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98 result/s found for Pain and pleasure

... contacts of other life and of Matter. Consciousness labours to manifest as best it can through the inadequacy of sensation its own inherent delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. In man the energising Consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things; this is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself, but a first conceptive potentiality... spiritual being which can look on the Divine Page 712 Existence and say, "That am I"; our mentality is not that spiritual consciousness; our will is not that force of consciousness; our pain and pleasure, even our highest joys and ecstasies are not that delight of being. On the surface we are still an ego figuring self, an ignorance turning into knowledge, a will labouring towards true force, ...

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

... dharma and is able to associate with these contacts not pain but insensibility or pleasure, then they will bring about those results of insensibility or pleasure and no other. The pain Page 24 and pleasure are not the result of the contact, neither is their seat in the body; they are the result of association and their seat is in the mind. Vinegar is sour, sugar sweet, but to the hypnotised... the reactions of joy and grief by the same force that created them. They are habits of the mind, nothing more In the same way though with more difficulty I can stop the reactions of physical pain and pleasure so that nothing will hurt my body. If I am a coward today, I can be a hero tomorrow. The cowardice was merely the habit of associating certain things with pain and grief and of shrinking from ...

[exact]

... sensations, actions, and prevention from returning wrong or imperfect responses to the questionings of the world, liberation from wandering in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling. Our crooked road of blind groping and changing goal is turned into a sunlit path. Page 79 Religion and Yoga In many respects Yoga may appear to be identical... dissolution of the consciousness which kept one within the boundaries of a small unifying centre that we call the ego. And with the removal of the ego comes about the liberation from dualities of pain and pleasure, honour and dishonour, success and failure and host of other dualities. Page 99 We can see this secret truth in all the yogic processes Yoga of divine works or Karma yoga to which we ...

... indestructible. Plant or animal life experiences the cycle of birth and growth and decay and death, but it is incapable of cerebration, and it indulges in no speculation about good and evil, pain and pleasure. It is man the mental being who has grown the faculty of interpreting phenomena in terms of the dualities. And yet human experience often jerks mental categories into hopeless confusion. Through... thus ultimately a cosmic purpose of their own, and always it is the Divine Will, untouched by the dualities, that manoeuvres the mind and makes it create these intricate patterns of desire and pain and pleasure and incapacity. IV The second Part of the second Volume of The Life Divine - "The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution" - begins with a brilliant summing-up of the conclusions ...

... and infinite wideness, out of the half figure of consciousness we have realised to be illumined into true consciousness, out of weakness to realise divine Mastery, out of the dual experience of pain and pleasure to emerge into possession of the cosmic Bliss of existence, out of the dull chrysalis of our limited selves to flower into oneness with the Divine Self that we are. For this is not an egoistic... ble yet from it all things and forms are, inconscient yet flowering into consciousness, inert yet manifesting enormous energies, lifeless yet the parent of life, insensible yet a fountain of pain and pleasure. This impossibility, this universal contradiction is unreal and born of our ignorance; yet that ignorance is not ours, but a result of the inconscience which was imposed on itself as a veil by... Life was gained; the gain was the beginning of the mute groping and involved consciousness that reaches out to growth, to sense-vibration, to waking and sleep, to hunger and thirst, to physical pain and pleasure, to a preparation for vital yearnings and a living joy and beauty. That was begun which still is unfinished—the first step towards a conscious consciousness and what shall yet be the divine Ananda ...

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... Page 587 one strays lower - to the heart which is the seat of the emotions, to the vital centre where the cauldron of desire keeps boiling constantly, to the physical plane where pain and pleasure fight their own unending battles, and to the still lower subconscient region of nightmarish fancies and the inconscient cellular mini-universes where a Walpurgis-night is perpetually being enacted... loose indeed, how shall the ādhāra bear the impact and the invasion and the insurrection? To bring the higher consciousness to the lower planes is to be able to feel everybody's pain and pleasure, to bear everybody's kicks and caresses, to stomach everybody's nightmarish visions and fantasies, to survive everybody's cellular disturbances and tissue-deteriorations: Accepting life... myself and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipur Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants, and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. 93 Now and then, Sri Aurobindo could enter even more fully into the spirit of the disciple's ruling sensibility and make almost a duet of the question ...

... highest evolution of all when he realizes himself as a potent and scient Will, master of creation and not its slave, whose infinite delight in its own existence is lifted far beyond the thraldom of pain and pleasure and uses them with as unalloyed a pleasure as the poet when he weaves joy and sorrow, delight and pain and love and fear and horror into one perfect and pleasurable masterpiece or the painter... Watcher within, the Knower with all thought, action and existence for His field of observation, the Will behind every movement, every emotion, every deed, the Enjoyer whose presence makes the pain and pleasure of the world. Mind, Life and all our subjective consciousness and the elements of our personal existence and activity, depend on His presence for the motive-force of their existence. And He is ...

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

... live in the ignorant seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature. Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between good and evil, sin and virtue, grief and joy, pain and pleasure, good fortune and ill fortune, success and failure, we follow helplessly the iron or gilt and iron round of the wheel of Maya. At best we have only the poor relative freedom which by us is ignorantly... ineffective. The soul circles in an unending round of Nature's alluring and distressing opposites, success and failure, good fortune and ill fortune, good and evil, sin and virtue, joy and grief, pain and pleasure. It is only when, awaking from its immersion in Prakriti, it perceives its oneness with the One and its oneness with all existences that it can become free from these things and found its right ...

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... Pain and pleasure shed their masks. "As for Divine rapture," he wrote in 1932, "a knock on head or foot or elsewhere can be received with the physical Ananda of pain or pain and Ananda or pure physical Ananda.... It began by the way as far back as in Alipore Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are ...

... higher. Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind. This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... boundless skies. Conquer the distance that is pain. So winning a more golden gain Than pleasure flickeringly caught Between small hands by feeble thought.  In God both pain and pleasure rhyme— A single seizure of sublime  Radiance beyond both grief and joy: A wide white peace without alloy, Which moves so quick. it's everywhere. One infinite life no hungers ...

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... things. It is leading the individual certainly, and the world presumably, towards the higher state but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker ...

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... life. … Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind. This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. … The nature of suffering is a [provisional] failure of the conscious-force in us to ...

... myself and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipur jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. But I do not expect that unusual reaction from others. And I suppose there are limits, e.g. the case of a picketer in Madras or Dr. Noel Paton. In any case, this ...

... and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipore Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. But I do not expect that unusual reaction from others. And I suppose there are limits, e.g. the case of the picketers in Madras or Dr. Noel Paton." (These were beaten ...

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... in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,—that is the seventh, the practical ignorance. Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception ...

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

... Yogavasishtha ], it does not mean "desire". It means usually the idea or mental feeling rising from the chitta, imaginations, impressions, memories etc., impressions of liking and disliking, of pain and pleasure. What Vasishtha wants to say is that while the ideas, impressions, impulsions that lead to action in an ordinary man rise from the chitta, those that rise in the Jivanmukta come straight from ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - I
[exact]

... bhoga , which makes the whole life-being vibrate with it and accept and rejoice in it; but ordinarily it is not, owing to desire, equal to its task, but turns it into the three lower forms,—pain and pleasure, sukha-bhoga duḥkha-bhoga , and that rejection of both which we call insensibility or indifference. The prana or vital being has to be liberated from desire and its inequalities and to accept ...

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... wide entry into the supreme Ananda: the psychic being uplifted by that Light and Force can unite itself with the original Delight of existence from which it came: overcoming the dualities of pain and pleasure, delivering from all fear and shrinking the mind, life and body, it can recast the contacts of existence in the world into terms of the Divine Ananda. Page 244 ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Life Divine
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... its health and its regular rhythm, its death is more poignant to us than its life is vivid: we know as much of it as we can consciously observe and use or as much as forces itself upon us by pain and pleasure and other sensations or as a cause of nervous or Page 578 physical reaction and disturbance, but no more. Accordingly, we suppose that this vital-physical part of us also is not conscious ...

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

... delight of Sachchidananda. Thus it harmonises for us all the oppositions, divisions, contrarieties of existence and shows us in them the One and the Infinite. Uplifted into this supramental light, pain and pleasure and indifference begin to be converted into joy of Page 423 the one self-existent Delight; strength and weakness, success and failure turn into powers of the one self-effective Force ...

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... consciousness to a natural ignorance, the way of working of a lower nature in which the soul is involved and sees itself as a separate ego returning to the action of things upon it dual reactions of pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, right and wrong, good happening and evil fortune. These reactions create a tangled web of perplexity in which the soul is lost and bewildered by its own ignorance; it has to ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
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... eternal and always the same. Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation and action; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this enjoyment into the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure. Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by her qualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities draws him constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys the variations ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
[exact]

... arranged life that the world is the soul's husband; Krishna its divine paramour. We owe a debt of service to the world and are bound to it by a law, a compelling opinion, and a common experience of pain and pleasure, but our heart's worship and our free and secret joy are for our Lover. 464) The joy of God is secret and wonderful; it is a mystery and a rapture at which common sense makes mouths of mockery; ...

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... things. It is leading the individual, certainly, and the world, presumably, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - II
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... dangerous gift which could very easily be perverted. So, to seek Delight before having acquired detachment does not seem to be very wise. One must first be above all possible opposites: indeed, above pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, enthusiasm and depression. If one is above all that, then one may safely aspire for Delight. But as long as this detachment is not realised, one can easily confuse ...

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... even if they do, they are not ready to pay the price. Of course they don't, but even if they did, it does not follow that they would prefer to follow it rather than their accustomed round of pain and pleasure. Many deliberately prefer that and say the other thing is too high for human nature—which is true, because you have to want to grow out of human nature before you can have the Ananda. Many ...

... contacts of other life and of Matter. Consciousness labours to manifest as best it can through the inadequacy of sensation its own inherent delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. In man the energising Consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things; this is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself, but a first conceptive po ...

... Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind. This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being ...

... of the other life and of Matter. Consciousness labours to manifest, as best it can through the inadequacy of sensation, its own inherent delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. But when we come to Man, we find that the energizing consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things. This is still a. partial and limited, not an integral power of itself; ...

... × can unite itself with the original Delight of existence from which it came: overcoming the dualities of pain and pleasure, delivering from all fear and shrinking the mind, life and body, it can recast the contacts of existence in the world into terms of the Divine Ananda."' 2 ...

... realise that which was revealed to him. Then a further stage will be revealed, if necessary. It is like that. Q: I had an experience once. It was an explanation of the principle of pain and pleasure. I had been on an outing and was very susceptible to Poison-Ivy. I was completely covered with the rash. I was waiting for some people to bring me some medicine, so spent half the day in great ...

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... becomes a real virgin forest with all sorts of little snakes and swamps. We are not yet quite in the body, but we are drawing nearer. All the sensations of weariness and sleepiness, of fear, of pain and pleasure, likes and dislikes, attraction and aggression, tension and relaxation — all this swarms about. But we realize to what degree all this is dictated by habit, the milieu, education: a whole jumble ...

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... our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,—that is the seventh, the practical ignorance." ¹ ¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo. Page 4 ...

... the Divine in the world, the Master of a spiritual evolution and the growing godhead in humanity. That godhead grows however slowly beyond the dependence on the sanctions of pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure govern our primary being and in that primary scale pain is Nature's advertisement of things we should avoid, pleasure her lure to things she would tempt us to pursue. Page 373 These ...

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... all-wise omnipotence. This machinery of ego, this tangled complexity of the three gunas, mind, body, life, emotion, desire, struggle, thought, aspiration, endeavour, this locked interaction of pain and pleasure, sin and virtue, striving and success and failure, soul and environment, myself and others, is only the outward imperfect form taken by a higher spiritual Force in me which pursues through its ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
[exact]

... theism afraid of the world's contradictions, but one which sees God as the omniscient and omnipotent, the sole original Being who manifests in himself all, whatever it may be, good and evil, pain and pleasure, light and darkness as stuff of his own existence and governs himself what in himself he has manifested. Unaffected by its oppositions, unbound by his creation, exceeding, yet intimately related ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
[exact]

... according to your nature, which is in itself a rule of perfection, but you will be—and this is a rule of the imperfection—eternally subject to its modes, its dualities of liking and dislike, pain and pleasure and especially to the rajasic mode with its principle of desire and its snare of wrath and grief and longing,—the restless, all-devouring principle of desire, the insatiable fire which ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
[exact]

... strong winds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, not distinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone is thus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain and pleasure, happiness and grief, desire and passion, attachment and disgust: he has no freedom. He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to the status of the Akshara; he will then be triguṇātīta ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Essays on the Gita
[exact]

... myself and passed with honours. It began, by the way, as far back as in Alipur jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. But I do not expect that unusual reaction from others. And I suppose there are limits, e.g. the case of a picketer in Madras or Dr. Noel Paton. In any case, this ...

[exact]

... seeming, we are the ego and are subject to the modes of Nature. Enslaved to appearances, bound to the dualities, tossed between good and evil, sin and virtue, grief Page 56 and joy, pain and pleasure, good fortune and ill fortune, success and failure, we follow helplessly the iron round of the wheel of Maya." The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 88 Yes there are people who have a happy and ...

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... arranged life that the world is the soul's husband; Krishna its divine paramour. We owe a debt of service to the world and are bound to it by a law, a compelling opinion, and a common experience of pain and pleasure, but our heart's worship and our free and secret joy are for our Lover. 465—The joy of God is secret and wonderful; it is a mystery and a rapture at which common sense makes mouths of mockery; ...

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... too of the lesser or unsuccessful or only partially successful work of greater writers. The error made is to confuse the sources of poetic delight and beauty with the more superficial interest, pain and pleasure which the normal mind takes in the first untransmuted appeal Page 259 of thought and life and feeling. That in its first crude form or a little deepened by sensitiveness of emotion ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Future Poetry
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... be eliminated, not accepted or enjoyed. There is something in the being that enjoys illness, it is possible even to turn the pains of illness like any other pain into a form of pleasure; for pain and pleasure are both of them degradations of an original Ananda and can be reduced into the terms of each other or else sublimated into their original principle of Ananda. It is true also that one must be ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
[exact]

... is neutral and permissible for the preservation of life and its maintenance and for the satisfaction of the life-instincts. The sensational values of good and evil are inherent in the form of pain and pleasure, vital satisfaction and vital frustration, but the mental idea, the moral response of the mind to these values are a creation of the human being. It does not follow, as might be hastily inferred ...

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

... existence, on the insensible neutrality of Matter to develop a various delight of being which must grow, setting itself free from its minor terms, its contrary dualities of Page 686 pain and pleasure, into the essential delight of existence, the spiritual Ananda. The Being is one, but this oneness is infinite and contains in itself an infinite plurality or multiplicity of itself: the One ...

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

... rendering of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood, knowledge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleasure are the necessary process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of Truth, Knowledge, Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a contradiction of the truth of things. It ...

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

... untruth and might serve to cover a reckless self-indulgence of the imperfect human nature. Neither is it meant that since good and evil are in this world inextricably entangled together, like pain and pleasure,—a proposition which, however true at the moment and plausible as a generalisation, need not be true of the human being's greater spiritual evolution,—the liberated man will live in the spirit ...

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... passion inward dips Where hides, behind both dazzle and dark, Perfection's pygmy, the soul-spark Plunged in the abyss to grow by strange Cry of contraries, chequer and change Of pain and pleasure, to the bliss Whose utter sky the utter abyss Wagered to mirror and manifest. That flaming finger can attest The paradox of eternity, The endless smile that knows no sigh ...

... Self of boundless skies, Conquer the distance that is pain, So winning a more golden gain Than pleasure flickeringly caught Between small hands by feeble thought. In God both pain and pleasure rhyme— A single seizure of sublime Radiance beyond both grief and joy: A wide white peace without alloy, Which moves so quick it's everywhere, One infinite life no hungers ...

... enter into a greater consciousness enlightened by a truer radiance of knowledge, armed with a mightier unerring strength, open to that vaster delight in which are drowned for ever our petty human pain and pleasure. Still even what can be done within the limits of our human consciousness brings a great liberation. But even to do that little is not easy to the physical mind of man, even when his higher ...

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... experience in the mind, pleasure a positive vikāra . The truth is ānanda . But this is a knowledge for which mankind is not ready. Only the Yogin realises it and becomes sama , like-minded to pain and pleasure, good or evil, happiness or misfortune. He takes the rasa of both and they give him strength and bliss; for the veil between his mind and his soul is removed and the apparent man in him has ...

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... It is leading the individual, certainly, and the world, presumably, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker ...

... spiritual knowledge which is based on subjective experiences which are not verifiable by objective tests. Physical life suffers from the experience of dualities like heat and cold, hunger and thirst, pain and pleasure, attractions and repulsions etc. which are so true to ordinary human consciousness but there is the subjective way of evading or escaping them by complete detachment and living in the spirit. ...

... our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance." 1 1 The Life Divine, pp. 654-55. Page 188 ...

... distancing oneself from life as one lives in its daily rounds. It is often said that art should be realistic. Poetry, for instance, must reflect our common moods, our afflictions and our joys, pain and pleasure, hunger and surfeit, nudity and opulence, love and hatred, our failures and successes, jealousy, cruelty as much as kindness, humanitarianism. It cannot be irrelevant to us. All talk of idealism ...

... strong winds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, not distinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone is thus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain and pleasure, happiness and grief, desire and passion, attachment and disgust: he has no freedom. He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to the status of the Akshara; he will then be trigunātīta ...

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... inward dips Where hides, behind both dazzle and dark,  Perfection's pygmy, the soul-spark Plunged in the abyss to grow by strange  Cry of contraries, chequer and change Of pain and pleasure, to the bliss Whose utter sky the utter abyss Wagered to mirror and manifest. That flaming finger can attest The paradox of eternity,  The endless smile that knows no sigh, ...

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... noble and elevating. When the Yogin has self-mastery and self-possession, then indeed the Self becomes his friend and from him disappear all conflicts and dualities, dualities of heat and cold, pain and pleasure, love and hatred, honour and dishonour, life and death. In all circumstances he remains calm, standing aloof and unperturbed, standing above these thousand distracting and troubling demands of ...

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... in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance." 46 Page 56 Liberation of the Individual and Status ...

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... prevention from returning wrong or imperfect responses to the questionings of the world, liberation from wandering in a maze of Page 259 errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling. Our crooked road of blind groping and changing goal is turned into a sunlit path. Yoga and Science Yoga has been rightly looked upon as practical psychology ...

... matter. Consciousness labours to manifest, as best as it can, Page 32 through the inadequacy of sensation, its own inherent delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure. But when we come to Man, we find that the energizing consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware of itself and things. This is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself; ...

... opposition and struggle... It is leading the individual, certainly,... towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker ...

... image of man and nature.... What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions.... ...

... AUROBINDO (after laughing) : He seems to be receptive. NIRODBARAN: He doesn't understand what is meant by the mental, vital, and physical consciousness. As for his wife, she says the intensity of pain and pleasure seems to have diminished in her. But at the same time she feels disinclined to do any work. SRI AUROBINDO: Does she feel like that after taking up Yoga? NIRODBARAN: Yes. SRI AUROBINDO: ...

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... ecstasy of devotion and surrender to the Lord, all the world Page 245 may appear bathed in the glory of beauty and love. But when one strays lower - to the physical plane where pain and pleasure fight their own incendiary battles, or to the still lower subconscient region of nightmarish h horrors and fancies and the inconscient cellular mini-universes Where a Walpurgis-Night ...

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... dispensed with if one chose. ² It began by the way as far back as in Alipore Jail when I got bitten in my cell by some very red and ferocious-looking warrior ants and found to my surprise that pain and pleasure are conventions of our senses. ³ 13-2-1932 Yes, of course, I have been helping X. When somebody wants, really, to develop the literary power, I put some force to help him or her. 4 ...

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... others, to enlighten others, so long as we are ourselves unregenerate, helplessly tossed between the dualities of good and evil, success and failure, gain and loss, honour and dishonour, and pain and pleasure; so long as we are floundering in ignorance and torn between the conflicting tendencies of our heterogeneous being ? Self-realisation, which is the most pressing problem of our life, can be shelved ...

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... 137—There is no iron or ineffugable law that a given contact shall create pain or pleasure; it is the way the soul meets the rush or pressure of Brahman upon the members from outside them that determines either reaction. It is obvious that the same event or the same contact causes pleasure in one and pain in another, depending on the inner attitude taken by each one. And this observation ...

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... 421—Most of all things on earth I hated pain till God hurt and tortured me; then it was revealed to me that pain is only a perverse and recalcitrant shape of excessive delight. 422—There are four stages in the pain God gives to us; when it is only pain; when it is pain that causes pleasure; when it is pain that is pleasure; and when it is purely a fiercer form of delight. 423—Even... where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy. 424—When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God's embraces. I would like You to explain to me the "four stages of pain" which Sri Aurobindo speaks of here. If Sri Aurobindo is speaking of moral pain, of any... achieved. When the union is perfect, there only remains "a fiercer form of delight". Page 332 If it is the physical pain endured by the body, the experience does not follow such a clearly defined order; especially because union with the Divine most often causes the pain to disappear. 25 March 1970 ...

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... it becomes divided, limited, confused & misdirected and owing to shocks of unequal forces & uneven distribution of Ananda subject to the duality of positive & negative movements, grief & joy, pain & pleasure. Our business is to dissolve these dualities by breaking down their cause & plunge ourselves into the ocean of divine bliss, one, multitudinous, evenly distributed (sama), which takes delight from... we have to replace dualities by unity, egoism by divine consciousness, ignorance by divine wisdom, thought by divine knowledge, weakness, struggle & effort by self-contented divine force, pain & false pleasure by divine bliss. This is called in the language of Christ bringing down the kingdom of heaven on earth, or in modern language, realising & effectuating God in the world. Humanity is, upon... Circa 1913 Essays Divine and Human The Entire Purpose of Yoga By Yoga we can rise out of falsehood into truth, out of weakness into force, out of pain and grief into bliss, out of bondage into freedom, out of death into immortality, out of darkness into light, out of confusion into purity, out of imperfection into perfection, out of self-division ...

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... looks as if it is being put back in order.... Yes, it was such... it was the whole problem of the world—a world that is nothing but pain and suffering, and a big note of interrogation: why? I tried all the palliatives that one uses: to change the pain into pleasure, to remove the capacity of feeling, to occupy oneself with some other thing.... I tried all the "tricks"—not a single one succeeded... But it was not an innocent paralysis! For at least three weeks—at least—for three weeks, a constant pain, night and day, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, without fluctuation, none: it was as though I was being torn asunder.... So there was no question of seeing anybody. Now it is finished. The pain is quite bearable and the body has resumed a little of its normal life. But I wanted to tell you ...

The Mother   >   Books   >   CWM   >   Notes on the Way
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... a lot of pain. We'd be in the middle of a squat6 and just cramp up. We'd roll on the ground and try to massage it out. That was the first time I knew pain could become pleasure. We were benefiting from pain. We were breaking through the pain barrier and shocking the muscle. We looked at this pain as a positive thing, because we grew. It was a fantastic feeling to gain size from pain. All of a... a sudden I was looking forward to it as something pleasurable. The whole idea of pain became a pleasure trip. I couldn't tell anybody about it then, because I knew they would say I was a weirdo, a masochist. Which wasn't true, I had just converted the pain into pleasure — not for its own sake but because it meant growing. Every year, in the spring, a stone-lifting contest... muscles in my triceps aching, and I knew why they were called triceps — because there are three muscles in there. They were all registered in my mind, written there with sharp little jabs of pain. I learned that this pain meant progress. Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing. I wanted to be a big guy. I didn't want to be delicate. I dreamed of big deltoids, big pecs ...

... Aurobindo, do you have them? On the four stages of pain? 421—There are four stages in the pain God gives to us; when it is only pain; when it is pain that causes pleasure; when it is pain that is pleasure; and when it is purely a fiercer form of delight. Page 123 You answer: "If Sri Aurobindo refers to moral pain, whatever it may be, I can say from experience that the... concrete stability or fixity, I don't know. For example, if you have a pain somewhere (say in the heart or lungs or... some pain), it corresponds to something within, something that happened, a disorder, and the pain (when you are in a tranquil state) corresponds to what we might call the "situation" of the cells, so when the pain disappears it means the cells are back in place—it doesn't mean that the... 'fiercer form of delight.' "If he refers to physical pain endured by the body, the experience does not follow so clearly defined an order, all the more so as union with the Divine most often causes the pain to disappear." Yes, that's my experience, that's what I told you. I don't know whether he was actually referring to physical pain?... How does he put it? "...A fiercer form of delight ...

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... recovering.... You know, it was such a... it was the whole problem of the world—a world that was nothing but pain and suffering, and a great question mark: why? I tried every possible remedy: changing pain into pleasure, suppressing the capacity to feel, thinking about something else.... I tried all the "tricks"—not a single one worked. There is something in the physical world as it is which is not... (how... least—for three weeks there was a continuous pain, night and day, 24 hours out of 24, without any letup, none whatsoever: it was as if everything were being torn out of me.... You know, I don't usually Page 21 complain, but I was almost forced to cry out loud all the time. So, of course, there was no question of seeing anyone. Now it's over. The pain is quite bearable and the body has resumed... For an entire period I was absolutely inaccessible because I was in constant pain, so I was just useless—it was absolutely continuous. You could say I was just a cry all the time. It lasted a long time. It lasted several weeks (I didn't keep track). Then, gradually, it alternated with moments of peace when the pain in the leg subsided. And for the last two or three days, it seems to be recovering ...

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... also, for the psychic being to grow within—for that brings a certain kindliness, patience, charity towards all and one no longer regards everything from the point of view of one's own ego and its pain or pleasure, likings and dislikings. The second help is the growth of the inner peace which outward things cannot trouble. With the peace comes a calm wideness in which one perceives all as one self, all ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Letters on Yoga - IV
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... unshaken, observing only as Sakshi and as Ishwara holding the system firmly together & calmly willing the passing of the dwandwas. It does not crave for or demand the pleasure. It does not reject the pain. Even when pleasure or pain are excessive, it wills that the mind and body should not shrink from or repel them, but bear firmly. It deals in the same way with all dwandwas, hunger & thirst, heat... or revolt inwardly at anything because it is hurt in its egoistic desires, opinions, preferences etc. Its whole attitude is based on the perception of God in all things & happenings. It accepts pleasure & pain, health & disease, bad fortune & good fortune, honour & disgrace, praise & blame, action & inaction, failure & victory; but attaches itself to none of them. Nati is not a tamasic acquiescence in... Consciousness, but also a play of delight. It is the dualities born of ego-sense in the heart, mind & body which creates grief and pain. We have to unite ourselves with this Self, Lord & One & with all things in Him, viewing them as our self, in order to get rid of pain & enjoy the divine Ananda. But, first, it is necessary that we should accept without revolt the Lila equally in all its details & ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Record of Yoga
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... an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the vital... vital gets disgusted and begins wondering whether there is not such a thing as real bliss and the physical gets tired and wants liberation from itself and its pains and pleasures. Then it is possible for this little ignorant bit of surface personality to get back to its real Self and with it to these Page 324 greater things—or else to extinction of itself, Nirvana. The real Self is not ...

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... an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the vital... supposed to go beyond every mental idealistic culture. Ideas and Ideals belong to the mind and are half-truths only; the mind too is, more often than not, satisfied with merely having an ideal, with the pleasure of idealising, while life remains always the same, untrans-formed or changed only a little and mostly in appearance. The spiritual seeker does not turn aside from the pursuit of realisation to mere... vital gets disgusted and begins wondering whether there is not such a thing as real bliss and the physical gets tired and wants liberation from itself and Page 32 its pains and pleasures. Then it is possible for the little ignorant bit of personality to get back to its real Self and with it to these greater things - or else to extinction of itself, Nirvana. The real Self is not anywhere ...

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... detachment of the mind must be strengthened by a certain attitude of indifference to the things of the body; we must not care essentially about its sleep or its waking, its movement or its rest, its pain or its pleasure, its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its comfort or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. This does not mean that we shall not keep the body in right order so far as we... each other. This detachment can be made so normal and carried so far that there will be a kind of division between the mind and the body and the former will observe and experience the hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, depression, etc. of the physical being as if they were experiences of some other person with whom it has so close a rapport as to be aware of all that is going on within him. This division ...

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... an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the... the vital gets disgusted and begins wondering whether there is not such a thing as real bliss and the physical gets tired and wants liberation from itself and its pains and pleasures. Then it is possible for the little ignorant bit of personality to get back to its real Self and with it to these greater things — or else to extinction of itself, Nirvana. The real Self is not anywhere on the... and weakness, — scission of oneness and by that scission disharmony and failure of sympathy and love and understanding, — inhibition or fragmentation of delight of being and by that fragmentation pain and sorrow. To recover what is lost we must break out of the walls of ego. The ego must either disappear in impersonality or fuse into a larger I: it must fuse into the wider cosmic 'I' which comprehends ...

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... gradually, it alternated with moments of peace when the pain in the leg subsided. And for the last two or three days, it seems to be recovering.... You know, it was such a it was the whole problem of the world—a world that was nothing but pain and suffering, and a great question mark: why? I tried every possible remedy: changing pain into pleasure, suppressing the capacity to feel, thinking about something... air passing by, a small thing ... I can’t say how it is—charming. It’s not a pleasure, not a joy, it’s a breeze passing by, something quite special—and charming, quite charming. The next minute, it’s gone. The body suddenly feels a sense of peaceful and luminous rest, something quite ... adorable—the next minute, it feels pain all over. So everything is like that. A sort of identification with everything... and even a body to move with, and for which the body’s very pain was a kind of unreality⎯yes, perhaps a different time, a “moving eternity” in the depths or behind that atomic film, a different state of Matter behind that hardened crust. On one side, the hole of death and pain; on the other side universal life, without any possibility of pain. A “funny” physical life on two levels, a paradoxical duality: ...

... not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that higher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient normal part of our being which is the field of the struggle. The action Page 150 of the ethical man is not motived by even an inner pleasure, but by a call... is great pleasure and that the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes this is a side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes to the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification... of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,—the hedonistic theory which refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics to be no more than a system of formulas of conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   The Human Cycle
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... experience. Is there, indeed, such a thing as truth,—beyond of course that practical truth of persistent material appearances by which we govern our lives, the truth of death, birth, hunger, sexuality, pain, pleasure, commerce, money making, ease, discomfort, ambition, failure and success? Has not indeed the loftiest of our philosophical systems declared all things here to be Maya? And if Maya is illusion,... except in so far as it throws light upon the general causes of pain; the nature, origin and purpose of pain is the fundamental truth that I seek about the sensational reaction to contact. This law of pain, moreover, is not so fundamental as the truth about the nature, origin and purpose of sensation and contact themselves, of which pain is a particularity, an example or a modification. This more fundamental ...

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... of Avidya, the false sense of diversity and limitation is a state not of pure bliss but of pleasure & pain, for pleasure is different from bliss, as it is limited & involves pain, while the nature of bliss is illimitable and above duality; it is when pain itself becomes pleasure, is swallowed up in pleasure, that bliss is born. Every thing therefore which removes even partially the sense of difference... make an arithmetical calculation of the pain & pleasure to result from an action and the numbers of the people diversely affected by them, before doing the action. This sort of ethical algebra, this system of moral accounts needs a different planet for its development; a qualified accountant has yet to be born on the human plane. You cannot assess pleasure & pain, good and evil in so many ounces & pounds;... just as the Sankhyas & others imagine that there must be an infinite number of Purushas, souls & not One, for otherwise, they say, Page 103 all would have the same knowledge, the same pleasure & pain etc. (This is so in a sense, as his present personality contains also in a submerged state the personalities of his previous births, and an unwise hypnosis may throw him back into a bygone state ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... Now we come to the problem of pain. The first proposition which Sri Aurobindo wants us to consider is that pleasure, pain and neutral indifference have no absoluteness about them. Thre is no point at which you can say: this must be painful. We cannot say certain things must give pleasure. Perhaps not. The scale of reception of sensation of pleasure and pain is a variable scale. It can move from... can be changed. One can return the response of pleasure to what Page 114 now brings pain, or pain to what now brings pleasure. One can even train oneself to give out the reaction of delight to all contacts. It is all a question of training. If you try to follow this process of the possibility of changing the scale of pleasure and pain, you will observe that in the mind it is pretty... sense to feel pain, pleasure, or indifference. Pain begins with life in matter and grows with the mental consciousness in matter. When the mind is free and unegoistic, then probably pain also would become much less. When the mind becomes less egoistic and less attached to the personal, then perhaps pain also would become less in its incidence on the consciousness. Elimination of pain, therefore, seems ...

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... nation we shall discharge not as an irksome obligation, but as a personal pleasure. The Christian virtue of charity, the Pagan virtue of justice are the very sap and life of Vedantic morality. Seeing the Self in all creatures, implies seeing the Lord everywhere. The ideal man of Vedanta will accept pain as readily as pleasure, hatred, wrong, insult and injustice as composedly as love, honour and kindness... experience, not to learn from it. Such curiosity is at the root of the practice of torture; for the primitive mind finds a neverfailing delight in the physical response evoked by intense and violent pain. This pleasure in crude physical, moral, aesthetic or intellectual reactions because of their raw intensity and violence is a sure sign of the undeveloped tamasic mind and is still Page 287 common... strives ever to turn them to the service of individual personality, to master its environments and use them for its own enjoyment. Everything which it experiences, it utilizes for the pleasure and pain of the individuality. The rajasic man is the creator, the worker, the man of industry, enterprise, invention, originality, the lover of novelty, progress and reform. The growth of rajas therefore ...

Sri Aurobindo   >   Books   >   CWSA   >   Isha Upanishad
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... that a given contact shall create pain or pleasure; it is the way the soul meets the rush or pressure of Brahman upon the members from outside them that determines either reaction. 138) The force of soul in thee meeting the same force from outside cannot harmonise the measures of the contact in values of mind-experience & body-experience, therefore thou hast pain, grief or uneasiness. If thou canst... towards some new joy of health, all evil & pain a tuning of Nature for some more intense bliss & Page 438 good, all death an opening on widest immortality. Why and how this should be so, is God's secret which only the soul purified of egoism can penetrate. 136) Why is thy mind or thy body in pain? Because thy soul behind the veil wishes for the pain or takes delight in it; but if thou wilt—and... company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground. 48) When I read a wearisome book through and with pleasure, yet perceived all the perfection of its wearisomeness, then I knew that my mind was conquered. 49) I knew my mind to be conquered when it admired the beauty of the hideous, yet felt perfectly ...

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... own self. He whose mind is neither sleeping, waking, remembering, destitute of memory, disappearing nor appearing, is liberated. Page 598 He feels neither heat, cold, pain, pleasure, respect nor disrespect. Such a Yogi is absorbed in Samadhi. He who, though awake, appears like one sleeping, and is without inspiration and expiration, is certainly free. ... then it Page 589 is called Kevala Kumbhaka. There is nothing in the three worlds which may be difficult to obtain for him who is able to keep the air confined according to pleasure, by means of Kevala Kumbhaka. After performing Pranayama and other related exercises like mudras, or bandhas ("stops" or "locks") which remove blockages, "capture" and channelize the energy... force) it kills the practiser himself. When Pranayama, etc., are performed properly, they eradicate all diseases: but an improper practice generates disease. Hiccough, asthma cough, pain in the head, the ears, and the eyes; these and other various kinds of diseases are generated by the disturbance of the breath. Considering Puraka (filling), Rechaka (expelling) and Kumbhaka ...

... at a happy and tranquil life by the eradication of two things: fear of gods and death, and pain both mental and physical. According to Epicurus, the yardsticks for good and bad were sensations of pleasure and pain, therefore the experience of pain was bad and the experience of Page 40 pleasure was good. He gave great importance to the presence of good friends for attaining a happy and... unbridled desire and over-indulgence in pleasure could lead to dissatisfaction, ultimately to pain. According to him, man should aim at the absence of pain (both physical and mental) and a state of satiation and tranquility that was free from the fear of death and the retribution of the gods. In other words, when man is free from pain, he no longer desires pleasure, and when he is free from fear, he is... Socrates. Page 39 Impressed with Socrates' calm acceptance of pleasure as a good, he developed a school of thought the Cyrenaic School of hedonism that advocated the ethic of pleasure which stated that for a good life, man should dedicate his life to the pursuance of pleasure and the avoidance of suffering or inflicting pain; but at the same time he must employ good judgment and exercise self-control ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Socrates
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... physical life: there is no organised self-consciousness, but only a sense of action and reaction, movement, impulse and desire, need, necessary activities imposed by Nature, hunger, instinct, pain, insensibility and pleasure. Although thus inferior, it has this awareness obscure, limited and automatic;... when we stand back from it, when we can separate our mind from its sensations, we perceive- that this... tive instincts, including the sexual instinct, and Thanatos or the death instinct. In this later formulation, libido came to be regarded as the energies of Eros, and aggression, turning away from pleasure, etc. as the expression of Thanatos. This subsequent modification of Freud's concept of the instinctual energies never dominated psychoanalytic thinking; the id and its libido have tended to retain ...

... two or three days that it looks as if everything is put back in order. It was the whole problem of the world – a world which is nothing but pain and suffering, and a big question mark: why? ‘I tried all the palliatives one uses: to change the pain into pleasure, to eliminate the capacity of feeling, to turn one’s attention to something else. I tried all the tricks, but not a single one worked. There... at least three weeks – at least – for three weeks [late December 1970 and early January 1971] a constant pain, night and day, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, without ever diminishing, never. It was as if I was torn apart. So it was out of the question to see anybody. Now it’s over. The pain is quite bearable and the body has resumed more or less its normal life … ‘I noticed how things – the... spoke very little. Most of the time she remained with her eyes closed … Whatever she said was mostly about her body, that she was feeling pain, that she was feeling cold, that she wanted water. Or she asked us to place her in such a way that she did not have pain but could be comfortable. This is all that she said. She never said anything about our work, about the Ashram or about anybody.’ 39 Six ...

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... arrived there; and therefore I did not pity him as might have seemed natural at such an hour. But I had not the pleasure, which I usually feel in philosophical discourse (for philosophy was the theme of which we spoke). I was pleased, but in the pleasure there was also a strange admixture of pain; for I reflected that he was soon to die, and this Page 93 double feeling was shared by us all;... crying out and beating herself. And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: — How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might he thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other;... and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows: as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed...... Page 95 And now, O my judges, I desire to prove to you that the real philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to ...

Kireet Joshi   >   Books   >   Other-Works   >   Socrates
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... live perfectly must know Life, he who would know Life, must know Sacchidananda. Pleasure is not Ananda; it is a half-successful attempt to grasp at Ananda by means which ensure a relapse into pain. Therefore it is that pleasure can never be an enduring possession. It is in its nature transient and fugitive. Pain itself is obviously not Ananda; neither is it in itself anything positive, real and... It has only a negative reality. It is a recoil caused by the inability to command pleasure from certain contacts which becomes habitual in our consciousness and, long ingrained in it, deludes us with the appearance of a law. We can rise above transitory pleasure; we can get rid of the possibility of pain. Pleasure, therefore, cannot be the end & aim of life; for the true object and condition of... unconditioned and infinite. If we make pleasure the object of life, then we also make pain the condition of life. The two go together and are inseparable companions. You cannot have one for your bed-fellow without making a life-companion of the other. They are husband and wife and, though perpetually quarrelling, will not hear of divorce. But neither is pain the necessary condition of life, as the ...

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... life: there is no organised self-consciousness, but only a sense of action and reaction, movement, impulse and desire, need, necessary activities imposed by Nature, hunger, instinct, pain, insensibility and pleasure. Although thus inferior, it has this awareness obscure, limited and automatic;... when we stand back from it, when we can separate our mind from its sensations, we perceive that this... ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure. If there were not this factor, the physical mind of man left to itself would live like the animal, accepting his first actual physical life and its limits as his whole possibility, moving in material... and its nature; — it is that part of us which seeks after life and its movements for their own sake and it does not want to leave hold of them if they bring it suffering as well as or more than pleasure; it is even capable of luxuriating in tears and suffering as part of the drama of life. Letters on Yoga, p. 323 The nervous part of the being is a portion of the vital — it is the ...

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... the appearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference; infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to... ...this book is not criticism; it is literary or rather journalistic pugilism. There too it is of a peculiar kind; it is a furious sparring at a lay figure of India which is knocked down at pleasure through a long and exuberant dance of misstatement and exaggeration in the hope of convincing an ignorant audience that the performer has prostrated a living adversary. Sanity, justice, measure are ...

... an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the vital... our positive statements are equally delusive. When we say that He is ānadamaya we equally miss the reality because most men do not know what ananda is. They only know pleasure They try to under- stand ananda in terms of pleasure and hence you get the materialising of the spiritual that mark so much of ordinary Vaishnava thought just as from the misuse of negation you get the coldness of so much... When a man has seen something even of the Reality—call him Krishna or Buddha or Brahman—he then knows what is meant. He knows how He is nirākāra but not cold and how He is ānandanaya but not mere pleasure. Till we get experience and knowledge we shall always be in unreality however lofty our conceptions may be. The Vedantin despises the Vaishrava for the tatter's concreteness and the Vaishnava spits ...

... of the vital, from top to bottom, namely, its utter indifference to our human sentimentalism; pain appeals to it as much as joy, deprivation as much as abundance, hatred as much as love, torture as much as ecstasy. It thrives in every case. This is because it is a Force, the same Force in pain as in pleasure. We are thus bluntly confronted with the absolute ambivalence of all the feelings that make... force of life in us. This is the region located between the heart and the sex center, which Sri Aurobindo calls the vital. It is a place full of every possible mixture: pleasure is inextricably mixed with suffering, pain with joy, evil with good, and make-believe with truth. The world's various spiritual traditions have found it so troublesome that they have preferred to reject this dangerous... feature of the surface vital: it is an incorrigible charlatan, 72 a shameless impersonator. (We are not even sure that our own Page 70 mother's death escapes its pleasure.) Each time we cry in disapproval or in pain (any crying at all), there is a monkey snickering in us. We all know this, yet we remain as sentimental as ever. To top it all, the vital excels in befogging everything. It is ...