6,8] have some uplift. The rest has energy of language and strength of thought— but not anything deeper." (4,2.37) ... think there is the least sense of splitting—the images flow naturally one after the other." (4.6.37) Magnitudes [In reply to the questions, "On its own plane—that is to say, the mental—what is the degree of success reached by this poem? Are any lines worth marking?":] "The poem is very successful throughout—it expresses with great power and beauty what it wants to say ...
... "physical mind" from the "mind of the body" or "body mind" belonging to "the very cells", for we read: "The physical mind is technically placed below the vital and yet it is a prolongation of the mind proper and one that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells..." Here the "body mind", to which... term "physical mind". She equates it to "the body mind" or "the mind that is in the body" and the letter editorially excerpted from Sri Aurobindo as relevant, with its mention of "this body mind" to signify "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles", leaves us in no uncertainty about the Mother's meaning. She means by "the physical mind" the dim mental consciousness... 326-27). We may consider the "physical mental", 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 ...
... to the mind when the mind justifies the lower vital's wrong movements. In fact the lower vital moves on its own lines, not according to Truth or reason. It is only the insistence of a stronger Light that can enlighten it by changing it in its own substance of consciousness. Page 156 It is the lower vital energy that rushes to the brain and either confuses it and prevents mental self-control... of the human mind or wilful indulgence of the demands and instincts and pretensions of the lowest part of the being, commonly justified under the name of human nature. It cannot be done if you insist on identifying these lowest things of the Ignorance with the divine Truth or even the lesser truth permissible on the way. It cannot be done if you cling to your past self and its old mental, vital and physical... and the presence of the Divine. It may be that behind this persistence of the lower vital demand for satisfaction there was something not quite clear—in the obscurer part of the physical mind—in your mental attitude towards the Yoga. You seem to regard this demand for the replacement of the old lower vital satisfactions by other joys and pleasures as something quite legitimate; but joys and pleasures ...
... abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit but also Chit Shakti. Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations... through the physical mind centre." The work was going on all the while. I do not know what work, but it was going on all the while. She told me this afterwards, that it was through the physical mind centre the work was going on. Page 49 Where is it, this physical mind centre? Cannot say, but perhaps the brain-cells. Must have some connection with the Mind of Light. The whole... evening I had come to the Ashram for meditation. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were doing the work for a long time. I could see it, and know it also. But there was no mind. The work continued so. But in the absence of the mind, who is it that knows what is being done? I was puzzled. Then I was told that it is the consciousness. I was told that I should be aware of it. I should try and ...
... such intervening gradations exist, it is clear that they must be superconscient to human mind which does not seem to have in its normal state any entry into these higher grades of being. Man is limited in his consciousness by mind and even by a given range or scale of mind: what is below his mind, submental or mental but nether to his scale, readily seems to him subconscious or not distinguishable from... of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes,—towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process. Again, there is not an entire absence of penetration from above into our mental limits. The phenomena... stic action of these higher grades into the mind of Ignorance. It is true that in human mind its action is largely hidden by the interventions of our normal 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 ...
... which takes form in life and mind, particularly. This energy has a will. This will in man becomes will for infinite life, will for absolute or unlimited knowledge. This very energy now finds expression in man's mind, in his mental energy. In the life of man this energy wants to attain infinite life, infinite delight. This infinite energy, when it manifests itself in mind wants to attain perfect knowledge... work; the contradictions are only in the mind. Spirit and Matter being the extreme ends of the Reality carry a sense of concreteness to the human being. But the intermediate terms of the series cannot satisfy ultimately the sense of Reality in man. There are systems of thought that want man to rest with some working of Life-force, others propound some mental ultimate. But they can hardly inspire for... same holds good for his mental and vital consciousness. One should not arbitrarily say that certain things cannot happen. One must leave the field open for experiment and experience. What is this whole universal energy ? One would say it is unknowable, something that you cannot know. A boundless movement is at work on various planes, a complex movement,—on the plane of mind, on the plane of matter ...
... March 25, 1934 The first step is a quiet mind—silence is a further step, but quietude must be there; and by a quiet mind I mean a mental consciousness within which sees thoughts arrive to it and move about but does not itself feel that it is thinking or identifying itself with the thoughts or call them its own. Thoughts, mental, movements may pass through it as wayfarers appear and pass... the formations, beliefs or doubts, mental preferences and interests which are in conformity with its education and its nature. But quite apart from that, what was commanding in St. Augustine may very well have been the thinking mind or reason while what was commanded was the vital, and mind and vital, whatever anybody may say, are not the same. The thinking mind or buddhi lives, however imperfectly... obey the mind and not follow its own nature? The disobedience is perfectly normal instead of being, as Augustine suggests, unintelligible. Of course, man can establish a mental control over his vital and in so far as he does it he is a man—because the thinking mind is a nobler and more enlightened entity and consciousness than the vital and ought, therefore, to rule and, if the mental will is strong ...
... intuitivising of all the parts of the mental being that the mind of ignorance can be, more successfully, if not as yet wholly, replaced by the mind of self-contained knowledge. But,—and especially for this kind of knowledge,—what is needed is the cessation of mental constructions built on the foundation of the mind of ignorance. The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former... highest mind of knowledge,—really the supramental action itself in a more and more transformed stuff of mind and a less and less insistent subjection to mental conditions. There is thus formed a lesser supramental action, a mind of knowledge tending always to change into the true supermind of knowledge. The mind of ignorance is more and more definitely excluded, its place taken by the mind of self... possibility of mental constructions and mental images interfering with the true truth of things in the presentations of the psychical experience. The coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to the surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness tend to Page 896 turn the mind of ignorance, with which we begin, increasingly though not perfectly into a mind of self-forgetful ...
... force than the earthly held his limbs,... Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed The heavenly wideness of a Godhead's gaze." 14 What does "the triple cord of mind" mean? The cords symbolise the limitations of the mind; and there are three of them because there is a physical mind, a vital mind and a mental mind. 9 November 1968 Page 386 "The days were travellers... The Jivatman is the individual Purusha, and the physical Purusha, the vital Purusha, the mental Purusha and the secret Purusha in the heart are projections of it. The soul is the Purusha that enters into the evolution. Is my understanding correct? This is one way of putting it. Mental definitions are never more than approximations, ways of speaking. 10 March 1967 My body... concentrated, we become aware of a wonderful transformation in all things. 13 December 1968 In order to be conscious of the constant Presence, is memory a good aid? Memory is a mental faculty and helps the mental consciousness. But feeling and sensation must also participate. 17 December 1968 Page 390 When the Presence becomes concrete, does this indicate the participation ...
... difficulty arises in understanding his rule or government of world-existence, because we immediately transfer to him our mental conception of a human ruler; we picture him as acting by the mind and mental will in an omnipotent arbitrary fashion upon a world on which he imposes his mental conceptions as laws, and we conceive of his will as a free caprice of his personality. But there is no need for the Divine... dependence upon these elements or constituents. The life and mind again are supraphysical 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... basic Force is one, but it manifests from itself innumerable forces; the basic substance is one, but it develops many different substances and millions of unlike objects; mind is one but differentiates itself into many mental states, mind-formations, thoughts, perceptions differing from each other and entering into harmony or into conflict; life is one, but the forms of life are unlike and innumerable; ...
... All the mind in its whole range cannot be transmuted at once, for the mind centres are not a region isolated from the rest of the being; the mind action is 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... 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 beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise... permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level. Mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees ...
... total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence. 55 The steps of ascent or "slow gradations" between Mind and Supermind - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - spiritual-mental powers, superconscient so far as mental man is concerned, but definitely below sovereign Supermind. In the Arya, Overmind was not mentioned; it was identified later and found... Supermind acted directly on the Mind, skipping so to say the four middle steps, might not mental consciousness be charged then with the Supermind's white radiance of Knowledge and be transformed in consequence as Mind of Light?* Technically it would be below Higher Mind, yet it might be more intrinsically (if feebly) supramental than the four higher states of the spiritual mind and it might also solve humanity's... unitarian and indivisible Sachchidananda above and the analytic and dividing Mind or mental activity below. This mediating Supermind is both the child of Sachchidananda and the parent of the Mind; by its poise of identity it has total comprehension, and by its power of differentiation it precipitates the processes of the Mind. Further, in Supermind there is no hiatus between knowledge and will, for Supermind ...
... was called Brahmānḍa. The sky or the heaven symbolised the principle of the mind and the mental world, since according to the Upanishadic knowledge, the physical world is not the sole existing reality. In fact, according to the Upanishadic system of knowledge, there are seven worlds, — the physical, the vital, the mental, the supramental, and three still higher worlds of bliss, consciousness, and... Upanishad, in the first place, begins with the knowledge of three worlds, the physical, the vital, and the mental, and while the word "heaven" refers to the mental world, the word "antariksaˮ or "ether" refers to the vital world, and which is intermediate between the physical and the mental and therefore it is called the world that links to other worlds. In a subsequent chapter, chapter five... and dyau, or the physical, the vital, and the mental. In this fifth chapter, the Upanishad speaks of the fourth world, and points out that that fourth world was revealed by Rishi Mahachamasya, a great teacher of that time, and the fourth world was named Mahas. Hence, the Upanishad proposes the study of four worlds, — the physical, vital, mental and the supramental. The discovery of Mahas or ...
... next state and even intuit that this state must be “non-pensive,” even feel the need to get out of this rattling, buzzing and tireless machine, and mentally try to stop the Mind. This is what meditators generally do: they grab hold of the Mind with the Mind and heroically strive to strangle it—for a few minutes. But the moment they release their grip, it all starts up again. The higher ape who, after... and the dark poles of existence, Wie Mind is simply an interregnum in Reality, 37 says Sri Aurobindo. But in this mental transparency, Mirra was going to uncover yet another, deeper layer, well hidden beneath the thinking racket of the first one, which She would not so easily penetrate. It is the “physical mind.” The last barrier before the cellular mind, our next evolutionary secret: a liberation... another, thicker barrier, proportionate to the newly acquired force. The mental barrier has Himalayan layers of thickness compared to which Matter is as light as a breeze. But the Mind has its roots right down in Matter, which is another solid secret we shall soon uncover with Mother. For the moment, Mirra had not yet conquered the Mind. Strangely enough, it is the last thing She explored, at the end of ...
... Foreword In ancient times the Veda was revered as a sacred book of wisdom, a great mass of inspired poetry, the work of Rishis, seers and sages, who received in their illumined minds rather than mentally constructed a great universal, eternal and impersonal Truth which they embodied in Mantras, revealed verses of power, not of an ordinary but of a divine inspiration and source. The name given... offering with a mind pouring ghrita, ghṛtapruṣā manasā and so manifest the Seats ("places", or "planes"), the three heavens each of them and manifest the Gods. 2 But what is a ghee-pouring mind, and how by pouring ghee can a priest manifest the Gods and the triple heavens? But admit the mystical and esoteric meaning and the sense becomes clear. What the Rishi means is a "mind pouring the light"... symbolic happening, the flow of clarifying light and the priest god pouring the clarified butter on the inner self-offering which brought the experience. This might seem strange to a Western mind, but to an Indian mind accustomed to the Indian tradition or capable of meditation and occult vision it would be perfectly intelligible. The mystics were and normally are symbolists, they can even see all physical ...
... 21 In other words, it is our world minus the laws of the mental cage. You cross the river without thinking of it, as Madame David-Neel had inadvertently done when she forgot the existence of the river and the mental laws that govern rivers and gravity. A world in which we forget the mental laws. An earth without the laws of the Mind—dehypnotized. The true earth, free at last. True Matter... bring back a story in a mental language. She brought the other side here, not for stuffing it into the cage (as if we could ever stuff that into a marmot's hole), but to the place in the body that is like both sides at once: what the others sought up above and in dreams, She found down here, concretely, in the cells of her body. And since it is not a little piece of the Mind that went on the journey... described them; any person at all conscious and developed has seen his "dead" friends after their death (in sleep, generally, precisely when the web of the physical Mind gives way), and each one has made his own "translation into mental language" of the experience he had on the other side (to make you think, however, that there are 100,000 other sides, as if each one were looking at the same phenomenon ...
... of awareness are included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being. The first indispensable step in an upward evolution would be to elevate our force of consciousness into those higher parts of Mind from which we already receive, but without knowing the source, much of our larger mental movements, those, especially, that come with a... is no end to the aspects of knowledge, n ā styanto vistarasya me. This is the Higher Mind in its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the being, the mental will, the heart and its feelings, the life, the body, through the power of thought, through the... Yoga, p. 239 Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, these are everywhere the three inseparable divine terms. None of them is really separate, though our mind and our mental experience can make not only the distinction, but the separation. Mind can say and think "I was, but unconscious," — for no being can say "I am, but unconscious," —and it can think and feel "I am, but miserable and without any ...
... have so far evolved: material, vital and mental. Sri Aurobindo often stressed that the human being is specifically the mental being, the typical embodiment of the mental gradation of the universal manifestation. “The mind pre-eminently is man; he is a mental being and his human perfection grows the more he fulfils the description of the Upanishad, a mental being, Purusha, leader of the life and the... for the mind to forecast in detail what the supramental change must be in its parts of life-action and outward behaviour or lay down for it what forms it shall create for the individual or the collective existence. For the mind acts by intellectual rule or device or by reasoned choice of will or by mental impulse or in obedience to the life-impulse; but supramental nature does not act by mental idea or... too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself is a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then ...
... the physical body in the scheme of Supramental transformation. The movement of ascent from Mind to Supermind and the descent from Supermind to the mental, vital and physical consciousness brings about the transformation of nature. For example. Mind would function as the Mind of Light, not as at present, a mind subject to half-light _____________________ 17 The Life Divine, P. 5 Page 15 ... evolution ______________ 6 ( Savitri : Book III Canto 4, P . 308. Page 8 has proceeded from Matter to Life, from Life to Mind. Man, the mental being, is transitional because he has yet to ascend to higher Consciousness beyond Mind. This is the great spiritual Odvssey that man has now to undertake consciously.If material science lays open before man a wide—practically unlimited-... cal are studied with the right starting point, the means will infallibly be found for mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future." But Man, the mental being, in spite of his scientific advance, is still a slave of his own nature, his blind ...
... 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. Page 226 Sri Aurobindo : It is... being and, coming up into the mind, they take up mental forms – mental emotions and mental sensations. That I call the mental-vital. According to some, it is purely vital. So from the head to the centre of speech (neck), so to say, you have the mental being. Disciple : What is meant by Buddhi ? Sri Aurobindo : Buddhi is what I call "the pure mind". It is the "intellect". It combines... because he has developed a mind and the mind gives him a chance of conscious evolution. But it does not necessarily follow that because man is a mental being he has used his mind for his evolution. Exactly because he has a mind, man has an infinite capacity to be devilish. He brings to the help of his devil a mind, and the devil himself can't be so bad as man with his mind when he puts it at the service ...
... an erroneous construction of the senses, a visual hallucination; when we take for an objective fact a thing which is a subjective structure of the mind, a constructive mental error or an objectivised imagination or a misplaced mental image, it is a mental hallucination. An example of the first is the mirage, an example of the second is the classic instance of a rope taken for a snake. In passing we... question of the nature of Mind, the parent of these illusions, and its relation to the original Existence. Is mind the child and instrument of an original Illusion, or is it itself a primal miscreating Force or Consciousness? or is the mental ignorance a misprision of the truths of Existence, a deviation from an original Truth-Consciousness which is the real world-builder? Our own mind, at any rate, is not... indeterminable. But our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought, is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies ...
... get depressed? It is only when the mind creates outer reasons that vital depression is possible? The vital mind is part of the vital. If the mind (mental mind, vital mind, physical mind, subconscient mind) does not respond to outer things, depression is impossible. The self at one end, the stone at the other never get into depression. In between, the true mind, true vital, true physical consciousness... 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, mental inertia can produce physical... put on the mind the impression that study was impossible. This impression was accepted for a long time. The acceptance of such impressions must necessarily stand in the way of getting rid of the inertia. If the inertia finds its suggestions seriously accepted, it will go on merrily bringing them in. When I speak of inertia, I mean usually mental inertia. Mental inertia would ...
... of mental language. As for ultimate Truth, I suppose both the Victorian agnostic and, let us say, the Indian Vedantin may agree that it is veiled but there. Both speak of it as the Unknowable; the only difference is that the Vedantin says it is unknowable by the mind and inexpressible by speech, but still attainable by something deeper or higher than the mental perception, while even mind can reflect... predominantly the vital creation on earth—the mind in them also is a vital mind—they act according to the push of the forces and have a vital but not a mental will. Even the animal is more in touch with a certain harmony in things than man. Man's only superiority is a more complex consciousness and capacity (but terribly perverted and twisted by misuse of Mind) and the ability (not much used as yet)... occult (mental and vital) energy and how it can be made to act on physical things. That is something which goes beyond mere magic. The direct power of mind-force or life-force upon Matter can be extended to an almost illimitable degree. It must be remembered that Energy is fundamentally one in all the planes, only taking more and more dense forms, so there is nothing a priori impossible in mind-energy ...
... a compact expression the view of the mind and of all mental activities from the chamber of the Self,—the inner chamber of the psychic being. To the Self the mind is only an "outer court"; mind is not the inmost chamber, the inmost sanctuary. This "court" of the mind is not only "outer" but "many-frescoed". Man goes on painting pictures on the walls of his mental consciousness. Thus the outer court of... Similarly the mental world when it manifests here on earth gets connected with the worlds of higher Mind and its powers and beings. The Master takes us from these mental realms to the centre of this creation and from there to the realms of the Eternal from where a Truth- world governs the whole movement of the cosmos, waiting for the fulfilment of its purpose here in Time. Man, the mental being, holds... ordinary mental level and carries with it not only the power of the highest Reality it represents or conveys but also the intensity of the rhythm and the body of the word. 2. Second is Pa ś yanti, the word that sees, or the seeing speech. It is the utterance that comes spontaneously to the illumined mind above the level of reasoning intelligence, but below the highest level of over-mental creative ...
... Page 306 upon life and transform it. The old yogas failed to transform life because, they did not go beyond mind. They used to catch at mental experiences but when they came to apply them to life they reduced it to a mental formula. For example, the mental experience of the Infinite or the application of the principle of universal Love. We have therefore, to grow conscious on... obstacles in the way of its coming down. There is the Mind and the mental ideas that grasp at the Truth coming from Above and try to. utilise the Truth for their own aims. There is, for instance, the Vital, or the Life-force, which seizes upon the Higher Force and wants to throw itself out into impure actions. The Truth that is coming down is not mental, it is Supramental. In order that it may be able... here involved in Matter and appears subject to it. By the process of evolution the vital and the mental being have come into manifest existence here. Our effort is to evolve to the Supermind from mind. The Tattiriya Upanishad speaks of the physical being taken up into the vital, and that into the mental Page 314 and that again into the Supramental and Ananda Consciousness. Another ...
... the outer mental personality representative of the inner mental Purusha could be possible. It could happen if our mental being came to be so powerfully individualised on the surface and so much one with the inner mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically to the progressive action of the Infinite that the soul no longer needed to dissolve the old form of mind and create... 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 seems to have an internatal access and into which it may pursue its internatal journey; but it is not likely to live consciously there if there has not been a sufficient mental or Page 831 ... man would have broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would govern the life. Our mind nature and our life nature could then be a continuous progressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of successive formations preserved only in their essence. Our mental personality and life personality would then subsist ...
... status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind-sheath or mental vehicle 6 , a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed Page 259 the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle 7 which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and... and economic human animal; but essentially and commonly he is the mental barbarian, the average sensational man. That is to say, his mental life is that of the lower substratum of the mind, the life of the senses, the life of the sensations, the life of the emotions, the life of practical conduct — the first status of the mental being. In all these he may be very active, very vigorous, but he does... men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind. Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not yet normally possess it. Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, Page 257 frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human ...
... means a world unimaginably different from ours, limited mental beings. Sri Aurobindo therefore gave answers like: ‘The Supermind alone can discern the method of its own workings,’ 12 or: ‘Supermind cannot be described in terms that the mind will understand, because the terms will be mental and mind will understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import.’ 13 ‘Have you any... We must leave the Supermind to work everything out.’ 14 He did not want to define the Undefinable because such definitions would inevitably become caricatures of the divine Reality in the mind of his mental audience, perhaps even with negative consequences for them. And in spite of all their ideas and occult experiences, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have always considered those ideas and experiences... friendly ‘Bonne Fête!’ And it eats and rests, and sometimes it even improvises on an electronic organ. Everybody kept seeing that … functional illusion. They understood that the mental consciousness could go anywhere, for the mind could be compared to something like radio waves. They also could accept that the vital could go anywhere, for one happens to experience this in one’s dreams. But matter? The ...
... and intuitive on the whole mental plane from the higher mind downwards. There is no reason to belittle them. Only in the transcription in his mind there is a mixture of his own mental and other suggestions which is almost inevitable at the beginning. We should now without interrupting his higher psychic development give more attention to a self controlled meditation and mental enlargement. In one letter... to recover your health of mind and body and that needs quietness of mind and for some time a quiet way of living. Do not rack your mind with questions which it is not yet ready to solve. Do not brood always on the one thing. Occupy your mind as much as you can with healthy and normal occupations and give it as much rest as possible. Afterwards when you have your right mental condition and balance, then... beginning of mental calm and some kind of psychic opening but neither of these has as yet been able to go very far. The reason probably is that he has done everything by a strong mental control and forcible stilling of the mind and emotional and vital movements, but he has not yet established the true spiritual calm which can only come by experience of or surrender to the higher being above the mind. It is ...
... his higher psychic experiences. These, including the voice, are not direct from the supra-mental but psychic and intuitive on the whole mental plane from the higher mind downwards. That is no reason to belittle them. Page 338 Only in the transcription in his mind there is a mixture of his own mental and other suggestions which is almost inevitable at the beginning. He should now without... beginning of mental calm and some kind of psychic opening but neither of these has yet been able to go very far. The reason probably is that he has done everything by a strong mental control and forcible stilling of the mind and emotional and vital movements, but has not yet established the true spiritual calm which can only come by experience of or surrender to the higher being above the mind. It is this... activities. But the quieting of the mind in a mental silence or inactivity although often useful as a first step is not sufficient. The mental calm must be changed first into the deeper spiritual peace, Shanti, and then into the supramental calm and silence full of the higher light and strength and Ananda. Moreover, the Page 364 quieting of the mind only is not enough. The vital and physical ...
... Sri Aurobindo : Because man, at present, is shut up in his mental being, his vital nature and physical consciousness and their limitations. You have to open yourself. By an opening I mean an aspiration in the heart for the Page 38 coming down of the Power that is above, and a will in the Mind, or above the Mind, open to it. The first thing this working of the Higher Power... beings were weak and his mind lacked discretion. He therefore decided to send him back. "These – the physical and vital and the mental – parts are the basis; unless the ground is there no structure can be raised on it," he said. A wire was sent in reply to Krishnashashi asking him not to come to Pondicherry. (Krishnashashi, a Sadhaka from Chittagong, had become deranged in mind). Another wire was sent... vital or the mental is very subtle and creates new forms. These difficulties persist to the very end. You must clearly distinguish between various movements in the lower being. We do not want to leave out in our yoga the common and even the petty things". 4–8–1924 Morning talk on Sādhanā : Disciple : What is the distinction between the vital mind and the mental will ? Sri ...
... as a mental being in a life and body, but he has that impression and can take inwardly that position. So too at first soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and from mentalised life; its movements are involved in the mind movements, its operations seem to be mental and emotional activities; the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back from the mind and... which will finally overtop the mental part and replace it as the leader of the life and nature. It is quite true that to a surface view life seems only an operation of Matter, mind an activity of life, and it might seem to follow that what we call the soul or spirit is only a power of mentality, soul a fine form of mind, spirituality a high activity of the embodied mental being. But this is a superficial... first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his normal mind and Page 888 life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a life form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly drawn, ...
... without conventions, mental and moral, otherwise he feels himself lost in the rolling sea of the anarchic forces of the vital Nature. Even the Russells and Bernard Shaws can only end by setting up another set of conventions in the place of those they have skittled over. Only by rising above mind can one really get beyond conventions — Krishna was able to do it because he was not a mental human being but... but an overmental godhead acting freely out of a greater consciousness than man's. Rama was not that, he was the Avatar of the sattwic mind -— mental, emotional, moral — and he followed the Dharma of the age and race. That may make him temperamentally congenial to Gandhi and the Page 315 reverse to you; but just as Gandhi's temperamental recoil from Krishna does not prove Krishna... point out what I mean in my next. By sattwic man I do not mean a moral or an always self-con- trolled one, but a predominantly mental (as opposed to a vital or merely physical man) who has rajasic emotions and passions, but lives predominantly according to his mind and its will and ideas. There is no such thing, I suppose, as a purely sattwic man — since the three gunas go always together in a ...
... indefinite substance of mind in Div, through yajna and mati, putting forth of force for activity and movement of the mind state into mental thought & feeling. By these movements the Maruts shape the mental enlightenment of the seer into a well-arranged and well formed knowledge. As a result, sa gantá gomati vraje, he has freedom of movement in the luminous ordered motion of the Chit in mind, vraja in the sense... to have increased mental force in accordance with past experience (वृद्धो अजायथाः, अवीवृधन्) and in answer to the prayer त्वां वर्धंतु नो गिरः; the Rishi prays that that increased mental force may remain unimpaired अक्षित, and that the Lord of the Force, thus preserved in the expansion of his power, may safeguard, preserve or keep safe (सनेद्) this substance of mind, this rich mind-stuff full of the... luminously clear in intention. Indra, god of mental force, is indeed a maker of beautiful forms or perfect images or a good fashioner of forms. If our hypothesis of Vedic philosophy is correct, Indra is, indeed, the direct builder of all forms; it is Mind that measures, limits & by its stress compels the infinite plastic Idea to objectivise Brahman in fixed mental & material forms. We have, therefore, at ...
... mysteries, and the trial is like the mental acrobatics of a master gymnast. But each time I finish one of his books, I feel that I have gained nothing, learned nothing new—that it was a waste of time. It is not absolutely useless. You probably had a great deal of tamas in your mind, and the mental acrobatics of the author shakes up this tamas a little and awakens the mind. But this cannot last for long... sometimes succeed in establishing mental silence. But how can one fix this as a constant experience? Because the moment one throws oneself into activity, the mental disturbance begins again! One can have a quiet mind without being in a complete state of silence; one can carry on an activity without being disturbed. The ideal is to be able to act without coming out of the mental quietude. One can do ... only an idea mechanically repeated by the mind; but , Mother, what can one do to realise it? To live for the Divine means to offer all that one does to the Divine without desiring a personal result from what one does. Certainly at the beginning, when the Divine is only a word or at most an idea and not an experience , the whole thing remains purely mental. But if one makes a sincere and repeated ...
... the mental being—which also has three centres, one in the throat (the outward- going or externalising mind), one between the eyes or rather in the middle of the forehead (the centre of vision and will) and one above, communicating with the brain, which is called the thousand-petalled lotus, and where are centralised the thinking mind and higher intelligence communicating with the greater mind planes... the presence of the Divine. It may be that behind this persistence of the lower vital demand for satisfaction there was something not quite clear —in the obscurer part of the physical mind—in your mental attitude towards the Yoga. You seem to regard this demand for the replacement of the old lower vital satisfactions by other joys and pleasures as something quite legitimate; but joys and pleasures... Page 67 constant contact or indwelling of the Divine, and this comes naturally not to the outer mind or vital but to the inner soul or psychic being. Therefore one who wants his Yoga to be a path of peace or joy must be prepared to dwell in his soul rather than in his outer mental and emotional nature. I objected in a former letter not to aspiration but to a demand, to making peace, ...
... that indicated another origin than the ordinary mental images. It is still a mental image, and all mental images have the same character. Only it may come from the higher mental plane. Once you open to them you receive knowledge of things you do not know in the ordinary mind. The image of a road is a very common image of the higher mental; its meaning is that of the path that has to be... before me. The mental images are vague, fragmentary, very much like waves of a sea growing calm. Besides, the sensorial impressions often give rise to vivid images which are a cause of trouble. Do you have the feeling of being a mental being ? Whilst I remain on the level of the mind, yes; but when I can raise myself above it, the being (?) that I am is not mental. The mental being is a mask... me by Prakriti. I know that the mind is not myself, but the thoughts seem to be born in the mind. Yes, but in the universal mind, which formulates them in you. So long as you are confined to the physical brain, naturally you cannot have this understanding. But later, you will be able to discern this action of the universal mind which projects them into your mental field How can one attain ...
... controls our thinking mind and communicates with higher mental realms: illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind, etc. (2) The Mind , with two centers: one between the eyebrows, which controls the will and dynamism of our mental activity (it is also the center of subtle vision, the "third eye" certain traditions speak of); the other, at throat level, controls all the forms of mental expression. (3) The... 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 mastery. It would indeed seem that the mind is the scapegoat in integral yoga, since it is being hunted down Page 96 ... already isolated, beneath our thinking mind, a "vital mind" that finds wonderful justifications for all our desires and impulses, and then a "physical mind" that repeats the same incidents a thousand times over like a broken record. But there is a deeper layer still, a mental bedrock, as it were, that Sri Aurobindo calls the cellular mind . This is actually a mind of the cells or of groups of cells ...
... the physical mind. The first “mentalization” of matter. It is the barrier. And at the same time, it is the way toward an even more radical discovery, an even deeper layer: that of the cellular mind which not only contains the power to undo our old habits of misfortune, but to undo the typal habit of each species, and finally the old habit of dying. 5 The Physical Mind This physical... The Mind Of The Cells This book was originally published in French under the title Le mental des cellules © Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1981. The Mind Of The Cells is the English translation © Institut de Recherches ÉVOLUTIVES, Paris, 1999, 2002. Beyond the tombs, forward! Goethe A Passport to Where? On precisely... identical relentlessness against me. It's not exactly the body's consciousness, but one could say the corporeal substance as it is organized by the mind, the first movement of the mind in Life, that which made the transition from animal to man, the first mentalization of matter. Well, something in there protests, and naturally, by protesting creates disorders. We are poised at the edge of human life, before ...
... Let us not exaggerate anything. It is not so much getting rid of mental activity as converting it into the right thing. Krishnaprem has mental activity, but it is a mind that has gone inside and sees things from there, an intuitive mind; I have mental activity (in the midst of silence) whenever necessary, but it is a mind that [has] gone up and sees things from above, an overmind action. What... the symbolic poem the mind is more active and the reader wants to know what it means to the mind, as you do with this one, but as minds differ, the poet may attach one meaning to it and the reader may find another, if the image used is at all an imaginative one, not mentally clear and precise. In the mystic poem the mind is submerged in the vividness of the reality and any mental explanation falls far... is" or "so it is not". But you can't get the inner or upper mind unless this old mental activity becomes a little quiet. A quiet mind does not involve itself in its thoughts or get run away with them by them; it stands back, detaches itself, lets them pass without identifying itself, without making them its own. It becomes the witness mind watching the thoughts when necessary, but able to turn away ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.