... occipital. Later, this cerebral effort will disappear, for you will not work with the brain. This is an intermediate state. Your consciousness will be centred at a particular moment outside your physical body—above your head—, then it will expand and you will become aware of its unity with the other centres. The throat-centre is not involved for it is not a mental centre, but only vocal. Most people... the manifested activity—in the play of forces—and at that moment the union you speak about is possible. I do not yet succeed in realising actually the independence of my real being from my physical body—an independence which I can conceive mentally. Will I realise this division ? This will necessarily come and you will realise that your body is an instrument which you can put aside. This... from this force. Later one succeeds in calling it down at will. When I prepare myself inwardly to practise silence, I have noticed that I centre my consciousness by taking the help of the physical body. Then my attention sinks deeper little by little. A moment comes when I must leave this point of support. Then I do not know where to fix my consciousness. Either it returns to external things and ...
... to what extent her body could be transformed. As early as January 1961 the Mother had mentioned the presence in her physical body of another body that was ‘bigger, more voluminous’ – we are reminded of Rijuta’s psychic being which exceeded the boundaries of her physical body – and that had ‘such a compact power that it was almost annoying.’ A year later, after her ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ in... convergent and indicative of one of the most wondrous realities imaginable. The Mother by her yoga of the transformation of the cells had built in, or out of, her physical body a supramental body in which she existed while still in her physical body. She was existing in two ‘physical’ bodies at the same time, the one in the gross physical and the other in the subtle physical, which in her terminology meant... being mostly consists of, especially in its physical elements. The following quote puts matters clearly: ‘The use of this [physical] body at present is for me simply: the Order of the Will of the Lord that I do as much preparatory work as possible. It [her physical body] is, however, not the Aim at all. We have no knowledge, not the least knowledge of what the supramental life is. Consequently, ...
... bodies for the soul, do not generally credit our earthly physical body with any great spiritual possibility of its own. Indeed, the goal set before the aspirant is that he should seek to 'loosen' "the soul, ātivāhika deha, sūtkṣma-śarīra,jñāna-deha, nirmāṇa-kāya, nafs-i-jāri, nafs-i-latīf,jism-i-misāl, subtle body...from the physical body, sthūla-śarīra, ādhibhautika deha,jaḍa-deha, jism-i-kasif... dynamic seer-vision of the apotheosis of the material body here upon earth in the very conditions of the material Universe, we must try to have a perspective view of different attitudes to the physical body and diverse conceptions regarding its ultimate destiny, that have occupied the reflective mind and the yearning heart of man throughout the long gamut of his cultural-spiritual history. ... non-material source or support but being only an operation of material energy acting in and upon a particular structural pattern of Matter, must perforce cease to exist with the dissolution of the physical body. The survival of man in any form after death is untenable. Since our personal existence is entirely dependent upon the persistence of the body and bodily life alone, we must regard — so ...
... I sometimes give people little hints: Can you sense your hand? DR. MISTRY: Yes. ECKHART: Yes, so you are in the body. DALAL; In the physical body? ECKHART: Physical body. At first, you sense the aliveness of the physical body, and then there is a deepening. There is just a generalized sense of aliveness. Not so much, any more, of feeling this is the body and then there's the... pervades the entire body. And then the mental image of the physical body disappears because your attention is entirely in that alive Presence, is that alive Presence, attention is that alive Presence. Then the image of me as a physical body that people still have even after they close their eyes—they still visualize the physical body—-well, the image disappears. What is left is no longer an observer... nor the root cause. Sometimes in spiritual practice people try to eliminate desire—it's almost impossible [chuckle]—without realizing that the cause of desire is identification with mind and the physical body. So, primarily [ir is] identification with the mentally created sense of self, which is never complete, and is always wanting Page 46 and needing more. An enormous amount of desires ...
... that even when I did not have a consciousness in the physical body, still there was another consciousness which saw and directed me, otherwise it could not have lifted up a body that had fainted. And I tell you, it is not only with this physical body that one sees, but there are other and better means to see and feel than with this physical body. But, to learn all this, I did not practise yoga or... most material physical plane, therefore it has a greater influence on the other parts of the body, and it is this which is the basis of the transformation of the physical body. It is vibration alone which has a direct effect on the physical body, not visions and experiences, etc., — all that belongs to the mental or rather to the vital, you understand? The visions, etc. belong to the vital-physical or... sensations and not the visions and experiences, etc. Because I work in the material and physical world, I can communicate directly through the vibrations and it is this that has the best effect on the physical body. It is, moreover, the most direct contact with the Supreme truth. It is only by the vibrations that I work with the individual in the physical plane because this is the most true and pure means ...
... But what precisely was this event? How far can we aver that it was connected with Jesus' physical body - and, if it was connected, what was the character of the "transformation" undergone by it? From the fact that Jesus is said to have disappeared we may be inclined to say that it could not have been a physical body that had originally appeared - and, in view of the belief that whatever did appear was... If the Supermind is already involved in material substance and evolves out of it by its own push upward and by the downward pressure and eventual descent of the uninvolved Supermind, a divinised physical body which can be concrete and palpable and visible is exactly what we should expect in the course of earth's evolutionary growth. This is the Aurobindonian supramentalisation of the body. I don't see... was never meant to stay for good, there could be no question of an Aurobindonian supramental physical body. This disqualification is apart from all the others that put the resurrection in a different category from the evolutionarily consequent and Yogically developed corps glorieux - the physical instrument itself enjoying total transformation by the grace of the Supermind while still alive and not ...
... Matter is the foundation of all evolutionary efflorescence of life here upon the terrestrial plane, our physical body assumes a supreme importance in the total scheme of our spiritual achievement. A full play of divine life demands as its essential prerequisite a totally transformed physical body which will, as a supple and flawless and transparent instrument, respond fully to each and every call of... calls "supramental substance". This supramental substance alone can confer on the physical body the status of a worthy mansion for the self-manifesting Spirit. And this, "not in the sense of any attachment of obligatoryrestriction to the corporeal frame, but as an exceeding of the [present] laws of the physical body, - the conquest of death, an earthly immortality." Let us close this essay... divine living in the physical world. But in the actually elaborated status of consciousness of man the mental being, this transformation cannot be achieved nor even initiated on the plane of the physical body. It will then be like putting the cart before the horse. For, where is the necessary lever of transformation or the potent agent, to effectuate this desired change? We should not forget that in ...
... the principle of each is repeated in all. Thus all is in each. Otherwise the world cannot go on. There are four other bodies different from the material physical body which we have. Disciple : What happens when the man dies and his physical body disappears? Sri Aurobindo : When a thing disappears it may go into the next plane which is not the gross material, but is physical all the same... your self with it. Disciple : How can one begin to feel this identification? Sri Aurobindo : The first thing one sees when one has broken the barrier is the vital-physical body. It is around the physical body and with the physical it forms as it were the "nervous envelope". The force of a disease has to break through it to reach the body – except for the attacks on the most material parts... electrical vibrations and that they can be cured by Page 166 producing certain other more powerful vibrations is also correct. Apart from the psychic causes, in the pure physical body it works by vibrations. In yogic practice also electrical phenomenon generally occurs. And when the Power descends some sort of electrical vibrations take place in the physical system. It is by ...
... to an end, that is, it is not indispensable for him to take birth again in a body. Till then rebirth is a necessity, for it is through rebirth that he grows; it is in the physical life and in a physical body that he gradually develops and becomes a fully conscious being. But once he is fully formed, he is free, in this sense that he can take birth or not, at will. So there, one kind of progress stops... Page 70 this is what happens: the psychic has alternate periods of activity and rest; it has a life of progress resulting from experiences of the physical life, of active life in a physical body, with all the experiences of the body, the vital and the mind; then, normally, the psychic goes into a kind of rest for assimilation where the result of the progress accomplished during its active... making, progressing; these generally, right at the outset, cannot choose much, but when they have arrived at a certain degree of growth and of consciousness (generally while they are still in a physical body and have had a certain amount of experience), they decide at that time what their next field of experience will be like. I can give you some rather external examples. For instance, a psychic ...
... the parts of the being, including the most material, have an independent consciousness. Hence when you go to sleep dead tired, when your physical body needs rest absolutely, your physical consciousness sleeps, while the consciousness of your subtle physical body or your vital or of your mind does not sleep, it continues its activity; but your physical consciousness is separated from the body, it is... I gave it a good scolding, saying, "You must not play such tricks with me!" Many people faint like this and see themselves. There is one condition for this: the organ of sight in the subtle physical body or in the most material vital must be developed. I must tell you that this kind of capacity may come spontaneously, without effort—one may be a born clairvoyant. They are not necessarily very... your body is so closely tied to your inner being that without thinking of it, without wanting to do so, without making any effort, it follows and does the same thing. Note that in this matter, the physical body has capacities it would not have in the ordinary waking condition. For instance, it is well known that one can walk in dangerous places where one would find it rather difficult to walk in the waking ...
... Waking-State having disappeared Page 233 into the Dream-State and no longer existing, the physical body must necessarily disintegrate since it has no longer a soul to support it and keep naturally together the gross material atoms out of which it is constructed. But because the physical body is destroyed or dropped off, it does not follow that no body is left. Man goes on existing after death... Sleep-State or causal self, a subtle body for his Dream-State or psychical self and a gross body for his Waking-State or physical self. When he dies, what happens is simply the disintegration of the physical body and the return of the Waking into the Dream-State from which it was originally projected. Death, in the ordinary view, is a delivery from matter; body is destroyed and only spirit or soul remains:... and fiery energisms of which the higher principle in his being is capable. He must learn how to transcend the limitations and errors of the physical senses and train his mind to act even in the physical body with the rapidity, directness and unlimited range proper to a psychical organ whose function is to operate in subtle as well as in gross matter. To see where the physical eye is blind, to hear where ...
... he feels something if he does Page 64 not see You for a long time. In the third, he does not need Your physical body—in the extreme fire of love Your body and his physical body are dissolved in a soul-communion. I think, Mother, that man does not need Your physical body, since You are already in his heart. That is not quite true. If there were not something more in the physical contact... against Your will? Yes, it is very base. It is because of such actions, constantly repeated, that these people never make any progress. 16 October 1934 I think that illnesses of the physical body are mostly imaginary. So if one always remained outside the body, Page 63 as one does during sleep, probably one would never feel ill. It is only a matter of remaining outside the body... Integral means complete, entire, omitting nothing, total the external being is very far from being integral. When we speak of "the integral being", we mean the being in its totality, from the physical body to the true Self, the Divine Consciousness. 31 October 1934 You write "the true Self, the Divine Consciousness"—does that mean the true soul, the psychic? No, it is not the same thing ...
... not like the golden light of the Supermind: rather a kind of phosphorescence. I felt that had it been night, it would have been physically visible. ... And it was denser than my physical body: the physical body seemed to me almost unreal—as though crumbly—like sand running through your fingers. ... I would have been incapable of speaking, words seemed so petty, narrow, ignorant. ..... intermediate body—a body, human in origin but thoroughly purified and refined right up to the cellular level and thus capable of the operations of the Supermind directly in the physical body. True, the entire physical body was not yet fully transformed, but it was yet a vehicle in which the subtle physical was so much supramentalised that its real matter—which Mother had described as something much... Aurobindo said: This instrument [the physical mind] is useless, it can only be got rid of....' It was very difficult to get rid of it because it was so intimately linked to the aggregate of the physical body and its present form... it was difficult; and when I tried and a deeper consciousness tried to manifest, it used to cause fainting. I mean that the union, the fusion, the identification with ...
... the body; the seeker will feel them himself without any difficulty as soon as he becomes a little clear. Suffice it to say that these centers (called Chakras in India) are not located in our physical body but in another dimension, though their concentration may at times become so intense that we have an acute, localized physical sensation. Some of them, though not all, are in fact quite close to... reach. We will also find that this consciousness is independent of the thoughts, feelings, and desires of our small frontal being; it is independent of the mind, of the vital being, and even of the physical body; in certain particular conditions, which we will discuss later, it can even go outside the body to have its own experiences. Our body, our thoughts, our desires are only a thin layer of our total... disintegrates and returns to the universal Mind; similarly, the vital vibrations that made up our vital ego, or vital body, disintegrate in the universal Page 86 Vital, just as the physical body disintegrates into its natural constituents in universal Matter. Only the psychic remains; it is eternal, as we have seen. Experiencing reincarnation, therefore, will depend on our discovering the ...
... and interconnection that the "jivatma" feels an irresistible pull from the higher worlds after it has shed its earthly-physical body, and it makes it enter those other worlds successively one after another. Also, all that it has left undone during its lifetime in the physical body upon earth, it tries to complete, albeit partially, in the corresponding supraphysical worlds beyond. For, we should remember... functions of their own, such as, his physical Page 82 being, vital being, mental being and others. Also, he has not only his gross physical body, visible and sensible to us, but has other bodies too; such as, a subtle physical body, a vital body, a mental body and others. His total being is constituted of five "Koshas" or sheaths and envelopes, such as, "Annamaya Kosha" (material... being around their soul, through a process of advanced sadhana, the psychic being may adopt many different courses after the dropping of the physical body at death: (i)Instead of spending time in the other worlds, the psychic being may assume a new physical body on the terrestrial plane as soon as possible in order to maintain its spiritual adventure uninterrupted there. (ii)There is also ...
... sadhana, tarati śokam ātmavit (Chhandogya Upanishad, VII. 1.3), is due to the concrete fact that one no longer feels his physical body to be his true "I". One realises beyond any doubt that the jīvātmā or the Self is sempiternal, without any beginning or end, while the physical body is nothing more than a detachable robe, or a rejectable instrument that one holds in one's hand as long as one likes and... utterly effaced." (The Synthesis of Yoga, Cent. Ed., p. 334) It is, of course, true that one essential element of the last Siddhi of the Integral Yoga will be the divine transformation of the physical body itself and a consequent conquest over physical mortality. For, in the case of a divinised body, there will be neither any illness, nor any decay and degeneration, nor even death: "Na tatra jarā... immortality. A careful perusal of the Mother's words is bound to change one's normal but erroneous outlook on life and death and help in the cancellation of one's natural fear of the dissolution of the physical body. Here are two passages from those writings which throw an altogether different light on the insistent problem of life and death: (1)"... opposition and contraries are a stimulus to progress ...
... the electric current stopped, and the subtle body got freed from the prison of the physical body, and sped away." A very uncanny account, indeed! Page 67 Scriptural Account Let us now give in brief the scriptural account of the way in which the soul of a dying man leaves the physical body and makes its journey elsewhere. Many accounts have been detailed in books such as (i)... its painful reality and man starts thinking about it in a sustained manner. Many nagging questions come crowding in his mind demanding satisfactory answers; such as, (i) Granted that the physical body will be cremated or interred and, in any case, destroyed, but what about the consciousness of the individual? Does it survive the body's death, Yes or No? (ii) If Yes, what is it or who is it that... death or after the lapse of a long period of time? (xiii) In my next return to earth, shall I be the same old person of my previous birth, in nature and temperament, however different may be the physical body and life-circumstances? (xiv) Those amongst my near and dear ones who have already died, can they see me even now? Do they still remember me? Or, has everything become a blank to them? (xv) Can ...
... once it has arrived at the summit of its development, is free to choose not only the time of its incarnation, but the place, the purpose and the work to be accomplished. Its descent into the physical body is necessarily a descent into darkness, ignorance, unconsciousness; and for a very long time it must labour simply to bring a little consciousness into the material substance of the body, before... is the psychic. So, this is what happens: the psychic has alternate periods of activity and rest; it has a life of progress resulting from experiences of the physical life, of active life in a physical body, with all the experiences of the body, the vital and the mind; then, normally, the psychic goes into a kind of rest for assimilation where the result of the progress accomplished during its active... and if the whole being is organised around it, the whole being passes under the psychic influence, becomes united with it, and can continue —if it is necessary for it to continue. Indeed, if the physical body could be given the same movement—the same movements of progress and the same capacity to ascend that the psychic being has—well, it wouldn't be necessary for it to decompose. But that indeed is ...
... and the outer become one. Source The Value of a Physical Body this kind of work, this harmonisation and organisation of the being around the divine Centre can only be done in a physical body and on earth. That is truly the essential and original reason for physical life. For, as soon as you are no longer in a physical body, you can no longer do it at all . And what is still more... more remarkable is that only human beings can do it, for only human beings have at their centre the divine Presence in the psychic being... And yet, human beings come into a physical body without knowing why, most of them go through life without knowing why, they leave their body without knowing why, and they have to begin the same thing all over again, indefinitely, until one day, someone comes ...
... itself in Matter is limited and divided in its self-relation and its powers by the limitations and divisions of this matter-governed and life-driven mind. This materialised soul lives bound to the physical body and its narrow superficial external consciousness, and it takes normally the experiences of its physical organs, its senses, its matter-bound life and mind, with at most some limited spiritual glimpses... glimpses, as the whole truth of existence. Page 466 Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in physical Nature; he is to his own self-consciousness a mind in a physical body. But at first he is this mental being materialised and he takes the materialised soul, annamaya puruṣa , for his real self He is obliged to accept, as the Upanishad expresses it, Matter for the Brahman... possible now for him to awaken in his consciousness to the vital plane and to become the vital soul, prāṇamaya puruṣa , put on the vital nature and live in the secret vital as well as the visible physical body. If he achieves this change with some fullness or one-pointedness—usually it is under great and salutary limitations or attended by saving complexities—and without rising beyond these things, without ...
... to effect the release; for it takes account of the psychical or mental body behind of which the physical is a sort of reproduction in gross form, and is able to discover thereby secrets of the physical body Page 536 which do not appear to a purely physical enquiry. This mental or psychical body, which the soul keeps even after death, has also a subtle pranic force in it corresponding to... why the embodied soul seems so dependent on the bodily and nervous life,—though the dependence is neither so complete nor so real as it seems. The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering... about that evolution or manifestation of the higher psychic being which is necessary for the greater aims of Yoga. In order to bring about this manifestation the present nodus of the vital and physical body with the mental being has to be loosened and the way made clear for the ascent through the greater psychic being to the union with the superconscient Purusha. This can be done by Pranayama. ...
... and the Mother had divided the tasks for the accomplishment of their mission. Sri Aurobindo, secluded in his apartment, took upon him the Yoga of bringing down the Supermind into his physical body. As his physical body, like any other human body, was a formation of the terrestrial evolution, this also meant that he was bringing down the Supermind in the very stuff of the Earth. The Mother had taken... Supermind in 1956. His words about the capability of the Mother’s body have proved true, and in the following years she has gradually realized the archetype of the supramental body by means of her physical body. By these two realizations the appearance of the next step in the evolution, the supramental being, has been brought nearer centuries if not millennia. Ours, humans of goodwill and aspiration, is... 1969 27 ; Sri Aurobindo’s presence; and the Mother’s presence. For Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s Work of building the New World cannot have been limited to their years of incarnation in a physical body. Helpers of the progress of the Earth and humanity during the whole of the past, they are undoubtedly there to help them now, after their initiation of the new evolution in its critical present ...
... into death fully conscious and with all his yogic acquisitions – except those of the physical body, for the laying down of the physical body is of course what ‘death’ is about. That is why another component of his master act consisted in transmitting the supramental acquisitions, the supramental stuff of his physical body to the Mother, who from now on had to continue alone and take on both parts of the... from Sri Aurobindo’s body into the body of the Mother, ‘with such a strong sensation as to make one think that it could be seen,’ happened immediately after Sanyal declared that the life of his physical body had come to an end. ‘On 6 December I entered Sri Aurobindo’s room before dawn,’ writes Sanyal. ‘The Mother and I had a look at him; how wonderful, how beautiful he looked, with a golden hue. ...
... Self there is no evolution. What is generally understood by the Soul is the psychic and mental indi-vidualisation which persists even after the dissolution of the physical body and the vital sheath. Now, when a man dies his physical body dissolves, the vital body dissolves after some time and the psychic and the mental bodies also dissolve. Take the case of an insect. In the insect there is only... Theosophy ; they have not only vital force but mental power. Disciple : What is their part in evolution ? Sri Aurobindo : They only exhibit power ; they do not generally take up a physical body. Disciple : Have they an idea of progress ? Sri Aurobindo : Their idea of progress is increase of power. But they can be converted. Théon – who was the Mother's instructor in ... between the physical and the vital? ; Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by the nature of the balance ? There is a fixed quantity of vital force and mental force that can be used by the physical body. The body is not able to bear a very great amount of those forces. That is why modern civilized man is much more delicate than the savage. All these words "assimilation" and "reproduction” do ...
... psychikon and what he calls soma pneumatikon. The former, the physical body, is one whose psyche or "soul" is not to be understood as in the Greek or the later Christian philosophy but simply as that body's life, the principle of animation common to animals and men, so that the soma psychikon is the living natural or physical body, the sensing, feeling, thinking "flesh and blood" which can never... be increasingly though yet too little and too clumsily examined,even while they are far too much exploited." Again, we read in Sri Aurobindo: 17 "Our substance does not end with the physical body; that is only the earthly pedestal, the terrestrial base, the material starting-point. As there are behind our waking mentality vaster ranges of consciousness subconscient and superconscient to... rise inwardly and outwardly above sin, above the alienation from God in one's heart and the performance of acts displeasing to him. The "appearances" were not of a resuscitated gross-physical body, however changed, but of a subtle or else causal one. As Jesus recovered his own original divinity we should understand the manifesting body to be that which Paul describes as exalted in almost ...
... might be 'purified' from a 'defiling encumbrance. 2 If the physical body alone is at the root of the trouble, so may aver the unwary seeker, it should be a very easy propostion to escape the clutches of Illusion and Ignorance and attain to the status of spiritual liberation, simply by waiting long enough for the physical body to drop off and disintegrate on death, or better 1 Cf... present physical body, the product of such karmas, runs its natural course even after the attainment of Knowledge and ceases to function only when the force of the karmas causing it becomes automatically exhausted in the fashion of the potter's wheel which, already set in motion, comes to a dead stop at the exhaustion of the imparted momentum (kulālaca-kravat). At the fall of the physical body, both... our normal waking consciousness to allow of a complete spiritual illumination has often been cited as one of the most potent and pertinent grounds for the disparagement and denigration of the physical body. In ancient Greece and Rome, in the Dionysian cult and in the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, such mystical-psychical experiences as men obtained in rare moments of exaltation described ...
... symbol is the material body. Behind this physical person figured in physical body there is the subtle person and it expresses itself in a subtle body. The subtle body, because it is subtle, does not mean that it is formless. This too has a form which has not the rigidity of the material body, is not bound like the physical body in a contour of fixed unchangeable unchanging lineament. The form, supple... name and a Divine body recognisable in the same way as a physical body is recognised. Now this Divine person is in us normally behind the veil almost inoperative acting or influencing only indirectly and can be and has to be brought forward and put in charge of the other personalities, over the head of the subtle body and the physical body. Then that true person will be the ruler and guide and control... composed of three beings, his person is made of three persons – it is a trinity, a triptych as it were. The first is the external person whom we recognise by his name and form. It is indeed the physical body in and through which nature and character express themselves or try to express themselves as best they can. For the body, the material body is both an expression and a limitation, the body is not ...
... not say, rather, to manifest God?"17 THE PHYSICAL BODY IN THE SCHEME OF SUPRAMENTAL PERFECTION The Life Divine presents so many avenues of new approaches to problems of man's individual and collective life that it is not possible to deal with all of them in a single exposition. I choose three such: (1) the physical body in the scheme of supramental perfection; ( 2 ) the... P. 234. Page 18 are called Koshas or sheaths. Though we are normally co, nscious of only physical body, it is possible to open oneself to other bodies; the psychic and occult phenomena we come across in life are due to them. Six nervous centres of life in the physical body, corresponding to six centres of vital and mental faculties in the subtle, have been discovered by the yogis... organisation and ethics in the collective life of man from the point of view of The Life Divine; ( 3 ) the origin of Ignorance. One question which might be considered here is the place of 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 ...
... to an end, that is, it is not indispensable for him to take birth again in a body. Till then rebirth is a necessity, for it is through rebirth that he grows; it is in the physical life and in a physical body that he gradually develops and becomes a fully conscious being. But once he is fully formed, he is free, in this sense that he can take birth or not, at will. So there, one kind of progress stops... making, progressing; these generally, right at the outset, cannot choose much, but when they have arrived at a certain degree of growth and of consciousness (generally while they are still in a physical body and have had a certain amount of experience), they decide at that time what their next field of experience will be like. I can give you some rather external examples. For instance, a psychic... leaving, it says: "Next time, it is in this domain that I shall take birth...." Suppose, for example, the psychic has reached a stage of growth when it would like to have the chance of working on the physical body to make it capable of coming consciously into Page 213 contact with the Divine and of transforming it. Now, it is about to leave the body in which it had authority, power, activity, ...
... thing is that this kind of work, this harmonisation and organisation of the being around the divine Centre can only be done in a physical body and on earth. That is truly the essential and original reason for physical life. For, as soon as you are no longer in a physical body, you can no longer do it at all . And what is still more remarkable is that only human beings can do it, for only human beings... usually called “gods”; and when they want to do it, when they really want to organise themselves and become completely conscious, they have to take a body. And yet, human beings come into a physical body without knowing why, most of them go through life without knowing why, they leave their body without knowing why, and they have to begin the same thing all over again, indefinitely, until one day ...
... their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses. Sri Aurobindo The Life Divine - I: The Two Negations:... planes are situated in the consciousness of general Nature. It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into connection with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds. In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which... justify, at any rate as an actual possibility, the ancient tradition of at least a temporary sojourn of the human conscious being in other worlds than the physical after the dissolution of the physical body. On the other side they open to us the possibility of an action of the higher planes on the material existence which can liberate the powers they represent, the powers of life, mind and spirit for ...
... the perfection of their physical body can come, not those who want to escape from life, escape from themselves, escape from their body to enter into the heights. That is why in the beginning the selection was very strict—it is widening little by little, with profit, I hope. We wanted only those who had truly taken it into their head that they wished to perfect their physical body, who understood that... often enough. Never say, "So-and-so does not do this", "So-and-so does something else", "That one does what he should not do"—all this is not your concern. You have been put upon earth, in a physical body, with a definite aim, which is to make this Page 117 body as conscious as possible, make it the most perfect and most conscious instrument of the Divine. He has given you a certain amount ...
... supreme divine self-discovery". The divine discovery is the discovery of the Divine in oneself. So man, that is, the mental being—for what we call man is a physical body with a mental being within, a mental being manifested in a body, a physical body—so the mental being has incarnated and become man in order to find within himself the divine Being, the divine Presence. Why? Are you asking why? It's... might say, or the most rapid, of being conscious of the Divine. And it is so true that even the great cosmic Individualities, when they want to be converted or to unite with the Origin, take a physical body for that, because it is more convenient for them, for it can be done faster and better than if they had to progress through all the states of being, from any one of the states of being in the universe ...
... illness force, then one can remain well even in the midst of plague or other epidemics—if the envelope is pierced or weak, then illness can come in. What you felt attacked was not really the physical body, but this nervous envelope and the nervous body ( prāṇakoṣa ) of which it is an extension or cover. A body is not a cloth—nor is a sick body a torn cloth. A body weak or sick can renew itself... s and subtle body before they enter the physical. If one is conscious of the subtle body or with the subtle consciousness, one can stop an illness on its way and prevent it from entering the physical body. But it may have come without one's noticing, or when one is asleep or through the subconscient, or in a sudden rush when one is off one's guard; then there is nothing to do but to fight it out... that gives you these pains. Remain always quiet and persist in opening yourself. The Force that releases you from the vital trouble, can also remove the disturbance in the nervous part and the physical body. The physical pain is obviously due to attacks—any physical Page 573 cause being only a means for the action of the attack. I have often seen that when the mind and consciousness ...
... of a Force to which the body is not accustomed but feels strongly. Here it was not the physical body that was being directly pressed, but the subtle body, the sūkṣma śarīra in which the inner being more intimately dwells and in which it goes out in sleep or trance or in the moment of death. But the physical body in these vivid experiences feels as if it were itself that was having the experience;... consciousness and that can remain in samadhi—one seems to be aware of the body, but it is really the subtle body and not the outward physical. But also one can go deep within and yet be aware of the physical body also and of working upon it, but not of outward things. Finally one can be absorbed in a deep concentration but strongly aware of the body and the descent of the Force in it. This last is accompanied ...
... 129 which the body is not accustomed, but feels strongly. Here it was not the physical body that was being directly pressed, but the subtle body, the sūkṣma śarīra in which the inner being more intimately dwells and in which it goes out in sleep or trance or in the moment of death. But the physical body in these vivid experiences feels as if it were itself that was having the experience;... life-force, some pressure for a change there. "The strength of the hand, the weight would not necessarily indicate that it was mine—for it was an experience not of the physical hand or in the physical body, but in the subtle realms of the being and there the Mother's touch and pressure might well be stronger and heavier than mine. The Mother does not remember the date, but one night about that period ...
... elimination of the intellectual response, involving a physical movement by which the thought ceases to descend into the area of the mental brain-stuff in the sukshma body environing the brain in the physical body and acts from the junction of the sukshma mind and the vijnana above the head, upon and above the sahasradala; Page 1048 (2) substitution of the inspirational for the intuitional stuff... vismriti. The opposite tendency of increase by continuity is not yet strong enough to get permanently the upper hand. There is also the habit of discontinuity which though no longer proper to the physical body is imposed on it by the mind of the Akasha of the surrounding [physicality] 8 and accepted through force of past habit. The old sanskara of the body that the Ananda must be discontinued to give... only partially, the intellect has a natural tendency to attempt to fill the place. Once again the ideal tapas has forced the fatigue out of the upholding prana. It now expresses itself in the physical body with a slight shadow thrown upon the prana. 17 May 1918 Script. "The extension of the ideality to T² in lipi, ideation, telepathy, tapas.. Enlargement of decisive trikaldrishti. Farther ...
... night owing partly to previous tapas the attack was neither so successful nor so forcible. Eye disease is now operating in the sukshma showing there its symptoms and trying to impress them on the physical body by the sraddha in the disease; it is combated by tapas and by sraddha in arogya and is not so far successful except very superficial[ly], and this slight superficial result is now more easily removed... rises. It is now quite evident that the source of disease is psychical, not physical; it is due to failure of tapas, idea of ill-health, weakness of the prana-shakti, faith in ill-health in the physical body. Faith with knowledge from the ideality is now powerful to combat it, though not yet entirely to eliminate; for the body is still subject to the mental suggestions from the outside forces. The... symptoms), but little manifestation in the body except depression and a sensation of weakness combated by the pranic tapas. Arogya force is changing to the ideal tapas, but not yet visibly in the physical body. Roga conquered in the evening. 13 July 1919 In the morning highest inspired revelatory gnosis and revelatory with inspirational basis take possession of lipi, thought-speech Page 1120 ...
... She only had to remain quiet for a moment and Sri Aurobindo was there, ‘very much present.’ They spent practically every night together ‘to carry out things.’ And as he no longer had to work in a physical body, he could move freely everywhere in the world and in all worlds, in many subtle bodies simultaneously. ‘He is as it were multiplied.’ But this encounter was special, completely new. It happened... processes of transformation went hand in hand. She found that the axis of the physical I, the referential axis in her body, was dissolving. Her body consciousness grew less and less restricted to her physical body; it was expanding, it was present in other things and in other persons. This was possible only by a transformation of the cells, which in their consciousness began to vibrate in attunement with... each part of their body, a microcosm, symbolically represented a part of the macrocosm. (One day, the Mother would even indicate where the Ashram as an entity was representatively located in her physical body: between the navel and the appendix.) In this Yoga we really get directly acquainted with the arcana, the hidden processes of the world, that incredible miracle. Everything is a miracle, a grain ...
... pass; at the end they see a bright light which some call God; everybody agrees on one thing: that they were enveloped by overwhelming love, the purest of love. None wants to return to his or her physical body. All lives are changed after the experience. 4. They are in the presence of the Highest Source some call God; they no longer need their ethereal shape for they become spiritual energy; they ... myself. I stood on the ship at the head of the gangway, calling the groups one by one and sending them ashore.” During this experience the Mother was suddenly interrupted and called back into her physical body by somebody in her room, and had at that instant a brief glimpse of herself. “My upper part, particularly the head, was not much more than a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange... than any myth, in which one sees the constant interaction of the three personalities of the Mother. In her conversations during the last years, as well as in the transformation of the cells of her physical body, it was unfortunately the human aspect that was most visible to human eyes. Day by day and year after year Sri Aurobindo fought his occult and spiritual battles without anybody around him being ...
... in 1 Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother, p. 434. 2 Savitri, Book VI, Canto II, p. 461. Page 416 the earth consciousness. She exposed Her own physical body representing the Earth-principle in evolution to the workings of this transforming Force.... She examined the reactions of the very cells in Her body to the influx of the Supramental Power and... on the body the status of a worthy mansion of the self-manifesting Spirit, "in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body, — the conquest of death, an earthly immortality". 1 Now, what are the attributes of this supramental substance that will render it immune to the ravages of decay and death? In the... an attribute of finally transformed Matter. The supramental body which has to be brought into being here has four main attributes: lightness, adaptability, plasticity and luminosity. When the physical body is thoroughly divinised, it will feel as if it were always walking on air, there will be no heaviness or Tamas or unconsciousness in it. There will also be no end to its power of adaptability: ...
... Force to which the body is not accustomed but feels strongly. Here it was not the physical body that was being directly pressed, but the subtle body, the sūksma śarīra in which the inner being more intimately dwells and in which it goes out in sleep or trance or in the moment of death. But the physical body in these vivid experiences feels as if it were itself that was having the experience;... change there. The strength of the hand, the weight would not necessarily Page 175 indicate that it was mine—for it was an experience not of the physical hand or in the physical body, but in the subtle realms of the being and there the Mother's touch and pressure might well be stronger and heavier than mine. The Mother does not remember the date, but one night about that ...
... that if the body is changed the next one will necessarily be better, is also a mistake. It is only when one has profited fully and to the utmost by the opportunity for progress which life in a physical body represents, that one may hope to be reborn in a higher organism. All defection, on the contrary, naturally brings in a diminution of being." (CWM, Vol. 16, p. 164) (Q. 10): Does the ... very small. Those who have returned are mainly the beings who, before leaving their body, asked to return in a new one." (Ibid., pp. 370-71) (Q. 21): After the dropping of his physical body, does a sadhaka come to the Mother? (A. 21): "To say that it is your body which separates you from me is sheer stupidity.... To think that if you leave your body you will come closer to... spiritually escape to some celestial world or even to merge himself in the repose of the Transcendent? (Q. 31): Does the soul never come to an end of its pilgrimage? Must it always take a physical body? (A. 31): "Not necessarily; but the soul needs to have achieved a before it has the power to choose whether to return to the physical life or to rest outside the manifestation." (CWM, ...
... The same remark holds for desires. In however subtle and attenuated a form desires must persist if the physical body has at all to function. For, as the Yoga-Vashishtha points out, desires form the supporting string for the formation of the garland of beads, which is no other than the physical body, and hence with the string gone, the body-garland vanishes in no time. 7 1 Sri Sri Ramakrishna... plane of relative consciousness. "When the Kundalini rises to the Sahasrara and the mind goes into samadhi, the aspirant loses all consciousness of the outer world. He can no longer retain his physical body.... In that state the life-breath lingers for twenty-one days and then passes out. Entering the 'black waters' of the ocean, the ship never comes back." 4 In his inimitable way Sri R ...
... Manifestation upon Earth, pp. 68-69. 2 The Life Divine, p. 988. 3 4 5 Ibid., p. 986. Page 18 guided by the Truth-Will of the indwelling Spirit. Man's physical body will thus be turned by the power of the Supramental Consciousness into an entirely conscious, "a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit". 1 As a result of this... and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda [would] of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical Nature." 2 The physical body of man will thus undergo a divine transfiguration and shine in the glories of "a pure and spiritualised physical existence". 3 And finally, as if to crown all other achievements, there... about for man the physical "conquest of death, an earthly immortality" 4 - "in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body." 5 For "from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; ...
... beings of other domains in the Universe, those, for example, Page 15 belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Over-mind, the demi-gods and even the gods are very eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they can have the experience of the psychic. These beings possess certainly many qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional... power, alienation from the origin and the utmost disdain for all that is pure and beautiful and noble. Those only, very rare, among them who wish to be converted do one thing immediately take a physical body. But Page 16 others do not want it; that ties them, restricts them to a rule which they refuse. ⁂ It is a fact—I do not like to say it often to him, for he... progress of his growth has ended. That is to say, it is no longer necessary for him to be reborn in a body. Till then reincarnation was obligatory. For it is in the physical life and in the physical body that he grows little by little until he becomes a wholly conscious being. But once he is completely formed, he is free, in the sense that he can, at will, take a body or not take. When ...
... being, so much so that beings of other domains in the universe, those, for example, belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, the demi-gods and even the gods are very eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they can have the experience of the psychic. These beings possess certainly many qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional... power, alienation from the origin and the utmost disdain for all that is pure and beautiful and noble. Those only, very rare, among them who wish to be converted do one thing immediately: take a physical body. But others do not want it; that ties them, restricts them to a rule which they defy. It is a fact – I do not like to say it often to him, for he has such a high opinion of himself that he... the progress of his growth has ended. That is to say, it is no longer necessary for him to be reborn in a body. Till then reincarnation was obligatory. For it is in the physical life and in the physical body that he grows little by little until he becomes a wholly conscious being. But once he is completely formed, he is free, in the sense that he can, at will, take a body or not take it. When a psychic ...
... actor: a mere puppet. Something a little taller than myself: its feet extended below my feet and its head went a little beyond my head. A solid block... one single piece. And it was denser than my physical body. 2 We shall often come across that particular feature. Already in Tlemcen, fifty years earlier, Theon had spoken of—and Mother had perceived—"a substance denser than physical Matter." What this... clouds of primordial gas? Real Matter, therefore, would be "denser" than the one we perceive through our senses.... Future experience will perhaps clarify this point. And within that density, the physical body seemed to me almost unreal—as though friable—like sand eroding away. 2 Obviously, if the supramental substance is to be molded in the way we have seen and if forms are to be able to change... life enter our life, true Matter enter our unclogged eyes and cells, and let in the true movement of Matter, its true malleability, its true light and warmth, its true form-creating power. The physical body appeared "friable" to me, Mother noted in her first experience. A formidable change of reality—without death. A formidable discovery, greater perhaps than the day the first hominid realized that ...
... far as it can be done." Are there limits to the transformation of the body? For the present, yes. But in the time, no. I am convinced that in two hundred years for example the physical body could be infinitely superior to what it is now — luminous, plastic, enduring, harmonious. . . And our effort of today would have made it possible. 2.1.1969 With progress in the Yoga... also the best way to surmount one's ego definitively. 10.5.1969 Page 88 Aspiration with no demands is becoming more and more interesting. Little by little the cells of the physical body have a constant élan that can be translated thus: "Whatever You want Lord, whatever You want." Without trying to know what it will be, without desire or preference of any kind, the... There is a very vague perception of a fantastic possibility: it is that one day the body could physically feel itself one with all existence. This is just the experience that this physical body (which is reading and writing here) is in course of having progressively. And I find it interesting that you came to know something of it without my ever having told you anything about it. ...
... of the body forces you out into the open spaces of the vital world. And you have no longer a defence; there is not the physical body any longer to rush back into far safety.”² The greatest spiritual achievement has to be made here, in this material world, in this physical body. Is the body dense and inert and reluctant ? The reason is that much of it is yet sub- merged in the obscurity of the... indisposition ceases, to give place to a well-being calm, deep and peaceful. ³ Regarding the protection the human body affords against the attack of the vital beings, the Mother says, "The physical body acts as a protection by its grossness, by the very thing we charge against it. It is dull and insensitive, thick, rigid and hard; it is like a fortress with strong dense walls. The vital world ...
... "Rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation...taking up a new body...that he (the psychic being) progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being.”¹ ¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII by Nolini Kanta Gupta. Page 94 After-death Journey... the fact of the soul's post-mortem journeying in the different worlds described in the religious books of India. What actually happens is that after death the soul continues to live in the subtle-physical body for some time—the time varies in each case—till the latter is dissolved. The soul then continues to live in the vital sheath, prāṇamaya koṣa, having experiences in the vital world. The vital... preparation/or the future. When the time comes for ¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part VII, by Nolini Kanta Gupta, Page 97 return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it made.. ,”¹ From above it surveys the earth atmosphere and can discern things, not, indeed, in their detail, but in their general contours. But the degree ...
... over and touched the earth and Savitri saw that "another luminous Satyavan arose", "forsaking the poor mould of that dead clay". He stood between Savitri and Death. It had no resemblance to the physical body of Satyavan but "the spirit knew the spirit still". He stood "like one who, sightless, listens for a command". The three powers stood in silence. Then "the impulse of the Path was felt",—the impulse... beyond". At first Savitri moved in a blind tangled wood and she seemed to move on earth but on its top, with thick obstacles of boughs of trees and leaves around her. But she felt the subtle physical body a burden. "Earth stood aloof, yet near". Then gradually the true Being in her freed itself from the earth atmosphere, and "into a deep and unfamiliar air" "they seemed to enlarge away"—away from... seemed as if Satyavan and Death would escape now. Then her "spirit soared at Satyavan" flaming from her body's nest—like "a fierce she-eagle." Her spirit separated itself from the body and the physical body fell into a trance. Now she Page 335 was not human Savitri; there was no Sun or earth, "All was the violent ocean of a will" "Where lived.. .her aim, joy, origin, Satyavan alone" ...
... luminous body into all the directions. Supreme Grace, Supreme Compassion and the Light of Grace are expressive of the secret truth that they hold the key for transformation of physical body into the deathless physical body of Grace in its eternal youthfulness. One has to live in the depth of the ocean of blissful Grace-light for getting transformed into the divine nature and as the divinised body... virtue (Punya) that on the first day of Tamil month Thai (14-1-1978), I had a continuous Vision between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. in my usual meditation in the night. The vision of dematerialization of the physical body of Swami Ramalingam into and as the Truth-Light of Supreme Grace which contains or possesses in itself Supreme Compassion and Bliss of Grace. Though I have had occasions to ascend into and... with its moon, stars and clouds. When he was thus absorbed in deep concentration, an effulgent Truth-Light of Grace broke out from his heart and with it’s unique Heat began to burn his radiant physical body very slowly, as if at a snail’s speed, and that in an upward direction, from the heart towards the head. The burning of the body may be somewhat likened to that of an incense-stick which however ...
... felt in the physical body are reflections of experiences of the subtle physical. What progress is needed to bring the experiences directly into the outer physical? I spoke only of the fact that what one feels recorded in the physical body may be actually taking [place] only in the subtle body. Whether in a particular case it is that or a direct experience in the physical body also, is a matter... penetrate the centres are recorded in the body and seem to be the body's experiences, but one has to distinguish between the reflection of the experiences there and the experiences that belong to the physical body consciousness itself. It is a matter of consciousness and fine discernment. There is no absolute law about the time. If one feels a fountain of Force rushing into the body, can it... sheaths only? Yes. Sheaths is simply a term for bodies, because each is superimposed on the other and acts as a covering and can be cast Page 114 off. Thus the physical body itself is called the food sheath and its throwing off is what is called death. Sometimes I feel the Force acting in the nerves, and also the nerves passing through different states ...
... before I can overcome this uneasiness.’ 12 These words cannot be interpreted in any other way than that the Mother already had a new subtle-physical body in 1954 besides and apart from her visible, gross material body. It was in this subtle-physical body that many saw her in their dreams and visions. ‘They see me like I really am,’ she said. The above quoted statements of May and September 1957... be transformed more and more. There is still a mystery between the two [between the gross physical and the subtle physical body]. A mystery. They are coexistent and yet … [gesture as of a link which is missing] the subtle physical seems to have no influence on this [the gross physical body]. There is still something that has to be found …’ 9 April 1969: ‘During the night the body is tall and... physical?’ ‘That is what I do not know,’ the Mother answered. ‘It was also evident that there was no longer a complicated digestive system like now nor the elimination as it is now … But how will the [physical] body itself change? I don’t know.’ Considering all this, it is evident that the Mother had a supramental body in the supramental world which was ready to be manifested upon Earth. The problem ...
... intermediary is necessary. Of this I am absolutely convinced by the experiences I have had. Two times it was a veritable seizure by the supramental world [of her physical body], and both times it was as if the body — and I mean the physical body — was going to be completely torn apart by what one could almost call the opposite of its condition.’ (15 October 1961) Be it noted that Sri Aurobindo has told... — not cancelled. But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical which is as living and tangible as her physical body even though not as concrete. In one of her last Notes [ Notes on the Way ] she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented in her vision. That body she has built up in... body] is a secondary effect.’ (29 April 1970) It would be difficult to keep asserting, taking into consideration quotations of this kind, that the Mother saw the transformation of her physical body as the goal of her sadhana. Besides, Sethna himself mentions the words of ‘a co-disciple’ who had written to him: ‘I have searched everywhere in all the available writings but nowhere the Mother ...
... of the body; they are supposed to be attached to the spinal cord; but in fact all these things are in the subtle body, sūkṣma deha , though one has the feeling of their activities as if in the physical body when the consciousness is awake. Chakras The thousand-petalled (head) lotus—Chakra or centre of the higher will and knowledge The lotus in the forehead—Will, vision, mental dynamism... it when it has no matter to touch? Dissolution? laya? When we speak of the Purusha in the head, heart etc., we are using a figure. The Muladhara from which the Kundalini rises is not in the physical body, but in the subtle body (the subtle body is that in which the being goes out in deep trance or more radically, at the time of death); so also are all the centres. But as the subtle body penetrates... above the physical, with the vital, mental, psychic and still higher worlds—the Muladhara and below with the physical and subconscient worlds (subconscient physical and sub-physical). The whole physical body of course belongs to the earth-world, but it is connected through these centres with the other worlds. According to our system the three lower centres are the vital, the lower vital and the ...
... parts in the gross physical. I spoke [ in the preceding letter ] only of the fact that what one feels recorded in the physical body may be actually taking place only in the subtle body. Whether in a particular case it is that or a direct experience in the physical body also, is a matter to be Page 496 seen in each case. One must distinguish for oneself which it is. Any reflection... attempt to do it or decide it with the Mind, before the Descent is an accomplished reality—for that would only retard the Descent and perhaps spoil the body. Experiences in the Subtle Body and the Physical Body It [ the higher consciousness ] can come into the physical consciousness direct in the sense that the rest can remain passive, but it must pass through the subtle to reach the material. ... the centres are recorded in the body and seem to be the body's experiences, 1 but one has to distinguish between the reflection of the experiences there and the experiences that belong to the physical body consciousness itself. It is a matter of consciousness and fine discernment. There is no absolute law about the time. It can be a rushing of Force into the subtle body which the physical ...
... entirely dependent on the action of the physical organs and functionings, such as the heart-beats and breathing. Hatha Yoga is an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. Yoga... knowledge relating to Kundalini. It takes into account the psychical or mental body of which the physical is a sort of reproduction in gross form and is able to discover thereby secrets of the physical body which do not appear to a purely physical inquiry. This mental or psychical body has also a subtle prānic force in it corresponding to its own subtle nature and substance, and this force is directed... corresponding to a plane of our existence, — these flow out and return in the stream of the pranic energies as they cross through the nadis. This arrangement of psychic body is reproduced in the physical body with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic centers as the charkas which rise up from the bottom of the column where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their summit in the br ...
... entirely dependent on the action of the physical organs and functionings, such as the heartbeats and breathing. Hatha Yoga is an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. ... knowledge relating to Kundalini. It takes into account the psychical or mental body of which the physical is a sort of reproduction in gross form and is able to discover thereby secrets of the physical body which do not appear to a purely physical inquiry. This mental or psychical body has also a subtle pr ā nic force in it corresponding to its own subtle nature and substance, and this force is... a plane of our existence, — these flow out and return in the stream of the pr ā nic energies as they cross through the n ā dis. This arrangement of psychic body is reproduced in the physical body with the spinal column as a rod and the ganglionic centres as the chakras which rise up from the bottom of the column where the lowest is attached, to the brain and find their summit in the ...
... the physical body, it was Mary, mother of Christ: nobody else was given this special privilege except Dante. In Indian tradition too there were some fortunate people who could go to Heaven in their physical body – Yudhishthira with his dog (who was not really a dog but Dharma metamorphosed) was one; Narada, Bibhishana, Ashwatthama and Hanuman – these went up only in their subtle physical body, they... We in India call it Vaitarani – "This water gives you a bath, a wash that removes your earthly tenement, your skin as it were, and leaves you bare with your inner body." We know however that the physical body, although an impediment in a way, is a sort of protection also to the human being in earthly life and blocks the way against any attacks from outside. It is a protective fort, so to say. After ...
... power also of overcoming physical limitations and developing a more perfect and divine instrumental body. The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. The physical body is a basis of action, which cannot be neglected or excluded from the spiritual Page 75 evolution. A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine being... and externalising Mind. The vital is divided into three parts, the emotional vital, the central vital and the lower vital. The physical refers to the material or physical consciousness and to the physical body. The thinking Mind is concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right. It reasons and perceives with ideas of infinity, eternity, unity, identity and self-contradiction. It considers... Volumes of 'Mother's Agenda', which is particularly related to that part of Integral Yoga which is concerned with the discovery and transformation of the mind of the cells, supramentalisation of the physical body, evolution of the next species, and mutation of death. This vast knowledge needs to be further explored. For the present, the reader may be referred to these Volumes as also to Satprem's biography ...
... not intended to be as it is, but that a self-contradictory spirit interfered at a certain stage and perverted it. My statement does not bear the meaning you give it. Supposing that this physical body has evolved on this planet in the way understood by Darwin ... It has nothing to do with Darwin. Page 645 yet it seems from inner knowledge that it was essentially an action of... to disturb it—a fact known to the Yogis and Rishis from early times. Forced opening by a vital or a hostile force means a forced opening and entering of the same force in our mental, vital, physical body. If you mean an invasion of the consciousness by a hostile force, that happens—but it cannot succeed unless something in the sadhaka either welcomes the invasion or is somehow attracted or won ...
... for a certain time, and then they begin to decline, and then disappear. It's because the physical body, physical matter as it is at present is not plastic enough to be able to progress constantly. But it is not impossible to make it sufficiently Page 205 plastic for the perfecting of the physical body to be such that it no longer needs disintegration, that is, death. Only, this cannot ...
... there are beings of other domains of the universe, those called by some people demigods and even gods, beings, for instance, of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, who are very eager to take a physical body on earth to have the experience of the psychic, for they don't have it. These beings certainly have many qualities that men don't, but they lack this divine presence which is altogether exceptional... these latter don't regret it, they don't want it. There are only those very rare ones, quite exceptional, who want to be converted, and for this they act without delay, they immediately take a physical body. The others don't want it; it is something which binds them and constrains them to a rule they do not want. But it is a fact, so I am obliged to state that this is how it is, that it is an e ...
... education, which will almost always be obstacles to its future growth. Therefore, I said here and I am repeating―it I thought I had been clear enough―that it was about the physical parents and the physical body I was speaking, nothing else. And that the soul which incarnates, whether it be in course of development or fully developed, has to struggle against the circumstances imposed on it by this animal... not how things happen. But anyway―anyway―even in the best cases, even when Page 202 the soul has come consciously, even when it has consciously participated in the formation of the physical body, still so long as the body is formed in the usual animal way, it will have to struggle and correct all those things which come from this human animality. Inevitably, parents have a particular ...
... mentioned here only as a matter of information. It is to enter into the domain of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of material existence with full knowledge. But for that one must be an initiate. Bulletin, February 1954 Page 87 Reply to Questions Raised by the last paragraph... material world. In order to take it up, one must possess special senses, for the domain in which it moves lies beyond our ordinary senses. These special senses are latent in men. Just as we have a physical body, so too we have other more subtle bodies with their own senses; these senses are much more refined and precise, much more powerful than our physical senses. But of course, as education does not ...
... material evolution, there must be behind it and there is a greater, a truer existence of which this is only the external result and physically sensible aspect. Our substance does not end with the physical body; that is only the earthly pedestal, the terrestrial base, the material starting-point. As there are behind our waking mentality vaster ranges of consciousness subconscient and superconscient to... from its mortal limitations, a physical life fit for a divine inhabitant and,—in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body,—the conquest of death, an earthly immortality. For from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into ...
... combining thought, of will, of sense, of emotion, of temperament and character, of ego feeling, which works upon a foundation of vital impulses, needs and cravings in the conditions imposed by the physical body. But it is not limited by them, since it can not only give them new directions and much variation, refining and extension, but is able to act in thought and imagination and a mental world of much... sense-image and mind as a conscious activity of life-experience. This soul in life is the vital conscious being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , which is capable of looking beyond the duration and limits of the physical body, of feeling an eternity of life behind and in front, an identity with a universal Life-being, but does not look Page 634 beyond a constant vital becoming in Time. These three Purushas ...
... wakened by previous yogic sadhana, the consciousness—veiled or obscure in most of us—which supports and forms there the vital sheath, the prāṇa koṣa . When this is awakened, we no longer live in the physical body alone, but also in a vital body which penetrates and envelops the physical and is sensitive to impacts of another kind, to the play of the vital forces around us and coming in on us from the universe... most notable of these more powerful but rarer phenomena are those which attend the power of exteriorisation of our consciousness for various kinds of action otherwise and elsewhere than in the physical body, communication in the psychical body or some emanation or reproduction of it, oftenest, though by no means necessarily, during sleep or trance and the setting up of relations or communication by ...
... "death" and "suicide" are relevant only to one who knows no state of existence apart from the material body. A Yogi in the full sense is precisely one who has, to say the least, transcended the physical body-formula. Mystical experience brings to light several "sheaths" other than the physical. The Yogi is awake in them at the same time he lives in the latter, and he can at any moment put his body in... supramental light that there is no sign of decomposition and the body will be kept lying on his bed so long as it remains intact." It is no use saying, as our reader does, that after death the physical body immediately begins to decay and cannot be kept intact by any act of grace and that if it did not decay something must have been applied to it. Nothing was applied or needed to be applied: what happened ...
... quibble about the word "death" and your insistence on "suicide" as a general term which, in spite of all subtle shades of difference, should cover the phenomenon of voluntary departure from the physical body, I think your statements rest on lack of proper information or of relevant experience. The sthula, suksma and karana sariras are not an arbitrary assumption. The Upanishads speak of them because... is one of the commonest experiences in Yoga. I myself have moved in it out of my sthula sarira scores of times, in as concretely conscious a manner as getting up from my bed and moving in my physical body! So, when you say that the well-known Upanishadic "psychotomy" is based on nothing but fancy, I can only smile and ask you to do a bit of Yoga. When you make sweeping assertions about what ...
... or lighten it to the point where some perception of the outer world clings to the skirts of the inner absorption. The perception in deep swapna is of the pranic basis of the physical body, but also often of the physical body made sensible to the sukshma mind and indriyas. There is also a direction towards the comprehensive many-planed samadhi. The whole major insistence throughout the day has been ...
... scientific transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another comparison, it could be said that the physical body is at the center—it is the most material and the most condensed, as well as the smallest—and the more subtle inner bodies increasingly overlap the limits of this central physical body; they pass through it and extend further and further out, like water evaporating from a porous vase which ...
... new level of consciousness became necessary. We find this confirmed in Sri Aurobindo. “Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own mental and physical body according to the needs and the pace of the human evolution and so appearing from age to age, yuge yuge ? In some such spirit some would interpret the ten incarnations of Vishnu, first in animal... Let us choose two snap-shots, two aspects of the Mother from the rich literature. During her experience of “the supramental ship,” in 1958, she was suddenly interrupted and called back into her physical body by somebody in her room, and at that instant she had a brief glimpse of herself. “My upper part, particularly the head, was only a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange fringe ...
... here the perfection of the soul of the sadhaks was no more than the first step; it had to be followed by the perfection of their character and body, and through them by the transformation of the physical body of Mother Earth. Sri Aurobindo had never felt much for the title of guru, and neither had the Mother. ‘I don’t trust the old profession of guru,’ she said, ‘I am not eager to be the guru of... Sri Aurobindo had in mind made further progress afterwards and that some of them, like Nolini, reached an advanced stage indeed. They were nevertheless still far from the transformation of the physical body — the reason why the ordinary eye could discern very little or nothing in them. They are the unknown heroes from the first phase of the transformation of the Earth; maybe they are now resting ‘ ...
... 1956, Sri Aurobindo’s birthday anniversary. The transformative presence of the mighty Supermind made itself felt. On 13 February 1957, the Mother talked about illness and its relation to the physical body. What came up in these “questions and answers”, twice a week at night, was always something happening in her own Yoga or in the inner life of the people around her – for all that was interconnected... had already said: “There are two things. There is the possibility of a purely supramental creation on the one hand, and [on the other hand] the possibility of a progressive transformation of a physical body into a supramental body, or rather of a human body into an overman body [surhumain]: In the latter case, it would be a progressive transformation which could take a certain number of years, probably ...
... g. in her talks at the Playground and in a series of encounters with a young disciple, Mona Sarkar, as reported by him in two slim volumes which he has called Sweet Mother I and II. The gross physical body is heavy, extremely limited in its possibilities, vulnerable, deficient in its perceptions, bound to its age, subject to illness and death, and not unjustly felt by some as a prison. The supramental... that determinates his vital being, full of fright, insecurity, egoism, aggression, cruelty. And it is his vital being that predominantly determines his mentalisations and thinking. Add to that a physical body subject to injury, illness and death, subject to a sexual urge that may be unsubduable, confused and insecure, and a life in the company of beings in the same tangled situation – and one has more ...
... divine body to appear in time. We content ourselves with picking up here one theme, the theme, we might as well say, of the Sphinx-like problem of death and dissolution of the individual's physical body. For, we have been assured by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that as a crowning achievement of the Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, there will come about 'the physical conquest of ... p. 172. Page 371 death, an earthly immortality', 1 — "in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body." 2 For, "from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; ...
... physical prepares itself for transformation. Ananda in the physical: may it be welcome, even if it manifests itself rarely. Ananda in the physical body: purified of all desire and all repulsion, in a perfect equality and surrender, the physical body is ready to enjoy the divine Ananda. Ananda in the centres: this will be one of the good results of the conversion of the physical. Page ...
... is nothing but the scientific transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another image, one can say that the physical body is at the center—it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest—and the inner bodies, more subtle, overflow more and more the central physical body; they pass through it, extending themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming ...
... 2 August 1952 It is a fact that the Godhead has always taken a physical body with the intention of transforming that body and making of it a fit instrument for His manifestation upon earth. But it is a fact also that, until now, He has failed to do so and for one reason or another He had always to leave that physical body with the work of transformation unfinished. In order that the Divine ...
... light, not like the golden light of the Supermind: rather a kind of phosphorescence. I felt that had it been night, it would have been physically visible. ...And it was denser than my physical body: the physical body seemed to me almost unreal—as though crumbly—like sand running through your fingers. ...I would have been incapable of speaking, words seemed so petty, narrow, ignorant. ...I saw ...
... certainty. For instance, to what extent does the presence of a physical body [Mother's body], in the world as it is now, act on the Work that is being done? To what extent?... Is it indispensable? Is it really indispensable? And if it is, what is the effect and the extent? In other words, are there things that one can do only in a physical body, or can the same things be done anyway (except we don't have ...
... defines more particularly though still in a broad manner thus: "There are two possibilities, the possibility of a purely supramental creation and the possibility of a progressive transformation of a physical body into a supramental body or rather that of a human body into a superhuman body; this progressive trans- formation might take a number of years, probably a very considerable number of years and produce... Aurobindo's were not yet visualised. She said: "The supramental body which has to be brought into being here has four main attributes: lightness, adaptability, plasticity and luminosity. When the physical body is thoroughly divinised, it will feel as if it were always walking on air, there will be no heaviness or tamas or unconsciousness in it. There will also be no end to its power of adaptability: ...
... world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to fully know and fully possess God—as it is said in the Gita, “To know Me integrally”. The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and Ananda, these are the spirit's five levels. The higher we rise the nearer we get to the condition of the highest perfection of Man's spiritual... practices that are extremely dangerous because they lead to an excited, exalted abnormal condition, and violently call down forces which the body cannot bear. They may lead to a breakdown of the physical body, the mind and the nervous system. As soon as I became aware of this turn, I warned him of the danger and prohibited the continuance of the practices. At first he attempted to follow my instructions ...
... 25 February 1952 It is a fact that the Godhead has always taken a physical body with the intention of transforming that body and making of it a fit instrument for His manifestation upon earth. But it is a fact also that, until now, He has failed to do so and for one reason or another. He had always to leave that physical body with the work of transformation unfinished. In order that the Divine ...
... 1952-10-03 It is a fact that the Godhead has always taken a physical body with the intention of transforming that body and making of it a fit instrument for His manifestation upon earth. But it is a fact also that, until now. He has failed to do so and for one reason or another, He had always to leave that physical body with the work of transformation unfinished. In order that the Divine ...
... sequence of events in the vital world, the world where one can go in deep sleep when one gets out of the body. So long as you have a body no true harm can happen to you in the vital world for the physical body acts like a protection and you can always return into it at will. This is expressed in the picture in a classical way. You will see that the little girl wears on her feet some magic red slippers... slippers and that so long as she keeps the slippers on her feet, nothing wrong can truly happen to her. The ruby red slippers are the sign and the symbol of the connection with the physical body and so long as the slippers are on her feet she can at will return to her body and take shelter therein. Two other details can be noted with interest. One is the snow shower that saves the party from the influence ...
... the Supermind in the supramental body. It was in the course of this "Yoga of the Cells" that the Mother discovered the "Mind of the Cells" which has the necessary capacity to reconstitute the physical body. This great yogic process has been described in thirteen volumes entitled "The Mother's Agenda", which consists of Mother's conversations with Satprem, one of her disciples, who had become her confidant... the Truth, the True Consciousness and to manifest it." Thereafter, she continued to accelerate the evolution of the new species, a task which is still continuing, even though she left her physical body on 17th November, 1973. Page 17 BIBLIOGRAPHY Sri Aurobindo: The Mother, volume 25 of the Centenary edition, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. The Mother: 15 volumes ...
... Supermind in the supramental body. It was in the course of this "Yoga of the Cells" that the Mother discovered the "Mind of the Cells" which has the necessary capacity to re-constitute the physical body. This great yogic process has been described in thirteen volumes entitled "Mother's Agenda", which consists of the Mother's conversations with Satprem, one of her disciples, who had become her... the Truth, the True Consciousness and to manifest it." Thereafter, she continued to accelerate the evolution of the new species, a task which is still continuing, even though she left her physical body on 17th November, 1973. 50 Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, SABCL, 1971, Pondicherry, Vol. 26, p.464. 51 Ibid., The Synthesis of Yoga, Vol. 20, pp. 377 8. 52 Ibid., The Life Divine ...
... immortality; the Rishis had described immortality as a state of the widening or universalisation of the physical consciousness as a result of the visitations of the supramental consciousness in the physical body. From the scientific point of view of yoga, it can be said that the discovery or rediscovery of the supermind by Sri Aurobindo could take place only if the supermind has objective reality; for then... supermind was not only a revisiting of the supramental realms of consciousness and power; he also found that the road to farther consequences of the visitations of supramental consciousness in the physical body were blocked; he also found that the Divine Will working in the evolutionary process required the necessity of removing that obstacle; as a result, Sri Aurobindo introduced a new objective in his ...
... the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds." (Ibid ., pp. 1499-1500) We are by now in a position to offer an occult-spiritual explanation of the phenomenon of dreams. In ordinary sleep, what hap pens is that our physical body falls into slumber for a period of time and only a ...
... sing divine love and solicitude. But who is there to console us now? Who shall guide and protect us? We have to seek for that consolation within our hearts. As Nolini says, "The Mother’s physical body was our protection; we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as a buffer.... Her body bore our burden and relieved us of the misery otherwise due to Us. Mankind... embodiment. "What is expected of us is to see this golden Mother within us and try to become as she always wanted, her golden children, within and without." Thus, though she has left her physical body, we have Still her golden body. Not that alone, even materially she has seen to it that we do not suffer from indigence in her absence. Our material prosperity has not been affected by her physical ...
... disciplines, this sense of an opening that made them invincible, this sense of exceeding oneself, of going beyond all limits, as if projected into the infinite — of flying without restraint in this physical body — as if entering into another dimension, into another plane of consciousness, — this sense of immortality. I see them, how this New Force has seized them to transmute their life, their attitude... divine life. For this He has invoked the Supreme, the Grace, to descend here below on this earth to help in His work. That is why, having heard His call, I have come down here into matter in a physical body, into this world of pain, suffering and death. And it is in the union of both of us that the world will witness gradually this miracle of a divine life. It is because of Him that I have descended ...
... ation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the... an immortal formulation of an immortal soul as energy consciousness with a specific role for the Divine to play. It maintains its identity, its personality independent of the vicissitudes of the physical body: it continues to function as a divine being, a godhead, to work for mankind and the world. The popular legend has imaged this phenomenon in the mystic figure of an immortal Aswatthama and Vibhishana ...
... physical discipline you secure a strong and beautiful body, even so by the inner discipline, by controlling your passions and impulsions you build an inner body strong and beautiful. Yes, even like a physical body you have a subtle body, a body as it were within this material frame. It is not, however, for that reason, something vague and imprecise, on the contrary, Page 43 it is very concrete... muscular exercises correspond to the exercise of your will and consciousness in regard to the inner body. The building up of the inner beautiful body has a great influence upon the building of the physical body, it adds something, it gives a feeling of inherent capacity, firmness and charm even to the physical frame. Many find it difficult at the outset to make the right movement even in the matter ...
... postponed—not cancelled. But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical, which is as living and tangible as her physical body, even though not as concrete. In one of her last "Notes on the Way" she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented to her vision. That body she has built up in her long... allowing her to do the work she has undertaken to do. 2 For us now it is time to make amends for the lapses of the past—there were lapses, indeed, grievous lapses. So long as her physical body was our protection, we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as a buffer: it broke the force of the impact of the Karma and reduced its evil effects to a minimum ...
... role in the working out of the evolution. The collaboration of her physical body has been withdrawn in order to leave us free in our physical movements so that we may learn to labour, and to labour in full freedom for the service expected of us. We Page 15 say she has withdrawn herself, that is to say, her physical body, but she is still here, and she being here, her very existence is ...
... your body. The body, your body, is also bound to the Mother, to her Presence and Influence. "Body" means not only the material body, but the subtle physical body, the inner body. Now, the imprint of the Mother's Presence you carry in this subtle physical body. You may not always be aware of it, but this makes no difference, none at all. Page 86 Here I may refer to something pertinent ...
... progress. Till then rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation—taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, it is free either to take birth or not to at will. There then one kind of progress stops... returns to the psychic world for the necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation for the future. When the time comes for return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it made, but from that higher and subtler plane at that moment the material world is not seen in the way we do, it appears in a different form; still one can ...
... Divine as a human person, the human person par excellence. Krishna's body is a radiant form of consciousness (chinmaya), no doubt, but it is as definite, determinate, and concrete as the physical body, it is the physical itself but in its true substance. And its exquisiteness consists in its being human in form. The Vedantin's Maya does not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness... identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an image— —a faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life,—of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the ...
... of his consciousness. Each human being is a soul, a psyche, a spark from the Spirit sent down into Matter, a ray from the Page 268 Divine Light descended upon earth and housed in a physical body. The spark, the ray is to attain the amplitude and splendour of its original form in the divine consciousness, to express that plenitude here below. This original, the archetype of each and every... variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure ...
... and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation... is meant by an ascension or emergence in the evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying Page 53 and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and higher status. The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth at such a crisis of evolution. Earth ...
... sees the Divine as a human person, the human person par excellence. Krishna's body is a radiant form of consciousness ( cinmaya ), no doubt, but it is as definite, determinate, and concrete as the physical body, it is the physical itself but in its true substance. And its exquisiteness consists in its being human in form. The Vedantin's Maya does not touch it, it is beyond the illusory consciousness. For... identity of its own. Each soul or Psyche is a contoured consciousness, as it were: it is not a vague indefinite charge of consciousness, but consciousness having magnitude and dimensions. And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an image – a faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life, – of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the ...
... after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory – the brain... itself elements of mind and vital and even subtle physical needed for the purpose of the particular life experience, and Page 204 even those that would go to constitute the physical body. The psychic being usually picks up these elements of mind and life and body out of the universal store-house of earth's atmosphere as it needs them, in the same way as it returns them there on ...
... consciousness merged into me. And it continued for hours and hours. Ah, it was so material an event that one cannot imagine. I cannot describe it… He has left everything for me. Well, it is this physical body which is limited, which is bound and which does not allow a free play. Once the consciousness enters into this ( the body ), it is completely restricted in this material form. But He, He is everywhere... this we decide. His presence is everywhere, wherever one needs Him. Everywhere, everywhere. He is united with me and at the same time he is in different places. He is not limited, it is only the physical body that is limited, but not the subtle physical. The subtle physical penetrates everything and can go everywhere. It is not limited by the body. It is this ( the body ) that limits. It is the mind ...
... feels also the splitting of the head in two or the bursting of. NIRODBARAN: Why can't the experiences come in quietly? SRI AUROBINDO: They do come in quietly but then you make a row. If your physical body or head were being split, you could object; but you ought to know by now that all these Yogic experiences are in the subtle body. NIRODBARAN: I also once or twice had such a fear as the lady... symbols. (Addressing Purani) You know W. Once in meditation he saw golden gods coming down and telling him, "We will cut up your body and make it new." He cried out, "Never! Never!" He thought his physical body will going to be cut up. But the symbolism is quite clear. It means that the old things in W's nature were to be thrown away and new things brought in. PURANI: I was surprised to hear that later ...
... events intervene before these things happen. Besides his physical body, man has several subtle bodies or sheaths about which most people are ignorant. And in the subtle worlds, there are innumerable separate entities, small and big, good and bad. In short, even when the soul has returned to its own world after the death of the physical body, the subtle sheaths may be taken hold of by subtle beings ...
... physical discipline you secure a strong and beautiful body, even so by the inner discipline, by controlling your passions and impulsions you build an inner body strong and beautiful. Yes, even like a physical body you have a subtle body, a body as it were within this material frame. It is Page 63 not, however, for that reason, something vague and imprecise, on the contrary... correspond to the excercise of your will and consciousness in regard to the inner body. The building up of the inner beautiful body has a great in fluence upon the building of the physical body, it adds something, it gives a feeling of inherent capacity, firmness and charm even to the physical frame. Many find it difficult at the outset to make the right movement even in the matter ...
... sinners remain always sinners. Here naturally you are not destined to remain sinners always. However, that atmosphere, the inner atmosphere still exists here. With the Mother's withdrawal of physical body that too might have withdrawn a little perhaps, a little only, just a few inches perhaps! But it is still there, for the Mother is there as concrete as before although not as material .. As I said... on. That is the child's call to the Mother and the Mother always responds-with her Light and Life and Love. You have been told, and I have also often told you, that although the Mother's physical body is not there, she has left her consciousness with us: the consciousness is still living, it is still working. She herself said even while she was in her body that if ever she left her body, her ...
... endowed with such plasticity that it can alter the form imprisoned in its rigid cage—truly speaking, death is rigidity. The deathless state, she said, is what can be envisaged for the human physical body in the future: it is constant rebirth. Instead of again tumbling backwards and falling apart due to a lack of plasticity and an incapacity to adapt to the universal movement, the body IS UNDONE... causes the perception of death and through its perception creates and engenders death and the whole blessed sequel. But Death is nowhere, it is at no point in physical space and at no point in the physical body. It is our perception that is deadly. Where is the root of that particular perception? But the problem is no longer that of changing something in Matter to prevent it from being mortal: ...
... Mirra spent a few months with them. Together they provided Mirra with the direct guidance she had sought and she made phenomenal progress in occultism. She was able with easy freedom to put her physical body into a trance, and awake in one after another of her various subtle sheaths, visit the supra-physical planes, in one or another of her subtle bodies. Once she left her body in Tlemcen, reached... material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms .... Page 23 She was ...
... wandering shell, His mind the many-frescoed outer court Of an imperishable Inhabitant." Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 5. Here we have the experience of the Self described wherein the physical body seems only the outer shell wandering from place to place in the enormous, unlimited spaces of the consciousness of Self, even from birth to birth. The next two lines describe in a compact expression... Tissue and flesh partook beatitude." Sāvitrī, Book III, Canto 4. The intensity of the experience of Delight and Power and its transforming influence penetrating right upto the physical body is vivid here. If this one gives us an experience of the higher consciousness and its nearness with at! the exaltation that accompanies it, there is another type in which Aswapathy comes down ...
... These things, of course, are not physical. Disciple : But why can't the experience come quietly? Sri Aurobindo : The experience comes quietly but you make a row! If your head or physical body is being split then you could object to it. You ought to know by now that Page 202 all these experiences are in the subtle body. Disciple : I had also once or twice such... (turning to X) You know V once in meditation saw that some golden beings came down and told him : "Now we will cut your body and make it new." He cried out : Never, never. He thought that his physical body was going to be cut. But the symbolism is quite clear : the old elements in the nature would be thrown away and new ones brought in. Disciple : I heard afterwards that he turned to Jainism ...
... outside. The force of the disease pierces, what the Mother calls, "the nervous envelope" and then enters the physical body. If one is conscious of the nervous envelope, – the subtle Page 89 nervous sheath, then the disease can be thrown away before it enters the physical body, as one throws away the thoughts before they enter the mind. Disciple : "X" told us once that she used ...
... spiritual life have been consistently characterized by an unfailing, downright practicality. Her ascent is an ascent of her whole integrated being, including the subtle physical— it is only the outer physical body that remains below; and the lengthening of her robe and the touching of it by those who implored her help and consolation—as we shall see presently - are as real, as vivid, as distinctive and decisive... compare with these two gems of spiritual realization. "The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made little by little, even in the most material sensation, all personal limits fall away. The being ...
... So that a spirit in the vital world, can have hunger which is practically insatiable. And there desire is not limited by the formula of material substance. There is no limit because there is no physical body to limit its working. We see something of it when a human being is possessed by some of these vital beings. It is said that Rasputin, the Russian monk, used to drink for the whole night and yet... holds in himself,—material substance, vital substance, mental substance. Man brings the whole evolved powers of the cosmos to a point; and his substance does not end with the body. A more perfect physical body, also, can be evolved if man admits the possibility. The body cannot be denied the possibility of changing into a higher substance than matter. Page 237 Questions and Answers ...
... the work. After quite some time, a few more people offered to assist and share the workload. I don't recollect clearly, today, whether these people volunteered while the Mother was still in Her physical body or after She had left. In any case, the next opportunity I got to talk to the Mother about the Music section came after quite a long gap when the Mother began to receive people again. When I stood... association with the Music section has enabled me to live through many events and incidents. Let me share with you some of these here. I am talking about the time when the Mother had left Her physical body. Once, a group of young students were dancing to some light music in front of the Drinking-water room in the school at about 4.30 in the afternoon when there was nobody around. Kireet-bhai, our ...
... the first instruction from Swami Vivekananda as to the direction for the later Tapasya. Eighteen years later, in 1926, he got the Siddhi of his Tapasya when Sri Krishna entered in his subtle physical body. That was the merging of the Overmental consciousness of Sri Krishna in the body of Sri Aurobindo. It was the eighteen years of his Tapasya that had brought down the Truth, like the eighteen... after 1950 and continue to do the work of Transformation? His was, exactly as written in Savitri, a destined death. Our death is also destined but His passing away is not like the death of our physical body. It is dying to Death itself. In 1961 the Mother had to battle with the Lord of Death or with Death itself. Like the debate between Death and Savitri in Savitri, the Mother too had to battle... divine life. For this He has invoked the Supreme, the Grace, to descend here below on this earth to help in His work. That is why, having heard His call, I have come down here into matter in a physical body, into this world of pain, suffering and death. And it is in the union of both of us that the world will witness gradually this miracle of a divine life. It is because of Him that I have descended ...
... and, while I was coming back, saw just for a quick while a huge golden Form. Yes, it was a huge golden Form. I saw it only for an extremely short duration. 17:03:1994 I was in the physical body of Sri Aurobindo; the Mother was doing some work in me. My psychic being went to the Transcendent; yes, to the Transcendent—and about it I was told afterwards. But I do not know which part of... and made the surrender. From some point of the universal the surrender is made by coming out and offering itself. But now the work is in the physical. For that to happen the spirit of my physical body must wake up; it must become conscious. It is that which will receive the higher power and be an instrument for its working. I must be aware of this spirit. I suppose that is what is meant... for about five minutes and then came out. When I came out Sri Aurobindo asked me: "Did you see me? Or, were you simply looking at the photo?" When you go to Sri Aurobindo's Room in your physical body, and not just mentally which you can do without walking into the Room, the physical should also receive something from him. Otherwise we can always go there in our consciousness. Then Sri ...
... . ‘Earthquakes of the soul,’ Sri Aurobindo called them. That was one of the main places where the Mother had to do the work for the world. It was one of the reasons why she had taken up the physical body which she now no longer considered hers. There she worked ‘in the lowest layers of senselessness.’ ‘I think that not one human being would be able to stand the sight of what has been shown to me... ill, she underwent the process of transformation. An illness is a powerless regression into a malfunctioning of the adhara by which the harmony of its functions is disrupted, and by which the physical body becomes restricted in its life-powers and even, in case of death, deprived of them. As far as the Mother was concerned, however, the ‘malfunctioning’ was a voluntary and always totally conscious... World Wars and know where the elements of the new fermentation have to be looked for, namely in the Power operating behind the supramental transformation, having then as its centre the transformed physical body of the Mother that had become one with the world. The transformation, the supramental mutation in her cells vibrated also in everything in the world that was attuned to it. There were new wars ...
... how would one be able “to be here and there at the same time”? How would one be able “to communicate with many people at the same time”? In other words, how would one be able to be godlike in a physical body? Already in the very beginning of The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo, taking the example of “wireless telegraphy”, predicted that “the physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical... Supreme.” 14 The whole material body had to be permeated by the Divine. This was, of course, the supreme siddhi , and if it is true that every siddhi has an influence, a repercussion on the physical body, then the supreme siddhi must have a supreme, absolute influence. The Mother’s day-to-day experiences were baffling and could not have been possible without her avataric Yoga and, yes, the solidity... function and afterwards a completely new, unknown way of functioning … Who could stand that? And all these changes, suspensions and transformations of course caused a considerable upheaval in the physical body – an upheaval making itself felt by pain. On the one hand there was the glory of the transformation, on the other the terror of it – heaven and hell alternating, sometimes in one and the same moment ...
... unequivocal: some great spiritual beings may have had partial supramental realizations (siddhis) in their mental or vital bodies that showed in their physical body; some may even have had this kind of temporary personal siddhi in their physical body. The generation of a new supramental species, nevertheless, cannot have taken place before because it presupposes a change in the substance, in the Matter... as personalities in the usual sense of the word. × By combination or conglomerate is meant her physical body. × According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother there are no permanently fixed, ineluctable laws ...
... strange activiti (26.2.1991) To answer your questions, we must first get them into proper perspective. You say that now that the Mother is not in her Page 279 physical body the Darshan Days - 21 February, 24 April, 15 August, 24 November - which, according to you, were reserved by her to shower special grace, do not have the same old obligatory and indispensable character... power she can exercise now on the universal scale was always there? There was always the Universal Mother as well as the Transcendent Mother in addition to the Individual Mother as manifested in a physical body. The embodied individual Mother's working put no bar to the working of her Page 281 other aspects. They were not impeded in any way. Her embodiment was something extra - it was... cannot but be a little discontented with what goes on in the absence of the Mother's embodiment. Indeed a great deal of positive life goes on and, as she once told me, one could feel her subtle-physical body with great concreteness if one were sufficiently sensitive; yet one can't be so receptive as a rule. Naturally then for people like me the Mother's withdrawal is a heavy loss. And even for those ...
... theory. 2 As a matter of fact, however, we find a great difference; for the old theories affirm, the modern denies rebirth as a part of the universal process. Modern thought starts from the physical body as the basis of our existence and recognises the reality of no other world except this material universe. What it sees here is a mental consciousness associated with the life of the body, giving... gross physical form by its organisation at once individualises and houses the animal mind and life. On the former supposition, we must admit that the animal too survives the dissolution of the physical body and has some kind of soul formation which after death occupies other animal forms on earth and finally a human body. For there is little likelihood that the animal soul passes beyond earth and enters... conscious individualisation does not seem sufficient to bear such a transfer or to adapt itself to an other-worldly existence. On the second supposition, the power thus to survive the death of the physical body in other states of existence would only arrive with the human stage of the evolution. If, indeed, the soul is not such a constructed personality evolved by Life, but a persistent unevolving reality ...
... inner being or the psychic entity. But that does not mean that they are entirely isolated from the soul. The soul is in the body in the same way as the mind or vital—but the body is not this gross physical body only, but the subtle body also. When the gross body falls away, the vital and mental sheaths of the body still remain as the soul's vehicle till these too dissolve. The soul of a plant or an... fragment of his vital structure that is seized on by some force or being of the vital world for its own purpose. For normally the vital being with its personality exists after the dissolution of the physical body for some time only; afterwards it passes away into the vital plane where it remains till the vital sheath dissolves. Next one passes in the mental sheath, to some mental world; but finally the soul... of the psychic. Yes, the psychic being has a form. But that does not appear from the photo [ of a person ]; for the psychic has not always or usually a form closely resembling that of the physical body, it is sometimes even quite different. When looking at the photo [ with Yogic vision ] what is seen is not a form, but something of the consciousness that either is expressed in the body or comes ...
... planes are situated in the consciousness of general Nature. It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into connection with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds. In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which... here has, supporting it, Page 129 subtler envelopes or forms of itself which make it subsist and connect it with forces acting from above. Man, for instance, has, besides his gross physical body, subtler sheaths or bodies by which he lives behind the veil in direct connection with supra physical planes of consciousness and can be influenced by their powers, movements and beings. What takes... middle and lower vital, mental.. Each plane is in communication with various worlds that belong to it. The appearance of the being in other planes is not the same necessarily as that of the physical body. Very often the form taken by the vital or psychic or mental being is very different from the physical form. Even when they resemble on the whole, there is always some difference. Page 132 ...
... the highest aim of a mental being born into a physical body. First existence has formed itself here, fundamentally, as Matter; it has been objectivised, made sensible and concrete to its own self-experiencing conscious-force in the form of self-dividing material substance, and by the aggregation of this matter there has been built up for man a physical body separate, divided from others and subject to... upon us and our world, has its powers and its beings, is related to us through our mental body. There we find the psychical and mental heavens to which the Purusha can ascend when it drops this physical body and can there sojourn till the impulse to terrestrial existence again draws it downward. Here too are many planes, the lowest Page 455 converging upon and melting into the worlds below ...
... weakness after fever). Page 655 17 October 1914 The fever expelled in the morning. No progress during the day— Strong attack on prana sharira at night, but no fever in the physical body, only strong "surexcitation" & uneasiness & broken sleep. Progress in swapna samadhi. 18 October 1914 As yesterday, but no farther attack. This time little reaction of weakness. Only... advancing, though mechanical touches of depression of a purely physical order still continue.. Preference in Tapas is still accompanied by vague reactions in the outward nervous consciousness of the physical body, but these are merely a survival of the old habit. There is a great mass of true samata behind in which titiksha, udasinata & nati are fused into a complete harmony of shanti. The perfect Ananda... indicated first by a reference) became strong & spontaneous in the evening & so continued with a slight break till sleep. Tivra inflicted on another subtle body was communicated to this physical body in the waking state. This usual[ly] happens only in Samadhi. Subjective Ananda is now ready to possess the physical prana. Dream coherent, but chiefly a combination of old familiar thoughts ...
... elementary things? Man has not a gross ( sthūla ) visible body only, but a subtle body ( sūkṣma deha ) in which he goes out of the sthūla deha at his death. The navel is the vital center in the physical body—but the native seat of the vital is in the vital sheath of the subtle body, which sheath it pervades, but for action through the gross body its action is centred at the navel and below it. 16... creative powers can have a repercussion on the supraphysical levels. 10 April 1934 I have always believed that there was an existence after death akin to our existence in this world minus the physical body. The soul goes out in a subtle body. On the strength of certain phenomena that did not appear to me to be capable of being summarily dismissed, I further believed that after a period of... psychic as a seed-saṁskāra or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state? Page 128 It is only meant that the separative ego is not a creation of birth in the physical body; the mental and the vital have it also. So long as the mental and vital are subject to ignorance, the ego will last also. When the psychic being goes into rest it naturally takes it with the essence ...
... are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother's wings. How does the physical body act as a protection? The physical body acts as a protection by its grossness, by the very thing we charge against it. It is dull and insensitive, thick, rigid and hard; it is like a fortress with strong dense walls... same forces that are the cause of your misery in this life. The dissolution of the body forces you out into the open spaces of the vital world. And you have no longer a defence; there is not the physical body any longer to rush back to for safety. It is here upon earth, in the body itself, that you must acquire a complete knowledge and learn to use a full and complete power. Only when you have done ...
... Needless to say, it is a subject which could fill volumes, no two cases are alike: practically everything is possible in the life after death as everything is possible on earth when one is in a physical body, and all statements when generalised become dogmatic. But still one may look at the problem in some detail, and sometimes one makes interesting discoveries. The question is like this: "When... leaving the body. The question here was about fully developed beings, that is, fully developed psychic beings—and I don't know if it means a psychic being which has profited by its presence in a physical body to do yoga, for then the conditions are quite different. But in a more general way, I have often told you that, with regard to the external envelope of the being, everything depends on its attitude... capable of receiving and assimilating it, and in order not to stop its material work when it leaves one body, it goes and joins another psychic being, merges with it, combines with it in another physical body; that is an extreme case, extremely Page 336 rare also, but one which forms part of an altogether traditional occult knowledge—to the instance at the other extreme, where the soul having ...
... thing is that this kind of work, this harmonisation and organisation of the being around the divine Centre can only be done in a physical body and on earth. That is truly the essential and original reason for physical life. For, as soon as you are no longer in a physical body, you can no longer do it at all. And what is still more remarkable is that only human beings can do it, for only human beings... usually called "gods"; and when they want to do it, when they really want to organise themselves and become completely conscious, they have to take a body. And yet, human beings come into a physical body without knowing why, most of them go through life without knowing why, they leave their body without knowing why, and they have to begin the same thing all over again, indefinitely, until one day ...
... like subtle perfumes. Naturally, those who have an inner vision can see, but for the most material senses there Page 129 is not—how shall I put it?—not the permanence given by the physical body as we know it materially. There are phenomena, yes, that can even be seen, but they are fleeting. There is no stability, the stability in matter, the fixity has not been acquired. I mean there... be the most permanent in the subtle physical world, more so than the perception of form—and also a certain sense of contact which is very, very concrete. Only, this heavy material presence of a physical body which occupies an absolutely definite and concrete place and prevents any other thing from occupying the same place, this does not yet seem to be possible; therefore, what has so far been achieved... Ah! Excuse me, you must not confuse things. There are two things. There is the possibility of a purely supramental creation on one hand, and the possibility of a progressive transformation of a physical body into a supramental body, or rather of a human body into a superhuman body. Then it would be a progressive transformation which could take a certain number of years, probably a considerable number ...
... domains of the universe, those called by some Page 25 people demigods and even gods, beings, for instance, of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, who are very eager to take a physical body on earth to have the experience of the psychic, for they don't have it. These beings certainly have many qualities that men don't, but they lack this divine presence which is altogether ... these latter don't regret it, they don't want it. There are only those very rare ones, quite exceptional, who want to be converted, and for this they act without delay, they immediately take a physical body. The others don't want it; it is something which binds them and constrains them to a rule they do not want. But it is a fact, so I am obliged to state that this is how it is, that it is an... because he was hungry, for a concrete, material thing, for food. This is a very old story, but it is eternally true. 28 — The Mother * ... from the very moment of birth in a physical body, there is in the being, in its depths, this psychic presence which pushes the whole being towards this fulfilment [discovery of one's divine Self], But who knows it and recognises it, this psychic ...
... inner being or the psychic entity. But that does not mean that they are entirely isolated from the soul. The soul is in the body in the same way as the mind or vital—but the body is not this gross physical body only, but the subtle body also. When the gross body falls away, the vital and mental sheaths of the body still remain as the soul’s vehicle till these too dissolve. Sri Aurobindo Letters on... there are beings of other domains of the universe, those called by some people demigods and even gods, beings, for instance, of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, who are very eager to take a physical body on earth to have the experience of the psychic, for they don’t have it. These beings certainly have many qualities that men don’t, but they lack this divine presence, which is altogether exceptional... But these latter don’t regret it they don’t want it. There are only those very rare ones, quite exceptional, who want to be converted, and for this they act without delay, they immediately take a physical body. The others don’t want it; it is something, which binds them and constrains them to a rule they do not want. But it is a fact, so I am obliged to state that this is how it is, that it is an ...
... events and similar characters in the vital world, the world where one can go when the body is in deep sleep, when one gets out of the body. So long as you have a physical body, no true harm can happen to you in the vital world, for the physical body acts as a protection, and you Page 244 can always return into it at will. This is shown in the picture in a classical way. You will see that the... feet some magic ruby-red slippers, and so long as she keeps the slippers on her feet nothing wrong can happen to her. The ruby-red slippers are the sign and the symbol of the connection with the physical body, and as long as the slippers are on her feet, she can, at will, return to her body and find shelter therein. Two other details can be noted with interest. One is the snow shower that saves the ...
... receive the new life. To discipline oneself is to hasten the arrival of this new life and the contact with the supramental reality. As it is, the physical body is truly nothing but a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self. But this physical body is capable of progressive development; through each individual formation, the physical substance progresses, and one day it will Page 31 ... once it has arrived at the summit of its development, is free to choose not only the time of its incarnation, but the place, the purpose and the work to be accomplished. Its descent into the physical body is necessarily a descent into darkness, ignorance, unconsciousness; and for a very long time it must labour simply to bring a little consciousness into the material substance of the body, before ...
... the way to progress; these generally, right at the outset, cannot choose much, but when they have arrived at a certain degree of growth and of consciousness (generally while they are still in a physical body and have had a certain amount of experience), they decide at that time what their next field of experience will be like. I can give you some rather external examples. For instance, a psychic... leaving, it says: "Next time, it is in this domain that I shall take birth...." Suppose, for example, the psychic has reached a stage of growth when it would like to have the chance of working on the physical body to make it capable of coming consciously into contact with the Divine and of transforming it. Now, it is about to leave the body in which it had authority, power, activity, the body it has used... like that." That is not how things happen. But anyway—anyway—even in the best cases, even when the soul has come consciously, even when it has consciously participated in the formation of the physical body, still so long as the body is formed in the usual animal way, it will have to struggle and correct all those things which come from this human animality. Inevitably, parents have a particular ...
... had remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much profound spiritual knowledge (profound rather than wide, I think)—I would not swear to it that he is referring to the supramentalised body (physical body). Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping him and abolishing this body of death which he felt the... non-physical, but it is a physical that I do not know! And it is not the substance as we know it now, particularly not the construction that we know now. I do not know, but if it must be a physical body, as Sri Aurobindo has said; it seemed to me (but perhaps it is day-dreaming) that it might be like a lotus-bud for example; our present body is like a lotus-bud that is quite small, closed, hard;... That is to say, in essence, a life which escapes from the necessity of renewing itself: that it is the eternal Force which manifests itself directly and eternally, and yet it should be this, a physical body ( Mother touches her skin with her fingers ). I understand very well a progressive change and that one could make of this substance something which might renew itself from within to the outside ...
... in an "improved physical body." I wondered about that... especially when you speak of "switching to a new body." What were you wondering? This, in particular: The difference between the present human body and the supramental creation is so considerable, the substance must be so different... Of course. ...that I am wondering to what extent even an improved physical body could be of use... by drawbacks. I have also looked at the problem—it doesn't make any difference. Switching to a new body may become a necessity, that's all, but it's secondary. What I meant by an "improved physical body" is that sort of mastery over the body that's being gained nowadays through physical training. I have seen lately magazines showing how it had started: the results in the beginning and today's results; ...
... remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much profound spiritual knowledge (profound rather than wide, I think)—I would not swear to it that he is referring 1 to the supramentalised body ( physical body ). Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping Page 216 him and abolishing this body of death... know if it's nonphysical, but it's a physical I am unaware of! And it's not substance as we now know it, and especially not the construction we now know. I don't know, but if it has to be a PHYSICAL body (as Sri Aurobindo said it would), it seemed to me (but that may be a daydream) that it could be like a lotus bud, for example: our present body is like a small, closed, hard lotus bud, and... it... of immortality.... Which means, basically, a life that escapes the necessity of renewal: the eternal Force would manifest Page 220 directly and eternally, and this would still be a physical body ( Mother touches the skin of her hands ). I quite understand a progressive change and that this substance could be made into something capable of renewing itself eternally from within outward ...
... attainment but can be learnt by the wise. Page 583 The second method used by Hatha Yoga is the Pranayama. Pranayama is known to eliminate disorders and malfunctioning in the physical body, but is not entirely effective at the beginning if some imbalance is present. Especially if there is a defect in the proportion of the three humours of the body as defined by Ayurveda (kapha or... called lotuses or chakras (circles) which rise in an ascending line to a summit, the "thousand petalled lotus " from where all vital and mental energy flows. This pattern is reproduced in the physical body: these centres are situated along a main channel (the sushumna nadi), in the centre of the spinal cord, that rises from the bottom of the vertebral column upto the brain. Usually, due to... consequences for the perfection of the spiritual, mental, vital and physical perfection. A divine life in a divine body would be the ideal of the integral Yoga. In the integral Yoga, perfections of the physical body would be a part of the totality of attainments, although the methods of Hatha Yoga may not prove to be indispensable. And yet, methods of Hatha Yoga can optionally be employed in the total processes ...
... power also of overcoming physical limitations and developing a more perfect and divine instrumental body. The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. The physical body is a basis of action, which can not be neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution. A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine being living on earth... and externalising Mind. The vital is divided into three parts, the emotional vital, the central vital and the lower vital. The physical refers to the material or physical consciousness and to the physical body. The thinking Mind is concerned with ideas and knowledge in their _____________ ¹ Ibid., p. 70. Page 253 own right. It reasons and perceives with ideas of infinity, eternity ...
... Bohm has also proposed that health is the result of the harmonious interaction of all the analyzable parts which comprise the explicate order'— the cells, tissues, organ systems, and the entire physical body — with the external environment. For Bohm, health is harmony, a quality ultimately grounded, as are all things, in the totality of the implicate order, and not in the particulate things themselves... material body, and that a fuller flowering of health will ensue. To transcend health care, to experience health as irrelevant, is not to neglect it. It is rather to regard all matter, including one's physical body, as alive Page 120 and beyond health, grounded with conscious thought in the implicate domain. Rather than engendering an abusive disregard for the flesh, this point of view is more... of parts, since all parts, which consist of matter, are ultimately enfolded in the implicate order, and thus consist of an indivisible whole. 7. The focus of health care is on the physical body. Consciousness is a secondary and irrelevant factor 7. Both matter and consciousness are enfolded in the implicate order, where all things are one. Thus, all matter is to some degree conscious ...
... extended sense of which Dr. Joules speaks ? Sri Aurobindo : Yes. That kind of story is current about many yogis. It is, of course, due to the psychic sense – which is not limited to the physical body – but the intensity of it is due to something else. 12-6-1924 There was talk about a poem written by Mrs. Maud Sharma, wife of Thakur Dutt Sharma. It was a poem on a "chair". ... is the question. If he is not conscious then the action must be mediumistic. Disciple : How is he able to move an object while remaining at a distance ? And how is he able to leave his physical body and with his vital body make himself felt somewhere else? Sri Aurobindo : Tremendous vital force is necessary to move an object at a distance. The Mother had such an experience in... require another form? Sri Aurobindo : Another physical form may not be required. What I can say, at present, is that all the physical functions would have to be transformed. The present physical body is "stupid" compared to what is required of it for Supramentalisation. 26-12-1925 There was a letter from a Sadhaka at Chittagong describing his experience and asking for guidance ...
... connection between the body and the soul. For the Hathayogin, the body is indeed "a mystic bridge between the spiritual and the physical being", and his whole aim is to awaken (he soul in the physical body and make it realise the purity, power, light, and freedom that are native to it. Through the disciplines of āsana and prānāyāma - in other words, through the systematic and complete control... and self-mastery Page 553 and also to awaken the reserves of power in the inconscient depths of the physical nature: The whole energy of the soul is not at play in the physical body and life, the secret powers of mind are not awake in it, the bodily and nervous energies predominate. But all the while the supreme energy is there, asleep; it is said to be coiled up and slumbering... to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the Ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amrta. Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret ...
... composition is. double: we have two bodies, two lives, two minds and two souls. They are derived from the involutionary and evolutionary movements of Spirit. We have a gross physical body, annamaya śarīra, and a subtle physical body, s ū kṣma or linga, śarīra; a life-force working in our gross body and conditioned by its past evolution in Matter, and a s ū kṣma or subliminal life, which is larger... upon the decisive stages of the evolution of its nature. Death is only a signal, may be an abrupt and violent signal in a majority of cases, for a shift of scenes, and nothing more. When the gross physical body drops, the being passes into the subtle physical, and from there into the vital world. It exhausts its vital Karma in the vital world, and then passes on into the mental. When the mental formations ...
... perfection is its absolute insistence on the invulnerability of the gross physical body to all attacks of the forces of disruption and disintegration in the material world. It is not any kind of dematerialisation that is held up as the ideal, or the assumption of a bright, etheric body, but the divinisation of the physical body itself in all its cells and nerves and constituting elements and energies... is, on the contrary, intimately connected with it; and if the centres that link our gross body with the subtle and the causal could be opened up, there would be no end to the perfection of the physical body—the infinite potentialities of the kārana or causal sheath would be automatically actualised in the gross. Hathayoga, Râjayoga, Tantra etc. opened Tip some of these centres, but the highest ...
... way to another stage of evolution." But how? By what MEANS? And that's where one of Mother's sentences had very much struck me. In fact, it was the key for me. One day, she said: "This physical body is capable of a progressive development in evolution. Through each individual formation (in other words, what we have undergone through evolution), the physical substance progresses...." And she... added: "And one day, it will be capable of making a BRIDGE between physical life as we know it and the life we might call supramental, as Sri Aurobindo did, the life of the next species – it's the PHYSICAL body that will make the BRIDGE." It isn't on the summits of consciousness above, on a razor-sharp point – so sharp it ends up dissolving, vanishing – that one actually moves to something else. ... that vastness. And that is why I was suddenly confronted with a very pressing and agonizing question, which propelled me back from my Himalayas to... to Her who had said: "It's in the body. The physical body is the BRIDGE." And this despite... everything that made me cringe – those walls, that ashram, all that conditioning which seemed to me as pointless in the East as it is in the West. Anything ...
... events and similar characters in the vital world, the world where one can go when the body is in deep sleep, when one gets out of the body. So long as you have a physical body, no true harm can happen to you in the vital world, for the physical body acts as a protection, and you can always return into it at will. This is shown in the picture in a classical way. The little girl wears on her feet some magic... magic ruby-red slippers, and so long as she keeps the slippers on her feet, nothing wrong can truly happen to her. The ruby-red slippers are the sign and the symbol of the connection with the physical body, and as long as the slippers are on her feet, she can, at will, return to her body and take shelter therein. Two other details can be noted with interest. One is the snow shower that saves the ...
... Sri Aurobindo "dying" cannot but be as inward, as profound as Sri Aurobindo living. No Yogi dies in the ordinary meaning of the word: his consciousness always exceeds the formula of the physical body, he is beyond and greater than his material sheath even while he inhabits it, and his action on mankind is essentially through his free and ample spirit to which both life and death are small masks... lacked a full and organised possession of the Supermind's purpose and power: the fusion of the supramental light with the inmost soul and the descent of it into mind and life-energy and even the physical body, transforming and divinising them in entirety, are Sri Aurobindo's special discovery and Yoga. With the supramental descent Sri Aurobindo aimed at creating a new humanity enjoying true self-consummation ...
... your will: there, too, distance is less rigid, but the movement is not immediate: the will has to be exercised. Inevitably, (in a dream) a wound received in the vital being is translated in the physical body.... If you receive a blow in the vital, the body suffers the consequence. More than half of our illnesses are the result of blows of this kind... men are not conscious of their vital.... If one... goes to its source and can cure oneself in a few hours. In dreams, you must remember that you are in the space and time of the vital world and not to try to act as if you were still in your physical body. One of the characteristics of activity in the vital space and time is that these beings are able to assume huge shapes at will and create the vibration of fear in you which is their most powerful ...
... body for my spiritual growth and I became more Hindu-oriented. This was all realized towards the end of the 1960s. Could you describe the atmosphere of the Ashram when Mother was still in her physical body and the difference since that time? I feel the main differences are 1) daily life from the balcony darshan onwards focussed on and around Mother’s physical presence. We also had to ask permission... beginning. Don’t begin, as many do, with the Agenda. When I asked Mother in 1961 what I should read first, she said Essays on the Gita. Is there a disadvantage in never having seen Mother in her physical body? Surely there must be. She could look at you deeply and know who you were and choose the right work for you. I would not have chosen the paper factory for myself. I would have said “Put me in ...
... her passing away. She had prepared us for it a long time ago. You may ask, “How did she prepare you?” I am unable to explain it. And the days pass so quickly. Though the Mother's absence in a physical body cannot be denied, yet I do not feel at any moment of the day or night that she is not present. When I look at it, I am surprised to see myself in the state in which I am. I feel her presence... presence even more concretely now than when she was physically present. It is very, very, very concrete. Only one with the right vision perceives or feels what Mother has done by leaving that physical body—and the work she is doing. It is not an imagination. It is a living experience. I live in her infinite Grace! Bliss! Bliss! Bliss—in body and in mind! Wonderful! Wonderful! Simply wonderful! I am more ...
... self does not live, as we feel in our surface consciousness, in a private and solitary inner world circumscribed by the physical body and separated from all that is beyond the body, but is connected with the entire cosmos. The individual is not limited to the physical body — it is only the Page 363 external consciousness which feels like that. As soon as one gets over ...
... wideness and with it for the things now asked for—direct contact with the truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body. Even in Europe the existence of something behind the surface is now very frequently admitted but its nature is mistaken and it is called subconscient or subliminal, while really it is very conscious... altogether exceeds it. The highest of the inner centres is in the head just as the deepest is the heart; but the centre which opens directly to the Self is above the head, altogether outside the physical body, in what is called the subtle body, sūksma śarira. This Self has two aspects and the results of realising it correspond to these two aspects. One is static, a condition of wide peace, freedom ...
... her conversations of the last years and concluding what she means by je, ‘I’. In her case this pronoun may refer to any of the stances she was taking at the moment, from the physical body to the being in the physical body, to the Mother in the sadhana, to the Universal Mother in any of her aspects or emanations, to the very Supreme identified with ‘the Lord.’ ...
... earth's atmosphere" - that is, the subtle-physical plane, which is the plane closest to the earth - until the work he had undertaken is fulfilled. According to the Mother, he is there in a subtle-physical body very much like the form he had before but now perfect, "with the light of immortality upon it". At present the Mother too must be taken to exist on that plane in the same manner and active in the... often brought about surprising results. Of course we cannot expect a recognisable Page 98 solution every time. But neither did such a miracle happen when the Mother was in her physical body, though I have the faith that in all circumstances an answer from her was always there in some form or other we didn't immediately recognise. Our inner life is helped in however secret a way and ...
... has drawn so sharp a contrast between what he terms the "physical body" and the "spiritual body" of the "resurrection", that a critical student may well ask: "Can the sudden appearance of Jesus in the midst of closed doors which two out of the four later-written Gospels report on hearsay be attributed, as these Gospels claim, to his physical body?" An occult phenomenon may strike one as the most likely ...
... go and that she must stay to fulfil their Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation. 1 Most certainly the Supramental Transformation includes as its crown and climax a supramentalised physical body. Sri Aurobindo looked upon his "Integral Yoga" as the swift-moving concentration of the Yoga which Nature has been doing over the aeons, and he clearly laid down in the very first chapter of The... that the Supermind is "involved" in Matter along with the principles of Mind and Life and must inevitably evolve just as these principles did. Sri Aurobindo regarded the supramentalisation of the physical body as the ultimate goal of the Yogic endeavour in which he and the Mother were engaged. It was understood that they had come upon earth to be the pioneers of a total supramentalisation: they would ...
... presence and bring back the direct experience of their scenes and truths and occurrences. It may even project actually the mental or vital body for the same purpose and travel in it, leaving the physical body in a profoundest trance without sign of life until its return. The greatest value of the dream-state of Samadhi lies, however, not in these more outward things, but in its power to open up easily... normally eclipsed by the insistence of the physical being, becomes powerful even in the waking state, until even there the enlarging man is able to live in his several subtle bodies as well as in his physical body, to be aware of them and in them, to use their senses, faculties, powers, to dwell in possession of supraphysical truth, consciousness and experience. The sleep-state ascends to a higher power ...
... physical being; one has even seen an ingenious exegete of the Hathayogic discipline explain the Vedantic symbol OM as a figure of this mystic human body. Although, however, he speaks always of the physical body and makes that the basis of his practices, he does not view it with the eye of the anatomist or physiologist, but describes and explains it in language which always looks back to the subtle body... whole aim of the Hathayogin may be summarised from our point of view, though he would not himself put it in that language, as an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt here in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. ...
... mixture of forces. That is why the writing is so often stupid—Not in the same way. It is not that I despise the physical world or physical means—Do that in your physical body. Yes—try to have it as far as possible...I am not like you in a physical body. I shall take it at the proper time. Thousands of times. Do not ask that; it goes too deep. It means that there are things for which neither you nor I are ...
... psychological evolution itself determines and in a way prepares its own mental and physical body. The soul prepares its own body, the body is not prepared for it without any reference to the soul. Are we then to suppose an eternal or continual Avatar himself evolving, we might say, his own fit mental and physical body according to the needs and pace of the human evolution and so appearing from age to ...
... wideness and with it for the things now asked for,—direct contact with the Truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body. Even in Europe the existence of something behind the surface is now very frequently admitted, but its nature is mistaken and it is called subconscient or subliminal, while really it is very conscious... altogether exceeds it. The highest of the inner centres is in the head, just as the deepest is the heart; but the centre which opens directly to the Self is above the head, altogether outside the physical body, Page 325 in what is called the subtle body, sūkṣma śarīra . This Self has two aspects and the results of realising it correspond to these two aspects. One is static, a condition of ...
... ble, not to make the least movement when you wake up; you must learn to wake up in a state of complete immobility, otherwise everything disappears. Has the mind need of rest apart from the physical body and the physical brain? Yes, an absolute need. And it is only in silence that the mind can receive the true light from above. I do not think that the mental being is liable to fatigue; if it... bodily rest, the repose of the muscles) three minutes of that state were equivalent to eight hours of ordinary sleep. Does the vital body also need rest? Yes. The vital body surrounds the physical body with a kind of envelope which has almost the same density as the vibrations of heat observable when the day is very hot. And it is this which is the intermediary between the subtle body and the ...
... before it can affect the physical body, touch another layer of the being that surrounds and protects it. This subtler layer is called in different teachings by various names,—the etheric body, the nervous envelope. It is a subtle body and yet almost visible. In density something like the vibrations that you see around a very hot and steaming object, it emanates from the physical body and closely covers it ...
... the suffering and disease of mind or body to which the physical being is subject in Nature. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Physical Consciousness The vital body surrounds the physical body with a kind of envelope which has almost the same density as the vibrations of heat observable when the day is very hot. And it is this which is the intermediary between the subtle body and the... ess and subtle body before they enter the physical. If one is conscious of the subtle body or with the subtle consciousness, one can stop an illness on its way and prevent it from entering the physical body. But it may have come without one’s noticing, or when one is asleep or through the subconscient, or in a sudden rush when one is off one’s guard; then there is nothing to do but to fight it out ...
... wideness and with it for the things now asked for - direct contact with the truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body. Even in Europe the existence of something behind the surface is now very frequently admitted, but its nature is mistaken and it is called subconscient or subliminal, while really it is very conscious... altogether exceeds it. The highest of the inner centres is in the head, just as the deepest is the heart; but the centre which opens directly to the Self is above the head, altogether outside the physical body, in what is called the subtle body, s ū ksma ś arira. This Self has two aspects and the results of realising it correspond to these two aspects. One is static, a condition of wide peace, freedom ...
... there are beings of other domains of the universe, those called by some people demigods and even gods, beings, for instance, of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, who are very eager to take a physical body on earth to have the experience of the psychic, for they don't have it. These beings certainly have many qualities that men don't, but they lack this divine presence, which is altogether exceptional... But these latter don't regret it they don't want it. There are only those very rare ones, quite exceptional, who want to be converted, and for this they act without delay, they immediately take a physical body. The others don't want it; it is something, which binds them and constrains them to a rule they do not want. But it is a fact, so I am obliged to state that this is how it is, that it is an ...
... mentioned here only as a matter of information. It is to enter into the domain of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of material existence with full knowledge. But for that one must be an initiate." What do you want to say? You have not understood what I meant?... I am not surprised! Has... the most material domain. One needs special capacities and a special development to be conscious in that domain, for it escapes our ordinary senses. We have subtle senses; even as we have a physical body, we have other more subtle bodies which also have senses, and Page 38 much more refined senses, much more precise and much more powerful than our physical senses. But naturally, as it ...
... those which have been formed, at present—for example in Jupiter there would be an atmosphere of ammonia and carbonic gas... Yes. So the formation is not the same after all? (Pavitra) The physical body, evidently, organic matter cannot be the same. Yes, the one people usually know... (Pavitra) ... cannot be the same. Cannot be the same, you see. Are there psychic beings up there... Mother, can we go to the other planets by occult means? Ah! Yes, one can go everywhere. What prevents us from going? One goes everywhere. Only, you see, we must know that it is not the physical body which goes; it is the most material thing... the most material vital; and this is already very difficult. Usually it is the mental part of the vital which goes out; not the mind, the vital. For ...
... change into your likeness, what do You do? 4 May 1970 I did not understand what You wrote yesterday. What Sri Aurobindo calls "the image" is the physical body. So I asked the Lord what He does when He wants to transform the physical body, and last night He gave me two visions in answer. Page 352 One concerned the liberation of the body consciousness from all the conventions regarding ...
... space." Mother wrote to the class:) I read what you sent with interest. And here is my reply: Death is the phenomenon of decentralisation and dispersion of the cells which make up the physical body. Page 340 The consciousness is, by its very nature, immortal, and in order to manifest in the physical world, it assumes more or less lasting material forms. The material substance... part of the being becomes aware that one is dead? Any part of the being that survives can become aware that the body is no longer there. It depends. How can one tell for certain that the physical body is dead? Only when it decomposes. How can one control or prevent the process of disintegration? By carefully maintaining the physical balance. When one dies, does one necessarily ...
... and the other two, the Lord of Death and the Lord of Falsehood, made an attempt at conversion by taking on a physical body—they have been intimately associated with my life. The story of these Asuras would be very interesting to recount ... The Lord of Death disappeared; he lost his physical body, and I don't know what has become of him. 1 As for the other, the Lord of Falsehood, the one who now rules ...
... are She,' at the same time he bestowed upon my body this attitude of absolute authority. But as I had the inner vision of this truth, I concerned myself very little with the imperfections of the physical body—I didn't bother about that, I only used it as an instrument. Sri Aurobindo did the sadhana for this body, which had only to remain constantly open to his action. 1 Afterwards, when he left... learning to work. I am only an apprentice, simply an apprentice—I am learning the trade! Page 155 ( Soon afterwards ) In a considerable number of people, it is their body, the physical body, that obstinately resists. The difficulty is greater for Westerners than for Indians. It's as though their substance were steeped in falsehood. It also happens with Indians, of course, but generally ...
... this envelope and the circumconscient are one and the same thing, but this is how Sri Aurobindo speaks of it: 'The first thing one sees when one has broken the barrier is the vital-physical body. It is around the physical body and with the physical it forms as it were the "nervous envelope." The force of a disease has to break through it to reach the body—except for the attacks on the most material parts ...
... Mother’s Agenda 1951-1960 November 28, 1958 ( Extract from the last Friday class ) As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self, but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; the physical substance progresses through each individual formation, and one day it will be able to build ...
... the consciousness descends through all the states of being down to the most material, bringing the Divine Force with it so that the Force can transform the whole being and finally divinise the physical body. 20 September 1967 In the message for the radio You substituted the word "union" for the word "unity". 5 May I know, Sweet Mother, why this change was made? Because most people... send back into the manifestation the spark that extinguishes itself in Him? Naturally, each time that one makes a rule one makes a mistake. Besides, although he has not taken up another physical body, the Buddha himself has returned to work in the earth-atmosphere. 26 July 1968 Page 382 If the universe is one, shouldn't the liberation of one single person on earth have ...
... between the two appears really possible only through the entry—the conscious and willed entry—of a supramentalized consciousness into a body that we could call an "improved physical body," in other words, the human physical body as it is now, but improved: the improvement produced, for instance, by a TRUE physical training, not in its present exaggerated form but in its true sense. It's something I ...
... Mother’s Agenda 1965 June 18, 1965 You remember what I had said? That it would be an improved physical body that would make the transition between the human body and the supramental body?... 1 Last night Sri Aurobindo told me in his own way that it was correct, that it was true. It was very interesting. Very i... × Satprem meant that he found it hard to see how the new substance, nevertheless very different from Matter, could be prepared through gymnastics for the physical body. × Mother is perhaps referring to "ionized matter"? ...
... Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared..." Another letter 21 says: "The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I... Grace-Light Ramalingam must have had a remarkable result in his subtle form, as compared to most other Yogis of the past, but even there the supramentalisation could be no more than partial. As for the physical body, the consequences are bound to have been still less — Page 52 certainly the powerful sense of a rare glory outflowing from the inner self yet as certainly falling short of any ...
... had sent this reply wrote back: "I did not understand what you wrote yesterday." Mother replied again (on the 9th): "What Sri Aurobindo calls 'image' is the physical body. So I asked the Lord what He does when He wants to transform the physical body, and last night He answered me by giving me two visions. The one was about the liberation of the body consciousness from all conventions regarding death; ...
... Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared..." Another letter 21 says: "The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I... Grace-Light Ramalingam must have had a remarkable result in his subtle form, as compared to most other Yogis of the past, but even there the supramentalisation could be no more than partial. As for the physical body, the * Letter to the author by Satprem after an interview with the Mother. Page 12 consequences are bound to have been still less - certainly the powerful sense of a ...
... Sri Aurobindo "dying" cannot but be as inward, as profound as Sri Aurobindo living. No Yogi dies in the ordinary meaning of the word: his consciousness always exceeds the formula of the physical body, he is beyond and greater than his material sheath even while he inhabits it, and his action on mankind is essentially through his free and ample spirit to which both life and death are small masks... lacked a full and organised possession of the Supermind's purpose and power: the fusion of the supra-mental light with the inmost soul and the descent of it into mind and life-energy and even the physical body, transforming and divinising them in entirety, are Sri Aurobindo's special discovery and Yoga. With the supramental descent Sri Aurobindo aimed at creating a new humanity enjoying true self-consummation ...
... goal is to discover and explore the body, and through the body awaken the consciousness of the entire being and all the parts that form it. Exploring parts of the being We address the physical body by working with the senses and through exercises that promote fluidity, space and expansion in joints and tissues of the Page 418 body. By helping the children to internalise the senses... developing an awareness of the inner being in all parts and actions of our personality, our consciousness begins to become an instrument of our soul rather than remaining primarily in the domain of our physical body, mind and emotions. Developing an awareness of the witness attitude—the observer within— stands central in all our work with Awareness through the Body. It is a never-ending process, a theme ...
... ss in the body, and although they succeeded in widening and universalizing body consciousness, they came to the conclusion that one cannot enter into the Supramental consciousness fully in the physical body. There is also a mention in the Upanishads43 that if one enters into the Supramental Consciousness fully, one cannot return from there into the bodily life. In the case of Socrates, we find... explorer of consciousness and the architect of a new world. "Man is a transitional being" and therefore a possibility of a Divine life on earth, not only in mind and life force but also in the physical body, was a discovery he made through his intensive exploration of consciousness, a search to which he devoted his entire life. In 1914, The Mother (Mirra Alfassa) (18781973) met Sri Aurobindo, and ...
... own force of consciousness the world and man in their endeavour for progress and evolution, to give the help wholly and completely from the innermost status of the self down to the most external physical body and the material field. This help again is a twofold function. The first is to make available, gather within easy reach, the high realisations, the spiritual treasures that are normally stored in... the conditions of mortality, show thus by his living and labour that this earthly earth can be transformed into a heavenly earth and this human body into a "body divine". Matter or the physical body is not by itself the centre of gravity of the human consciousness; it is not that that pins the soul or the self to the life of pain and misery and incapacity and death. Matter is not the Evil, ...
... ation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the... an immortal formulation of an immortal soul as energy consciousness with a specific role for the Divine to play. It maintains its identity, its personality independent of the vicissitudes of the physical body: it continues to function as a divine being, a godhead, to work for mankind and the world. The popular legend has imaged this phenomenon in the mystic figure of an immortal Aswatthama and Vibhishana ...
... the mystic of the Mahabharata: "No time ripens for me, time is not my Lord." 1 It is worth noting in this connection what the Mother has pronounced on the subject of indefinite durability of a physical body: "What is quite worth noticing is that one must change one's sense of time if one is to be in the state of consciousness where waste does not exist; you enter into a state where time... Bulletin, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, pp. 73, 75. Page 411 this doom of physical mortality . But does this mean that a Siddha of this Yoga has perforce to keep the same physical body for ever and for ever? Evidently not, and this we have pointed out already in Chapter IV ("Mortality and Immortality: The Real Issue"). What we seek to achieve in our Yoga is not the irrevocable ...
... him in a physical body, the solution becomes relatively easy. He has only to place his problem before his Guru and ask for his direction. The only point of uncertainty in this case is whether the sadhaka would like or be able to carry out the Guru's guidance against all possible hesitations of his blindly arrogant egoistic promptings. When the Guru is not present in his physical body, the sadhaka ...
... multiplied with the passage of time. Many new questions come up in their mind demanding precise and immediate clarifications. When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were present in their physical body, the sadhakas of those days used to put before them directly or in writing their individual questions and waited for specific replies. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo also, in their infinite Grace... Compassion, used to answer all those questions and the sadhakas concerned would be satisfied with these solutions and clarifications. But now, when both of them have withdrawn from their physical body and many of the sadhakas have not yet been able to establish direct inner contact with the Master and the Mother, they wonder where to find the right solutions. Yet they vaguely feel that Sri Aurobindo ...
... spiritual principle. But this theory involves two paradoxes. Firstly, the hourly creation of beings having a beginning in time but no end in time and, moreover, being born by the birth of the physical body but somehow not ending with the dissolution of that body. Secondly, these individual beings are arbitrarily given a ready-made mass of qualities, virtues, vices, capacities, defects, temperamental... Pythagorean transmigration of the soul. It accepts the existence of many supraphysical worlds of manifestation and the possibility of the human soul moving to these worlds after the dissolution of the physical body. Thus the necessity of constant immediate rebirth is avoided and the soul's capacity for passage to other worlds followed by a subsequent return to terrestrial birth is admitted. But even this modified ...
... may we speak for hundred autumns, may we hear for hundred autumns, and may we even live more than hundred autumns." In another hymn. the seeker prays for spiritual well-being supported by the physical body and nourished by contentment of all the organs and limbs made capable of stability for the entire span of life. The secrets of longevity and perfect health were known to the Vedic seers and they... emphasis on the concept of health as a condition of happiness which transcends mere worldly happiness. It looks upon the human being as a whole consisting of body, mind and spirit. Even the gross physical body is conceived as consisting of dhatus, substances, which are rather subtle in character. It declares that dhatus consist of Vata (wind), Pitta (bile), Kapha (phlegm). They also include ...
... and opening to the yogin, fields of consciousness, ranges of experience, abnormal faculties and striking results of control and mastery over the physical body. The secret of Page 51 the Hatha Yoga lies in its idea that the soul in the physical body can, by fixed scientific processes, develop power, light, purity, freedom and an ascending scale of spiritual experiences if it dwells more and ...
... (c) Vastness, synthesis and globality. 10-B. Intelligent Will should grow to achieve: (a) perseverance and endurance; (b) dynamism and heroism; (c) equality and mastery. 10-C. Physical Body should grow to achieve: (a) health; (b) strength; (c) agility; (d) plasticity; and (e) grace and beauty. But this is not enough. There is in us a central being, who is the... Page 46 10-B. Intelligent Will should grow to achieve: a) perseverance and endurance; b) dynamism and heroism; c) equality and mastery. Page 47 10-C. Physical Body should grow to achieve: (a) health. (b) strength Page 48 (c) agility (d) plasticity and (e) grace and beauty. Page 49 But this ...
... and circulation, of assimilation and rejection—have to be turned, obviated, neutralised so that man may be actually, physically a citizen of the world. Now the discipline that the physical body is made to undergo at present in order to accustom itself to high flying may one day point to the way for a new adaptation and disposition for the body. As it is, the disruption that has been made... expressing its reactions in the instabihty of the balance so long enjoyed by man. That is to say, the modern man physically lives or soon will have to live under a new set of circumstances and his physical body has to undergo a change commensurate with its habitat or it will have to disappear. Page 14 The cosmonauts are teaching us at least the possibility of a new, almost a ...
... respiration and circulation, of assimilation and rejection—have to be turned, obviated, neutralised so that man may be actually, physically a citizen of the world. Now, the discipline that the physical body is made to undergo at present, in order to accustom itself to high flying, may one day point to the way for a new adaptation and disposition for the body. As it is, the disruption that has been... expressing its reactions in the instability of the balance so long enjoyed by man. That is to say, the modern man physically lives or soon will have to live under a new set of circumstances and his physical body has to undergo a change commensurate with its habitat or it will have to disappear. The cosmonauts are teaching us at least the possibility of a new, almost a revolutionary acclimatisation ...
... direction. Still it is a fact: so much so that beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi-gods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are anxious to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it. These beings have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an ... got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have it. There are, however, a few exceptional beings on this level who wish to be converted and therefore desire a physical body; but the rest do not want, they are bound to the law of their being and cannot repudiate it. So I say and we are bound to admit that it is an exceptional virtue in the human being to bear ...
... and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation... is meant by an ascension or emergence in the evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying Page 52 and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and higher status. The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth at such a crisis of evolution ...
... and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation... transformation which is what is meant by an ascension or emergence in the evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and higher status. The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth at such a crisis of evolution. Earth ...
... is in your body. The body, your body, is also bound to the Mother, to her Presence and Influence. Body means not only the material body, but the physical body, the inner body. Now, the imprint of the Mother's Presence, you carry that in this physical body. You may not be always aware of that, but this makes no difference, nothing at all. Here I may refer to something pertinent…One day someone went ...
... respiration and circulation, of assimilation and rejection – have to be turned, obviated, neutralised so that man may be actually, physically a citizen of the world. Now, the discipline that the physical body is made to undergo at present, in order to accustom itself to high flying, may one day point to the way for a new adaptation and disposition for the body. As it is, the disruption that has been... expressing its reactions in the instability of the balance so long enjoyed by man. That is to say, the modern man physically lives or soon will have to live under a new set of circumstances and his physical body has to undergo a change commensurate with its habitat or it will have to disappear. The cosmonauts are teaching us at least the possibility of a new, almost a revolutionary acclimatisation of ...
... the frontal role in the working out of the evolution. The collaboration of her physical body has been withdrawn, in order to leave us free in our physical movements so that we may learn to labour and labour in full freedom for the service expected of us. We say she has withdrawn herself, that is to say, in her physical body, but she is still there, and her being there, her very existence is force, a ...
... cancelled. But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical which is as living and tangible as her physical body even though not as concrete. In one of her last Notes2 she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented to her vision. That body she has built up in her long arduous labours... the work she has undertaken to do. (2) For us now it is time to make amends for the lapses of the past – there were lapses, indeed, grievous lapses. So long her physical body was our protection; we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as buffer: it broke the force of the impact of the karma and reduced its evil effects to a minimum ...
... progress. Till then rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation i.e. by taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, Page 398 it is free either to take birth or not to do so at will. There... it returns to the psychic world for the necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation for the future. When the time comes for return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it had made, but from that higher and subtler plane at that moment the material world is not seen in the way we see it, it appears in a different form; still one ...
... direction. Still it is a fact: so much so that beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi-gods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it. These beings have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional... got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have it. There are, however, a few exceptional beings on this level who wish to be converted and therefore desire a physical body; but the rest do not want, they are bound to the law of their being and cannot repudiate it. So I say and we are bound to admit that it is an exceptional virtue in the human being to bear the ...
... here at this place was the Divine himself or herself, in a physical body. Nowhere else they could have this vision, this direct contact; that was what prompted them to come here. We had had, poor human creatures, this great opportunity for years. I have always spoken of it, the presence of Page 3 the Divine in a physical body. Even if you did not know, something in you knew and the ...
... after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory—the brain mind—with... down upon earth, it calls round itself elements of mind and vital and even subtle physical needed for the purpose of the particular life experience, and even those that would go to constitute the physical body. The psychic Page 69 being usually picks up these elements of mind and life and body out of the universal storehouse of earth's atmosphere as it needs them, in the same way as it ...
... remain always sinners. Here naturally you are not destined to remain sinners always. However, that atmosphere, the inner atmosphere, still exists here. With the Mother's withdrawal of the physical body, that too might have withdrawn a little perhaps, a little only, just a few inches perhaps! But it is still here, for the Mother is here as concretly as before although not as materially. As I said... on. That is the child's call to the Mother and the Mother always responds—with her Light and Life and Love. You have been told, and I have also often told you, that although the Mother's physical body is not here, she has left her consciousness with us: her consciousness is still living, it is still working. She herself said, even while she was in her body, that if ever she left her body, her ...
... subliminal Page 215 self. In the life also, there is an outer vital personality and an inner vital being, you can say, a subliminal vital being. There is a subtle physical body behind this gross physical body. Desire-soul is the projection of the psychic being in this world of ignorance—in the mind, life and body. When it withdraws the desire-soul and comes to the surface then it can ...
... mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the disgust and despair of even the greatest of spiritual men. Hathayoga, rightly practised, gives considerable control over the physical body, but not over the whole physical nature; and even the best control acquired by Rajayoga is neither conquest nor conversion. The bitter truth has to be admitted that no amount of spiritual... but share in this imperfection.” "Whatever therefore may be the possible degree of perfection, consciousness and knowledge that our deeper being possesses, the simple fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation. And yet, the incarnation has for its goal precisely the victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter.”¹ The perception ...
... body; they are supposed to be attached to the spinal chord; but in fact all these things are in the subtle body, ' Sukshma Deha ', though one has the feeling of their activities as if in the physical body when the consciousness is awake. "³ * * * In the process of our yoga the centres have each a fixed psychological use and general function which base all their special powers and... mind and opening upward to intuitive and overmind."5 " When we speak of Purusha in the head, heart, etc, we are using a figure. The Muladhara from which the Kundalini rises is not in the physical body, but in the subtle body (the subtle body is that in which the being goes out in deep trance, or more radically, at the time of death); so also are all the centres. But as the subtle body penetrates ...
... transformed when Brahmashakti herself has taken a human form in this world of Falsehood, and Brahman himself is present in the form of Sri Aurobindo. When Sri Aurobindo was preparing to leave his physical body one of his attendant-sadhaks courageously asked: “Are you not using your Force to cure yourself?” “No,” he answered. Everyone was thunderstruck. The sadhaks imagined that they had probably... being churned out from within us and thus They were protecting the world and humanity. Every time the Mother has come down into this physical world, Brahman too has been present near Her in a physical body. Where there is Parvati, there is always Mahadev, Shiva. Where there is Ishwari, there is also Ishwara. Even though two they are in fact One. One cannot exist without the Other. The Mother has clearly ...
... September 1915 LETTER OF THE MOTHER TO SRI AUROBINDO The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in... God in life. ... If we cannot rise above, that is, to the supramental level, it is hardly possible to know the last secret of the world and the problem it raises remains unsolved . . . . The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda – these are the spirit's five levels. The higher we rise on this ascent the nearer to man comes the state of that highest perfection ...
... Aurobindo said, that this instrument [the physical mind] is useless, it can only be got rid of.... It was very difficult to get rid of it because it was so intimately linked to the amalgam of the physical body and its present form that when I tried and a deeper consciousness [of the other state] wanted to manifest, it caused fainting. I mean to say that the union, the fusion with the other state, without... through billions of years of pain: to be at once the point and the totality. Now, this habitual human coagulation which we call the physical mind was “so intimately linked to the amalgam of the physical body and its present form,” said Mother, “that when I tried to get rid of it, it caused fainting.” You are spread out into the cosmos. A new principle of coagulation or centralisation had therefore ...
... BODY would be thus a participator and agent in its own transformation... 1 Next, an extraordinarily illuminating text of Mother's: As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; through each individual formation, the physical substance progresses, and one day IT WILL BE CAPABLE OF ...
... A Letter of The Mother to Sri Aurobindo: The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made little by little even in the most material sensation all personal limits fall away. The being pr... world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully possess God - to do what is said in the Gita, 'To know me integrally'. The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the super- mind and the Ananda - these are the Spirit's five levels. The higher we rise on this ascent the nearer to man comes the state of that highest perfection ...
... mechanical reactions and responses to outward impacts have always been the disgust and despair of even the greatest of spiritual men. Hathayoga, righty practised, gives considerable control over the physical body, but not over the whole physical nature; and even the best control acquired by Rajayoga is neither conquest nor conversion. The bitter truth has to be admitted that no amount of spiritual... 'share in this imperfection." "Whatever therefore may be the possible degree of perfection, consciousness and knowledge that our deeper being possesses, the simple fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation. And yet, the incarnation has for its goal precisely the victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter." 1 The perception ...
... planes of the Supermind, Sri Aurobindo had to, first of all, traverse the maze of continents that lay in between. Like any rational person Sri Aurobindo did not believe that man was confined to the physical body alone. Actually there are many planes and parts that go into the making of a human being. These planes were fairly well known to the travellers of the inner worlds. India at least never lacked ... some legacy of traces for posterity to follow. Particularly, a spiritual realization once completely achieved could never be entirely obliterated. Said Sri Aurobindo, "I find that the Supramental physical body has not been brought down; otherwise it would have been there." As he explored the lowest rung of the lower hemisphere, and descended to the sub-material, the subconscient, the inconscient ...
... is of the mind and speech as well as of the body. On the other hand, all self-control conserves the energy in the retas , and conservation always brings with it increase. But the needs of the physical body are limited and the excess of energy must create a surplus which has to turn itself to some use other than the physical. According to the ancient theory retas is jala or water, full of light ...
... order, 1 not in fact himself acting, but conscious of the presence and power of the divine Force in his deeds and their issue. He knows that the supreme Shakti is doing in his mental, vital and physical body, adhiṣṭhāna , as the sole doer the thing appointed by a Fate which is in truth not Fate, not a mechanical dispensation, but the wise and all-seeing Will that is at work behind human Karma. This ...
... the anatomy of its victim; that in the man outwardly insensible not only feels and remembers the action of the surgeon's knife, but knows the appropriate reactions of suffering which were in the physical body inhibited by the anaesthetic and therefore non-existent; that in the illiterate servant-girl heard and retained accurately the words of an unknown language and could, as Yogic experience knows, ...
... political nation, she still survives and is still India. After all the spiritual and cultural is the only enduring unity and it is by a persistent mind and spirit much more than by an enduring physical body and outward organisation that the soul of a people survives. This is a truth the positive Western mind may be unwilling to understand or concede, and yet its proofs are written across the whole ...
... rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service. For the faculties that transcend the senses, by the very fact of their being immeshed in Matter, missioned to work in a physical body, put in harness to draw one car along with the emotional desires and nervous impulses, are exposed to a mixed functioning in which they are in danger of illuminating confusion rather than clarifying ...
... for a long time. I feel that at that time she gives us something specially, so I concentrate to receive and feel what she gives. But this evening suddenly I saw (while looking at her) that her physical body disappeared—there was no sign of her body, as if she were not there! Then after a few seconds her figure reappeared. I felt at that moment that she mixed with the ether and became one with all things ...
... powerful atmosphere, limpid, calm, divine; it lies merged within it, and then the life of splendour begins again in all its amplitude, Page 268 all its complexity, all its sublimity; the physical body is glorified, supple, vigorous, energetic; the mind is superbly active in its calm lucidity, guiding and transmitting the forces of Thy divine Will; and all the being exults in an endless beatitude ...
... ty, that is, without any a priori judgments. Whatever we may think, this work of observation, analysis and introspection is never completed. At all events, as long as we are on earth in a physical body, we should always study the immensely complex being that we are, so that no element may elude our knowledge and therefore our control: for we can only master what we know and command what we have ...
... way when you are in your vital and mental bodies. In dreams, for instance, you must remember that you are in the space and time of the vital world and not try to act as if you were still in your physical body. If you have the necessary knowledge of the state of things there, you can deal much more effectively with those vital beings who terrify you and give you such unpleasant nightmares. One of the ...
... manifesting itself. But the psychic being can very well return to the psychic world and it is the psychic being which takes a body again. I explained to you the other day that before leaving the physical body, the psychic being decides most often what its next rebirth will be, the environment in which it will take birth and what its occupation will be, because it needs a certain field for its experience ...
... and if the whole being is organised around it, the whole being passes under the psychic influence, becomes united with it, and can continue—if it is necessary for it to continue. Indeed, if the physical body could be given the same movement—the same movements of progress and the same capacity to ascend that the psychic being has—well, it wouldn't Page 358 be necessary for it to decompose ...
... ... But that is yet to come; it has not yet been done. And so long as it is not done, one cannot know. For even in the highest mental expression there is something which intervenes, due to the physical body. For the inspiration to come right down to the paper, for instance, well, despite everything, it must pass through very material vibrations which may change it. But if these very vibrations are ...
... . Pavitra opens his eyes amidst laughter. Mother tells him :) A question? ( He makes a sign that he has no question. Laughter. ) Sweet Mother, sometimes an incarnated being has a very weak physical body; in this case isn't his body an obstacle to his work upon earth? An incarnated being? Whom do you call an incarnated being? For example, Ramakrishna or some others... Page 75 ...
... vital being. And then, if one is a yogi and knows, one rises just above—so as to see his body; the vital being, if it has come out in a fairly material form, can see the body; one sees his own physical body, and then at that moment, with the consciousness one has and the force one has, one can direct the rays of these forces on the place in the body which is ill. But this of course is the peak, it ...
... practices that are extremely dangerous because they lead to an excited, exalted, abnormal condition and violently call down forces which the body cannot bear. They may lead to a break-down of the physical body, the mind and the nervous system. As soon as I became aware of this turn, I warned him of the danger and prohibited the continuance of these practices. At first he attempted to follow my instructions ...
... something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives, one outer, involved in the physical body, bound by its past evolution in Matter, which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death ...
... years of life before it and, if the Divine creation begins, it will develop at that time and itself decide the question. Will anyone leave his body even after manifesting the Divine in his physical body? It will depend upon the person whether he wants to leave it or not. 19 November 1933 You have said that the Overmind is not sufficient to deal with the physical. 3 Does this mean ...
... disguise or a veil. Many a time the Divine sought, under the supreme form of love, to make the discipline easier and create a closer and more clearly perceptible intimacy; for this he put on a physical body similar in appearance to the human, but always, imprisoned within this gross form of matter, he could express only a caricature of himself. He will be able to manifest himself in the plenitude of ...
... up in the psychic as a seed-samskāra, or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state? It is only meant that the separative ego is not a creation of birth in the physical body; the mental and the vital have it also. So, so long as the mental and vital are subject toignorance, the ego will last also. When the psychic being goes into rest it naturally takes it with the ...
... illness force, then one can remain well even in the midst of plague or other epidemics—if the envelope is pierced or weak, then illness can come in. What you felt attacked was not really the physical body, but this nervous envelope and the nervous body (prāṇakoṣa) of which it is an extension or cover. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - IV: Illness and Health They [the forces of illness] first ...
... vital and mental bodies. In dreams, for instance, you must remember that you arc in the Page 64 space and time of the vital world and not try to act as if you were still in your physical body. If you have the necessary knowledge of the state of things there, you can deal much more effectively with those vital beings who terrify you and give you such unpleasant nightmares. One of the ...
... by Sri Aurobindo or revised and published under his guidance. The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in ...
... draft) : perhaps all of the power of reasoning; and, even, the organ itself may become useless, disappear little by little as the monkey's tail, which was of no use for man, disappeared from his physical body. × This paragraph and the two which precede it replace the following passage of an earlier draft ...
... it is only in its reception that it gets deformed), then, instead of being your will Page 399 it becomes an expression of the divine Will. And this happens without your leaving the physical body —you can receive the force of the divine Will without leaving the physical. Only, you see, you must not change it and deform it, spoil it in the receiving. When you feel within you a kind of indomitable ...
... says, found that one has a divine Self and that consequently one must seek to know this divine Self.... This comes much later, and yet, in spite of everything, from the very moment of birth in a physical body, there is in the being, in its depths, this psychic presence which pushes the whole being towards this fulfilment. But who knows it and recognises it, this psychic being? That too comes only in ...
... like that. And so you lose patience or lose courage, for you feel that you are not advancing. But when you engage in the development of the body—material, physical development—when you want the physical body to do sadhana, it is exactly like that. You begin by trying out all kinds of things without precision or exactitude, without knowing which end to begin with, and you feel you are groping, searching ...
... is itself fully awake and quite conscious. This is the real trance. I have already told you several times, I think, that when one undergoes this occult discipline, one is able to leave one's physical body, go out in the vital and move about quite consciously, Page 276 acting quite consciously in this vital world; then to leave one's vital being asleep and go out mentally, acting and living ...
... special development, a special education, all these things do what they can to express the Power in the body, but it is a very clumsy and very incomplete expression. It is beyond question that a physical body which has been trained according to the most complete and rational methods of physical culture is capable of things it could never do otherwise. I think no one can deny that. Well, for the mind ...
... divine Presence in the core of Matter. And naturally, since they have no psychic being, they do not know the psychic being. Some of these beings have even Page 202 wanted to take a physical body so as to have the experience of the psychic being—but not many of them. As a rule, they did it only partially, through an "emanation", not a total descent. For example, Vivekananda is said to ...
... someone who informed me: a little entity, or some kind of being; sometimes it was the aura that protected me. And it was for all kinds of things. That is to say, life was seldom limited to the physical body—this is convenient, this is good. It is necessary, it increases your capacities. This is what the person who taught me occultism told me straightaway: "You are depriving yourself of senses which ...
... seeking, the total Truth. But with the two experiences I have had—the experience of external life, with universalisation, impersonalisation, in short, all the yogic experiences one can have in the physical body, and on the other hand the experience of total and perfect union with the Origin—now that I have had these two experiences and that something has happened, which I cannot describe yet, I know that ...
... goes well, but as soon as it starts moving, that is to say, the person shows itself in any way, it becomes detestable. But it is very strong. You know, there are a thousand experiences of the physical body which say: "Ooh! This beatific state is an impossibility"—it is this stupidity which delays everything. It is as though it were the cells—the cells of the body—that are accustomed to fight and suffer ...
... sound reasons for this mental attitude. The geographical necessity of union was entirely absent; on the contrary, distance created a positive mental separation. Each colony had a clear-cut separate physical body and seemed predestined, on the lines on which human evolution was then running, to become a separate nation. The economic interests of the mother country and the colonies were disparate, aloof from ...
... the air,—a physical object like the cricket ball flying through the same physical medium; but we know neither in what direction it will fly, nor where it will alight. The material is the same, a physical body, the medium is the same, the physical atmosphere; to a certain extent even the energy is the same, the physical pranic energy, as it is called in our philosophy, inherent in matter. But another ...
... called the Dissolution (Vinasha). Page 60 Birth and Non-Birth are not essentially physical conditions, but soul-states. A man may break the knot of the ego-sense and yet remain in the physical body; but if he concentrates himself solely in the state of dissolution of ego, then he is not born again in the body. He is liberated from birth as soon as the present impulse of Nature which continues ...
... interchange constantly kept up by Nature and by special means devised by her; breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical Page 545 body and its workings and inner potencies Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable and elimination of what ...
... Indian Tradition Yes [ the inner being is made up of sheaths ]. Sheaths is simply a term for bodies, because each is superimposed on the other and acts as a covering and can be cast off. Thus the physical body itself is called the food sheath and its throwing off is what is called death. You can only distinguish [ the different sheaths ] either by intuition or by experience and then you have e ...
... Rupa maintains itself but has not appreciably advanced. Vijnana is exceedingly powerful in Veda. Page 422 Bj. [Bijoy] gets the vision of the colour-body with regard to R—behind the physical body—yellow in blue, then red, red in black, again red and once more yellow in blue. Today with the Veda, the literary work of the Dharma has definitely begun; proof is given of the general successful ...
... accuracy of the details if immediately after returning to the body (which is usually done with a clear consciousness of the whole process of getting into it) one can traverse the same scene in the physical body. But this is rare; the subtle wandering is on the contrary a frequent phenomenon, only when it is near to the physical world, all seems very material and concrete and the association of physical ...
... peace and wideness. This is possible even if the material body is ill. In most cases it is the subtle body that feels like that, but as the subtle penetrates everywhere the gross physical, the physical body also feels like that. But then it does not feel disturbed by the pains or motions of the illness—they do not affect its peace or Ananda. Degrees in the Higher Consciousness The plane makes ...
... it into sundry details in order to feel the progress made. It is not a theory but a constant experience and very tangible when it comes that there is above us, above the consciousness in the physical body, a great supporting extension as it were of peace, light, power, joy—that we can become aware of it, and bring it down into the physical consciousness and that that, at first for a time, afterwards ...
... Krishna. Blue is his especial and significant colour, the colour of his aura when he manifests,—that is why he is called Nil Krishna ; the adjective does not mean that he was blue or dark in his physical body whether in Brindavan or Mathura or Dwarka! Violet is the radiance of Krishna's protection,—that was why, very naturally, it brought to you a sense of peace. The Mother says that she always saw it ...
... under the obligation of taking on birth and developing the psychic being and evolving towards the Divine. They wish to remain what they are and yet amuse themselves with the physical world and physical body. Loss of balance produces disorder in the consciousness and the adverse forces use that loss of balance for attacking and wholly upsetting the system and doing their work. That is why people ...
... Page 107 The letter you wrote to me shows a surprising inability to understand the plainest distinctions and the simplest truths. The one who was an instrument for giving birth to the physical body of X was no doubt in her lifetime his material mother. But the relation which exists between the Mother here and X (and between the Mother and all who accept her), is a psychic and spiritual ...
... our thought seeks That from you, That for the Enjoyers 2 our Thought desires. Page 535 × Not the physical body only; the soul dwells here in five sheaths or embodyings. × The Atris,—literally, eaters; the ...
... The peace, joy and full satisfaction in the mental, vital and physical being. × Not only the physical body, but the vital and mental sheaths, all the embodied states or forms of the soul. × The supramental ...
... sattwa, the mode of light, and acquires a relative freedom and mastery and knowledge and with it a qualified and conditioned sense of inner satisfaction and happiness. Man, the mental being in a physical body, should be but is not, except in a few among this multitude of ensouled bodies, of this nature. Ordinarily he has too much in him of the obscure earth-inertia and a troubled ignorant animal life-force ...
... truth; for, corollary to this true immortality, there exists a perpetual continuity of our temporal existence and experience from life to life, from world to world after the dissolution of the physical body: but this is a natural consequence of our timelessness which expresses itself here as a perpetuity in eternal Time. The realisation of timeless immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the ...
... mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter. Still we can Page 213 see broadly that not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others. An ancient ...
... be accomplished here in the body and takes life in the physical world as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratiṣṭhā , which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living ...
... not the bodily existence which is only a result, the man still belongs normally to the status of human, or at least mental activity and this cannot be abrogated by the fact of passing out of the physical body; to get rid of mortal body is not to get rid of mortal mind. Nor is it sufficient to have a dominant disgust of the world or an anti-vital indifference or aversion to the material existence; for ...
... embodied nature such as no Yoga has ever contemplated in the past, a perfect and integral divinisation and not a mere reflected radiance in our members, a divinisation of all our parts down to our physical body. Yes, this very body must become Godlike and incorruptible with the descent of the Supreme Light. "A quixotic hope!" cries the doubter in us, but it is Sri Aurobindo's vision that, if all things ...
... of years she spent in Algeria, learning the higher occultism from a Polish adept, Theon by name, and his still more profoundly experienced English wife: Alma. Under them she would put her physical body into a trance and awake progressively in her subtle sheaths: putting to sleep the subtle sheath next to the physical, she would grow aware in the one on a deeper level: she thus climbed the ...
... "the involutionary being" and by its "embodied state" or "disembodied state"? The Avataric being has a subtle form of its own and this form may be thought of as achieving its presence within the physical body in which the soul destined to receive the Avatar is itself housed. 7. I do not know Valmiki's Ramayana sufficiently to pronounce whether he pictures Rama as conscious of the Divine born in ...
... existence from which man is apparently sprung and his look upward from it towards spiritual truth. He is, somehow, always subject to the dual attraction of Matter and Spirit. Living and thinking in a physical body, he cannot neglect the demands and necessities of his material nature, its comfort, gratification and development, its insatiable push towards a perfect secular fulfilment. But at the same time ...
... man. I must here warn you against stumbling into the error of those who try to harmonise Yogic Science with the physical science of the Europeans and search for the Yogic Nadis and Chakras in the physical body. You will not find them there. There are certain centres in the physical nervous system with which the Chakras correspond, otherwise Hathayoga would be impossible. But the Chakras are not these ...
... formula. The animal achieved a first form of mind, but could not possess it, because this first organised mind consciousness was enslaved in a narrow scope, tied to the first functionings of the physical body and brain and nerve, tied to serve the physical life and its desires and needs and passions, limited to the insistent uses of the vital urge, to natural longing and feeling and action, bound by ...
... being, power and operation of mental consciousness is the third note of the scale of being. Mind cannot certainly be said to be constituted of life and body, nervous action and reaction in a physical body. Nervous action does not appear to constitute of itself consciousness, any more than physical impact and consequent atomic disturbance appears of itself to constitute nervous action. As a correspondent ...
... sufficient foundation in our vital and physical nature; therefore they can change a side of our mind and colour a part of our actions, but they cannot transform our lives, cannot find here their physical body. Ideals touch and pass, mankind remains the same; after religions, ideals, moralities without end we keep always the same ignorant and imperfect human nature. Moral rules and ideals are a harness ...
... in the three things formerly gained by the sadhana, touch of subtle water and fire, touch of light things, eg insects, thread, wind,—both of these strong, vivid, materialised, effective on the physical body, and other touches not materialised, but having a certain physical result of sensation; subtle in intent, sthula in result, but not with the full density. Some of these sparshas are however on the ...
... on the verge of possession. The Ananda is now increasing again to lay its hold on the system and overcome the distraction. It is attempting to penetrate more and take hold of the fibres of the physical body. Tapas in T² is visibly increasing in mass and swiftness of efficacy, but it still acts in a large atmosphere of the surrounding and limiting incertitude. Samadhi is recovering its progressive ...
... the impression of having miserably failed. Your somewhat puzzled child, with love, Satprem ( Mother's reply ) Satprem, my dear child, What A.R. calls me (the mother) is this physical body, and it is a fact that he receives nothing from it. Whether he knows or feels it or not, he receives everything from above, not from within his body. Today, I observed carefully: the Presence ...
... ( Mother interlaces her fingers to show a sort of interpenetration of the physical and that world ). There are so many, so many things to learn. Yes! ( silence ) Only those with a physical body have the kind of reactions—pleasure, displeasure—we have in physical life. The others no longer have it. That seems to disappear with the purely physical consciousness. ( silence ) More and ...
... end of the night, at two in the morning, only a kind of faint suggestion was left: How can this state—which I knew in trance, in samadhi, and which necessitates lying down—become constant in a physical body which moves about? There is something to discover there. And what form will it take? For in my consciousness, you see, it is constantly like that, this universal flood, but the problem is IN THE ...
... way, all is well; but as soon as it starts stirring, that is, as soon as the individuality comes to the forefront in any way, everything becomes detestable. It's really too much. You see, the physical body has a millennium of past experiences that says, "Why, that blissful state is impossible!"—this stupidity is what delays everything. It's as if the cells themselves, the cells of the body which are ...
... came forward to help the poor and downtrodden people. He was very fond of music. Songs of Rabindranath Tagore, Ramprasad, Rajanikanta and Nazrul were his favourites. After the Mother left her physical body in 1973, he had to face a lot of opposition and obstacles in the Ashram, but always maintained calmness and good humour. At the age of 77, on 14 th August, 2001 everybody's favourite "Rajabhai" ...
... his youth, the ascetic intensity of year on single-aimed year, to a most serene manhood, a most calm and cool yet humane and generous maturity, a head of the clearest, a heart of the noblest, a physical body of the healthiest and free alike from self-torture and self-indulgence—an all-round sanity, sublimity, sweetness. Such strong nerves, such an equipoised sensorium, such a tranquillity mated with ...
... consciousness and to establish it on the earth. So, about his passing, Sethna says: "No Yogi dies in the ordinary meaning of the word: his consciousness always exceeds the formula of the physical body, he is beyond and greater than his material sheath even while he inhabits it, and his action on mankind is essentially through his free and ample spirit to which both life and death are small ...
... Experience of Sudarshan Chakra Significance of Chakras 1 “There are in the human system certain key centres of consciousness. They run along the spinal column, but not in the physical body. They are located in the subtle body though their areas of operation are in the physical. Each centre is a focus for a particular form of consciousness and the action of its power. The configuration ...
... them by touching something corresponding in the earth-atmosphere.’ 9 By this he does not mean the physical atmosphere, but the extremely complex invisible body of Earth, the living entity, her physical body being to our senses the perceptible exteriorization of it. Seen in this way the Earth is no longer some little globe spinning in space, one out of a probably countless number — as one so often ...
... people who do not have the experience and who are interested in this kind of adventure. For, firstly, they tell us that a realisation of one of the spiritual levels has a direct repercussion on the physical body, on the adhara. We will have to come back to this when we learn about the work the Mother did for “the new humanity”. For the Mind of Light, which is the consciousness of that new humanity, is ...
... must have been frightful, but we get only scarce glimpses of it. What are most extensively documented are her risky adventures later in life, after 1958, when she took up the transformation of her physical body. “My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in a letter meant to put the record straight, “from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce ...
... needs of the whole person. Man does not live by bread alone, and neither does he live by the intellect alone. In him there are the realms of the life-forces, impulses and feelings; there is the physical body with its hunger, its need of movement, sexual satisfaction and health; and there is the soul at the centre of the being, the place where one feels connected with the soul of the Volk, with nature ...
... publicly demand unconditional independence for his motherland.) However, his categorical condition of India’s full and effective participation in the one world of tomorrow – the complete unity of her physical body – has not yet been fulfilled, for Bharat Mata remains divided into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What seemed just after the Second World War an idealist’s fancy, has now become a daily item ...
... body, not on left or right; they are supposed to be attached to the spinal cord; but in fact all these things are in the Sukshma Deha, though one has the feeling of their activities as if in the physical body when the consciousness is awake. Sri Aurobindo ...
... interchange constantly kept up by Nature and by special means devised by her; breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical body and its workings and inner potencies, Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable and elimination of what cannot ...
... the surface physical mind's waking activity or its cessation that determines the waking or sleep of common parlance. Thus, in ordinary sleep, when this activity ceases for a period, our physical body falls into slumber and only a subconscient residual consciousness is left in it. The rest of the being stands back and a part of its consciousness goes out into various planes and regions of ...
... Ignorance, avidy ā , but the establishment of a divine life upon earth, ihaiva. But since Matter is the foundation of all evolutionary efflorescence of life here upon the terrestrial plane, our physical body assumes a supreme importance in the total scheme of our spiritual achievement. A divine transformation even of our physical sheath, annamaya ko ṣ a, is an indispensable concomitant of a truly ...
... is the first part of Mirra’s entry in her diary on 26 November 1915: ‘The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in ...
... what I've been told (not physically), I believe that the Rishis practiced going into trance. But I suppose they wanted to achieve what Sri Aurobindo speaks of: a PHYSICAL transformation of the physical body permitting one to LIVE this consciousness instead of the ordinary consciousness. Did they ever do it?... I don't know. The Veda simply recounts what the forefathers have done . But who are these ...
... it—an intermediary is needed. The experiences I've had make me absolutely convinced of it; twice the supramental world took veritable possession of me and both times it was as if the body—truly the physical body—was going to completely disintegrate, due to... what you could almost call the opposition of the two conditions. And yesterday again I clearly saw... ( Mother touches this mass in her head ) ...
... falsehood, here is a way: Do not try to please yourself, do not try either to please others. Try only to please the Lord. Because He alone is the Truth. Each and every one of us, human beings in our physical body, is a coat of falsehood put on the Lord and hiding Him. As He alone is true to Himself, it is on Him that we must concentrate and not on the coats of falsehood. ...
... this next war and whether the world would be better. He replied as follows: 'Yes, great sages like Sri Aurobindo who are wandering now in their subtle bodies will appear. Some sages may take the physical body of political leaders in the West. It will be the end of ignorant atomic machines and the beginning of a new age with great sages leading the world.' So it seems that X's vision links up with Sri ...
... Notes on the Way 22 August 1968 About a note written by Mother concerning an ordeal that threatened her physical body. The doctor advises not to get tired. What is it that tires? Only that which is useless. To see sincere people to whom it does good is not tiring. But those who come to weigh theories and practices, those who in their i ...
... regarding a crucial experience to which She will later refer a number of times. First penetration of the supramental force into the body. Sri Aurobindo alive in a concrete and permanent subtle physical body. Page 325 ...
... body that does things, is active and has an existence of which it is wholly conscious), and it's different from this ( Mother touches the skin of her hands ), but in the subtle physical it's a PHYSICAL body, and it's already something permanent, in the sense that you REMAIN the same, you find things again as you left them (they exist permanently, though they aren't visible with the ordinary vision ...
... silence ) It remained for a long time. It remained for at least a quarter of an hour—a long time. And I felt like doing this ( Mother rubs her eyes as if in disbelief ). It's the first time the physical body has had an experience of that sort, with the eyes wide open. I saw it come down, come down like that, settle down and stay there. And all the cells seemed to be thirsting and thirsting for that—it ...
... from any preparation to be taken in from outside. I have used the epithet "material" for the sweet secretion, but truly speaking the tongue reflects, as it were, a sensation in the subtle-physical body which is ours behind the gross-physical. Were the saliva with the Soma-taste to be chemically analysed, I don't think a special sugary element would be detected. All the same, "the honey of paradise" ...
... down the ages. They, no less than our psychic being, have continuous survival. And the psychic being picks them up while acquiring new subtle-physical, vital and mental sheaths to accompany the physical body into which it is born."? When I turn to Sri Aurobindo I don't get quite the same picture. He 2 1. Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 134. 2.Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol ...
... could walk "with ease", needing no "Canadian canes". For, from a figuration of the earth's beauty and bale, we had passed into a domain beyond the body's hold. Properly speaking, I should say "the physical body", for there is an embodiment on all the planes, but the stuff is not physical. Even on the subtle-physical plane something of the earth's characteristics linger. There I may not be tottering, yet ...
... Divine - Kundalini - sleeping coiled like a serpent in the chakra or lotuslike circle in the subtle body - sukshma sharira - at a place corresponding to the base of the spine in the gross physical body is here awakened not directly from below by Yogic concentration and special breath-exercise (prānāyāma) but by the descent of an Overhead Force into the lotuslike circle situated in the he ...
... anything, it was... "something"—there was something black moving inside something—and it did look a little Page 279 broken down. So I left, I went back downstairs; and the symbol of the physical body was a pair of shoes—I put my shoes on again and left. There were lots of details; it began after two-thirty, and it lasted till about four-thirty. And then, later in the morning, I was completely ...
... failures , I see them like that: "All right, it's a springboard—hop! let's jump, now let's go beyond that." When one does the work I am doing and is in contact with all the petty reactions of the physical body, of the most material consciousness... mon petit, it would be absolutely disheartening and sickening to anyone having an ideal. But that... that's how it is, so that's how it is: it must change—we ...
... instrument [the physical mind] is useless, it can only Page 187 be got rid of...." 2 It was very difficult to get rid of it because it was so intimately linked to the aggregate of the physical body and its present form... it was difficult; and when I tried and a deeper consciousness tried to manifest, it used to cause fainting. I mean that the union, the fusion, the identification with the ...
... all will be well...." Strange, we are very small things—very small poor things. But we must laugh. There, mon petit. And you are very closely associated with those experiences, even in your physical body, and several times these last few days, I have had the opportunity to tell you, "See, don't worry." 3 Those things are really appearances, which human thought crystallizes and hardens, but if ...
... Presence in the heart of Matter. And naturally, as they don't have a psychic being, they don't know, they have no knowledge of the psychic being. Some of those beings even decided to take on a physical body in order to experience the psychic being—not many. They generally did it only partially, through an "emanation," not through a complete descent. It is said, for instance, that Vivekananda was ...
... Page 378 The Riddle of This World 254 TheRishi 99 The Secret of the Veda 302 Urvasie 2,60,74,218,289 St. John of the Cross 126 subtle-physical body 116 plane 209 Sufi 70 sukshma sharira 116 Sun of Truth 38,86 Supermind 51,58 Supernature 12,128,208,273,315 Swinburne 42,127 T Tagore, Rabindranath ...
... divisions in what is beyond: the dream-consciousness and the sleep-consciousness. We enter into the former through subtle centres or chakras which have some sort of corresponding plexuses in the physical body. We enter into the latter by going beyond the system of the inner and the outer through a chakra that has no corresponding physical plexus, the traditional "thousand-petalled lotus" above the brain ...
... Mother's room, rapid and extensive deterioration was observed. On 1 February 1969, in a series of questions and answers on death, when she had been asked: "How can one tell for certain that the physical body is dead?" her reply was: "Only when it decomposes." Now no doubt could remain as to what she had allowed to happen. This does not mean that the goal she had originally set up was anything ...
... × The life-nature, closely enmeshed in the reactions, desires, needs, and sensations of the physical body. × Sri Aurobindo, Letter; on Yoga, SABCL. Vol. 23, p. 1010. ...
... read out to Sri Aurobindo and he made some changes and additions." 68 Part I consisting of the first three Books was published in September 1950 just before Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his physical body in December that year; the publication of Part II and Part III as the second volume of the epic can be taken, from the date available from the printer's page, to be May 1951. Which means that ...
... propounded by Krishna when he declares, in the Gita, that in all creatures he is that kāma which is not contrary to dharma : dharmāviruddho bhūteṣu kamo 'smi In Kalidasa the physical body is of the foremost importance for the practice of religion and morality: 85 Ibid ., p. 226. 86 Kumārasaṃbhava , 5.38. 87 For the moral significance of one form of love ...
... who had any occasion to come in personal contact with him, his face, beaming with a smile, remains ever fresh in their memory—and he remains Amrita, the immortal, even in death, even without a physical body. ** The late K. Amrita, Manager-Trustee, Sri Aurobindo Ashram whose centenary falls this year i.e. 1995. Page 92 When I came to the Ashram for the first time, in 1963 as ...
... wideness and with it for the things now asked for — direct contact with the truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body. ...the highest spiritual Self is not even behind our personality and bodily existence but is above it and altogether exceeds it.... This Self has two aspects and the results of realising ...
... sattwa, the mode of light, and acquires a relative freedom and mastery and knowledge and with it a qualified and conditioned sense of inner satisfaction and happiness. Man, the mental being in a physical body, should be but is not, except in a few among this multitude of ensouled bodies, of this nature. Ordinarily he has too much in him of the obscure earth-inertia and a troubled ignorant animal ...
... insistence of the physical being, Page 217 becomes powerful even in the waking state, until even there the enlarging man is able to live in his several subtle bodies as well as in his physical body, to be aware of them and in them, to use their senses, faculties, powers, to dwell in possession of supra-physical truth, consciousness and experience. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 503-04 ...
... and sweetness and delight And mingling make the high and low worlds one. 18 The HathaYogin, however, in affirming the truth of the Spirit seems to deny the truth and value of the physical body. This does not conform to the spirit of Integral Truth which is what Aswapati is seeking. Another great pitfall of the kingdom of subtle matter is its beauty and simplicity themselves ...
... radical will be the conversion needed to return to it; but the return is always possible." (22-12-1943) * * * (You know that for many years I have been in the habit of leaving my physical body and making exploratory tours in my subtle body. I leave the physical from the region of the waist. Slipping out into the other planes while I am living in Bombay, I find that I mostly get into planes ...
... A number of years she spent in Algeria, learning the higher occultism from a Polish adept, Theon by name, and his still more profoundly experienced English wife. Under them she would put her physical body into a trance and awake progressively in her subtle sheaths: putting to sleep the subtle sheath next to the physical, she would grow aware in the one on a deeper level: she thus climbed the whole ...
... is "awake" inwardly and witnesses the work of a superhuman agency. Of course, on this occasion too, as on the other, there is no vision of any beyond: Adam witnesses what is being done to his physical body by the glorious Shape. But the sleep that is like a trance can have many functions, and Milton's description of it can be a clue to the experience he was himself undergoing night after night ...
... photograph was not created by the imagination or emotion of an artist. Nor is it that Mother struck a meditative pose at the time of taking the photograph. It was taken when the Mother was still in her physical body and she was actually meditating. I suppose you can see this. The Mother has entered deep, very deep within. Those who succeed in uniting their consciousness with the Mother's will definitely get ...
... Part I — Recollections and Diary Notes Champaklal Speaks “I am There” Ever since Mother left her physical body, known and unknown persons have been asking for something touched by her. Once someone came and said, “Please give me something touched by the Mother; it will help me very much in sadhana.” I saw that he was sincere. I also remembered seeing him ...
... quite new in manner—simple and precise and penetrating. What you describe is the psychic fire, agni pāvaka, which burns in the deeper heart and from there is lighted in the mind, the vital and the physical body. In the Page 267 mind it becomes a light of intuitive perception and discrimination which sees at once what is the true vision or idea and the wrong vision or idea, the true feeling ...
... consciousness, the single bowl which was framed by Twashtri, the Framer of things, with higher workings, and multiplied four-fold the original material body and perfected the four planes of the physical body, vital body, mental body and the causal or ideal body. These four bodies become the four-fold bowl for the pouring of the nectar, and thus these bodies partake of the nature of the nectar of Immortality ...
... they would be in this sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in their sense of identity. But the immortality of the mental and vital being would still not ensure the survival of the physical body. The physical being could only endure, if by some means its physical causes of decay and destruction could be overcome and at the same time it could be made so plastic and progressive in its structure ...
... the darkness, and we arrived at the highest light of the Sun. Page 441 And when the Vedic seers spoke of the attainment of immortality, they spoke of their victory while in the physical body. As Parashara points out: आ ये विश्बा स्वपत्यानि तस्थुः । कृण्वानासो अमृतत्वाय गातुम् । । महना महदभिः पृथिवी वि तस्थे । माता पुत्रैरदितिध्यासे वेः । । RV.I. 72.9. The physical ...
... necessary for this transformation I might go, you will have to fulfil our Yoga of supramental descent and transformation.' It was on 5 December 1950 at 1.26 a.m. that Sri Aurobindo left his physical body, and yet for 111 hours the body remained intact and undecomposed. As the Mother announced: '. .. His body is surcharged with such a concentration of Supramental Light that there is no sign ...
... translate them by a luminous and harmonising conversion into a unity of the truth, power and delight of a living existence. The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. And the fifth element is arrived at when this perfection is pushed to its highest conclusion which, according to Sri Aurobindo, brings in spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical ...
... presence and bring back the direct experience of their scenes and truths and occurrences. It may even project actually the mental or vital body for the same purpose and travel in it, leaving the physical body in a profoundest trance without sign of life until its return." 30 Our subliminal being to which we can have access more readily in the yogic dream-state, is not, like our surface being, an ...
... itself has varying forms. Nonetheless, the strength of empiricism lies in the fact that the concepts of Pure Reason do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. Just as our physical body sees things through two eyes always, even so, the integrality of our nature demands integral seeing as consisting of ideative conception and factuality verified in experience. Mere ideative conception ...
... practice and experience. In Hathayoga, 29 the primary and predominant attention is not on the mind and the powers of the mind but on the vital forces and functions and on the instrumentality of the physical body. Methods are centered on physical postures (asanas) and on the control of breath (pranayama). The science of Hathayoga lays down a methodical development of the control and mastery of the body and ...
... Manifestation Upon Earth" on the structure and functioning that the divine body will have, when it will visibly be operating physically on the physical earth in the same way in which the human physical body is today operating on the physical earth. That, when it happens, will be, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the conclusive proof of the evolutionary birth of a new supramental species on ...
... relaxation or idleness or a whim of momentary defiance or negligence. No education and much less spiritual education can be perfected without discipline, just as even in the functioning of the physical body, every part and every organ has to function with the perfect sense of discipline and co-ordination. In the very atmosphere of the educational process, there must be an overriding sense of self-imposed ...
... translate them by a luminous and harmonising conversion into a unity of the truth, power and delight of a living existence. The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. And the fifth element is arrived at when this perfection is pushed to its highest conclusion which, according to Sri Aurobindo, brings in spiritualising and illuminations of the whole physical ...
... Purushottama." 64 Gnostic Perfection and Divinizing the law of the Body The fourth element of perfection relates to the supramental Page 74 or Gnostic perfection and the physical body, and it aims at and accomplishes the transformation of life in the physical world as one of its fields and even though the super mind opens up possession of planes and worlds beyond the material ...
... the human figure seemed to them the noblest subject for their art. They were fascinated not only by all Page 79 that can be expressed by the body, but also by the complexity of the physical body itself. It looked to them like a wonderful universe to be explored; and they thought that they could not praise God better than by trying to represent the body as accurately as possible. So these ...
... the "Earth, sky, heaven, the quarters and the lesser quartersˮ This is a symbolic description of the macrocosm. This is followed by the statement of senses and parts and elements of the physical body, the microcosm. 8. The eighth lesson expounds the meaning of OM. 9. The ninth lesson gives a list of duties: Page 28 i) Righteousness with the study and teaching of the Veda ...
... the subtle physical world, vital sheath in the vital world, and mental sheath in the mental world and rest in its own world, which Sri Aurobindo calls the Psychic world, it gets reborn into a new physical body, normally after about three years sojourn in the Psychic world. This traveler is immortal, and it is this traveler who is obliged to come back again and again into the human body. As Sri Aurobindo ...
... body has been envisaged. Here the human body is required to achieve not only high degrees of excellence but also such perfections which can be expected when the Spirit manifests fully in the physical body. One can achieve extraordinary capacities by practices which have Page 577 been recommended by Hatha Yoga. One can also utilize methods, of or even Martial Arts. On account ...
... tomb but a temple of the Spirit and that there is discernible in us a spiritual will which wants to manifest itself fully in the physical life. It is also being increasingly perceived that the physical body can, with the aid of spiritual capacities, attain to greater peaks of excellence and perfection. This perception came to be developed in its largest scope in the vision and works of Sri Aurobindo ...
... thrusts are far from being homogenous or harmonious with one another. The physical being is often in conflict with the vital pursuits, and when the vital ambitions and attractions impose upon the physical body their own burden, the physical often revolts or collapses. The demands of physical health are often in clash with the demands of the vital being. Again, the demands of the vital being are in conflict ...
... controlled by crass ignorance. And is not the potency of the egoistic will drastically limited and almost always ineffective in action? What should the sadhaka do then? If the Guru is present in his physical body, the problem may not arise; but if not? Who will guide the sadhaka then? Herein comes the great role played by our psychic being, the luminous representative of the Divine, dwelling in the ...
... ever able to liberate itself from all the present frailties and limitations? In which way will the New Man's body, in its form and functioning, be different and distinguished from the present physical body of man? Our last chapter seeks to furnish answers to these questions. Page 225 ...
... p. 261. 2 Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, pp. 707, 709, 710, 711. 3 Bulletin, Vol. IX, No. 2, p. 85. But let us clearly note that this seeking after a perfected physical body, this yearning for the release from the frailties and disabilities of our actually elaborated physical existence and incarnate life are not in any way related to the finite being's blind and ...
... the essential knowledge that every individual needs to cultivate in order to become truly human and humane, irrespective of and in addition to one's own specialisation. Since everyone possesses a physical body and a psychological complex of emotions, dynamism, thought and will, everyone needs to know the mystery and excellence of the human body, and how to harmonise demands of rationality, morality and ...
... fostered by exploration of the following four themes: 1.The aim of life; 2.Teaching that aims at awakening and infusion of inspiration and enthusiasm to learn; 3.Care and health of the* physical body which can be vehicle of sustaining ideals of life {sari ram adyam khalu dharma ); 4.Pursuit of knowledge, heroism, harmony and skills. There will be many other benefits to the country's ...
... radiating from the Mother's being and body is pervading the whole atmosphere. One can see His Presence, hear his foot-falls, his rhythmic voice, ever vigilant, devoid of the encumbrance of the physical body. One day the sacrifice will bear fruit, what he had depicted in Savitri , will come true. For, what is, after all, Savitri if not the inner life- Page 24 episodes of the Mother and ...
... to say whether it was in the subtle body or the outer that the density was felt. It must be in the subtle body, for it is that one feels in trance or sleep - besides, if it were the physical body, the density would usually last for some time after waking. For the last three days the trance comes at noon. After it is over the dense energy it brings lasts up to the night. ...
... it when it has no matter to touch? Dissolution? laya? When we speak of the Purusha in the head, heart etc., we are using a figure. The Muladhara from which the Kundalini rises is not in the physical body, but in the subtle body—(the subtle body is that in which the being goes out in deep trance or more radically, at the time of death); so also are all the centres. But as the subtle body penetrates ...
... Mother, what does this photo represent? (indicating Her photo) It 1 represents me. Yes, but it is one of the diverse... It depends on one's receptivity. It can represent a physical body. It can represent the eternal mother... It depends on one's receptivity... 11.1.72 1. It is not certain which photo the Mother is referring to here. Page 30 ...
... watching Purani go to her for Blessings. All of a sudden I experienced profound oneness with the Mother. For a moment I felt as if I was a part of her. This unity was experienced right up to her physical body. Then tears welled up which I could not check. Why the tears? Psychic tears, I suppose. No harm in them. During yesterday's sleep I found myself moving in a world where ...
... Indra was satisfied and he started going back again, his doubts set at rest. But a fresh doubt arose as he was wending his way. "Granted," he thought, "any harm done in the waking state to the physical body does no hurt indeed to the dream-self, it does not reflect any flaws of the other. But one does feel during sleep, in the dream-state as if someone is coming to attack, one does feel that one is ...
... Who is the lover and who is the friend? 222 Savitri's talk of love and pledge are meaningless, for essentially she and Satyavan are strangers. Once Savitri loses sight of Satyavan's physical body, she loses him forever. The physical remains of the Shalwa prince will be distributed between the five elements, which will again fashion forth another man who will love and live and die again, ...
... Brahmacharya BRAHMACHARYA means the storage of energy in the body and its sublimation. The energy in view is mainly physico-vital energy, the vital energy based upon and imbedded in the physical body. Brahmacharya naturally meant a strict observance of certain rules and regulations involving a strenuous discipline. Brahmacharya was the very basis of education in ancient India: indeed, it ...
... vision here, this being of Alfred de Musset says: "I can approach you but I cannot touch you, there is a separation between the two. We can touch only when there are some conditions fulfilled in the physical body." Another French poet speaks of a similar experience. He speaks of it in a jocular way, in a funny way. He says that this inner self sees things in a quite different way than the external being ...
... as could be done while in the body—farther was not possible. For a new mutation, a new procedure was needed. "Death" was the first stage in that process. 2 Sweet Mother, Your physical body belonged to the old creation because you wanted to be one with your children. You wanted this body to uphold the New Body you were building upon it, and it gave you the service you asked of it. ...
... carried Dante in his peregrinations through all the worlds even to the very presence of God in heaven, to the presence Page 24 of his divinised Beloved (in and with his very physical body, it is said). You have to create the subtle world of feeling: it may be dwelling within you or enclosing -you, surrounding you, it may be immanent and circumambient – both are the same in that ...
... gross mistake. In any case, even in the very best of situations, when a soul comes down consciously and when it has consciously Page 83 worked in the formation of the physical body, so long as the body is formed in the usual animal way, the soul will have to struggle and to correct all that comes from this human animality. The parents have naturally a particular ...
... man or rather to the animal. But this does not mean that it has no body, that it is something airy, nebulous, smoky. Not at all: the soul has a body, its own body as concrete and definite as the physical body; it even has a material body, although its matter is of a different kind. Have not the Western sages begun to speak of immaterial matter, of anti-matter? That soul-body you are carrying even now ...
... the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very Page 5 form and figure of the Light supernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly ...
... Consciousness, one Divine Power, one Divine Bliss, one Divine Page 133 Being, however various they may appear in outward name and form. But the physical consciousness, the physical body, this very material frame have for us upon earth, a divine significance. They are not to be despised or thrown out. On the contrary, our object is to take special care of the body, to cleanse it ...
... or increased as to be purified, made conscious, yoked together in a common drive towards a harmonious dynamic realisation in life and life's achievements. And lastly the organisation in the physical body. The limbs of the body have not even growth, they do not move together Page 41 in a balanced and rhythmic way. Some are unhealthy, some do not work, some others are overworked ...
... antinomy has become obsolete, because the body too on its side recognises that it has not the structure and character that millennial ignorance gave it. The material particles that constitute the physical body are found to be after all not inert masses but quantas of energy, of luminous energy. The spiritual Light above demands nothing better for its earthly home. This is symbolical of the col ...
... in life. The calm heave of the lungs and the glad beat of the heart are the sign and symbol of a radiant animation. We now come to the fourth domain, the domain of Marut; in the physical body it is the mouth, the throat, the tongue, the facial front in general. It is the field of expression, of articulation—Vak, the word is the symbol. Here is the alert, the mobile field, also a stage ...
... Another instance will show another kind of identification. It is an experience to which I have often Page 106 referred. I was seated, drawn in and meditating. I felt that my physical body was dissolving or changing: it was becoming wider and wider, losing its human characters and taking gradually the shape of a globe. Arms, legs, head were no longer there: it became spherical, ...
... only block the way to the true consciousness and knowledge. And yet you cannot leave the intellectual faculties uncared for or undeveloped on the plea that something higher is needed. In the physical body it need not be your ideal to become a "muscle man"; but neither would you like to have frail, ill-grown, rickety limbs that are weak and unshapely. With regard to your mental body too it would ...
... divine assume a body divine. 15 This is an ideal whose realization may well belong to a distant future. But, even if we limit ourselves to the actualities, a relative perfection of the physical body must be the aim of an efficient physical education. Our stand is that, whatever type of body a man may have, he must accept as a starting-point and bring out, by a concentrated effort and an ...
... by which one allows the Supramental to come and take hold of the several parts of the being ; complete Supramentalisation takes place when the Supramental takes hold of all the parts down to the physical body. . Disciple : I also attach the same meaning to the term. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, but you confuse "height" with "richness". Two persons may be on the same plane and yet one may be richer ...
... idea that this Yoga has been attempted times without number in the past, that the Light descended and has withdrawn again and again. This does not seem to be correct. I find that Supramental physical body has not been brought down : otherwise it would have been there. We must not therefore belittle our effort and throw obstacles in the way of its accomplishment. The time has not yet come ...
... imagination, or from the psycho-mental or any other plane. Disciple : I have a question. The poet describes the form of Sri Krishna. Now, is it the description of his psychic body or his physical body – because we see that form of his in our own psychic vision even to-day. T Sri Aurobindo : What on earth does it matter whether he Page 146 lived on the physical plane ...
... wise and face the problem squarely. The whole difficulty comes from the popular, Page 287 perhaps normal human conception of the soul; it is considered almost something like the physical body (even as Virochana of old did in the Upanishadic days), namely, it has a definite form and figure, even perhaps a definite mass: each is an isolated entity shut out from everyone else by a fixed ...
... to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, even Page 181 while in the physical body, existence in heaven, ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said. That he may pass me through when my star falls Who have ambrosia eaten, and yet live. Life extinguishes when the ...
... sympathy with him. The Divine -the Soul-can be in flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot pierce it nor can fire burn it. Page 130 ...
... the meanwhile, however, "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." A physical incarnation clouds the soul-consciousness and involves loss of memory, amnesia. The soul's travail therefore in a physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that – that is also what Plato thought ...
... Brahmacharya BRAHMACHARYA means the storage of energy in the body and its sublimation. The energy in view is mainly physicovital energy, the vital energy based upon and imbedded in the physical body. Brahmacharya naturally meant a strict observance of certain rules and regulations involving a strenuous discipline. Brahmacharya was the very basis of education in ancient India: indeed, it ...
... the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions and desires, of life activity and vital dynamism; finally, it gets into brute Matter itself, the hard and obscure rock of the physical body, for that too has to be illumined and made the very form and figure of the Light supernal. The Divine in his descending Grace is the Master-Architect who is building slowly and surely the many-chambered ...
... Some friend said: "One feels the inner touch gone because one may not be quite ready to retain the Divine's pressure. Probably it might be the Divine Himself who takes it away, for our physical body may get fatigued by the constant working." Is this a fact? Yes, the ordinary physical consciousness is not able to hold the contact and it does get tired — also it cannot assimilate ...
... upon your back the load of the past, but go ahead, as if through a virgin tract, making quite new discoveries, and opening unexpected vistas at each step. You can make an experiment even on your physical body, i.e. take the physical consciousness too to share in your adventure of ever new discovery. Thus you may, for example, forget your habit of eating or even walking, truly forget and try to learn ...
... can only block the way to the true consciousness and knowledge. And yet you cannot leave the intellectual faculties uncared for or undeveloped on the plea that something higher is needed. In the physical body it need not be your ideal to become a "muscle man"; but neither would you like to have frail, ill-grown, rickety limbs that are weak and unshapely. With regard to your mental body too it would not ...
... of health and happiness. "Another instance will show another kind of identification. It is an experience to which I have often referred. I was seated, drawn in and meditating. I felt that my physical body was I dissolving or changing: it was becoming wider and wider, losing its human characters and taking gradually the shape of a globe. Arms, legs, head were no longer there: it became spherical, ...
... ignorant, asleep; human energy, too, at this level is obscure and mechanical, extremely limited. The whole energy potential, the consciousness-force is Page 384 locked up in the physical body consciousness. Now the serpent does not remain asleep forever. It has to wake up, it wakes up. That is to say, man's consciousness awakes, grows and rises upward. The serpent one day shakes its ...
... developed or increased as to be purified, made conscious, yoked together in a common drive towards a harmonious dynamic realisation in life and life's achievements. And lastly the organisation in the physical body. The limbs of the body have not even growth, they do not move together in a balanced and rhythmic way. Some are unhealthy, some do not work, some others are overworked. These too have to be co-ordinated ...
... Love, there is only one Divine Consciousness, one Divine Power, one Divine Bliss, one Divine Being, however various they may appear in outward name and form. But the physical consciousness, the physical body, this very material frame have for us upon earth, a divine significance. They are not to be despised or thrown out. On the contrary, our object is to take special care of the body, to cleanse it ...
... a need for sleep as with us, but with a difference. For our sleep is a heavy plunge into inconscience where we forget everything, whereas a Yogi sleeps awake. There is also a state in which the physical body is apparently asleep, while the subtle body goes out visiting various persons in their sleep. The Mother has said that she does most of the subtle work in this way at night. Sri Aurobindo wrote ...
... externals, "Sri Aurobindo's Action" is a movement generated from Sri Aurobindo Ashram since mid-1970, a Society With office-bearers, rules and subscriptions - even as a human being needs to have a physical body and a name and various adhesions and propensities. But just as a human being is quintessentially the indwelling soul, the informing Spirit, for without it the body is nothing, the mind is nothing ...
... sake. It is by a constant inner growth that one can find a constant newness and unfailing interest in life. 69 The concern one brings to the well-being and efficiency of one's physical body has further to be extended in respect of one's dealings with other physical or material things as well. In handling houses, furniture, machines, cars, and other physical things ever so apparently ...
... geographical entity spotted with mountains and hills, veined with rivers and streams, and shaded with forests and plains. Sri Aurobindo always saw this spiritual reality of the Mother behind the physical body of the Indian sub-continent. One of his distinguished pupils, K.M. Munshi, has recorded how Sri Aurobindo once pointed to a wall-map of India and called it Bharat Mata's, Mother India's, portrait ...
... global - and universal - ramifications. We have only to call, and the Grace responds at once. It is obvious that a veil seems to separate us from the Force, because the support of the Mother's physical body has been withdrawn, and the physical contact to which we had grown used has now apparently snapped. It is therefore the test of the ardour of our aspiration and the strength of our faith that we ...
... the consciousness descends through all the states of being down to the most material, bringing the Divine Force with it so that the Force can transform the whole being and finally divinise the physical body. 20.9.1967 In the message for the radio You substituted the word "union" for the word "unity." 1 May I know, Sweet Mother, why this change was made? 1 "O India, land ...
... Page 16 and intensity of its dedicated work. Although the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's spiritual collaborator during the last thirty-five years of his life, has also left her physical body, she still guides the ashram's destiny. A couple of points should be stressed before we pass on to a brief—necessarily very brief—consideration and "assessment" of Sri Aurobindo's ...
... the veil of mud. All we know is that the experience seemed to come more and more often. Twice the supramental world took veritable possession of me and both times it was as if the body—truly the physical body—was going to completely disintegrate, due to... what you could almost call the opposition of the two conditions. 1 Of course, we can imagine one of those "tall beings" of the supramental shore ...
... the depths, and the effect on her everyday life is unmistakable: In all work, constantly, there is the perception of Thy invariable presence in Thy dual form of Non-Being and Being ... the physical body is glorified, supple, vigorous. energetic; the mind is superbly active in its calm lucidity, guiding and transmitting the forces of Thy divine Will; and all the being exults in an endless beatitude ...
... the pinchbeck lords of the sub-nations had fissured and fractured and sundered, the Mother still viewed as an integral whole, breathed life into it, and lighted up the divine Agni within. The physical body is a prisoner of its own limitations, the vital is often caught at cross-purposes, even the mind is usually content to be a slave of the vital's irrational pulls and drives: these are but dungeons ...
... radiating from the Mother's being and body is pervading the whole atmosphere. One can see His Presence, hear His foot-falls, His rhythmic voice, ever vigilant, devoid of the encumbrance of the physical body. 8 With Nirod's heart of adoration, his eyes and ears of faith, others have also seen and heard Sri Aurobindo, not in the Ashram's sanctified precincts alone, but wherever the need may have ...
... Whether that is so is another question. Incarnations and philosophers have tackled this problem of pain, its why and wherefore and the remedy for it, because pain exists not only on one level. In the physical body there is pain owing to disease and weakness and fatigue and illness. In the collective life you will find that the problem of pain, the infliction of pain, is in the whole record of human history ...
... itself in all and all in itself, and dealing with the world of diversity as if it was—as, indeed, it is—a multiple self-deploying of the One. The constituents of the nature of man are the physical body, the vital, that is to say, the principle and active formation of life, and the mind. Behind this triple formation is the psyche or the soul evolving in this nature for a divinely perfect self- ...
... layers of our consciousness participate in them. But it is possible, as the Mother says, "to have complete sleep, without dreams; but to plunge our mind into a repose analogous to that of our physical body, it is necessary to attain a per feet mastery over the mental being, which is not an easy matter. ”¹ This state of repose can hardly be called sleep, "for it is extremely conscious. In that condition ...
... achieve that much. It is within the capacity of any human being with normal goodwill to be sincere in his psychic movements, even if these are rare. But to be sincere in the very cells of your physical body is a still rarer achievement. To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and through the Divine. That is true sincerity and that you must ...
... works and what is the place and function of the individual soul and its nature in them. It has understood that the ego has to go, lock, stock and barrel; but, how, it asks, so long as the gross physical body is there and the ego's roots thrive in the fertile fields of the subconscient ? Has it ever been achieved except in trance or a deeply indrawn state of human consciousness? Is there any spiritual ...
... they are all true? Sri Aurobindo : I have no personal knowledge of them. But I believe most of the miracles attributed to Bijoy Goswami are more possible with the subtle than with the physical body. Sri Aurobindo then recounted the story of how Mother was once on the point of death in Algeria when she was practicing the yoga with Theon and his wife both of them great occultists. Madame ...
... transformation of man. She assured them that he was present in their midst, not in a figurative sense or as a universal, impersonal consciousness, but as the very divine being he had been in his physical body, as the very dynamic Master they had loved and adored. Sri Aurobindo had often told them that his consciousness and the Mother's were one; and now they ...
... assured them that he was present in their midst, not in a figurative sense or as a universal, impersonal consciousness, but as the Page 65 very divine being he had been in his physical body, as the very dynamic Master they had loved and adored. . Sri Aurobindo had often told them that his consciousness and the Mother's were one; and now they realised that truth more and more, in ...
... sands—the peoples and turning the sands into a fertilizing delta, is a proper acme to the poet's inspiration which invokes the peoples in the following words:- "Rise, Will of life in brothers". The physical body serves as a very apt symbol of the body social. In contradiction to the theory of class war as the solution of social problems this symbol brings Page 75 out the organic nature and ...
... messages from the departed souls. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, that is another definition of "spirituality", or rather "spiritualism", in Europe. Disciple : The one thing they accept is the physical body and in France they have come to accept vital force or "living matter". Sri Aurobindo : The French find it difficult to go beyond the intellect. Other European nations are no better,, ...
... evenings you stand for a longer time and I feel just at the time that you give us something especially, so I also concentrate to receive and feel what you give, but this evening suddenly I saw your physical body had disappeared, there was no sign of it! Then again in a few seconds your figure reappeared.” The last portion of my letter was in Bengali. It began with “I felt at that moment...” Sri Aurobindo ...
... gas. It appears like an inanimate force. In man, animals and plants it is animate. All renews, nothing perishes. Even death is process of life. Even physical disintegration is a renewal. When the physical body is dissolved the elements are used by other organisms. The second thing about Life is that it is impelled to go on creating eternally. Life depends upon Matter for its continuation and growth ...
... is crumbling—everything is different, we are completely different! The physical world we perceive is a huge falsehood put into an equation by a physical mind that has conditioned everything. The physical body that we perceive and experience is a body of falsehood. And death is another falsehood: it is the death of falsehood. So we must become the true body through the old. We must become the ...
... lot to silence and annul it. But She realized this, which was her first, negative discovery. It was very difficult to get rid of it because it was so intimately linked to the aggregate of the physical body and its present form ... it was difficult; and when I tried and a deeper consciousness tried to manifest, it used to cause fainting. I mean that the union, the fusion, the identification with the ...
... ancient times, partially forgotten since then. Now it is reawakening, and with the progress of modern science, it is acquiring quite a new amplitude and importance. This knowledge deals with the physical body and the extraordinary mastery that can be obtained over it with the help of enlightened and systematised physical education. This renewal has been the result of the action of a new power and ...
... that ridiculous position?' And you rush back inside." A condition is however attached to this 'seeing' when you are out of your body: you have to have the visual organ of your subtle physical body well developed. Mirra had seen to it when she was confined to bed for five months in Rue Lemercier. "It happened to me once in Paris," she said. "1 was given a good dinner, then 1 went to a ...
... was no need to get up from his bed and go there to see what was happening. "You have only to get out of your body and come." Mirra explained to her son that a human being is not limited to his physical body alone, but can go to other places and see what is going on. We don't know what the child understood, but it struck him as so extraordinary that he remembered it till the end of his days. Page ...
... to us from different planes. Tanta's emphasis is on 1 "Sheaths is a term for bodies, because each is superimposed on the other and acts as a covering and can be cast off. Thus the physical body itself is called the food sheath and its throwing off is what is called death." Page 318 Shakti. Its Kundalini Yoga deals with the latent power asleep in the chakras and the processes ...
... object, is true also of the general and universal. What is true of the man, is true also of the nation. The country, the land is only the outward body of the nation, its annamaya kosh , or gross physical body; the mass of people, the life of millions who occupy and vivify the body of the nation with their presence, is the pranamaya kosh , the life-body of the nation. These two are the gross body, the ...
... off the stroke. मर्ताः Greek βρoτóς, mortal. The Rishi has already prayed for protection of his spiritual gains against spiritual enemies; he now prays for the safety from human blows of the physical body. But I am inclined to think that मर्ताः here has an active rather than a passive sense; for the termination त may have either force. मर्तः undoubtedly means mortal in the Veda, but it is possible ...
... gods drink in the fourfold bowl, camasaṁ caturvayam , the pourings of the nectar. For Twashtri, the Framer of things, has given man originally only a single bowl, the physical consciousness, the physical body in which to offer the delight of existence to the gods. The Ribhus, powers of luminous knowledge, take it as renewed and perfected by Twashtri's later workings and build up in him from the material ...
... afternoon. It seems that both these physical siddhis have to be relaxed today. On the other hand the ahaituka kamananda is taking possession of the sukshmadeha and surrounding the nervous system of the physical body on which it impresses now prolonged & sometimes intense touches; continuity seems to be beginning. Page 152 ([Written] Dec 16) Trikaldrishti in the evening. Return of someone, not ...
... a conscious becoming of the one Being. Raudrananda, ahaituka & sukshma (materialised), has for some time been established in the system; vishayananda today has received similar rights in the physical body & vaidyuta is beginning to be regularised, although at present it is more often negative than positive. The five sharira anandas now usually occur together, involved in the main bliss-touch or explicit ...
... material and both of these from the vital or dynamic which forms a link between them and supports them both. We are then able to distinguish the movements of the Pranic currents not only in the physical body which is all that we are normally aware of, but in that subtle frame of our being which Yoga detects underlying and sustaining the physical. This is ordinarily done by the process of Pranayama, ...
... formula. He sees Life as the Sole Existence, Pranam Brahma. "For from the Life, verily, are all these existences born; being born they live by the Life, to the life they pass away and enter in." Our physical body at death is resolved into various forms of energy, the mind which inhabits the nervous system dissolves also and is or seems to be no more, except in its posthumous effect on others, an organised ...
... Ananda, I cannot fail to possess all things in myself inalienably and eternally, without being bound to possession or loss as are those who seek & acquire only with personal possession & through the physical body. The concentration of our vision on the form of things & in the outward motion of desire is the third element of error that has to be eliminated. We desire and suffer because we mistake form ...
... and here it does it with a supreme perfection. And as for the "contorted" postures of some figures, the same law holds. There is often a departure in this respect from the anatomical norm of the physical body or else—and that is a rather different thing—an emphasis more or less pronounced on an unusual pose of limbs or body, and the question then is whether it is done without sense or purpose, a mere ...
... their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses. But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the ...
... the physical parts for instrumentation can annul their intrinsic character; there is something more and other in our vital and mental being and vital and mental forces than the functioning of a physical body. But, again, each finite is in its reality or has behind it an Infinite which has built and supports and directs the finite it has made as its self-figure; so that even the being and law and process ...
... Bhagawad Gita are difficult enough to accept, but here in our midst we have something that exceeds them all. Can that intractable old stumbling-block of every spiritual effort in the past, the physical body, be illumined and transformed together with the mind and heart? The signs of such a change would not be the ability merely to stay in a sealed trance, insensitive to outward attacks of pain, or ...
... material thing—without experiencing desire or refusal, without existing in relation to that object, the inner transparency which one then experiences can extend to the outer being, to the physical Page 15 body, and subtly lend it the meaning of its non-existence as an individual entity and its boundlessness as a conscious element of the Infinite. That, moreover, is the avowed objective of ...
... Kiran) Amal Kiran's Correspondence with The Mother 28 March 1944 Mother, You know that for many years I have been in the habit of leaving my physical body and making exploratory tours in my subtle body. ( Here several experiences are described. ) I wonder whether I should keep up my practice of going out of the body. It is extremely fascinating ...
... 2nd floor balcony on the four Darshan Days, P always hovering behind Her within reach, but out of sight. Then those too stopped — came that Fateful Day the 17th of November 1973 — She left Her Physical Body — Mahasamadhi. Pranab-da was now with much time on his hands. He took to motorbiking with a small group. His motorbikes too were shining and looked new till their retirement. Pranab-da was ...
... testify regarding Jesus' burial, the Romans having driven them all out in crushing the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D. Page 198 In short, Paul's account of Jesus' resurrection in a non-physical body is the earliest and only first-hand evidence available to us. There is no evidence of any special burial or entombment or feminine witness to resurrection. We are left with a series of appearances ...
... Her seal on my forehead by way of a soft kiss. I saw in the Hall nothing except brilliant golden Light. I felt She covered both my eyes with Her palms, the way She used to do when She was in Her physical body. I saw the Auroville Foundation Ceremony of 28th February 1968 as I had heard it being narrated to the Mother then. But now I saw all with an inner significance. I saw the Mother just above each ...
... and spread around in space. It was going farther and farther. The Mother came very near to me and with both Her palms covered my eyes and—forehead—just as She used to do when She was in her physical body. The vision was over. It gave me a feeling of a great change in myself. ...
... Savitri had God-given strength and, for the creation of the new world, she put that God-given strength entirely at the disposal of that God himself. Thus she became entirely, including even her physical body, a luminous instrument that could express the Will of the Lord in the freest possible way. In that supreme identification her task was accomplished and now whatever has to happen that will happen ...
... Too Human If you are quite sincere, you will agree with me that you are complaining of my being not too Divine but not Divine enough. For if, in my physical body I had assumed, for instance, the appearance cherished by the ancient Indian tradition, how convenient it would be! Imagine, if having several heads and a great number of arms, possessing the power ...
... fully take care of all our mortality. But we can certainly live in its warmth and greatness to profit from it; in it we can make spiritual progress,—to the extent that we can even transform the physical body into an altar for her sacrificial fire that shall bring auspicious merits of the Yajna to us. The Deadlock Yama as the Dark Terrible has snatched the soul of Satyavan and is taking ...
... 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 can be carried out in a state of silence, so the activity of the mind is not incompatible with ...
... Reminiscences Champaklal's Treasures “I am There” Ever since Mother left her physical body, known and unknown persons have been asking for something touched by her. Once someone came and said, “Please give me something touched by the Mother; it will help me much in sadhana.” I saw that he was sincere. I also remembered seeing him with Mother upstairs. ...
... the formless within oneself can become aware of the empty space outside. The inner body —By focusing one's attention on the inner body, the invisible energy field that gives life to the physical body, one establishes connectedness with Being. A portal that has come to me as a particular revelation lies in creating gaps in the constant stream of thought, especially with the aid of Nature ...
... and "myself" are felt to be the same. Hence, generally the terms "ego" and "self" are used synonymously by most writers. 2 (ii)The ego or self is felt as a living reality, existing in a physical body. As Assagioli states, "...man's basic existential experience... is being a living self." 3 And as William James remarks, "No psychology... can question the existence of personal selves." 4 ...
... body; they are supposed to be attached to the spinal cord; but in fact all these things are in the subtle body, sūkṣma deha, though one has the feeling of their activities as if in the physical body when the consciousness is awake." — Sri Aurobindo "In the process of our yoga the centres have each a fixed psychological use and general function which base all their special powers ...
... anatomy of its victim; that in the man outwardly insensible not only feels and remembers the action of the surgeon's knife, but knows the appropriate reactions of suffering which were in the physical body inhibited by the anaesthetic and therefore non-existent; that in the illiterate servant-girl heard and retained accurately the words of an unknown language and could, as Yogic experience knows ...
... there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, intuition and vision.... In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds. In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which ...
... more powerful but rarer phenomena are those which attend the power of exteriorisation of our consciousness for various kinds of action otherwise and elsewhere Page 244 than in the physical body, communication in the psychical body or some emanation or reproduction of it, oftenest, though by no means necessarily, during sleep or trance and the setting up of relations or communication ...
... world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to fully know and fully possess God — as it is said in the Gita, "To know Me integrally". The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and Ananda, these are the spirit's five levels. The higher we rise the nearer we get to the condition of the highest perfection of Man's spiritual ...
... The exact way in which disequilibrium brings in illness, and how peace can act as a healing force is explained in the following passage: Page 147 "The vital body surrounds the physical body with a kind of envelope which has almost the same density as the vibrations of heat observable when the day is very hot. And it is this which is the intermediary between the subtle body and the ...
... practices that are extremely dangerous because they lead to an excited, exalted abnormal condition, and violently call down forces which the body cannot bear. They may lead to a breakdown of the physical body, the mind and the nervous system. As soon as I became aware of this turn, I warned him of the danger and prohibited the continuance of the practices. At first he attempted to follow my instructions ...
... overwomen. Through them is worked out the guidance of the Overman Consciousness, which is sometimes detectable in the world events. The presence of Sri Aurobindo . Death is a laying down of the physical body by the soul. The soul remains “sheathed” in its vital and mental bodies to the extent that these have been developed. But what happens if the vital and mental sheaths are supramentalised? Supra ...
... been no less, as witnessed for instance by some of her conversations in The Mother’s Agenda . At that time her transformational work in the depths of the subconscient had its repercussions in her physical body, while she had to perform what she called la besogne obscure , the obscure chore, and to confront toutes les horreurs de la création , all the horrors of creation. Now Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... of sensitiveness is such that you believe you are giving a game or even helping a good old lady to play for whom you feel a little gratefulness and some kind of affection.’ 45 About her physical body: ‘Each point of the body is symbolical of an inner movement; there is there a world of subtle correspondences.’ 46 This is a truth applicable to all bodies, but each point in hers was conscious ...
... have been here for a very long time become strange in their old age. Is it because consciousness depends on one’s health? In no way. Consciousness is eternal and nothing can affect it. But the physical body is rarely infused with consciousness, and, even when it is, it is only partly infused. The body, as it is at present, is like a musical instrument (piano or violin) and if some strings or notes ...
... a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do that twelve times in succession. This means that she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put this subtler body into trance, exteriorize herself from it – and so on, twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms.’ 24 Soon Mirra too would learn ...
... circumstances on one of the islands of Japan in the Far East, would crop up again in one form or another throughout her whole life. Mirra had left her soul with Sri Aurobindo, who was in his physical body working out his yoga on the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. She would later say to a disciple that he was always present with her in Japan, and that he directed her stay there. Around the ...
... Krishna. Blue is his special and significant colour, the colour of his aura when he manifests, —that is why he is called N ī l Krishna; the adjective does not mean that he was blue or dark in his physical body whether in Brindavan or Mathura or Dwarka! Violet is the radiance of Krishna's protection—that is why it brought to you a sense of peace. The Mother says that she always saw it when she was in communion ...
... Aurobindo’s). We have already seen how refined and sensitive it had become after her occult schooling in Tlemcen and the sequence of experiences described in her Prayers and Meditations. ‘Behind the physical body [of the Mother] there are many forms and powers and personalities of the Mother,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo; and: ‘She has many personalities and the body is plastic enough to express something of each ...
... earth to perfect this formation." 1 But she also added: "it is hardly probable that any human being has reached such a consummation, more so, since there must go with it a transformation of the physical body, which has not yet been done." 2 What the Mother, despite her Herculean labour, left undone for the present in her own material frame—are we going to do in ours in the near future merely by being ...
... answers are of the utmost value at present when the world seems so gloomed over with terrible possibilities and the Asura or Titan is on the march and Sri Aurobindo has withdrawn from his physical body. Apropos a couple of letters in which the Master had written that he was not in the least discouraged by the steady trend from bad to worse in the world-situation since it was temporary and ...
... of the details if immediately after returning to the body (which is usually done with a clear consciousness of the whole process of getting into it) one can traverse the same scene in the physical body. But this is rare; the subtle wandering is on the contrary a frequent phenomenon, only when it is near to the physical world all seems very material and concrete and the association of physical ...
... possible in matter, which at present still is gross matter. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were supramentalized in their mental and vital, but their enormous problem was the supramentalization of the physical body, consisting of the gross matter of the Earth. As the Mother said: ‘It is matter itself that must change so that the Supramental may manifest.’ 21 A new kind of matter no longer corresponding ...
... justify, at any rate as an actual possibility, the ancient tradition of at least a temporary sojourn of the human conscious being in other worlds than the physical after the dissolution of the physical body. On the other side they open to us the possibility of an action of the higher planes on the material existence which can liberate the powers they represent, the powers of life, mind and spirit for ...
... imperceptibly react, partly because the energies transmitted by the contacts are too subtle to be utilised by the crude inorganic density of formed Matter. Life in the tree is determined by its physical body, but it takes up the physical existence and gives it a new value or system of values,—the life-value. Page 740 The transition to the mind and sense that appear in the animal being, that ...
... intervene and the Light of Lights did not break out of the obscurity—for that is the meaning of the manifestation. An Incarnation is the Divine Consciousness and Being manifesting through a physical body. It is possible from any plane. It is the omnipresent cosmic Divine who supports the action of the universe; if there is an Incarnation, it does not in the least diminish the cosmic Presence ...
... remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much pro found spiritual knowledge (profound rather than wide, I think)—I would not swear to it that he is referring to the supramentalised body ( physical body ). Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping him and abolishing this body of death which he felt the ...
... It is through this that these forces or the thoughts or feelings of others enter. The environmental is not a world—it is an individual thing. The individual is not limited to the physical body—it is only the external consciousness which feels like that. As soon as one gets over this feeling of limitation, one can feel first the inner consciousness which is connected with the body but ...
... all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body; but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim, for he must arrive at an infinitely more difficult perfection in the handling of all ...
... most easily and effectively or can aid with a most powerful rapidity the perfection of the rest? Since we are the spirit enveloped in mind, a soul evolved here as a mental being in a living physical body, it must naturally be in the mind, the antaḥkaraṇa , that we must look for this desideratum. And in the mind it is evidently by the buddhi, the intelligence and the will of the intelligence that ...
... to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amṛta . Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret ...
... form of being. The fact would seem to be, then, that as there is a constant dynamic energy in movement in the universe which takes various material forms more or less subtle or gross, so in each physical body or object, plant or animal or metal, there is stored and active the same constant dynamic force; a certain interchange of these two gives us the phenomena which we associate with the idea of life ...
... realise because we live only in the present, yet death, cessation or interruption at least of our actual mode of being is a fact and the sense or prevision of continued existence in the future in the physical body becomes beyond a point we cannot now fix a hallucination, a false extension or a misapplication of our present mental impression of conscious being,—so conceivably Page 521 it might ...
... superstitious Hindu priests or poets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun and moon and could easily believe that during the periods of non-creation the supreme Deity in a physical body went to sleep on a physical snake upon a material ocean of real milk and that therefore it is a vain ingenuity to seek for a spiritual meaning in these fables. My reply would be that there is in ...
... seen in being & force, swáhá & swadhá. Page 488 Ananda Kamananda has persisted in the will of the sukshma body, but was only occasional yesterday in the sthula because the physical body failed to react against habit & satisfy the test to which it was put. It is now attempting to recover continuity as well as frequent & intense recurrence. In this attempt it will rapidly succeed ...
... of the physical consciousness. Writings, c. 1920 - XVI 30 corps physiques Yes, I am here.— The thirty are three tens. They are those who support the physical consciousness, not the physical body alone, but the obscurer consciousness of which it is the visible representation. In this consciousness there are three layers, one which receives the mental impressions and store[s] them in the ...
... this triple character. Our food, for example, the Gita tells us, is either sattwic, rajasic or tamasic according to its character and effect on the body. The sattwic temperament in the mental and physical body turns naturally to the things that increase the life, increase the inner and outer strength, nourish at once the mental, vital and physical force and increase the pleasure and satisfaction and happy ...
... Divine is the godhead of Soma who by the rasa , the sap in the Earth-mother, nourishes the plants and trees that clothe her surface. The Divine and no other is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of living creatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force. He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from him are memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason ...
... the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes cognizance of the field, kṣetrajña , the knower of Nature. It is evident, however, from the definitions that succeed that it is not the physical body alone which is the field, but all too that the body supports, the working of nature, the mentality, the natural action of the objectivity and subjectivity of our being. 1 This wider body too ...
... it is true that the Supreme deals with the child soul according to its childishness and allows it to continue its sensational imaginations of heaven and hell for a time beyond the death of the physical body. Perhaps both these ideas of after-life and of rebirth as fields of punishment and reward were needed because suited to our half-mentalised animality. But after a certain stage the system ceases ...
... to account for these phenomena on any reasonable theory. Mind therefore is held by the Hindus to be a species of subtle matter in which ideas are waves or ripples, and it is not limited by the physical body which it uses as an instrument. There is an ulterior force which works through this subtle medium called mind. An animal species develops, according to the modern theory, under the subtle influence ...
... in manner—simple and precise and penetrating. 1 What you describe is the psychic fire, agni pāvaka , which burns in the deeper heart and from there is lighted in the mind, the vital and the physical body. In the mind Agni creates a light of intuitive perception and discrimination which sees at once what is the true vision or idea and the wrong vision or idea, the true feeling and the wrong feeling ...
... the meditation depends on the part of the being in which one is centred at the time. In the body (rather the subtle body than the physical, but connected with the corresponding parts in the gross physical body also) there are centres proper to each level of the being. There is a centre at the top of the head and above it which is that of the above-mind or higher consciousness; a centre in the forehead ...
... The Mother's Emanations I saw the Mother in an experience. Is it an emanation of hers that I saw or is it her whole body and whole consciousness? An emanation. How can her physical body be seen in a dream experience? 7 July 1933 The Mother when she works in the supra-physical levels goes out in a different emanation to each sadhak. 11 December 1933 During the afternoon ...
... Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared. The object of supramentalisation is a body fitted to embody and express the physical consciousness on earth ...
... centralised around the body requires good training. Few people have a mind with a well-defined form: it is like clouds which roll, come and go. Even to have a vital with a form similar to that of your physical body, an analogous form, it must be very much individualised, very much centralised. The mind still more; it must be completely individualised, centralised, organised around the psychic centre in order ...
... something very, very slow, but thought is already something quicker than light... perhaps Page 219 not. Thought gives the sensation of the instantaneous. Do you perceive thought in the physical body, for example? Do you perceive thought apart from a material quality? It remains to be seen, doesn't it? Let me explain: if you go out of your body, if you go out of the vital world and enter the ...
... is an attribute of finally transformed Matter. The supramental body which has to be brought into being here has four main attributes: lightness, adaptability, plasticity and luminosity. When the physical body is thoroughly divinised, it will feel as if it were always walking on air, there will be no heaviness or tamas or unconsciousness in it. There will also be no end to its power of adaptability: ...
... is an attribute of finally transformed Matter. The supramental body which has to be brought into being here has four main attributes: lightness, adaptability, plasticity and luminosity. When the physical body is thoroughly divinised, it will feel as if it were always walking on air, there will be no heaviness or tamas or unconsciousness in it. There will also be no end to its power of adaptability: in ...
... simultaneously or successively, according to the quality and type of the manifestation of our activity. Physical contact is compulsory, so to say, since it depends on the fact that we have a physical body. It inevitably occurs with those who have provided us with this body and with all Page 71 those who are materially dependent on them. These are the relations of kinship. There are also ...
... substance, we cannot but share in this imperfection. Therefore, whatever degree of perfection, consciousness or knowledge is possible to our inmost being, the very fact that it incarnates in a physical body gives rise to obstacles to the purity of its manifestation; and on the other hand, the aim of its incarnation is victory over these obstacles, the transformation of Matter. We must therefore not ...
... 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, is much more… ( silence ) how to put it?… immaterial ...
... they do not yet dispel the ignorance. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Subconscient and the Inconscient * Environmental Consciousness *The individual is not limited to the physical body—it is only the external consciousness which feels like that. As soon as one gets over this feeling of limitation, one can feel first the inner consciousness which is connected with the body but ...
... have seen that even the subtle physical which is yet material compared with the vital being and in certain conditions almost visible, extends at times considerably beyond the visible limits of the physical body. This subtle physical is constituted of active vibrations which enter into contact or mingle with the vibrations of the subtle physical of others, and this reciprocal contact gives rise to infl ...
... of peace.... Suppose you succeed more or less completely. Then, if you can draw the peace into yourself and bring it down into the solar plexus―for we are not talking of inner states but of your physical body―and from there direct it very calmly, very slowly I might say, but very persistently, towards the place where the pain is more or less sharp, and fix it there, this is very good. This is not ...
... when I woke up the next morning, I had a red mark in the same place, on the forehead and the cheek.... Inevitably, Page 26 a wound received in the vital being is translated in the physical body. But how does it happen? There must be some intermediary? It was in the vital that I was beaten. It is from within that this comes. Nothing, nobody touched anything from outside. If you ...
... certain length of time, then you keep your balance and can use these energies for all kinds of things, as for example, to progress, to become more conscious and transform your nature. But if your physical body doesn't have much in reserve and grows considerably weak from not eating, then this creates an imbalance between the intensity of the energies you absorb and the capacity of the body to hold them ...
... material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms.... I shall speak to you about that ...
... So, these are the sweetnesses of divine Delight. And just now, when I was evoking this joy which is in things, spontaneous, simple, this joy which is at the heart of everything, well, for the physical body it has something truly... oh! naturally, the taste of honey is very crude and gross in comparison—but something like that, something extremely delicious. And very simple, very simple and very integral ...
... 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, is much more... ( silence ) how to put it?... ...
... its own way, you see; the mental opening and the vital opening are very different in nature and the physical opening is still more different. What is the physical opening? That's when the physical body opens to the divine influence and receives the divine forces. For example, you see, there's a moment when the divine forces come and penetrate all the cells. To begin with, it is the physical ...
... And each thing created here has, supporting it, subtler envelopes or forms of itself which make it subsist and connect it with forces acting from above. Man, for instance, has, besides his gross physical body, subtler sheaths or bodies by which he lives behind theveil in direct connection with supra-physical planes of consciousness and can be influenced by their powers, movements and beings. What takes ...
... thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will etc. that are part of man's intelligence. The physical is that part of human nature which includes the physical body and the physical consciousness. The psychic or psychic being is the evolving soul of the individual, the divine portion in him which evolves from life to life, growing by its experiences until ...
... have seen that even the subtle physical which is yet material pared with the vital being and in certain conditions almost visible, extends at times considerably beyond the visible limits of the physical body. This subtle physical is constituted of active vibrations which enter into contact or mingle with the vibrations of the subtle physical of others, and this reciprocal contact gives rise to infl ...
... is the psychic. So, this is what happens: the psychic has alternate periods of activity and rest; it has a life of progress resulting from experiences of the physical life, of active life in a physical body, with all the experiences of the body, the vital and the mind; then, normally, the psychic goes into a kind of rest for assimilation where the result of the progress accomplished during its active ...
... Himself and the Ashram: Admission to the Ashram What you describe is the psychic fire, agni pāvaka , which burns in the deeper heart and from there is lighted in the mind, the vital and the physical body. In the mind Agni creates a light of intuitive perception and discrimination which sees at once what is the true vision or idea and the wrong vision or idea, the true feeling and the wrong feeling ...
... I may not be injured once again and miss my group activities. Be more conscious and you will no more be injured. 8 July 1968 Mother, I have seen that I am not able to force my physical body to do a little better than my actual capacity. I would like to know how I can force it. But, Mother, is it good to force one's body? No. The body is capable of progressing and gradually it ...
... rays. The form and colour of the badge have an occult significance and may be interpreted as follows: The tortoise is the symbol of terrestrial immortality, that is, the immortality of the physical body on this earth. The red centre symbolises the illumined physical and from this radiate the twelve white rays of the integral Light of Truth. The rays are curved to indicate that the Light is dynamic ...
... a being that was neither man nor woman, having the combined characteristics of both. And it was bigger than the person and in every way overtopped her by about so much ( gesture surpassing the physical body by about twenty centimetres ); she was there and it was like this ( same gesture ). And it had this colour... this colour... which if it became quite material would be the colour of Auroville. ...
... and a veil for it. Many a time, in order to make the discipline easier and to create a closer and more easily perceptible intimacy, the Divine has sought, in his highest form of love, to assume a physical body similar in appearance to the human body; but each time, imprisoned within the gross forms of Matter, he was able to express only a caricature of himself. And in order to manifest in the fullness ...
... Aurobindo is in the subtle physical, you can meet him when you sleep, if you know how to go there. 13 August 1964 ( During sleep a sadhak had a vision of Sri Aurobindo in his subtle physical body living in the subtle physical world. He sent a report of his vision to Mother, who replied: ) Sri Aurobindo shows himself according to the need of each one and in the subtle physical the things ...
... bound to come. 14 December 1972 Role as Guide If you are quite sincere, you will agree with me that you are complaining of my being not too Divine but not Divine enough. For if in my physical body I had assumed, for instance, the appearance cherished by the ancient Indian tradition, how convenient it would be! Imagine, if having several heads and a great number of arms, possessing the power ...
... one should keep an absolute calm. It is only in the peace and the calm that the Divine Force expresses itself and acts. You know that for many years I have been in the habit of leaving my physical body and making exploratory tours in my subtle body. [Here the sadhak describes various experiences.] I wonder whether I should keep up my practice of getting out of the body. It is extremely fascinating ...
... here is the way Do not try to please yourself, do not try either to please others. Try only to please the Lord. Because He alone is the Truth. Each and every one of us, human beings in our physical body, is a coat of falsehood put on the Lord and hiding Him. As He alone is true to Himself, it is on Him that we must concentrate and not on the coats of falsehood. There is only one solution ...
... was neither man nor woman, having the characteristics of both combined. And it was bigger than her, it extended about this much beyond her everywhere (gesture extending about 20 cm beyond the physical body). She was there and it was like this (gesture). And it was this colour... this colour... which, if it would become very material, would be the Auroville colour [orange]. It was softer, as if ...
... on earth to bring this process to perfection. But it is unlikely that any human being has yet arrived at this fulfilment, especially since it must be accompanied by a transformation of the physical body, and this has not yet been accomplished. 30 August 1969 ...
... measure of power or fame or success or realization, are placed under conditions where their outer effect is subordinated to the needs of a particular work. Let me put it to you more clearly: your physical body, for example, should have been either stronger or more supple or endowed with certain very strong vital compensations, so that you wouldn't suffer from your working conditions.... Of course, for ...
... Wisdom. Something so wonderful! It foresees things the universal forces in their universal play would overlook—a wonder! ( silence ) We mustn't be in a hurry. It's hard to imagine how a physical body can, for instance, extend or enlarge itself. It all seems unimaginable. It is unimaginable because the body can't do it yet. No... and besides, you don't see. If my body resembled its co ...
... world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize God—to do what is said in the Gita, "To know Me integrally." The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda—these are the spirit's five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection ...
... a central one, but one of the pivots of the body's invisible action, of its consciousness. And it is expressed by attracting certain circumstances. A whole range of things having to do with the physical body has thus become very clear and precise to me—and that's what the body was made for: to go full speed ahead. Intellectually, I don't at all believe in taking others' misfortunes upon oneself—that's ...
... the treatment. More and more I feel that nothing can completely cure me except Your Grace, and I trust myself to that. If I love You and am faithful to You, I am sure that You will transform this physical body. It is all right; if the treatment does not suit you, you must stop it. It is true that the transformation can only be done by the divine force; but under the present conditions of the earth ...
... 'Widen yourself.' All this must be universalized; it is the condition, the basis, for the Supramental to descend into the body. According to the ancient traditions, this universalization of the physical body was considered the supreme realization, but it is only a foundation, the base upon which the Supramental can come down without breaking everything. ...
... There is a difference between immortality and the deathless state. Sri Aurobindo has described it very well in Savitri . The deathless state is what can be envisaged for the human physical body in the future: it is constant rebirth. Instead of again tumbling backwards and falling apart due to a lack of plasticity and an incapacity to adapt to the universal movement, the body is undone ...
... exist; it's like this ( Mother makes a vertical motion which towers over and embraces everything at once ). And so, in an individual consciousness it's expressed by an infinitesimal point—a physical body and everything dependent on it; but it's exactly the same thing as the Supreme Point and everything depending on that. It's the same thing. It is only like the shifting of a glance—if it can be ...
... "Learn to go out of your body", for there are many requirements before you can do it safely. If you have any affinities with the forces of falsehood and violence, it is better to stay in your physical body. Page 333 ...
... psychic being is a definite and very concrete fact, as all who have had the experience know. Blessings. 6 October 1969 Sweet Mother, I have seen that I am not able to force my physical body to do a little better than my actual capacity. I would like to know how I can force it. But, Sweet Mother, is it good to force one's body? No. The body is capable of progressing and it can ...
... that if the body is changed the next one will necessarily be better, is also a mistake. It is only when one has profited fully and to the utmost by the opportunity for progress which life in a physical body represents, that one may hope to be reborn in a higher organism. All defection, on the contrary, naturally brings in a diminution of being. Only the resolution to face courageously, in the present ...
... month, but I believe that everything will be completed in a short time from now. Sweet Mother, I have a kind of fear that all these mantras are not bringing me nearer to you—I mean you in your physical body, for it is not upon you physically that I was told to concentrate. Also, I almost never see you in my dreams any longer, or else only very vaguely. Last night, I dreamed that I was offering you ...
... it's like crossing a zone, a perfumed zone, and then it's past—for the moment, it's over. A fleeting caress. After the work: Generally speaking, the progress is undeniable, but the physical body... has a terrible need of rest. It's annoying, for it prevents me from working. How to explain it?... It's rather strange: the cells' attitude and their state of consciousness is changing with ...
... present body or does one have Page 322 to leave it? If one has to leave the body, there seems to be death. So...? What he means is that when one will have the power to withdraw the physical body from the influence of death, the power of transformation will be such that one will also be able to change the form of that body at will. 14 July 1965 Sweet Mother, What do You mean ...
... It can happen in different ways. Quite often I was informed by a small entity or some being or other. Sometimes the aura protected me—all sorts of things. My life was rarely limited to the physical body. And this is useful, it's good. Necessary also—it enhances your capacities. Théon told me right from the start: "You people deprive yourselves of the most useful kind of senses, EVEN FOR ORDINARY ...
... page on which she had written: ) Page 140 Night of July 24-25, '59 : first penetration of the supramental force into the body. Sri Aurobindo alive in a concrete and permanent subtle physical body. I told you about that experience of meeting Sri Aurobindo (the true Sri Aurobindo) in the subtle physical. This is the exact date—early that morning I jotted it down on this paper. And it gives ...
... ready cannot do it wherever they are. 12 November 1971 The supramental transformation is hard labour and needs a strong body. For some time more, probably more than a hundred years, the physical body will need to eat in order to keep its strength; and we have to comply with this necessity. December 1972 ...
... has quieted down. But every time the vital comes into play (and one is obliged to let the vital play because of the physical health; one can't "calm" it down totally because that would make the physical body suffer), it's like that.... It gives me, if you like, the impression of a cat's vital! Cats have a wonderful vital ( laughing ), far, far more clever and intense than human beings have, but the ...
... " And it was absolutely true, and since that day it has been absolutely true. It absolutely does not matter. And I now have with Sri Aurobindo an intimacy I didn't have when he lived in a physical body: he was busy on his side, I was busy on mine, we never used to speak to each other. We were very close, as close as can be, as one as can be, ON THE SAME PLANE AS WE ARE NOW. And now when I want ...
... stops completely." That's death. As for me, I'll tell them this ( Mother reads with difficulty ): "Death is the phenomenon of decentralization and scattering of the cells making up the physical body. "Consciousness is, in its very nature, immortal, and in order to manifest in the physical world, it clothes itself in material forms that are durable to a greater or lesser degree. "The material ...
... the being that becomes aware that one is dead?" Any part of the being that lives on becomes aware that the body is no longer there! It depends. "How can one say with certainty that the physical body is dead?" Only when it decomposes. "You said, 'Decomposition of the cells often starts before death....' How to control or check the process of disintegration?" ( Mother laughs ) By ...
... before your last "Apropos," because not all those who read the Bulletin know what has happened. I propose to add this: "This Apropos was written by Mother following an ordeal that threatened her physical body." It's a bit dramatic! But after all, that's what happened. ( After a silence ) Yes, you're right, it's better to say it's a purely physical question—"over there," there are no more ...
... slowly, as though overburdened, until it finally became difficult for me to find my way... to escape. "These experiences seemed to last for a long time. When they ended, I found myself in my physical body, surprised that it bore no marks of all that I had just undergone. "But I slowly began to understand the meaning of all that had taken place. An immense gratitude rose from my heart towards the ...
... .. I might say that my body had too much (probably the way of seeing and reacting to the material world), too much... 1 Extremely rarely in my life—extremely rarely did I have Ananda in the physical body. It's only when I would see beautiful things ( Mother lifts her eyes as if to look at the coconut tree near the Samadhi, which she can no longer see ), that it, certain moments of contact with ...
... doing things—a totally conscious and active life. Last night, he was speaking to some people, organizing meetings, he was extraordinarily active. Besides, he was among people who still have a physical body, who were sleeping, I mean who had come out of their body. He was so conscious! I've never seen anyone so... so materially conscious, I could say. Exactly as if he were continuing his work. Mainly ...
... things has sort of dissolved leaving the place for... everything to be learned anew ( Mother opens her hands, attentive to what comes from above ). ( silence ) It's in the consciousness of the physical body, you know. A sort of... not even an alternation of states, it's as if both were constantly together: the sense that you know nothing and are completely impotent in terms of, well, the "present" ...
... all illnesses and accidents. It is the only part. The other parts of the being can be transformed, Page 187 can transform their consciousness while remaining what they are—but the physical body needs to change. I don't know whether it's a passing experience or a final one—that I don't know. We'll see. And yet with a supramental consciousness, it should be impossible to get cancer ...
... Nature. Many Yogis catch snippets, so to speak, of these powers, but the real and final miracle to work on Nature is what Sri Aurobindo calls transformation - the utter divinisation of the physical body so that it becomes a form of the Consciousness that is luminous and immortal. Remember that Sri Aurobindo's teaching is Integral Yoga. The word "integral" denotes the Aurobindonian search ...
... Aurobindo's answers are of the utmost value at present when the world seems so gloomed over with terrible possibilities and the Asura or Titan is on the march and Sri Aurobindo has withdrawn from his physical body. Apropos a couple of letters in which the Master had written that he was not in the least discouraged by the steady trend from bad to worse in the world-situation since it was temporary and he knew ...
... Arya-series, The Secret of the Veda, has the note: "The Rishi has already prayed for protection of his spiritual gains against spiritual enemies; he now prays for the safety from human blows on the physical body." 13 Then Sri Aurobindo adds that, though the Sanskrit marta undoubtedly means "mortal" in the Rig-veda, the termination ta may have either a passive or an active force so that the word may ...
... alone will and knowledge are equal and in perfect harmony; there alone Consciousness and Force arrive at their divine equation." 3 It is through the supramental transformation of our physical body, — that "is still a flower of the material Inconscience," 4 — down to its very cells and functionings that the law of incapacity and consequent fatigue will be finally abrogated and with it ...
... material basis of life is not satisfactorily solved, "we have to go back to food and the established material forces of Nature," 4 for "as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical body and its workings and inner potencies Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable and elimination of what cannot ...
... as sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter." 3 When that day arrives the man of science will wake to the discovery that "not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others.... ...
... time-lessness, there exists as a natural consequence "a perpetual continuity of our temporal existence and experience" 4 from life to life, from world to world after the dissolution of the physical body. "The realisation of timeless immortality comes by the knowledge of self in the Non-birth and Non-becoming and of the changeless spirit within us: the realisation of time-immortality comes by ...
... if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 212) "Our substance does not end with the physical body; that is only the earthly pedestal, the terrestrial base, the material starting point.... There are behind our gross physical being other and subtler grades of substance with a finer law and ...
... theory of Avatarhood, in the process of evolution — the progressive manifestation of the Divine, or Spirit, in its innumerable material forms — an incarnation of the Divine consciousness in a physical body becomes necessary at times of the evolutionary process when a certain grade of consciousness must be surpassed. In the case of Sri Chaitanya, it may be considered that the secret Divine Consciousness ...
... here to note the heroism of king Dilīpa, who was prepared to sacrifice his own life for the sake of the holy cow for whose protection and services he had offered himself voluntarily. More than his physical body, Dilīpa was more concerned to protect his "body of fame", for he speaks out his mind to the lion as follows: - If you think of sparing me, be kind to spare the body of my fame, for people ...
... to tell all the utter unity and all the eternal variety of the Ananda of divine love. Our higher and our lower members are both flooded with it, the mind and life no less than the soul: even the physical body takes its share of the joy, feels the touch, is filled in all its limbs, veins, nerves with the flowing of the wine of the ecstasy, amrta. Love and Ananda are the last word of being, the secret ...
... by what faculty can we really know? Plato's answer is that we can know by the operation of reason, which is itself a cluster of unchangeable ideas. Plato also held the view that behind our physical body is an inner soul or psyche, and that this soul has the knowledge of the realm of Ideas, which in physical existence is lost in forgetfulness. According to Plato, this forgotten knowledge can be ...
... Beyond, only the rhythms exist (in other words, the intangible universe, the non-being, devoid of colours and sounds). Each stage has its own vibrations, joining the spiritual essence to the physical body. By studying, not the causality but the relationship between the stages, one can comprehend the Way (michi), that is to say, that which unites I — the intangible — to WI — the tangible. The ...
... do!) Mother was rather advanced in age and dark, while you were younger—these things make me doubt the dream. These dreams are in the vital and their appearance is not fixed as it is in the physical body. It can change to express various things, some vital condition, some psychological symbolism, something in the mind of the man who sees, etc., etc., etc. So nothing funny, sir,—all quite normal ...
... peace and wideness. This is possible even if the material body is ill. In most cases it is the subtle body that feels like that, but as the subtle penetrates everywhere the gross physical, the physical body also feels like that. But then it does not feel disturbed by the pains or motions of the illness—they do not affect its peace or Ananda. November 17, 1936 May I ask Ardhendu to play ...
... After some more talk the Mother departed for the general meditation. SRI AUROBINDO (resuming) : When the subtle body goes out, there is a thin thread that maintains the connection with the physical body. If that thread is snapped somehow, the man dies. NIRODBARAN: I have heard that the Mother had such an accident in Algeria. SRI AUROBINDO (surprised) : How do you know that? She went to Algeria ...
... sleeps, the inner being meditates. It does not mean this happens in all cases. All cases of snoring are not meditation. CHAMPAKLAL: Why does one snore? SRI AUROBINDO: You mean why does the physical body snore? For that you have to ask a doctor. Ask Nirod. Why should others get disturbed by snoring? PURANI: One doesn't if one can get into the rhythm of the snoring. I disturb Nirod when he goes ...
... while trying only to enlighten it. How much resistance you and the Mother must be facing while supramen-talising the whole material Nature! How do you manage it? The attacks must be coming on your physical body also. When one knows that it is like that and sees the play of forces one does not get disturbed. There is the inner position described by the Gita, "Whatever comes or goes, sattwa, rajas ...
... she wants to. DR. MANILAL: She can know then everything? SRI AUROBINDO: What do you mean by everything? She can know what is necessary for her to know. She may not know everything in her physical body, but in her universal entity she can know. Sarvajnatva doesn't mean knowledge of everything. It usually means knowledge of the Trikala. When the Gita says Sarvavid, it doesn't mean knowledge of ...
... greater fulfilment. Evolution means the growth of consciousness. In man in his collective existence the growth continues: it lies in two directions. First of all, in extension. A sufficiently large physical body is needed to house the growing life and consciousness: therefore the unicellular organism has developed into the multicellular. In the same way, in the earliest stages of human Page 208 ...
... submerged in the subconscient. I saved them. But it was a most difficult and dangerous task. I am aware of all the details of my subtle bodies. Then finally I return and enter gradually in my physical body—in the world of Matter. Moving on, I had to show Aswapathy receiving the Light from above: that is to say, from the blue stars and the blue square. I did the painting—I painted two straight ...
... physical part of action, but for the purposes of this life a base or pedestal also for all inner action." 2 So a full play of divine life demands as its essential prerequisite a totally transformed physical body which will as a supple and flawless and transparent instrument respond fully to each and every call of the self-manifesting Spirit. "At present the notation of the body and the physical consciousness ...
... anxious thoughts! And finally Rebirth! and the trepidant query: Will I come back upon earth again in a new human body? Or, is all an eternal zero and silence after the dissolution of my present physical body? There is not a human being who never asks himself some such questions even for once in his lifetime. Death is a constant phenomenon facing man with its grim ruthlessness. Who is there ...
... in her turn the Mother too left her body in 1973 she made it a point to assure her children in advance through respected Nolini-da (Nolini Kanta Gupta) that if ever she would withdraw from her physical body, she would continue to remain with us. With this double assurance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as regards their continued presence and active guidance in our midst, we in the Sri Aurobindo ...
... , not to claim anything, but to refer all to the Divine." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1372) We as sadhakas should never forget that the main purpose of our human existence upon earth in a physical body is to give our-selves totally to the Divine and be the perfect instruments of his manifestation. If we can successfully do this and completely forget ourselves we will be granted an ineffable ...
... receive the physical impression produced and its nervous translation and thus be aware of the object in question. But this account errs on many counts. The physical eye belonging to the physical body is meant only for a limited range of physical sight. But we have bodies other than the physical one: the subtle body {suksma satire) and the causal body (kārana sarìra), and these bodies have ...
... citizens' group for "EVERY CHILD MATTERS" will undertake a big program of providing a message to the citizens that: "NOTHING SHOULD BE DONE IN PUBLIC LIFE WHICH WOULD ADVERSLY AFFECT THE CHILD'S PHYSICAL BODY, CHILD'S EFFORTS TOWARDS SELF - CONTROL AND CHILD'S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT". 77 (i) Every Citizens' group will have in its constitution at least (a)One Engineer; ...
... withered leaf of a tree and he attains to what is called "videha-mukti", the status of "disembodied liberation", which then endures for eternity. The Videhamukta will never again assume a new physical body and come upon earth to lead another round of worldly existence. For him will cease the intractable "cycle of rebirths", "janma-cakra-nivṛtti". And that is supposed to be the ultimate spiritual ...
... prophetic words of the Mother, the lifelong divine collaborator of Sri Aurobindo in his unique mission of transfiguring humanity. Now, Sri Aurobindo is no longer Page 86 in his physical body: the Mother too has left her physical frame in 1973. More than thirty years have passed since then. The teachers and students of the early days have, in course of time, left the Centre of Education; ...
... mind, life and body so as to evolve the fullness of a divine life on earth. He envisages that a stage can be reached where a secure completeness and stability of the health and strength of the physical body could be maintained by the indwelling Spirit and that all the natural capacities of the physical frame, all powers of the physical conscious ness would reach their utmost extension and be there ...
... towards the bringing about of unity and more harmonious world order towards which we look as our hope for humanity's future. Physical culture is a matter of great yogic educational value. The physical body is the instrument for the final victory of the highest values on the earth. We need therefore to develop health, strength, plasticity, grace and numerous physical perfections so as to make the body ...
... translate them by a luminous and harmonizing conversion into a unity of the truth, power and delight of a living existence. The next element of perfection is that of the Gnostic perfection in the physical body. The fifth element is arrived at when the perfection of Page 86 the body is pushed to its highest conclusion which, according to Sri Aurobindo, brings in spiritualizing and illumination ...
... light of Swar beyond the darkness, and we arrived at the highest light of the Sun. And when the Vedic seers spoke of the attainment of immortality, they spoke of their victory while in the physical body. As Parashara points out: आ ये वऽवा स्वपत्यानि तस्थु : || कुण्वानासो अमृतत्वायगतुम् | | महना महदभिः पुथिवी वि तस्थे | माता पुत्रैरदितिघ्येसे वेः | RV.I.72.9. ...
... existence, we find its presence. This is more fully explained in the Taittiriya Upanishad. At the physical level we find it to be annamaya purusha, a physical being, possessing and sustaining our physical body and its movement. At a higher level of our vital and dynamic movements, we find it to be pranamaya purusha, a being of life-force, sustainer and supporter of our vital energies and activities ...
... being's self-becoming by self-exceeding? A spiritual evolution, it is affirmed, an evolution of consciousness in Matter, in a constant developing self- formulation till the form, even the physical body, can reveal the highest supramental knowledge and power and harmony is the key-note, the central significant motive of terrestrial existence. The theory of spiritual evolution may accept the ...
... knowledge, and what spirituality ought to demand for its ultimate victory on the earth, can be fulfilled only if supramental consciousness can be demonstratively seen and touched in supramental physical body. Let us refer to that conversation of the Mother of May 24,1962: Satprem read out the following from Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Aphorisms'. "73 - When Wisdom comes, her first ...
... danger; and it turned out that, immediately he crossed the border, he was arrested and kept in jail for the duration of the war. After arriving in France the Mother became seriously ill, her physical body reflecting the sufferings of the war-ravaged world. In April she left Paris and went to Lunel in the South of France where she spent the next six months. Her diary entries reveal that even during ...
... freedom of life. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "After all the spiritual and cultural is the only enduring unity and it is by a persistent mind and spirit much more than by an enduring physical body and outward organization that the soul of a people survives. This is a truth the positive Western mind may be unwilling to understand or concede, and yet its proofs are written across the whole ...
... pass comments on the sadhaks here. If one knows how to look, even the dishwashers in the kitchen have gone far, in spite of the appearance. You see how one can draw oneself out of the physical body, with a strong will, to be merged with the Divine. He was completely withdrawn, so the whole night this process was going on. *** So now to resume our story. Remember, we are speaking ...
... balance and merge in her consciousness. I do not know what you mean by losing the balance. To merge in there one need not lose any balance; though one may become unconscious of the physical body. After the meditation, I found my consciousness filled with the Mother's inner gifts. Does it not indicate that she is making up for my lapse of the last four days when I was ...
... in it. Now, it seems as if she has begun to come into me and be with me more and more. It is the next thing that must be perfected. It seems to me, Lord, that my physical body is opening to the Mother's experiences. There is nothing to be said about the Page 287 peace and silence — they appear to be there all the time, but something else happened ...
... done? In whatever worlds you pass through — but it is doubtful whether the statement is more than very partially true. But which part of us suffers or enjoys when our physical body is no more there? The vital can suffer, or enjoy in the vital world for a time. Page 94 ...
... wishes, that this body will become. Voilà, the light has come back…. What, why are you looking like that, phou ! ( gesture ) Mother, is there a difference between Your subtle body and Your physical body? Seems to be. For the human eyes, it seems there is a difference. But… Mother, once X saw You in a dream, in a luminous body… Maybe X saw my subtle body which is transformed. The mental ...
... Voilà! My child, I am the Unknown that is unseizable, yet I consent to be seized; I am the Unknowable, yet men pretend to know me. I am the Infinite but I am constrained to limit myself in a physical body by time and space. I am the Eternal who has submitted itself to be bound in evolution. I am Immortality which awakes in its innumerable aspects that perish, in order to climb back towards the One ...
... entire universe bows down to me, imploring me in an act of adoration to serve me. You do not know who I am, who has descended in the ignorance among you, who has consented to be human, to take up a physical body among you all. You have no idea of who is there before you. Well, even the gods whom you revere so much, perform tapasya in order to have a glimpse of me. It is for me and through me that the whole ...
... greater fulfilment. Evolution means the growth of consciousness. In man in his.collective existence the growth continues: it lies in two directions. First of all, in extension. A sufficiently large physical body is needed to house the growing life and consciousness: therefore the unicellular organism has developed into the multicellular. In the same way, in the earliest stages of human Page 98 ...
... and through it; its fullness will be the fullness of the Divine Presence and intention. The mind will be wholly illumined, the vital with it will become the pure energy of Consciousness and the physical body will be made out of the substance of the divine being: our humanity will be the home and sanctuary of the Divine. Page 183 ...
... bottled up, narrow, ignorant, asleep; human energy, too, at this level is obscure and mechanical, extremely limited. The whole energy potential, the consciousness-force is locked up in the physical body consciousness. Now the serpent does not remain asleep forever. It has to wake up, it wakes up. That is to say, man's consciousness awakes, grows and rises upward. The serpent one day shakes its ...
... achieve that much. It is within the capacity of any human being with normal good will, to be sincere in his psychic movements, even if these are rare. But to be sincere in the very cells of your physical body is a still rarer and arduous achievement. To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and Page 120 through the Divine. That ...
... swallow your tongue and even more serious things. When you wish to go into trance, to have the experience of being outside the body, you must have someone by your side, not only to keep watch on your physical body, but also to prevent the vital entities from getting possession of the nerve centres which, as I said, are no longer under the control and protection of the conscious intelligence. There is a still ...
... antinomy has become obsolete, because the body too on its side recognises that it has not the structure and character that millennial ignorance gave it. The material particles that constitute the physical body are found to be after all not inert masses but quantas of energy, of luminous energy. The spiritual Light above demands nothing better for its earthly home. This is symbolical of ...
... Chit-Achif, the Ignorance is a sort of peripheral reality not Page 47 rouching or affecting the Knowledge, but connected with or depending upon the nuclear reality, something like the physical body coexisting with and depending on the soul or self. One can also remember in this connection the Purusha-Prakriti relation in Sankhya. Such a standpoint, I suppose, is the precursor or philosophical ...
... or achieve that much. It is within the capacity of any human being with normal good will, to be sincere in his psychic movements, even if these are rare. But to be sincere in every cell of your physical body is a still rarer and arduous achievement. To make the body cells so one-pointed that they too feel they cannot live but for the Divine and in and through the Divine. That is true sincerity and that ...
... antinomy has become obsolete, because the body too on its side recognises that it has not the structure and character that millennial ignorance gave it. The material particles that constitute the physical body are found to be after all not inert masses but quantas of energy, of luminous energy. The spiritual Light above demands nothing better for its earthly home. This is symbolical of the collaboration ...
... all movements in life. The calm heave of the lung sand the glad beat of the heart are the sign and symbol of a radiant animation. We now come to the fourth domain, the domain of Marut; in the physical body it is the mouth, the throat, the tongue, the facial front in general. It is the field of expression, of articulation – Vak, the word is the symbol. Here is the alert, the mobile field, also a stage ...
... and Ignorance – cit – acit ; the Ignorance is a sort of peripheral reality not touching or affecting the Knowledge, but connected with or depending upon the nuclear reality, something like the physical body coexisting with and depending on the soul or self. One can also remember in this connection the Purusha-Prakriti relation in Sankhya. Such a standpoint, I suppose, is the precursor or philosophical ...
... IX. 126 Page 160 depressed and confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, "I shall not fight", but God and the ...
... is the Law of Knowledge, that is to say, of happiness, immunity and and immortality, not elsewhere in another world and in a transcendent consciousness, but here below on the physical earth in a physical body. The whole question then is this-how far has this Higher Nature been a reality with us, to what extent do we live and move and have our being in it. It is when the normal existence, our body ...
... done while in the body – farther was not possible. For a new mutation, a new procedure was needed. "Death" was the first stage in that process. (2) Sweet Mother, Your physical body belonged to the old creation because you wanted to be one with your children. You wanted this body to uphold the New Body you were building upon it, and it gave you the service you asked of it. ...
... the nearer we come to the roots and sources of things even most superficial. The spiritual view sees and declares that it is the Brahmic consciousness that holds, inspires, builds up Matter, the physical body and form of Brahman. The highest ideal, the very highest which God and Nature and Man have in view, is not and cannot be kept in cold storage: it is being worked out even here and now, and it ...
... and through it; its fullness will be the fullness of the Divine Presence and intention. The mind will be wholly illumined, the vital with it will become the pure energy of Consciousness and the physical body will be made out of the substance of the divine being: our humanity will be the home and sanctuary of the Divine. Page 380 ...
... vision here, this being of Alfred de Musset says: "I can approach you but I cannot touch you; there is a separation between the two. We can touch only when there are some conditions fulfilled in the physical body." Another French poet speaks of a similar experience. He speaks of it in a jocular way, in a funny way. He says that this inner self sees things in a quite different way than the external being ...
... marks – the stigmata of crucifixion of Christ's body; Ramakrishna, too, it is said, once showed marks of scourging on his back when a boy was whipped in his presence. All this means that the physical body is not man's sole means of action in the physical world. The physical extends and expands into more and more subtle modes of activity and all the more, not less, effective for that very reason. ...
... made a gross mistake. In any case, even in the very best of situations, when a soul Page 60 comes down consciously and when it has consciously worked in the formation of the physical body, so long as the body is formed in the usual animal way, the soul will have to struggle, and to correct all that comes from this human animality. The parents have naturally a particular formation ...
... But even this fixing of the supramental consciousness in the physical consciousness will, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, lead to great and even visible changes in the structure of the physical body. Just as with the evolution of newer species in the past, not only has there been the emergence of new capacities of consciousness but even physiological changes, even so, the evolution of the ...
... vital is divided into three parts, the emotional vital, the central vital and the lower vital. The physical refers to the material or physical consciousness or corporeal consciousness and to the physical body. The thinking Mind is concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right. It reasons and perceives with ideas of infinity, eternity, unity, identity and self-contradiction. It considers ...
... stabilize that consciousness in Matter to such a degree that Matter could manifest those highest levels of consciousness. The constant message of the past efforts was that one was required to leave the physical body in order to become permanently fixed in the supramental consciousness. That message has been constantly repeating itself in the declaration that the divine-consciousness and the earth-consciousness ...
... bhuri aspasta kartvam) It seems, therefore, that the central question of Indian Culture has been to ask as to how it is possible to realize integral perfection in the terrestrial life and in physical body itself. This question was, it seems, answered in the Veda in a seed form. It even seems that it was realized that this aim was very difficult to achieve, and that it could probably be realized ...
... marks —the stigmata—of crucifixion of Christ's body; Rama-krishna too, it is said, once showed marks of scouring on his back when a boy was whipped in his presence. All this means that the physical body is not man's sole means of action in the physical world. The physical extends and expands into more and more subtle modes of activity and all the more, not less, effective for that very reason ...
... upon your back the load of the past, but go ahead, as if through a virgin tract, making quite new discoveries and opening unexpected vistas at each step. You can make an experiment even on your physical body, i.e. take the physical consciousness too to share in your adventure of ever new discovery. Thus you may, for example, forget your habit of eating or even walking, truly forget and try to learn ...
... But these Siddhacharyas of the esoteric cult have passed beyond the realm of Delight to that of Divine Love; this Love too has changed from an inner experience to a divine Passion and Joy in the physical body. In other words, they have arrived at the experience of bodily delight with the full consciousness of the heights, effected a unique marriage Page 127 of pure consciousness ...
... which Sri Krishna heaped upon the dejected, depressed and confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, "I shall not fight", but God and the ...
... the meanwhile, however, "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." A physical incarnation clouds the soul-consciousness and involves loss of memory, amnesia. The soul's travail therefore in a physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that—that is also what Plato thought ...
... natural to man or rather to the animal. But this does not mean that it has no body, it is something airy, nebulous, smoky etc. Not at all, the soul has a body, its own as concrete and definite as the physical body, even it has a material body although the matter is of a different kind. Have not the western sages begun to speak of immaterial matter, that is to say, anti-matter? That soul-body even now you ...
... nay beasts; we are at the lowest rung of the ladder of consciousness. And we must start our work from there, from the bottom. It is the utmost physical consciousness; in the absence of Mother's physical body we have plunged straight into the bog, into the mire of crude physical existence. So we have to start the work of purification from that level, from the consciousness identified with the body; we ...
... nothing physical in it, but it carried Dante in his peregrinations through all the worlds even to the very presence of God in heaven, to the presence of his divinised Beloved (in and with his very physical body, it is said). You have to create the subtle world of feeling: it may be dwelling within you or enclosing you, surrounding you; it may be immanent or circumambient—both are the same in that ...
... the Mother's Notes on the Way. In the May of 1962, the Mother fell very ill. Her condition was very serious. The Page 45 Mother says that She has left the protection of Her physical body to one person: I entrusted it to the person I walk with. In other words, it is not my responsibility: the other person has to make sure it does not fall... As soon as Dada heard ...
... existence of Guru vadas are all examples of singular leaderships. Your comment, to have a single leader here is not on the Mother's programme, is true as long as the Mother with us in Her physical body. But after Her Mahasamadhi the situation has to be viewed from a different angle. It is my firm conviction that in the present Ashram set- up, only a man having Supramental Realisation can ...
... morality." — Tilak 38. Social usage and observances. Page 188 causal. As the gross body of the individual is only the outer crust or coating of the inner being, so the physical body of the nation is only its mutable material covering. To see only its material covering or shell, its social and political configuration, and regard that alone as one's nation is to miss the truth ...
... Indra was satisfied and he started going back again, his doubts set at rest. But a fresh doubt arose as he was wending his way. "Granted," he thought, "any harm done in the waking state to the physical body does no hurt indeed to the dream-self, it does not reflect any flaws of the other. But one does feel during sleep, in the dream-state as if someone is coming to attack, one does feel that one is ...
... of interchange constantly kept up by Nature and 'by special means devised by her, breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical body and its workings and inner potencies Nature has selected the taking in of outside matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable and elimination of what cannot or ...
... is of the mind and speech as well as of the body. On the other hand, all self-control conserves the energy in the retas, and conservation always brings with it increase. But the needs of the physical body are limited and the excess of energy must create a surplus which has to turn itself to some use other than the physical. According to the ancient theory retas is jala or water, full of light ...
... the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, even while in the physical body, existence in heaven, ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said. That he may pass me through when my star falls Who have ambrosia eaten, and yet live. Life extinguishes ...
... travailler huit heures?" (No fruits, no butter. How to work for eight hours?) (60) N ow let me tell you about a strange incident. It was after Mother had left her physical body in 1973. This occurred in 1974. I was sitting in my office. A gentleman accompanied by his wife and two daughters arrived. The father was an engineer. One of his daughters was aged six or ...
... of Death standing before her. He declared that he had come to take the life of Satyavan and accordingly took it. Savitri Page 4 followed the spirit of Satyavan separated from his physical body and captured in the noose of the God of Death. She conversed with Yama, the God of Death, while following him, and her conversation so pleased him that he granted her several boons, the last of ...
... identity". There was a direct communication between consciousness and consciousness and life was not there present as life "but an impassioned force". It was a subtle and spiritual power. There was no physical body there, because body was not needed. The soul itself was its own deathless form. The knowledge derived of things was by their soul and not their shape. Everything there was beautiful by its own ...
... by Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta. ² "...Beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi-gods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are anxious to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it". Page 82 to waken it by degrees towards the Divine Consciousness, the Divine Presence, to the Divine ...
... and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.”² So long as one is in the material world, living the material life in a physical body, one cannot lead the life of an absorbed contemplative—the ineluctable necessities of this life will constantly pluck at his elbow and remind him again and again of the work he has to accomplish ...
... detach yourself from the obstacle and watch it and then you have to call down the help from Above. You can always receive my help if once the relation is established. Man is not confined to the physical body. The real Soul has almost nothing to do with the physical man. It is not necessary for me to give my thought to you, the subliminal self can give the necessary help even without the thought-mind ...
... their food ? Sri Aurobindo : It is not for observing the hygienic laws. Their aim is to reduce the needs of the body and the Rajasic tendencies and so they want to minimise the needs of the physical body. They try to take Sattwic food. Disciple : Many things that are considered hygienic would be rejected by the Sannyasis as non-Sattwic. Sri Aurobindo : They take vegetarian food. But ...
... our shield. And this shield will protect us forever. It will protect us now from the attacks of the subtle world. * After the Mother’s physical withdrawal Nolini-da wrote: So long her physical body was our protection; we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as a buffer: it broke the force of the impact of the Karma and reduced its evil effects to a minimum ...
... the Mother? How could we humans get a clue to understand Her utterances and Her acts? She kept everything about Her cloaked behind a veil of mystery. Many years later, (the Mother had left her physical body by then), I was coming out of the Ashram when one of the elderly sadhaks offered me a flower called ‘ Psychological Perfection ’ by the Mother. At once it flashed on my mind that almost every evening ...
... Huxley would point out, the paradise of Sachchidananda is always "on the further side". Of the four "principles" in the lower hemisphere (aparārdha ), we are normally aware of three: Matter (the physical body). Life (nerve-energy or prāna) and Mind. The fourth. Psyche, is the "double soul" in man, the superficial desire-soul of our normal experience and the quintessential psychic-soul that is a portion ...
... her sandals. Then just afterwards, she saw that Mother had slipped her sandals on. Dark red sandals, as is the heart of the red hibiscus (Kali’s flower). Sandals or shoes are the symbol of the physical body. Mother used to say that Cinderella’s shoes symbolized her getting out of and coming back into her body. So, Mother slipped her sandals on — red sandals. Is Kali going to come out? This strikingly ...
... morning of 5 th December, I heard on the radio that Sri Aurobindo had left his body. At once before my eyes, the memory of that last darshan welled up from my being. I would never see Him in his physical body again. I felt that He had blessed me in that unbelievable way before leaving this physical world and my heart spilled over with infinite gratitude at His Grace. Page 24 ...
... It was the phoenix hour of the Sunrise of realisation: The entire consciousness immersed in divine contemplation, the whole being enjoyed a supreme and vast felicity. Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew ...
... else death may follow. One shouldn't do these things except under guidance or in the presence of a Master. 25 Some years later, when Sethna wrote about his experiences on leaving his physical body and making explorations in his subtle body, the Mother wrote firmly: It is much better to stop the experiences altogether. They seem to take you into levels which are undesirable and ...
... something like cutting the Gordian Knot: It is to enter into the domain of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of material existence with full knowledge. 42 However, the Mother adds guardedly: "But for that one must be an initiate." Perhaps the Mother had in mind Savitri, as ...
... going into the pool. On the first day the Mother watched some of the aquatic exercises in an atmosphere of joy and fulfilment. 19 Page 632 She was indeed the Mother divine, yet her physical body couldn't claim immunity from the mounting strain resulting from contact with others and the struggle with universal forces. She suffered a slight haemorrhage in her left eye, and on 6 March she ...
... heartfelt prayer, Nolini Kanta Gupta, senior trustee of the Ashram, spoke at once for himself and for many of the Mother's children feeling terribly orphaned at the time: Sweet Mother, Your physical body belonged to the old creation because you wanted to be one with your children. You wanted this body to uphold the New Body you were building upon it, and it gave you the service you asked of it. ...
... which can respond even in the slightest degree to the forces of ignorance and falsehood and suffering, which sway the life of humanity and impede its spiritual evolution. From the cells of the physical body to the summits of our mental being, all, without exception, must be divinely converted and rendered perfectly plastic to the supramental Force of the divine Mother. "So long as one element ...
... King,—contain the kernal of the methods and results of an integral yoga followed by Aswapathy. Man is not in reality what he appears to be,—a mere material phenomenon, — mentalised animal having a physical body. He has from the dawn of history a feeling of something imperishable within him. And there are hidden powers in man which can be awakened to make the realisation of that Self possible by following ...
... send back into the manifestation the spark that extinguishes itself in Him? Of course, each time one makes a rule one makes a mistake. Besides, although he did not take up another physical body, the Buddha himself returned to work in the earth-atmosphere. 26.7.1968 If the universe is one, shouldn't the liberation of one single person on earth have the power to liberate everyone ...
... radiating from the Mother's being and body is pervading the whole atmosphere. One can see His Presence, hear his footfalls, his rhythmic voice, ever vigilant, devoid of the encumbrance of the physical body. 88 Still Nirod hears the Master's whisper, "lam here, I am here", and with the ear of faith we can hear the words too. The mystic realisation of his presence in our midst ...
... consciousness!” he exclaimed in a conversation with Sri Aurobindo. And Mother replied, Yes. The question is to link both consciousnesses, which means to bring the higher consciousness down into the physical body. Everything must be present, here, in the natural consciousness. 14 We do not know the extent of the profound revolution Sri Aurobindo and Mother have brought to the world.... And in her ...
... She was beginning to find her way around all these worlds and to move from one to the other with great dexterity, just as we change from one dress to another, ever lighter and wider, while the physical body remained there at the far end of the thread—a thin “thread of light”—in a deep “sleep,” progressively deeper as She went farther and farther "away,” and almost cataleptic in the end. Life or death ...
... body from her material body, totally consciously, and twelve times in a row. In other words, she could shift consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, then again put that more subtle body into trance, exteriorize herself from it, and so on, twelve times in a row, up to the extreme limit of the world of forms. 16 It is this extreme ...
... different ways. Quite often I was informed by a small entity or some being or the other. Sometimes the aura protected me." We shall soon see how. "All sorts of things. My life was rarely limited to the physical body. And this is useful, it's good. Necessary also —it enhances your capacities. Theon told me right from the start, 'You people deprive yourselves of the most useful kind of senses, EVEN FOR ORDINARY ...
... of Rigveda 11.23 8c 24. Bh. has fresh Yogic experiences,—this time of the voice of God 8c miraculous cure____ "Bj. [Bejoy] gets the vision of the colour-body with regard to R—behind the physical body—yellow in blue, then red, red Page 419 in black, again red and once more yellow in blue." Sri Aurobindo observed that in political and social sphere "the power is not yet ...
... Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that be became their blessed child. They poured their Grace on him not only during the five decades when he untiringly served them but even after they had left their physical bodies Champaklal has been breathing their Grace always and ever. The Mother had affectionately called him, besides “My True Child”, “My Lion” and “a part of my being”. For Champaklal, art has a spiritual ...
... it's because physical bodies are supported by materialized vital forces (slightly materialized). So then, it put me back in contact with those forces and beings, and last night they said that to me; they told me, "Why aren't you using us any longer? We were quite happy!" I said, "Come along and do some work!" And there you are ( the grapes ). When you sleep (that is, when the body is in a state... state of trance), you can eat. You sense the taste when you have gone outside the body. And it's very nourishing, it gives strength. I have eaten I don't know how many times like that, mostly grapes—and what grapes!... Soon afterwards Yes, this problem of the transformation, I see more and more clearly that there are three approaches, three ways to go about it, and that in order to be more complete ...
... from within, spiritual, ideal or mental similarly translated. Inert physical bodies receive all the impacts that the mind receives, but being devoid of organised mentality, retain them only in the involved mind in matter and are incapable of translating them into mental symbols. Our bodies are naturally inert physical bodies moved by life & mind. They also receive all impacts, but not all of them... evolution of life is caused & supported by the pressure of the gods of the Bhuvar or life-world upon Bhu. Life entering into body is dominated partly by the laws of body; it is therefore unable to impart its own full & uninterrupted energy to its form. Consequently there is no physical immortality. The organisation of individual animated life tends to hasten the period of dissolution by introducing shocks... composed of eternal life-energy. Life is not itself subject to death,—death not being a law of life-energy,—but only to expulsion from the form which it occupies and therefore to the physical experience of death of its body. All matter here is filled with life-energy of a greater or less intensity of action, but the organisation of life in individual animation begins later in the process of the material ...
... and angels. The Divine in a physical human body upon earth – it is such a temptation for the disembodied beings in the other worlds; it was so great an opportunity to be near the physical aura of the Divine. It was indeed a privilege, the privilege of having a material body, the privilege possessed by human beings alone to come in touch with the divine material body! So these beings rushed down and... and tried to be as much near as possible to the earth, to bask in the delightful golden sunshine of the physical presence of the Divine upon earth. Also it is said, when the Mother used to play on the organ, the same thing happened; there was a crowd of invisible listeners around Her; not only so, the Mother Herself revealed the secret, some beings, even departed musicians, also prayed to Her to... to be allowed to play on the organ through Her fingers – making the Divine their instrument instead of their being the Divine's instruments! The Mother in Her body was such an abode of miracles. Page 260 ...
... and it is no use being here is another. Of course they are all false. When one listens to the suggestions, then things begin to appear like that. These suggestions are natural to the ignorant physical or body consciousness in human nature, just as suggestions of vital passion and disturbance are natural to the ignorant vital consciousness in human nature. You had vital reactions but you did not allow... unfit for the Yoga, because you relied upon the Mother and did not yield to the contrary vital Force. Here also you will have to have constant reliance on the Mother and reject the suggestions of the physical consciousness in the atmosphere when they come. 30.5.1935 Sri Aurobindo ...
... 205 Ashram audience the result of my research in physics. I said something like: "Newton showed that all physical bodies attract one another. Einstein with his relativity theory provided the reason for it. He said that the attraction is due to the fact that all these bodies are relatives!" Don't you think I deserve the Nobel prize for this illuminating rapport 1 have made between Newton and... not only as a master Yogi but also as the mighty poet of Savitri and, though his eyes had grown somewhat hazy in the physical sense, the subtle seeing behind them was supreme: one could well quote his own epic - A universal light was in his eyes - or His wide eyes bodied viewless entities - and assert that whatever he dictated to Nirodbaran had the vision and vibrancy of the Mantra:... the old physics of India. We are asked to believe that space is not filled with any subtle matter such as the physicists of the nineteenth century called "ether" - space is utterly empty and yet physical bodies create a "curvature" in it along which lesser masses gravitate towards bigger ones. Thus sheer emptiness can be structured! This is one of the concepts of the famous general theory of relativity ...
... two together in one body, were seen in front of each and every one at the same time, in a benediction-pose, with their right hand showing grace and love. What an indescribable scene of wonder and beatitude! Everything became quiet and peaceful. Suddenly an ear-piercing resounding victory conch was heard. Simultaneously the children were seen wonder-struck as their physical bodies were slowly and gradually... golden light was continuously emanating from it. It seemed that the Mother was seated there in Her golden translucent body. Again it appeared that Sri Aurobindo was there. In between, time and again was seen an incredible vision of the two-in-one body. It seemed to be a transparent body but I could not comprehend how it was inside. The meditation started. The Mother herself was singing. Instrumental... caressing not only my head but everyone's. Everything became peaceful. Once again a sweet melody was heard. My eyes opened. It is just impossible to formulate in words the impact of the moment on my body. As I write this, golden Lanka of the Ramayana comes to my mind. When I came down, saturated with Peace, Ananda, Love and Joy, a Matrimandir worker put into my hands an enlarged 20” x 24” size photo ...
... Aurobindo were in their physical bodies and the difference since that time? The general atmosphere of the Ashram did not change radically. When both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had left their bodies, I could still feel their presence. Perhaps because their subtle physical was said to have extended a number of miles beyond their bodies. I remember being told that their subtle physical auras extended up... great deal of money began to pour in to the Ashram from America after the Mother’s departure. I always felt a special admiration for those who had never seen Mother or Sri Aurobindo in their physical bodies and yet could dedicate themselves to the Ashram life… especially those people from America and other countries. I know of some who had come here as fulfilling a part of their pilgrimage in India... himself in an out-of-body experience in quite a conscious way. He knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was watching himself do this extraordinary thing; then he asked a self-conscious question, “How is this possible?” With this question there was a sudden rush back into the body. He said that with this he learned not by any argument, but by actual experience that we are more than just a body. This, finally, was ...
... get hold of the experience and utilise it for its own purposes; it is enjoyed as a tasty food, made to serve the vital's ambition or vanity, some lower ignorant egoistic urge. Or again, the physical, the body consciousness, may not at all participate in the experience; it may remain indifferent, listless, lethargic with no impulse or enthusiasm to carry out in practice the experience of the inner ...
... to get hold of the experience and utilise it for its own purposes; it is enjoyed as a tasty food, made to serve the vital's ambition or vanity, some lower ignorant egoistic urge. Or again, the physical, the body consciousness may not at all participate in the experience; it may remain indifferent, listless, lethargic with no impulse or enthusiasm to carry out in practice the experience of the inner ...
... consciousness. But the true secret of the power to control and guide Nature's dispensation lies along a different line, not along the line of the normal activity of the mental and vital and physical consciousness. Body and life and mind belong after all, at least are closely affiliated, to one's environmental consciousness; they are indeed part of the circumstances in which one is born and lives and moves... field, the greater the possibility of the effectiveness. Moreover, a mental will affects chiefly the mental field, a vital will is directly operative in the vital world, even as a physical force is effective on physical things: each is largely confined to its own domains, the effect on other domains is for the most part indirect and remote. But the truly effective will, that can produce an all-round... nature and outside circumstances too. The orthodox name for this endeavour is spiritual discipline or Yoga. On lower levels, a conscious will made up of a compound energy of the mental and vital and physical will, when in sufficient proportions, has considerable effective force: great men of action have this distinction. Even then, however, . theirs is not that type which is absolute or never-failing ...
... secret of the power to control and guide Nature's dispensation lies along a different line, not along the line of the normal Page 64 activity of the mental and vital and physical consciousness. Body and life and mind belong after all, at least are closely affiliated, to one's environmental consciousness; they are indeed part of the circumstances in which one is born and lives and moves... possibility of the effectiveness. Moreover a mental will affects chiefly the mental field, a vital will is directly operative Page 62 in the vital world,- even as a physical force is effective on physical things: each is largely confined to its own domain, the effect on other domains is for the most part indirect and remote. But the truly effective will, the will that can produce... outside circumstances too. The orthodox name for this endeavour is spiritual discipline or Yoga. On lower levels, a conscious will made up of a compound energy of the mental and vital and physical will, when in sufficient proportions, has considerable effective force: great men of action have this distinction. Even then, however, theirs is not that type which is absolute or never-failing, nor ...
... power been awakened, there wouldn't be any weakness in your body. 1 No. But it is THERE, Sri Aurobindo says it clearly: it is THERE, inside, within the very cells. Yes, there's no need to seek elsewhere. But how to awaken it? Through faith, our faith. If one knows that and has trust.... But you see, my physical, my body is deteriorating very rapidly—what could stop it from d... Mother a pale yellow, slightly golden hibiscus with a red heart. Mother holds the flower without seeing it. That day, I don't know why, I was full of questions. ) What is it? It's "Ananda in the physical." !!! We badly need it! Yes, Mother! And you? I was thinking about something Sri Aurobindo wrote.... In "Savitri," he clearly says, "Almighty powers are shut in Nature's cells." ... complete powerlessness that the most complete Power will be forced to awaken.... Ah!... you're right. That Power will then be COMPELLED to come out. Or else I could... I could leave this body, no? Ah, no, Mother! No, Mother, it must be done NOW. ( silence ) It must be done now.... You see, I am certain its NOT disintegration, not at all. It is NOT disintegration. 2 ( ...
... inhabit the physical frame? What is it that the Soul draws out from the body when it casts off this partial physical robe which enveloped not it, but part of its members? What is it whose issuing out gives this wrench, this swift struggle and pain of parting, creates this sense of violent divorce? The answer does not help us much. It is the subtle or psychical frame which is tied to the physical by the... constantly changing mentality and physical bodies that are, we may presume, the result of that changing composite of ideas and sensations which I call myself. The identical "I" is not, never was, never will be Practically, so long as the error of personality persists, this does not make much difference and I can say in the language of ignorance that I am reborn in a new body; practically, I have to proceed... senses a palpable shape of bone and flesh? In the ordinary, the vulgar conception there is no birth of a soul at all, but only the birth of a new body into the world occupied by an old personality unchanged from that which once left some now discarded physical frame. It is John Robinson who has gone out of the form of flesh he once occupied; it is John Robinson who tomorrow or some centuries hence will ...
... lids drooping over the orbs of the spirit dreaming in its body of Matter, resulting in the manifestation of growing intensities of self-awareness and world-awareness, — is this not what the process of evolution signifies in its most fundamental aspect? As a matter of fact, if we look upon the world and consider the living physical forms appearing on the surface of our globe, we cannot but... and men, between inert and inanimate 1 2 Savitri, Book III, Canto IV, p. 336. 3 ya eṣa supteṣu jāgarti. (Katha Upanishad, V. 8) Page 180 Matter, living physical bodies and a creature like man in whom the mind consciousness has emerged into the open to look around and wonder? The essential difference lies in "the more or less involved or more or less evolved... ss, but its gathering inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external things. And is not this what all existence is that has not yet developed means of outward communication with the external physical world?" (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine p.86) Sleep is in its widest and intrinsic sense a cosmic phenomenon, evolutionary in character. And man's psycho ...
... ( Mother goes into a contemplation ) The subtle physical seems to be more and more transformed. There is still a mystery between the two. A mystery. They are coexistent (the physical and the subtle physical bodies), and yet ... ( gesture of a lack of connection ), the subtle physical doesn't appear to have an influence on this ( the body ). Something ... Something to be found ... something... hour, as the Power comes back ... You remember, I once said it had gone completely, 1 and that was true, it had gone completely in order to leave the body absolutely to itself, for its conversion, we could say; but once there had been in this body consciousness the same aspiration and the same ardour of consciousness (with a far greater steadiness than in any other part of the being; there are no... Otherwise, the slow underground labour, invisible, almost imperceptible, continues. ( silence ) Page 248 The interesting point is that this body spontaneously, immediately and effortlessly—spontaneously—tries to find in itself, in the body's cells (it's a whole WORLD! A whole world), the cells try to find in themselves, "Oh, where is my incapacity? Where is my helplessness? Where is ... even ...
... behind the attitudes of the mind and the body; he has not laboured to manifest the external gestures, the physical changes that are visible in our day-to-day life; the little that had to be done in this connection was executed in such a manner as to make it coincide with or merge into the idea of the truth itself – it Page 255 became the very body of the idea. The Oriental sculptor has... while Valmiki read into men the symbol of some larger and higher truth. In the works of Shakespeare we feel the touch of material life and enjoy the savour of earthly pleasure, the embrace of physical bodies with each other, as it were. But Valmiki deals with experiences and realities that exceed the bounds of ordinary earthly life. Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear are the highlights of Shakespearae's... ideal. To-day we are convinced that these two different types of virtue are complementary to each other. The body without the soul is blind; the soul without the body is lame. The body must be infused with the spirit of the soul, and the dynamis of the soul must manifest itself through the body. This is indeed the ideal of the new synthesis. Let us try to throw more light on this difference so that ...
... You must have seen the Mother, many perhaps had her physical touch, while there are others who continue to breathe in the atmosphere where her body still endures. You have within you the rare thing hardly found elsewhere, the spark of which I was speaking – it is a particle of the Mother's own consciousness, her own life and her own subtle body-consciousness. You have imbibed it in you with your breath... forerunners are among you. Naturally there will be formations of the new life in all climes and countries, but the patterns, the norms will have been set by you for the Mother was here in her physical material body. So the Mantras you declare as divine words, you must make them living powers, gods themselves embodied in you. The basis is here: the Mother has laid the foundations here for her creation... to the point from where I started. The mottoes – the writings displayed on the wall – are also to be displayed as living entities in your being – in your consciousness, and in your life, even in your body. That is the better part of your work – indeed, the essential part. Today a new consciousness is abroad. The earth-atmosphere is filled with the new spirit. But here the Mother has left with us ...
... I haven't seen him again.... In other words, the physical is a little timorous by nature. But now it's learning—it's learning. It also has a sort of distrust for anything new in its functioning, which means that if the functioning we regard as "normal" is changed, it has a distrust, it wonders whether... I don't know if all physical bodies are like that, but I notice that with others, the least... saw the Force. The body only acted as a way to touch the earth—the Force came, then it went out and spread. And it went... I saw that, I saw it go towards all those who call. It was directed by a wholly conscious consciousness, while I was... quiet, ( laughing ) I just was the pipe! It's the only thing I had to say. It's the first time it has happened physically, it was physical. ( silence )... must circulate and must not be a personal property. In the consciousness, everything is fine, but the body has its old habit, and it observed the state in which this man is: for him money is a force that must circulate, go where it has to go, it doesn't belong to this or that person—so it [the body] first had this reaction: "Oh, watch out, he's an adventurer." ( Mother laughs ) I caught myself, I said ...
... observe these ideals particularly in the midst of day-to-day life in the external world with all its challenges. Is there a disadvantage in never having seen Mother and Sri Aurobindo in their physical bodies? It is certainly my deepest regret that I never had darshan of Sri Aurobindo in 1943 while we were training for war and moving around in South India. I consider it very fortunate that I had... applied to any facet of life’s activities to one’s advantage. One misses her physical presence but it hardly makes any difference to the Sadhana. If one’s faith is unshakable, there is little difference. This is so even though I met her only twice in my life, for brief periods. No words were exchanged. There was only her physical presence. [Krishna had told me earlier that he had been advised to put... there to receive Sri Aurobindo’s darshan. Perhaps I was just too involved in the preparation for war. Can you describe the Ashram atmosphere since the Mother left her body? How has your sadhana changed since Mother left her body? What new forms, if any, has your sadhana taken at this stage? I met the Mother only twice, once described above on 22nd February 1972 and a second time later that year ...
... You must have seen the Mother, many have had her physical touch, while there are others who continue to breathe in the atmosphere where her body still endures. You have within you the rare thing hardly found elsewhere, the spark of the spirit of which I was speaking—it is a particle of the Mother's own consciousness, her own life and her own subtle body-consciousness. You have imbibed it in you with... Naturally there will be formations of the new life in all climes and countries, but the patterns, the norms will have been set by Page 71 you, for the Mother was here in her physical material body So the mantras you declare as divine words, you must make living powers, gods themselves embodied in you. The basis is here: the Mother has laid the foundations here for her creation—the... see you, for I am blind in both of my eyes." Then the Mother answered, "What does that matter? You cannot see me but I am seeing you." And this is always so. You cannot see it with your physical eyes, but the Mother's look is always upon you, her look of love and protection: be sure and certain of that. You carry that within you for all time and wherever you go, wherever in the entire world ...
... Europe presents to herself and the world; they are unwilling to discern any disease in the entrails, any foulness in the rear. For the Europeans are as careful to conceal their social as their physical bodies and shrink with more horror from nakedness and indecorum than from the reality of evil. If they see the latter in themselves, they avert their eyes, crying, "It is nothing or it is little; we are... to question or examine their efficacy. His European doctors have told him that early marriage injures the physique of a nation, and that to him is the gospel. It is not convenient to remember that physical deterioration is a modern phenomenon in India and that our grandparents were strong, vigorous and beautiful. He hastens to abolish the already disappearing nautchgirl, but it does not seem to concern... Puranas, whether because they are sacred or because they are national. Well, but, if they are sacred, you must keep to the Page 50 whole and not cherish isolated texts while disregarding the body of your authority. You cannot pick and choose; you cannot say "This is sacred and I will keep to it, that is less sacred and I will leave it alone." When you so treat your sacred authority, you are ...
... dynamic, it depends on where your experience feels the unity. If in the mental, your mind feels one with the cosmic mind; if in the vital, your vital becomes part of the cosmic vital; if in the physical, the body is felt as a speck of universal Matter. Just as there is a wall that separates the outer nature from the soul, the psychic being, so also there is a wall above the head. You break that wall... subtle body before you can do it. CHAMPAKLAL: X told me once how she used to have a headache which remained just above the head and it was very severe. We used to laugh at her because we couldn't believe in a headache of that nature. SRI AUROBINDO: How do you know there can't be such a headache? If the consciousness can be lifted above the head and remain there, why not a headache? The body is a... fast, I did it straightaway with normal food. NIRODBARAN: How is it possible to be active like this without food? SRI AUROBINDO: One draws energy from the vital plane instead of depending on physical sustenance. Once in Calcutta I lived for a long time on rice and bananas only. It was a very good food. DR. SATYENDRA: The trouble is that one can't draw conclusions from your case. SRI AUROBINDO ...
... atmosphere of the Ashram since Mother and Sri Aurobindo left their bodies? There is no real difference. The presence is still very powerful. I feel it everywhere. Some people feel that the Force has dispersed, but it is very vital, very alive. Is there a disadvantage in never having seen Mother and Sri Aurobindo in their physical bodies? It is difficult for me to judge this, really. It meant so... What power there was in her eyes and in her smile! Sri Aurobindo said that the Mother worked on people through her eyes and smile. In what way has your sadhana changed since the Mother left her body? For me the sadhana has remained the same. However, in the early years all the work we did was done for the Mother and her alone. The Mother had given us our work and all our work was dedicated ...
... How was She going to resolve the problem? The transformation of this physical, animal body is the very symbol of the victory over death. It is the very nest of Death. Must one die to conquer death? How can one win the victory in death and at the same time win it in a body? Or then one must die, traverse death in the body , and come back victorious. It is a mystery. Mother clearly said: ... “invisible” world is on the other, a “subtle” world, though perhaps physical. But if the veil, that opaque periphery, wore down and fell, if our cells perceived reality, what would happen? Firstly, it is probable (without talking about outer upheavals) that a formidable desire for transformation would result in all our human bodies, as if they were breathing true air for once—they would no longer want... absorbable elements cross the threshold, and from one body to another or century to century, all the species would slowly ascend the ladder of consciousness or remain in their stagnant but harmonious perfection. What one does not know is to what extent, perhaps formidable and unpredictable, the formation of this new body or of several new bodies endowed with this vibratory power⎯somewhat fantastic as ...
... Savitri Bhavan and Matrimandir will change that situation, then Auroville will come around to more yogic ways. How has your sadhana changed since Mother and Sri Aurobindo are no longer in their physical bodies? Now I must rely on myself. I have to go more deeply within myself to find the answers and solutions to situations. Would you describe your darshans with Mother and Sri Aurobindo and any... free India from the British. Anu said Sri Aurobindo selected her father and her uncle (his brother) and they were both quite willing to work in this capacity. While Purani was in college he started physical culture centers all over Gujarat for sports, bodywork, playing sticks, climbing wooden poles and wrestling. At that time there were many young men from Afghanistan who knew wrestling well and her... if a child did not want to study he or she was free to be ignorant. It did not mean that they had no other faculties or capacities. So some learned electricity and became engineers. Some went into physical culture and other areas of study. Not everybody liked the Free Progress method. At present Sri Aurobindo is taught in the Higher Course at “Knowledge” and Free Progress is a choice, it is not imposed ...
... Multisided Physical Education: One of the great deficiencies in Indian system of education is its neglect of meaningful programme of physical education. Sometimes what goes under the programme of yoga has not been sufficiently well planned and what goes under P.T. is so perfunctory that it neither serves the purposes of health nor of strength nor of agility of the physical bodies of the students... students. A healthy and strong body should be regarded as pre-requisite for any candidate to be a good teacher. Only then the teacher will be able to inspire the child to become a good gymnast, athlete or swimmer, body builder or a good yogi having the right type of the body for spiritual accomplishments. Page 213 In the relevant AnnexureXI details of this programme have been suggested... suggests topics to be included in a 5-yeasr course in Physical, Vital and Mental Education. VI Examination Reforms need to be revised in the light of the following: • Examination on Demand (as in NIOS) • Examination of Skills • Examination of Personality Development • Examination of Physical Fitness VII We may summarise a tentative proposal ...
... Lord was seen. My being got fused and absorbed in the eternal Ananda which is beginning less and endless, and verily became that. There, all the crores of heavens and worlds and the physical cosmic bodies, namely, the sun, planets, earth, moon and stars, were seen whirling like atoms. I saw them with the eye of Grace. I realised the vast and supreme golden Light of Grace in its own Home... Truth into the whole material earth. The golden red Light of Truth is verily the concrete physical form of the highest supreme consciousness. The descending Golden Light becomes the golden red Light when reaching into matter and the material world and the material body. The phenomenal universe which is derived and born from the supreme eternal Truth of Bliss, Light and Peace moves to reach and... golden. The golden Light entered into all the cells of the body, into the bones, muscles, tissues, brain and nerves, blood and its cells, skin and even the hairs, from the root to the end, and made them appear golden with a tinge of red. The whole body appeared a beautiful golden red body. I saw even the Sun of golden red Light rising up over the earthly sky, spreading its golden red Light of Truth ...
... that usually either the vital being or the mental being or even the physical being is very anxious to play a part, very anxious. So it swells up, takes up a lot of place, covers the rest; and it covers it so well that one can't even become aware of the presence of the divine Force because the personal movement of the physical, the body, the vital, the mind, covers everything with its own importance. ...
... factors which cause the transformation of species are the external determinants of the environment. They create in response a besoin , an inner need, which ultimately creates modifications in the physical bodies. According to Darwin, on the other hand, the modifications in the species are caused by the internal factor of random variations, now called mutations, among which the favourable ones are selected... Descartes (1596-1650) the human being consisted of a body and a rational soul. His body, and that of all animals, was a mechanism, a machine; his soul was an “epiphenomenon” – one of those labelling terms which can mean everything without meaning anything. It will not take long before Julien de la Mettrie and his generation keep the mechanical body and discard the soul, on the same ground as the one... suffice as the “stimulating cause.” – “Nature, among the bodies which have resulted from her operations, has been able to form some which could react to the first effects of an organization and the movements which constitute life. This is indeed what she seems to have done by producing, among the inorganic bodies, very small gelatinous bodies of the weakest possible consistency.” 18 The composition ...
... one another and also accurate prediction will be possible. Similarly, predictions such as of eclipses are said to be correctly made because, although the individual "staticles" composing the physical bodies taking part in an eclipse have an unpredictable nature, a huge crowd of these "staticles" are involved. In other words, large-scale phenomena seem to be governed practically by causal laws simply... postulate of the staticle". At once we realise the significance of the postulate. For, the elementary and primal body or event which Page 149 bafflingly extends over more than one point of space and over more than one instant of time and thus escapes all final analysis by physical concepts of space-unit and time-unit - what else can this "staticle" with its inherent indefiniteness and natural... have no physical existence when only one individual is in the street. If 10,000 individuals are there, however, the wave will be visibly displayed by their distribution, and, taken as a whole, may be said to have a physical existence. Our knowledge by probability concerning the individual becomes by analogy from the crowd a physical characteristic of the man. But we must remember that the physical cha ...
... difficult time for the body now.... As I told you in our last conversations, the physical is being penetrated by the subtle physical. The body obviously doesn't need any more difficulties than it already has. ( long silence ) It's a strange sensation, a bizarre perception of both the true functioning and the functioning distorted by the sense of being an individual body. They're not even...... way, so it's very upsetting! ( Mother laughs ) The Energy is tremendous, more tremendous than it has ever been; and there is practically no physical strength. I can act, but only if I bring in the Energy: the least physical act demands the Energy. I think the body is completely... flimsy; it seems... sometimes I touch it to see if it's still... if it's hard or if it's soft! Page 341 (... violent one. I had to battle for more than half an hour. It always feels as if something wants to tear the life out of the body. It takes that form. ( silence ) It is quite evident that X and I are not on the same plane. His power and his action are on a mental-physical plane ( gesture below ), and this may bring me some complications by making me do a work I usually have nothing to do with. ...
... consciousness and physical Nature? Tell me, is your body absolutely conscious, conscious of itself, conscious of its functioning? No, then what is it? It can only be physical Nature. And if there is a physical Nature which is not conscious, it means that physical Nature and consciousness are not the same thing. Physical Nature includes everything that is physical: your body belongs to physical Nature, mountains... active and dominating may succeed in awakening the body, and if they have the spirit of Page 366 adventure (which happens very often, for the vital is an adventurous being), the physical obeys, it obeys the impulse, the inner order; then it consents to the change, the novelty, but it is an effort for it. But for the physical being and physical consciousness to be ready to receive the divine... the body was there, like that, and it was necessary to put a will into it, to push this body for it to get up and act. It is like that, this is tamas. Tamas is a purely material thing; it is very rare to have a vital or mental tamas (it may occur but through contagion), I believe it is more a tamas of the nerves or the brain than vital or mental tamas. But laziness is everywhere, in the physical, the ...
... Eden on the one side and his subsequent entry into Heaven on the other, the question of questions is: 'What happens to his inner being, his 'spirit', when the body dies - what happens to it in the period between the body's death and the physical resurrection?" Ordinarily, we should suppose this crucial query in a Christian context to be concerned with an after-life in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory... Shall be all Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden... 21 The terrestrial Paradise would continue till the time when all the happy just ones would go to Heaven in their new physical bodies. If these passages are taken along with the other in a literal sense, the terms definitely imply that Man's redemption is identical with Christ's conquest of death: he is freed from death by being... in a spiritualised earthly body. The bodily transformation would be the result of a descent or manifestation of the archetypal form of man, the divine original "truth-body", known to the ancient Vedanta as the k ā ra ṇ a ś ar ī ra, "the causal body", secretly underlying the s ū k ṣ ma ś ar ī ra, "the subtle body" as well as the sthula ś ar ī ra, "the gross body". Just as the doctrine ...
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