... Otherwise why is he a sadhak at all? He is supposed to be here for seeking the Divine—but in the seeking for the Divine, jealousy, envy, anger, etc. have no place. They are movements of the ego and can only create obstacles to the union with the Divine. It is much better to remember that one is seeking for the Divine and make that the whole governing idea and aim of the life. It is that which pleases the ...
... that love helps to turn one towards the Divine, can it be said it was an unconscious seeking for the Divine? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, or it may be a seeking for love itself and its realisation or fulfilment. NIRODBARAN: I have read a novel where the hero—an artist—has been depicted as unconsciously seeking for the Divine through human love but every fresh contact or relation seems to disillusion him because ...
... awakener and uplifter. Blake accepts the physical also as something Divine. The elements of love are : adoration and desire for the union. Disciple : Is such a love an unconscious seeking for the Divine? It may not bring divine fulfillment but that of love itself. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, it is. Disciple : Is it possible to evoke the Divine in oneself to love the other? Sri... even if it is degraded afterwards, tends to awaken the consciousness and evolve the being. Page 231 21st November, 1939 Disciple : If love is an unconscious seeking for the Divine, why some people, who have turned to the Divine will seek the human love, especially here? Sri Aurobindo : Are they conscious of the Divine? If one is conscious of the Divine, one of ...
... here did not come with a conscious seeking for the Divine. It is without the mind knowing it the soul within that brought them here. In your case it was that and the relation your soul had with the Mother. Once here the force of the Divine works upon the human nature till a way is opened for the soul within to come out from the veil. The conscious seeking for the Divine does not by itself prevent the struggle ...
... for the base of a greater and happier life to be brought now or hereafter into the world-existence. but whatever be the aim, the actual state of the world is no argument at all against the seeking for the Divine or the truth of Yoga. Also the accidents of the search, that A. is dead and will attain only in another body or B. is ill or C. misbehaves are side matters altogether. It makes no difference... things had been agreed upon between us—at least so I understood it—some time ago. So I did not see why for these things I should declare you unfit or send you away. So long as you have the seeking for the Divine as Krishna that is quite sufficient. As for ahaitukī' bhakti, I wanted to point out that to think I insisted on it is a mistake; it is the highest and most powerful method, but in its absence ...
... that we have been almost stagnating at the same spot, if not actually regressing. But what is the reason behind this bizarre but nearly universal phenomenon? The only reason is that our seeking for the Divine and for spiritual life lacks in genuine commitment and sufficient intensity. It is not supported by any ardent will; it arises out of a tepid wish and an easily dispensable thirst for the ... for the sake of the Divine himself and not for anything else, and this because such is the intrinsic call of his being, the deepest truth of his Spirit. But this entirely motiveless seeking for the Divine is a distant possibility for most sadhakas, accessible only to very advanced Yogis. At a somewhat less advanced level a sadhaka can surely pray for the purity, force, light, love, wisdom and ...
... Bengal and becomes there a long continued tradition. The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases passing ...
... your hands that is not a pure and harmonious expression of beauty. And the Divine’s help will always be there.” Aster Patel at AUM Conference in Los Angeles, Ca. May 2003 Our seeking for the Divine — in the world of form — looks for its expression through “beauty”. It is within a growing perfection of the form that there lies the fulfilment of this seeking. But to arrive at the fullness ...
... indispensable when living in the same house. If it is a sentimental and emotional attraction, it is easier to channelize and turn it to the Divine by confining your relations to a common seeking for the Divine and the spiritual life. Then all will depend on your sincerity and reciprocal goodwill. The Mother ...
... Mother did not intend to return upon it; it is understood that whatever the motive immediately pushing the mind or the vital, an asking for Ananda or knowledge or power, yet if there is a true seeking for the Divine in the being, it must lead eventually to the realisation of the Divine. The soul within has always the inherent (ahaituk ī ) yearning for the Divine; the hetu or special motive is simply ...
... strong distaste (to say the least) for the methods which we find most useful but you find grim and repellent, makes a great obstacle. But I maintain my idea that if you remain faithful to the seeking for the Divine, the day of grace and opening will come. Nobody will be more pleased than ourselves if it comes over there in the Himalayas, or for that matter anywhere. The place does not matter—the thing ...
... the psychic yearning may come sometimes or often in intense waves, what comes as the basis is a quietude of the being and in that quietude a more and more steady perception of the truth and seeking for the Divine and need of the Divine so that all is turned towards that more and more. It is into this that the experience and growing realisation come. Because the opening is growing in you, you are getting ...
... "thinking of the Divine" ] the giving up of the preoccupation with your ego and its rights and claims and ideas of unfair treatment and all the rest and to think more of the Divine and the seeking for the Divine for which you came here and make that your chief preoccupation. It is not in meditation alone, but in life and thought and act and feeling that that has to be done. Human nature has ...
... others. Service to parents is part of family and social duty. It has nothing to do in itself with Yoga. Yoga is truth not of family or society, but of spiritual life, and in spiritual life the seeking for the Divine takes precedence of everything. If we ask you to remain still with your father and mother, it is not from the point of view of Truth, but of charity. Four of their children have already ...
... these three things. When these three lowest passions of humanity are brought into play, that is what I call the abyss. When someone has decided to consecrate his life to the seeking for the Divine, if he is sincere, that is to say, if the resolution is sincere and carried out sincerely, there is absolutely nothing to fear, because all that happens or will happen to him will lead him ...
... indispensable when living in the same house. If it is a sentimental and emotional attraction, it is easier to channelise and turn it to the Divine by confining your relations to a common seeking for the Divine and the spiritual life. Then all will depend on your sincerity and reciprocal goodwill. I very much appreciate your frankness and your sincerity. It is true that it is extremely difficult ...
... combination of these three things. When these three lowest passions of humanity are brought into play, that is what I call "the abyss". When someone has decided to consecrate his life to the seeking for the Divine, if he is sincere, that is to say, if the resolution is sincere and carried out sincerely, there is absolutely nothing to fear, because all that happens or will happen to him will lead him ...
... You forget that it is thanks to him that the yoga of the superman is possible, that it is he who prepared it, he who brought down the great flood of the New Consciousness so that, instead of seeking for the Divine Truth up above, men can live it down here and walk their every step in it. It is like saying that Sri Aurobindo did not have the key to the door he opened! His yoga is integral because, ...
... possible. "Won't return" seems impossible for have you not said that his success is sure and that you will carry him yourself to his goal? I put a proviso, "If you are faithful to your seeking for the Divine". How is it that in spite of tremendous cost of Force and Energy, you could not change his views about your Yoga? His mind changed somewhat, but his vital clung to the feeling of f ...
... AUROBINDO: Is yours also a misogynist question? NIRODBARAN: Misogynist means woman-hater? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. NIRODBARAN: No, my question is not that. Someone asked me, "If love is a seeking for the Divine, why does one seek human love after taking up Yoga?" SRI AUROBINDO: But is the man conscious of the Divine? If he is, either of two things may happen. All human relations may fall off or ...
... human consciousness. The sense of infinity, the sense of magic and wonder are common to both; thus the two may be congruous and commensurate, although the purely religious spirit, the soul's seeking for the Divine and the type of theism proper to the scientific mind are different in nature and orientation and are independent of each other. From the standpoint of norms and. ultimate values that science ...
... afterwards. First the Divine. And consecration to the Divine must come first, everything else comes afterwards. If it comes, it comes; if it doesn't, it does not matter. What matters is the seeking for the Divine, this is the first thing, the thing that comes before everything, the most important thing. This is what it means. There is "something truer in you". 4 It is the psychic, isn't it? ...
... or other ambition to be a superman, (2) one is ready to undergo Page 283 the conditions and stages needed for the achievement, (3) one is sincere and regards it as part of the seeking for the Divine and a consequent culmination of the divine Will in one and insists on no more than the fulfilment of that Will whatever it may be, psychisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation. It should ...
... standing that all must be turned towards the Divine and everything else either sacrificed or changed into a subordinate and ancillary movement or made by sublimation a first step only towards the seeking for the Divine. This no doubt helps the Indian sadhak if not to become single-hearted at once, yet to orientate himself more completely towards the goal. It is not always for him the Divine alone, though ...
... Mother did not intend to return upon it; it is understood that whatever the motive immediately pushing the mind or the vital, an asking for Ananda or knowledge or power, yet if there is a true seeking for the Divine in the being, it must lead eventually to the realisation of the Divine. The soul within has always the inherent ( ahaitukī ) yearning for the Divine; the hetu or special motive is simply ...
... methods and get the help of the occult powers. But the occult spiritual forces and masteries can be called down or come down without calling only if that is quite secondary to the true thing, the seeking for the Divine, and if it is part of the Divine plan in you. Occult powers can only be for the spiritual man an instrumentation of the Divine Power that uses him, they cannot be the aim or an aim of his sadhana ...
... and makes human service its mental ideal instead of spiritual service of the Divine. That it is a misguiding movement you saw yourself; for it wanted to sacrifice your sadhana, that is, your seeking for the Divine to this new ego of altruistic self righteousness; it was prepared to do things without permission of the Mother or rather avoiding asking for permission. One has to get rid of selfishness and ...
... base of a greater and happier life to be brought now or hereafter into the world-existence. But whatever be the aim, the actual state of the world is no argument at all against the seeking for the Divine or the truth of Yoga. Also the accidents of the search, that A is dead and will attain only in another body or B is ill or C misbehaves are side matters altogether. It makes no difference to ...
... explain specially about the request for Pranam – that logically hangs on to the rest. She did not come here out of any personal devotion to the Mother; she was quite prepared to go to R in her seeking for the Divine if she could not get in here – that was the best she could do, since we were not prepared to offer up Janaki Prasad as a sacrifice – and so it was arranged. I hope these things are now perfectly ...
... distaste (to say the least) for the methods which we find most helpful but you find grim and repellent, makes a great obstacle. But I maintain my idea that if you remain faithful to the seeking for the Divine, the day of grace and opening will come. Nobody will be more pleased than ourselves if it comes over there in the Himalayas, or for that matter anywhere. The place does not matter—the thing ...
... Lasting remembrance: the remembrance of that which has helped the being to progress. Page 70 Sentimental remembrance: only those circumstances which helped us in our seeking for the Divine must be the object of this remembrance. At certain periods, the whole terrestrial life seems to pass miraculously through stages which, at other times, it would take thousands of years to ...
... combination of these three things. When these three lowest passions of humanity are brought into play, that is what I call "the abyss." When someone has decided to consecrate his life to the seeking for the Divine, if he is sincere, that is to say, if the resolution is sincere and carried out sincerely, there is absolutely nothing to fear, because all that happens or will happen to him will lead him ...
... others. Service to parents is part of family and social duty. It has nothing to do in itself with yoga. Yoga is truth not of family or society, but of spiritual life, and in spiritual life the seeking for the Divine takes precedence over everything. If we ask you to remain still with your father and mother, it is not from the point of view of Truth, but of charity. Four of their children have already ...
... get the help of the occult powers. But the occult spiritual forces and masteries can be called down or [can] come down without calling only if that is quite secondary to the true thing, the seeking for the Divine, and if it is part of the Divine plan in you. Occult powers can only be for the spiritual man an instrumentation of the Divine Power that uses him, they cannot be the aim or an aim of his sadhana ...
... Both of them are a seeking. Morality is a seeking for a guiding principle of conduct; but this seeking is mental, and, when it goes beyond that, it no more remains morality. Religion is a seeking for the Divine, but the method of seeking is one of dogma, ritual, and ceremony, and an involvement in a fabric of moral, social and cultural institutions all determined and permeated wholly or partly by ...
... theme itself of the poem is a symbol of this kind of spiritual search. For Parvati's love is a very sensuous passion, but the very fact that it has for object the Eternal Being makes it into a seeking for the divine; it gives it a strange charm which partakes of the body and of the spirit. Shiva's well-known marks, such as his blue throat, his moon-crescent, his third eye, which are part of a symbolic ...
... other words, an aspiration is an upward elan of our consciousness towards all that is essentially good and pure and beautiful; it is a thirst for spiritual knowledge; it is a quiet and steady seeking for the Divine and divine life; it embodies an indomitable courage to fight against all that tries to prevent the sadhaka' s progress by exercising upon him a gravitational pull downward and backward. ...
... his life as well as in his art, especially in his poetry, the thing that has taken shape is what we call aspiration, an upward urge and longing of the inner soul. In common parlance it is a seeking for the Divine, in philosophical terms it is a spiritual quest. But Rabindranath is a poet, and he is a modern poet. He cannot be wholly included in the older category, fixed in a mould of clear definition ...
... flow uninterruptedly towards Thee, my body unweariedly and faithfully serve Thee", should be the silent, unceasing prayer of the whole being. Nothing can be more effective -than this constant seeking for the Divine everywhere and Page 140 in all things and all happenings. One should watch the movements of one's nature and see whether this seeking has awakened there or not, and open and ...
... Radha-Krishna cult, Sri Aurobindo writes: The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases passing ...
... of this poetry: The desire of the soul for God is there [in Bengali Vaishnava poetry] thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases ...
... 1957 White Roses 23 February 1957 These difficulties are there for all those who seek for the Divine. Nobody can hope for an easy way—but the Victory is certain and this certitude gives strength to endure. ...
... we become recipients of the grace the more it becomes spontaneous and sincere till at last it culminates in a whole-hearted surrender to the Divine. Humility is also an essential and indispensable element in the seeking of the Divine. The attitude of the seeker should be : "Je ne sais rien, Je ne suis rien, Je ne puis rien, Je suis dans L' obscurite de I' insconscience." ... of its presence, the individual or immanent divine, the cosmic or universal divine and the transcendental or supracosmic divine. Faith, sincerity, humility, devotion and surrender are absolutely indispensable for the spiritual seeker to realise the Divine. This faith must not be an egoistic faith in one's own strength and capacity but in the Divine Grace and omniscience which knows better than... a spark of the Divine has to be uncovered from its sheaths of body, mind and life by persistent and sleepless endeavour. At last when the ego-comrplex is completely dissolved, it manifests itself to the seeker. Then we are one with the Divine and enjoy not only divine peace, bliss and harmony but also share with Him his omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. This Divine can be realised in ...
... Indeed the round of Nature is intended to show it all possible sorts of satisfactions and by exhausting them convince it that none of them can really satisfy it and that what it is at bottom seeking is a divine satisfaction. In Yoga we hasten this slow process of Nature and insist on the physical consciousness seeing the truth and learning to recognise and want it. But how to show it the truth? Well... things. Aspiration in the physical for the Divine's Love implies that the physical asks for nothing else save that it should feel how the Divine loves it. It realises that all its usual satisfactions are utterly insufficient. But there cannot be a compromise: if the physical wants the Divine's Love it must want that alone and not say, "I shall have the Divine's Love and at the same time keep my other... 1930 - 1931 1930 - 1931 Questions and Answers (1929-1931) Aspiration in the Physical for the Divine's Love Here is the flower we have called "Aspiration in the Physical for the Divine's Love." By the "Physical" I mean the physical consciousness, the most ordinary outward-going consciousness, the normal consciousness of most human beings, which sets such ...
... Indeed the round of Nature is intended to show it all possible sorts of satisfactions and by exhausting them convince it that none of them can really satisfy it and that what it is at bottom seeking is a divine satisfaction. In Yoga we hasten this slow process of Nature and insist on the physical consciousness seeing the truth and learning to recognise it and want it. But how to show it the truth? Well... physical asks for nothing else save that it should feel how the Divine loves it. It realises that all its usual satisfactions are utterly insufficient. But there cannot be a compromise: if the physical wants the Divine's Love it must want that alone and not say, "I shall have the Divine's Love and at the same time keep my other attachments, needs and enjoyments ..." The fundamental seat of aspiration... "Aspiration in the Physical for the Divine's Love." By the "Physical" I mean the physical consciousness, the most ordinary outward-going consciousness, the normal consciousness of most human beings, which sets such great store by comfort, good food, good clothes, happy relationship, etc., instead of aspiring for the higher things. Aspiration in the physical for the Divine's Love implies that the physical ...
... and the Divine alone. This is how Sri Aurobindo has described the ascent of love and the progressive transformation of its motives: "By seeking 101'his good from the Divine, he [the sadhaka] •hall come in the end to seek in the Divine all his good.... By knowing the Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know him as the All and the Transcendent who is the source of all things... only for the Divine. Aspire only to the Divine. Work only for the Divine. Serve only the Divine. Be attached only to the Divine. Want only the Divine. Seek only the Divine. Only adore the Divine." (White Roses: Letters to Huta) By somewhat adapting the words of a great mystic of old we Page 173 may state that a sadhaka of the Prema-yoga or the Yoga of Love... the Divine for all our requirements even if they may be of a purely mundane nature. At the next step we will learn to shun the petty and impermanent things of this world and ask from the Divine only those gifts which are conducive to our spiritual growth. Next, we will learn not even to ask for these apparently noble and permanent possessions: our sole object of seeking will be the Divine and ...
... the gate to fulfillment and harmony and the Spirit's delight in life. * The human in man seeks Divinity, the Divine in man seeks humanity. * Your smallnesses only you can call your own; your greatness is the greatness of the Divine in you. * It is the Godhead in you that can reveal God to you; there is no other proof... gods. * The Heart is the blazing hearth of Aspiration, the divine door that opens into Immortality. * Of Love Ananda is the soul, self-mastery the head, and purity the foundation. * The human approaches to the Divine are dangerous. Seek God in God's ways. * Aspire and love . . . Ascending... surrender and dissolve itself into the Divine self. * Never seek through your desire-soul the person you love. You invite thereby not only misery to yourself but bring a curse upon one you profess to love. Place always a space of detachment between yourself and your beloved; make the Divine your mediator. Page 5 ...
... - This is the gate to fulfilment and harmony and the spirit's delight in life. *** The human in man seeks Divinity, the Divine in man seeks humanity. Page 345 Your smallnesses only you can call your own; your greatness is the greatness of the Divine in you. It is the Godhead in you that can reveal God to you; there is no other proof of God. *** ... flames up to the gods. *** The Heart is the blazing hearth of Aspiration, the divine door that opens into Immortality. *** Of Love Ananda is the soul, self-mastery the head, and purity the foundation. *** The human approaches to the Divine are dangerous. Seek God in God's ways. *** Aspire and love. . . Ascending Love leads to Immortality... The human self must yield, surrender and dissolve itself into the Divine self. *** Never seek through your desire-soul the person you love. You invite thereby not only misery to yourself but bring a curse upon one you profess to love. Place always a space of detachment between yourself and your beloved; make the Divine your mediator. Then shall you secure pure and perfect enjoyment ...
... 1957 White Roses 06 July 1957 The only thing that is important is your seeking and realising the Divine all the rest is zero . ...
... offended palate, then certainly they were quite unfit for yoga and this was not the place for them. For it means that a mutton chop or a tasty plate of fish was more important for them than the seeking of the Divine. It is not possible to do Yoga if values are so topsyturvy in the consciousness. Apart from such extravagance, these things which ought to be only among the most minor values even in the human ...
... eternal divine spark; it attains its culmination, its total fulfilment if and when it unites with a being or personality from above. What is particularly interesting is the way in which the Mother amplifies and explains in simpler language the great concepts articulated by Sri Aurobindo, which in turn flow from xi his exalted spiritual stature. Spiritual seekers around the... find this selection of great value in their quest. I myself have benefited greatly from Shri Dalal's earlier selections, and warmly commend the valuable service that he is rendering to genuine seekers for the Divine. 15 August 2002 xii ... Emergence of the Psychic FOREWORD The two basic concepts of the Vedanta are the all-pervasive Divine — the Brahman — and the spark or reflection of this Divine within each being, specially human beings — the Atman, and joining these two — Yoga — is the well-established methodology to be found in our scriptures and in the teachings of realised seers ...
... accept the psychic motives or aims, partake of the nature of the psychic or follow its aims but with a modification in the manner which belongs to the mind, vital or physical. The psychic-vital seeks after the Divine, but it has a demand in its self-giving, desire, vital eagerness. The psychic has not, for the psychic has instead pure self-giving, aspiration, intensity of psychic fire. The psychic-vital... knowledge of the Divine, what the Europeans call the intellectual love of God. In the vital it may express itself as a hunger or hankering after the Divine. It can bring much suffering because of the nature of the vital, its unquiet passions, desires, ardours, troubled emotions, cloudings, depressions, despairs. Nevertheless all cannot approach, at least cannot at once approach the Divine in the pure psychic... psychic way—the mental and vital approaches are often necessary beginnings and better from the spiritual point of view than unsensitiveness to the Divine. It is in both cases a call of the soul, the soul's urge —it only takes a form or colour due to the stress of the mind or vital nature. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - II: The Call and the Capacity Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo has ...
... darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come. Page 619 × ... the sunlit man has no difficulties; he may have many, but he regards them cheerfully as "all in the day's work". If he gets bad beatings, he is capable of saying, "Well, that was a queer go, but the Divine is evidently in a queer mood and if that is his way of doing things, it must be the right one; I am surely a still queerer fellow myself and that, I suppose, was the only means of putting me right... difficulties is due to the Yoga having come down against the bedrock of Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resistance in the individual and in the world to the victory of the Spirit and the Divine Work that is leading toward that victory. The difficulties themselves are general in the Asram as well as in the outside world. Doubt, discouragement, diminution or loss of faith, waning of the vital ...
... relations of the Divine with the human, that too we shall not deny ourselves; we shall admit both the play of the love and the delight and its ineffable union. By knowledge we seek unity with the Divine in his conscious being: by works we seek also unity with the Divine in his conscious being, not statically, but dynamically, through conscious union with the divine Will; but by love we seek unity with... the blossoming of a flower because the Divine is in him and the joy of the Divine, and as that joy expands in him, soul and mind and life too expand naturally into their godhead. At the same time, because he feels the Divine in all, perfect within every limiting appearance, he will not have the sorrow of his imperfection. Nor will the seeking of the Divine through life and the meeting of him in... equally in all men and in all beings. And because in him we are one with all, it seeks him not only for ourselves, but for all our fellows. A perfect and complete delight in the Divine, perfect because pure and self-existent, complete because all-embracing as well as all-absorbing, is the meaning of the way of Bhakti for the seeker of the integral Yoga. Once it is active in us, all other ways of Yoga convert ...
... Thoughts and Aphorisms Aphorism - 482, 483 482—The seeker after divine knowledge finds in the description of Krishna stealing the robes of the Gopis one of the deepest parables of God's ways with the soul, the devotee a perfect rendering in divine act of his heart's mystic experiences, the prurient and the Puritan (two faces of one temperament) only ...
... within and around us and we can feel like the bird that opens its wings for an unopposed soar. 6 December 1954 A being free from all bondages, flying from height to height in a happy seeking for divine transformation. A resplendent sun rises above the horizon. It is your Lord that comes to you. The whole world awakes and stretches in delight at the contact of His glory. As the ...
... and self-assurance press always downward. But confidence in the Divine and a faith in one's spiritual destiny (i.e. since my heart and Page 42 soul seek for the Divine, I cannot fail one day to reach Him) are much needed in view of the difficulties of the Path. A contempt for others is out of place, especially since the Divine is in all. Evidently, the activities and aspirations of men are... the Divine Purity and Light and Love. Necessarily this can only happen if he conquers his lower nature and throws it from him; for if he relapses into it, he is likely to fall from the path or at least to be, so long as the relapse lasts, held back by it from inner progress. But for all that the conversion of great sinners into great saints, of men of little or no virtue into spiritual seekers and... Bilwamangal and many others. The house of the Divine is not closed to any who knock sincerely at its gates, whatever their past stumbles and errors. Human virtues and human errors are bright and dark wrappings of a divine element within which once it pierces the veil, can burn through both towards the heights of the Spirit. Humility before the Divine is also a sine qua non of the spiritual life ...
... that have brought it about—a connection in past lives with the Mother and myself, the development of your nature in former births which made it possible for you to seek the Divine, bhakti in those lives bearing its fruit now—finally, the Divine Grace. October 1935 ... privilege of coming here at the Divine's Feet? It is the call of your soul that brought you here and also some aspiration or connection with the Mother and myself in past lives. 6 May 1933 Page 87 What sort of bhakti in my past lives has brought me to the Mother's feet? The aspiration for union with the Divine and perhaps also for the descent of the Divine on the earth. 8 May 1933 ...
... will to atone, there need be no cause for despair. But I must remind you that that is only the individual aspect. There is here an Asram, a group of seekers of the Divine Truth with a collective existence and aim; a work is being done for the Divine against great difficulties and in the midst of a hostile and censorious world which is only too glad of any pretext for assailing it and, if possible... that and ignore the importance of obedience. It is the mind wanting to follow its own way of thinking and the vital seeking freedom for its desires which argue in this manner. If you do not follow the rules laid down by the spiritual guide or obey one who is leading you to the Divine, then what or whom are you to follow? Only the ideas of the individual mind and the desires of the vital: but these... superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one's own fancy, vital impulses and desires. In Yoga obedience to the Guru or to the Divine and the law of the Truth as declared by the Guru is the foundation of discipline. 12 June 1933 What is discipline and how does it apply here, in our Yoga? It is not the discipline of Yoga ...
... is stated here is much simpler and transparent. It is this that when the Divine is absent and the divine Knowledge, then comes in man with his human mental knowledge: it is man's humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the human values, all the moralities, salva dharmān, seek only the Divine. The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great Way... Page 131 Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under the heading "God in the World". Here it is: "The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep our feet firmly on the physical... collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather ...
... spiritual self-giving there are no reactions of this kind; no despondency or despair, no saying “What have I gained by seeking the Divine,” no anger, revolt, abhiman , wish to go away — such as you describe here — but an absolute confidence, and a persistence in clinging to the Divine under all conditions. That is what I wanted you to have; it is the only basis on which one is free from troubles and ...
... child, cleave to us for our weal. [7] I.1 The Strength I seek who is set in front as our divine representative in the sacrifice and offers in the order of the Truth, the priest of our oblation who disposes utterly delight. The Strength [was] desirable to the ancient sages and they of today Page 455 must seek him too, for 'tis he that brings hither the gods. By the Strength one... outshining, increasing in thine own home. Therefore be easy of approach to us, O Strength, as a father to his child; cleave to us for our blissful state. [8] I.1 1) The God-will I seek with adoration, divine priest of the sacrifice who is set in front and sacrifices in the seasons of the Law, giver of oblation who most ordains the ecstasy. 2) The Flame adored by the ancient finders of knowledge... increasing in his own home. 9) Therefore do thou, O Will, be as easy of approach to us as a father to his child, cleave to us for that happy state of our being. [9] I.1 The Will I seek with adoration, divine priest of our sacrifice who is set in its front and sacrifices in the seasons of the Truth and offers the oblation and establishes in us wholly the Bliss; Will, the object of their adoration ...
... all-effective, the hymn of the Will, of the godhead that seeks for us our divine substance, 1 of him who touches the heavens. अग्निर्जुषत नो गिरो होता यो मानुषेष्वा । स यक्षद् दैव्यं जनम् ॥३॥ Page 436 3) May the Will accept with love our words, he who is here as the priest in men; may he offer the sacrifice to the divine people. त्वमग्ने सप्रथा असि जुष्टो होता वरेण्यः ।... The Thirteenth Hymn to Agni A Hymn of Affirmation of the Divine Will [The Rishi declares the power of the Word affirming the Divine Will who attains to the touch of heaven for man. That Will affirmed in us by the word becomes the priest of our sacrifice and the winner in us of the divine riches and of the energy that conquers. This godhead contains all the others in its... containest in thy being all the gods; thou shalt bring to us a varied joy of those riches. Page 437 × The divine riches which are the object of the sacrifice. ...
... January 1957 " Man seeks at first blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search; He seeks and enjoys man's blindness like the hands of a little child that... unthinkingly. And in the depths of one's being is this psychic being which seeks, seeks, seeks to awaken the consciousness and re-establish the union. One knows nothing about it. When you were ten years old, did you know this? No, you didn't. Well, still in the depths of your being your psychic being already wanted it and was seeking for it. It was probably your psychic which brought you here. There... that grope after its mother. " Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 382 Sweet Mother, how is it that one seeks something and yet does not know that one is seeking? There are so many things you think, feel, want, even do, without knowing it. Are you fully conscious of yourself and of all that goes on in you?—Not at all! If, for example, suddenly, without your expecting it, at a ...
... praying to the Mother to be present and guide us all in our activities of the centre and of life at large. Think only of the Divine Live only for the Divine Aspire only for the Divine Work only for the Divine Seek only the Divine Serve only the Divine Adore only the Divine —White Roses × This is the report... a single destination, which taught me to do all activities for the Divine and realize the Divine at every moment in waking as well as in sleep. I was trying to invoke the Mother's Grace in all my activities and wished to make my whole life an ascent towards the Divine and have all the time genuine contact with the Divine as naturally as a stream flows towards the ocean. I had taken up the centre's... their interest in Sri Aurobindo, Purani suggested that they might form a group and write a letter to the Divine Mother to permit them to start a study circle. All those who were interested in reading Sri Aurobindo's books signed a letter addressed to the Mother and gave it to Purani to obtain the Divine Mother's sanction. They had not mentioned in the letter the name of the person who was to be responsible ...
... conquering this resistance. For instance I expect that you will attend this evening meditation at the playground and I hope you will benefit by it. If life is all a game of hide-and-seek instituted for the Divine's delight, naturally the more difficult it is and the longer it takes, the greater the delight. So why should I expect anything more than just enough help to keep me in the game? This... stopping I have done since then seems to be ineffective, so now I shall stop completely everything that to me means sadhana (going to you at balcony, going to class and meditation, reading, marching, seeking guidance, trying to be quiet and relaxed). Little good seems to come from these things anyway. I never told you to stop any of these things which are, on the contrary, the indispensable frame of... with The Mother 19 January 1957 Gracious Divine Mother, I cannot believe that in the Integral Yoga the darkness and ugliness and suffering I have been immersed in for almost three years are necessary. Nor do I believe that it is beyond the power of the Divine to help. Only, something is dreadfully wrong somewhere. In our last interview you said ...
... darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come." (XXVI.169-170, April 9, 1947 ) Very appropriate. Very well, we have... es is due to the yoga having come down against the bed-rock of Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resistance in the individual and in the world to the victory of the Spirit and the Divine Work that is leading toward that victory. The difficulties themselves are general in the Ashram as well as in the outside world.... The description follows. You would think it was happening now: ...
... of the little ego in union with the Divine, purification, surrender, the substitution of the Divine guidance for one's own ignorant self-guidance based on one's personal ideas and personal feelings is the aim of Karmayoga, the surrender of one's own will to the Divine Will. "If one feels human beings to be near and the Divine to be far and seeks the Divine through service of and love of human... between the sadhaks and an expression of the vital movements, a free vital interchange whether with some or with all. "The work was meant as a service to the Divine and as a field for the inner opening to the Divine, surrender to the Divine alone, rejection of ego and all the ordinary vital movements and the training in a psychic elevation, selflessness, obedience, renunciation of all mental, vital... it is done without remuneration. Sadhaks and sadhikas here strive for perfection in their work not in hopes of material advancement, but in order to make their labour a more worthy offering to the Divine. But as years have rolled by, especially after the physical withdrawal of the Mother, and with the arrival of a new generation of entrants, the real purpose of work in the Ashram has been lost ...
... young girls and thus to talk of seeking the Divine is quite apt on this occasion. How to get more and more in touch with the Supreme Indweller is the whole business of Sadhana. If you ask me what is the simplest way, I shall quote to you three words of the Mother — "Remember and offer." Wherever you are, whatever you do, you can always think of the Divine, and you can always make an offering... Naturally I came at once." So, you see, to seek the Divine we do not have to go far. He dwells within ourselves. He is as near and natural as our own heart. His flute is always playing there. And hearing it there I found that Yoga was not at all an unusual thing to do. However young you may be, you can always get in touch with the Divine's luminous presence. And indeed the story of Brindavan... part of your life. It is not by cutting yourself off from people or by shutting out activity and locking yourself up in an impenetrable Samadhi that you meet the Divine. Yoga means being in touch with the Divine's presence every minute. It is an all-time job, as Sri Aurobindo has often said. And, if you live out the Mother's formula of remembering and offering, you will feel ...
... to seek and possess the divine consciousness. 13 June 1937 Page 286 "We would be completely under Thy influence to the exclusion of every other." 1 Each force or power has an influence on other forces and powers and this reaction is reciprocal. To escape this constant and general confusion or influence, there is only one way, to concentrate exclusively on the Divine Co... the Divine Consciousness. There can be no true integral surrender to the Divine if any human relations and their habits and attachments are still maintained. All relations must be turned upward and directed to the Divine alone and transformed into means for the union and surrender. Vital relations are always dangerous. A complete, absolute consecration of the vital to the Divine is... of the Mother - II Duty towards the Divine and Others Duty towards the Divine is far more sacred than any social or family duty; it is all the more sacred because within the human collectivity it is almost wholly ignored or misunderstood. One who has given himself to the Divine has no longer any other duty than to make that consecration more and more ...
... Hereditary influence 2 creates an affinity and affinity is a living thing. It is only when the hereditary part is changed that the affinity ceases. It is your own being that seeks for the Divine. The hereditary part is not your true being, but something you have taken up as part of this birth. It can be got rid of or changed. Evolution, Karma and Ethics The question as put in... spiritual consciousness where all bonds are untied. As for peace one can gain it by an entire reliance on the Divine and surrender to the Divine Will. Page 520 In life all sorts of things offer themselves. One cannot take anything that comes with the idea that it is sent by the Divine. There is a choice and a wrong choice produces its consequence. Karma and Heredity Karma and heredity... degree, kind, power, everything? But why should we assume that the psychic seeds or sparks all started in a race at the same time, equal in conditions, equal in power and nature? Granted that the One Divine is the source of all and the Self is the same in all; but in manifestation why should not the Infinite throw itself out in infinite variety, why must it be in an innumerable sameness? How many of these ...
... the mental being seeks to know the Divine, it falls short as an instrument to realize the Object of realization in its entire indivisibility and integrality. As he points out: "When ... the mental being seeks to know the divine, to realize it, to become it, it has first to lift this lid, to put by this veil. But when it succeeds in that difficult endeavour, it sees the divine as something superior... convincingness, — ekdtma-pratyaya-saram , — with which this realization seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them, — and not this alone, — are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of Its presence or with the ineffable peace and power of the liberation... of the Eternal One. At an early stage, the aspect of an illusory world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. Sri Aurobindo clarifies that this was no reimprisonment in the ...
... its acts,—the Seer-Will of the one & infinite Divine Conscious-Existence at work in the universe. The Rishi, seeker and finder of knowledge, adores and seeks this divine Seer-Will as the priest of the inner sacrifice by Page 550 which man seeks the godhead. He is the priest in the three chief functions of that divine priesthood. The divine Seer-Will is the Purohit, that power which is... Mystic Fire [10] RV I.1.1 1) I adore Agni the god, the Purohit of the sacrifice, the Ritwik, the Hota, most delight-placing. I seek with adoration the God-Will, divine priest of the sacrifice placed in front, sacrificer in the seasons, offerer of the oblation, who most ordains the ecstasy. Agni (अग् and अज्) is the brilliant, the strong, the ... consciousness to act for the human being; replacing the fallible human will this divine force as soon as it is kindled conducts the sacrifice; he leads it in its journey through the stages by which the sacrificer rises to the supramental divine consciousness; he is its vanguard and front-fighter in the battle of the divine with the undivine and the march of man to his goal, पुरएता, प्रणेता. The Seer-Will ...
... Knowledge by identity is the characteristic of spiritual knowledge. If one keeps oneself separate and seeks to apprehend the Divine as an object outside, the Divine escapes or is caught only by the trail it leaves, its echoes and shadows, its apparent qualities and attributes. But one with the Divine, the being realises and possesses it in full consciousness, the Revealer reveals himself as such (vrnute... The Revealer and the Revelation How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower ...
... God or the Divine, whom we seem to have lost in the wilderness of the sense-objects—the Divine whom we seek in all our obscure and groping endeavours, and aspire to realise and reveal here in our material life. Even the atheist seeks an absolute of atheism, the rationalist an absolute of reason, the hedonist an absolute of life-enjoyment. They too are, therefore, seekers of the Divine, whom they... Light The Life of Life Man's Eternal Quest—the Absolute WHAT do men seek in life ? In their desires and dreams, in their hopes and ambitions, as well as in their eagle flights of spiritual aspiration, what is it they have all been seeking since Time began ? Is it not an Absolute ? The scientist in his laboratory, the philosopher in his ivory tower of... whom lies the secret of the transfiguration of the son of man, it is only ii the Word that one has to seek the mystery of the transubstantiation of the flesh. Page 272 Faith, the Leader This transcendent-immanent Absolute is the Divine, the Life of our life whom we have to seek continuously and discover and embrace in love and joy. Does our sense-bound reason doubt His existence ...
... and characteristically, of a mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling... aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as... the being to the Divine who is adored. Page 572 And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his self-revelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and ...
... love, integral knowledge leads to multitudinous richness of divine love. As the Gita points out, one who knows the supreme Purusha, who is not only the immutable monotone of oneness but who is also the many- sided movement, and who transcends both the immobile and the mobile, and thus because one has the integral knowledge, one seeks the Divine by love in every way of his being. Here again, we arrive... the principles of his being, then one enters into the Divine. It is by the union of love and knowledge that the seeker of the Divine in his pursuit avoids blindness, crudeness and stumbling blocks that are often dangerous; if love does not become united with knowledge, Page 69 there is only the fervor of adoration and that fervor condemns itself often to narrowness. Love leading to perfect... the world. Once again, one arrives at the trinity of our powers, the union of knowledge, love and will, when we start on our journey by the path of divine love. In the integral yoga, there is a constant striving to unite the three powers and the seeker is counseled to avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the misunderstanding and mutual deprecation which is often found between the followers ...
... spiritual experience. Is the Divine something less than Mind or is It something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual... since men began to seek after the Divine. If it is not true, then there is no truth in Yoga and no necessity for Yoga. If it is true, then it is on that basis, from the standpoint of the necessity of this greater consciousness that we can see whether Doubt is of any utility for the spiritual life. To believe anything and everything is certainly not demanded of the spiritual seeker; such a promiscuous... truth-seeker. This is a lesson I have learnt from the experience both of my own mind and of the minds of others; the only way to get rid of Doubt is to take Discrimination as one's detector of truth and falsehood and under its guard to open the door freely and courageously to experience. All the same I have started writing, but I will begin not with Doubt but with the demand for the Divine as a concrete ...
... (2) That one seeks not only the realisation of the Divine in the soul and self but also in the whole nature (that means the transformation of this lower human into the Divine spiritual nature). (3) That one seeks the Divine not only beyond life (by the cessation of birth) but for life, so that life also may become a realisation of the Divine and a manifestation of the Divine Nature. As... Yoga means (1) that instead of approaching the Divine through the mind alone (Jnana) or the heart alone (Bhakti) or through will and works alone (Karma Yoga), one seeks the Divine with all the parts and powers of the consciousness and the being, uniting these three ways and many others in a single Yoga (way of union with the Divine) and receives the Divine in His presence, consciousness, force, light... In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview, the spiritual and the material, and to try to establish the divine Consciousness and the divine Power in men's hearts and in earthly life, not for personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope ...
... "are the few among the seekers who know me in my totality in all the truth of my being." In fact, it is only in the supramental light that all opposition disappears and the aspects are indivisibly united in the Whole. One must go on enlarging knowledge, adding experience to experience till all the limitation disappears. The Transcendent, Cosmic and Individual Divine The Divine has three aspects for... some sattwic control, by tapasya, over the action of the Prakriti; but the impersonal Self has no power to change or divinise the Nature. For that one has to go beyond the impersonal Self and seek after the Divine who is both personal and impersonal and beyond these two aspects. If, however, you practise living in the impersonal Self and can achieve a certain spiritual impersonality, then you grow in... come. The Divine is neither personal nor impersonal, formless nor formed. He is the Divine. You talk of these distinctions as if they separated the Divine into so many separate Divines which have nothing to do with each other. The Divine Consciousness By the Divine Consciousness we mean the spiritual consciousness to which the Divine alone exists, because all is the Divine and by which one ...
... The Yoga of Divine Love The Synthesis of Yoga Chapter VII The Ananda Brahman The way of devotion in the integral synthetic Yoga will take the form of a seeking after the Divine through love and delight and a seizing with joy on all the ways of his being. It will find its acme in a perfect union of love and a perfect enjoyment of all the ways of the soul's... the Divine thus revealed, and on the intensity of our force of seeking; but at others it proceeds rather by a passive surrender to the rhythms of his all-wise working which acts always by its own at first inscrutable method. But the latter becomes the foundation when our love and trust are complete and our whole being lies in the clasp of a Power that is perfect love and wisdom. The Divine reveals... us, the lightnings of vision and the fire of the divine energy. The bliss existence may come to us through either one of these centres. When the lotus of the heart breaks open, we feel a divine joy, love and peace expanding in us like a flower of light which irradiates the whole being. They can then unite themselves with their secret source, the Divine in our hearts, and adore him as in a temple; they ...
... Life is meant for seeking the Divine. Life is realised when finding the Divine. Let this be our one need in life, to realise the Divine. Yes, to live in the consciousness of the Divine Presence is the only thing that matters. 2 June 1934 To want only what the Divine wants in us and for us, is the one important thing. 5 April 1935 The individual self and the universal self... worth in this life? To serve the Divine. 22 October 1964 Page 4 The only thing worth living for is to serve the Divine. January 1966 Conversion of the aim of life from the ego to the Divine: instead of seeking one's own satisfaction, to have the service of the Divine as the aim of life. What you must know is exactly the thing you want to do in life. The time needed... to unite with the Divine for his manifestation. 17 September 1972 Page 7 Man was created to express the Divine. His duty is therefore to become conscious of the Divine and to surrender himself entirely to His Will. All the rest, whatever the appearance, is falsehood and ignorance. 26 December 1972 We seek not our personal salvation but the absolute surrender of our being ...
... the religious instinct in man, which is to lead him towards the Divine Reality, to formulate all that he has yet achieved in that direction and to give to each human being a mould of spiritual discipline, a way of seeking, touching, nearing the Divine Truth, a way which is proper to the potentialities of his nature. " The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 863-64 Sweet Mother, can faith be... something in the being that is seeking and longing, even though not in a very conscious and systematic way. But in any case, when faith has been granted, when one has had this sudden inner illumination, in order to preserve it constantly in the active consciousness individual effort is altogether indispensable. One must hold on to one's faith, will one's faith; one must seek it, cultivate it, protect... even what seemed to us the worst, was a Divine Grace to make us advance on the way; and then we become aware that the personal effort too was a grace. But before reaching that point, one has to advance much, to struggle much, sometimes even to suffer a great deal. To sit down in inert passivity and say, "If I am to have faith I shall have it, the Divine will give it to me", is an attitude of laziness ...
... the impersonal Godhead, the impersonal Divine; but beyond the impersonal Divine there is the Divine who is the Person himself; and we must go through the Impersonal to reach the Supreme Divine who is beyond. Only it is good, as I said, for those who have been put by education into contact with too individual, too personal a God, to seek the impersonal Divine, because this liberates them from many... farther and have once again a personal contact with a Divine who indeed is beyond all these other godheads. So that's it. Page 240 Sweet Mother, how can we escape from other people's influence? By concentrating more and more totally and completely on the Divine. If you aspire with all your ardour, if you want to receive only the divine influence, if all the time you pull back towards... not disperse anything also: the least little thing in your being which is not given to the Divine is a waste; it is the wasting of your joy, something that lessens your happiness by that much, and all that you don't give to the Divine is as though you were holding it in the way of the possibility of the Divine's giving Himself to you. You don't feel Him close to yourself, constantly with you, because ...
... persistently the divine help for their removal, but not to allow oneself to be upset or pained or discouraged. Yoga is not an easy path and the total change of the nature cannot be done in a day. 27 May 1931 Throw aside this weakness. The Mother's help is there—keep yourself quiet and calm and face the difficulties with the courage a sadhak must have when seeking the Divine. 22 November 1933 ...
... an outer claim, on the inner rather than on any physically embodied Divine: it was a claim for the full spiritual union, the God-lover seeking the Divine, but the Divine also giving himself and meeting the God-lover. There can be no objection to that; such a claim all seekers of the Divine have; but as to the modalities of this Divine meeting, it does not carry us much farther. In any case, my object... Even if it is long before I can meet you, even if you delay to manifest yourself, let my bhakti, my seeking for you, my cry, my love, my adoration be always there." How constantly the Bhakta has sung, "All my life I have been seeking you and still you are not there, but still I seek and cannot cease to seek and love and adore." If it were really impossible to love God unless you first experience him, how... this be? In fact your mind seems to be putting the cart before the horse. One seeks after God first, with persistence or with passion, one finds him afterwards, some sooner than others, but most after a long seeking. One does not find him first, then seek after him. Even a glimpse only comes after long or fervent seeking. One has the love of God or at any rate some heart's desire for him and afterwards ...
... evolution, of self .concealment and self discovery is the 'Lila ' of the Divine one. Every being and everything is inhabited by the Divine which is His own self-creation, then why should not soul in man seek the Divine attracted like iron to magnet t? It is the nature of the soul to realise its highest self, i.e., the Divine inhabitant in his own and in the body of the whole creation. Naturally... to the Divine is the only truth in life. —Sri Aurobindo Moksha, i.e., the liberation of the Soul from the dominance of Prakriti was considered the highest goal of life from time immemorial. In fact, after the Vedic age and during the period of the Upanishads when the Vedic ritualistic practices fell into disuse and the Jnana kanda came into prominence in our spiritual seeking, the sole... the bliss of Brahman. Naturally, even this was not an easy job to accomplish and the hundreds and even thousands who succeeded in realising their Self were emulated by the rest who had a spiritual seeking. Thus at the top level of Indian humanity, the very best were cut off from the world and the result was failure of vital and material life which was considered fit only for the ignorant masses. This ...
... goal and appropriate means to reach that goal, and that again necessarily involves a choice, a process of acceptance and rejection. The goal is also called the Ishta, the godhead that one seeks] the Divine that is fulfilled in oneself. Being a personality, an individual, one has to choose, one can best follow the line of evolution and growth and fulfilment of that personality and individuality-e-that... Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and justification of creeds and dogmas. Only, it must be borne in mind, that one can be faithful even ...
... definite goal and appropriate means to reach that goal, and that again necessarily involves a choice, a process of acceptance and rejection. The goal is also called the ista , the godhead that one seeks, the Divine that is fulfilled in oneself. Being a personality, Page 99 an individual, one has to choose, one can best follow the line of evolution and growth and fulfilment of that p... Precisely because God is at once one and infinitely multiple and because human nature also is likewise, if one in essence, infinitely multiple in expression, each one, while seeing and finding the one God, seeks and finds him in and through a particular formulation. That is the original meaning, the genesis and justification of creeds Page 100 and dogmas. Only, it must be borne in mind ...
... It substitutes for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual seeking of a divine union. It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self... Its aim besides is limited to a terrestrial perfection of the normal human life. A Yoga of integral perfection regards man as a divine spiritual being involved in mind, life and body; it aims therefore at a liberation and a perfection of his divine nature. It seeks to make an inner living in the perfectly developed spiritual being his constant intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind... and the mental limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life, but takes account of the large supraterrestrial action behind the earthly material living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from whom the supreme o ...
... self-limitation, ignorance and egoism, to seek satisfaction of the spirit upon earth or to seek an issue and divine purpose and culmination for the world-play is a vanity and delusion; only in a heaven of the Spirit and not in the world, or only in the Spirit's true quietude and not in its phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only... represent the only possible relation between sense and substance, between the Divine as knower and the Divine as object, or if, other relations being possible, they are yet not in any way possible here, but must be sought on higher planes of existence. In that case, it is in heavens beyond that we must seek our entire divine fulfilment, as the religions assert, and their other assertion of the kingdom... to arrive at a seeking after the Infinite. He is the first son of earth who becomes vaguely aware of God within him, of his immortality or of his need of immortality, and the knowledge is a whip that drives and a cross of crucifixion until he is able to turn it into a source of infinite light and joy and power. This progressive development, this growing manifestation of the divine Consciousness and ...
... but Nature herself find her deliverance. This is the Truth which has been seen in flashes, in more and more entirety of its terms by the line of seers whom the Tantra would call the hero-seekers and the divine-seekers and which may now be nearing the point of readiness for its full revelation and experience. Then whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world yet if there... fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in whose infinite manifestation thesc things have come - it is the Divine itself that is here, behind us, pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If above... there is a spirit, a central presence greater than the series of surface personalities which, like the supreme Divine itself, is not overbome by the fate they endure. If we find out this Divine within us, if we know ourselves as this spirit which is of one essence and being with the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and in it we can emain ourselves even in the midst of this world's disharmonies ...
... sadhika in this yoga is to be able to meet each other without thinking at all that one is a man and another a woman - both are simply human beings, both sadhaks, both striving to serve the Divine and seeking the Divine alone and none else. Have that fully in yourself and no difficulty is likely to come." (Ibid., p. 816) Page 854 ... one loves. Therefore if you want to be like the Divine, love him alone. Only one who has known the ecstasy of the exchange of love with the Divine can know how insipid and dull and feeble any other exchange is in comparison." (Ibid.) (3)"Since we have decided to reserve love in all its splendour for our personal relationship with the Divine, we shall replace it in our relations with others... - Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny E. Wrong Relationship Between Sadhaks and Sadhikas The admission of women in an Ashram of spiritual seekers might strike many people as a dangerous novelty. In the history of past attempts to build a spiritual community, many an organisation has been wrecked because of wrong relationships developing between ...
... undivine against the divine." (Ibid., p. 2) (4) "The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalised order of things. It is imperative to exchange this surface orientation for the deeper faith and vision which see only the Divine and seek only after the Divine. The next need is... us again on the path of integral sadhana: (1)"Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering - it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. ... This is what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything... most ordinary and external actions ... When you can thus gather all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of division. No longer is one part of your nature given to the Divine, while the rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realised in you." (The Mother, Questions and Answers ...
... for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left. Page 7 In the initial stages of... it is not our Yoga. For we want the divine conquest of this world, the conquest of all its movements and the realisation of the Divine here. But if we want the Divine to reign here we must give all we have and are and do here to the Divine. It will not do to think that anything is unimportant or that the external life and its necessities are no part of the Divine Life. If we do, we shall remain where... everything to the Divine, even every little thing that one has or does in life. What is precisely the meaning of that? Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering—it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. In the beginning you start by making this offering in a general way, as though once for all; you say, "I am the servant of the Divine; my life is ...
... between the individual soul in its egoistic eagerness and the universal Powers which seek to fulfil the divine purpose of the Cosmos. The seer Agastya, at such a moment, confronts in his inner experience Indra, Lord of Swar, the realm of pure intelligence, through which the ascending soul passes into the divine Truth. Indra speaks first of that unknowable Source of things towards which Agastya... Being, friend as comrades in a common effort and One in the divine love that unites God and man, and by this friendship and alliance has attained to the present stage in his progressive perfection; but now he treats Indra as an inferior Power and wishes to go beyond without fulfilling himself in the domain of the God. Page 27 He seeks to divert his increased thought-powers towards his own object... flame of the divine Force, Agni, be kindled in front as head of the sacrifice and leader of the march. Indra and Agastya together, the universal Power and the human soul, will extend in harmony the effective inner action on the plane of the pure Intelligence so that it may enrich itself there and attain beyond. For it is precisely by the progressive surrender of the lower being to the divine activities ...
... which does not feel any need of the Divine. But for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left. ... it is not our Yoga. For we want the divine conquest of this world, the conquest of all its movements and the realisation of the Divine here. But if we want the Divine to reign here we must give all we have and are and do here to the Divine. It will not do to think that anything is unimportant or that the external life and its necessities are no part of the Divine Life. If we do, we shall remain where... everything to the Divine, even every little thing that one has or does in life. What is precisely the meaning of that? Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering—it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. In the beginning you start by making this offering in a general way, as though once for all; you say, "I am the servant of the Divine; my life is given ...
... between the individual soul in its egoistic eagerness and the universal Powers which seek to fulfil the divine purpose of the Cosmos. The seer Agastya at such a moment confronts in his inner experience Indra, Lord of Swar, the realm of pure intelligence, through which the ascending soul passes into the divine Truth. Indra speaks first of that unknowable Source of things towards which Agastya... Supreme Being, friend as comrades in a common effort and one in the divine love that unites God and man,—and by this friendship and alliance has attained to the present stage in his progressive perfection; but now he treats Indra as an inferior Power and wishes to go beyond without fulfilling himself in the domain of the God. He seeks to divert his increased thought-powers towards his own object instead... flame of the divine Force, Agni, be kindled in front as head of the sacrifice and leader of the march. Indra and Agastya together, the universal Power and the human soul, will extend in harmony the effective inner action on the plane of the pure Intelligence so that it may enrich itself there and attain beyond. For it is precisely by the progressive surrender of the lower being to the divine activities ...
... into many realms of consciousness and from each of these there go up its words that express the impulses in it which seek a divine fulfilment. The Mind-Soul answers to these and gives assent, it supplies to the word of expression the answering word of illumination and to the Life that seeks the Truth it gives the power of intelligence that finds and holds the Truth. ... confirmed the desire with which the Life-Soul has given the sacrifice of the Life-Horse to the gods. The Rishi prays that this Mind-Soul, lord of the triple dawn, may give to the journeying Life that seeks the truth, the mental intelligence and power of possession needed and may itself in return receive from Agni the peace and bliss. The LifeSoul on the other hand has given the hundred powers, the vital... he who answers to me with assent give to the illumined giver of the Horse-sacrifice, 8 by the word of illumination possession of the goal of his journey; may he give power of intelligence to the seeker of the Truth. यस्य मा परुषाः शतमुद्धर्षयन्त्युक्षणः । अश्वमेधस्य दानाः सोमा इव त्र्याशिरः ॥५॥ 5) A hundred strong bulls of the diffusion 9 raise me up to joy; the gifts of the sacrificer ...
... its relevance to the pursuit of spiritual progress. Second condition — The sadhaka should expect no egoistic return from his practice of Yoga or from his ardent seeking after the Divine. 'The Divine for the Divine's sake' should be the constant motto of his life. The vital self's craving for some desired! fruit of his actions should be entirely renounced by the sadhaka of the Path. Wealth... desire-impulsions pushing him to some specific activity. (ii)He has to invoke the Presence of the Divine Shakti, place himself in that ambience, and sincerely pray to the Mother Divine that he be rightly guided at this moment in the matter of the choice of the action. (iii)He must seek to eliminate all preferences and antipathies as regards the possible indication of the anticipated course... receive the divine Light and transform yourself, it is your whole way of being you must offer..." (M C W, Vol. 4, p. 373) Seventh condition — This is one of the most important conditions to fulfil: it is to change the whole basic attitude activating all the efforts of sadhana of the sadhaka. A sadhaka of the integral Path should do everything, including his sadhana and his seeking after ...
... suffering. The ecstasy of the divine Page 327 embrace will not abandon him because he obeys the impulse of divine love for God in humanity; or if it seems to draw back from him for a while, he knows by experience that it is to try and test him still farther so that some imperfection in his own way of meeting it may fall away from him. Personal salvation he does not seek except as a necessity for... we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love Page 329 itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion; a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that... world was created. We seek to realise our unity with God, but for us that realisation involves a complete and absolute recognition Page 328 of our unity with man and we cannot cut the two asunder. To use Christian language, the Son of God is also the Son of Man and both elements are necessary to the complete Christhood; or to use an Indian form of thought, the divine Narayana of whom the ...
... whole nature to the eternal Good. It deals similarly with our perceptions and sensations and reveals all the delight that they seek, but in its truth, not in any perversion and wrong seeking and wrong reception; it teaches even our lower impulses to lay hold on the Divine and Infinite in the appearances after which they run. All this is done not in the values of the lower being, but by a lifting up... Vijnana in the purity, in the right, in the truth of the superior or divine Prakriti. Its powers may often seem to be what are called in ordinary Yogic parlance siddhis, by the Europeans occult powers, shunned and dreaded by devotees and by many Yogins as snares, stumbling-blocks, diversions from the true seeking after the Divine. But they have that character and are dangerous here because they are... the Truth-power and Truth-action of the divine Being in its divine identities, and, when this acts through the individual lifted to the gnostic plane, it fulfils itself unperverted, without fault or egoistic reaction, without diversion from the possession of the Divine. There the individual is no longer the ego, but the free Jiva domiciled in the higher divine nature of which he is a portion, parā ...
... will and seeks to satisfy a Godhead who transcends her and her works and creations; his finite being, his will and his satisfactions are hers and not his, and she offers them at every moment as a sacrifice to the Divine of whose purpose in her she makes all this the covert instrumentation. Because of this ignorance whose seal is egoism, the creature ignores the law of sacrifice and seeks to take all... worship and not a field for the self-satisfaction of the independent ego; not the fulfilment of the ego,—that is only our crude and obscure beginning,—but the discovery of God, the worship and seeking of the Divine and the Infinite through a constantly enlarging sacrifice culminating in a perfect self-giving founded on a perfect self-knowledge, is that to which the experience of life is at last intended... this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being is the one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, a divine movement opening out from God and returning to God. All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power of the Divine which works out the consciousness and will of the divine Soul master of her works and inhabitant of her forms. It is for his satisfaction that she descends into the ...
... like the rest is a growth and a seeking towards the absolute, the divine, which can only be attained securely in the suprarational. It seeks after an absolute purity, an absolute right, an absolute truth, an absolute strength, an absolute love and self-giving, and it is most satisfied when it can get them in absolute measure, without limit, curb or compromise, divinely, infinitely, in a sort of godhead... all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great secret of life, that which it is in labour to discover and to make real to its self-knowledge. The seeking for God is also, su... into the divine nature. Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of God's being; its parts of truth and right are a seeking after conscious unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts of sympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and universality of the divine love; its parts of strength and manhood are an edification of the divine strength ...
... various means of uniting contact and sympathy, negatively by various means of hostile contact and antipathy. The divine is inalienable self-bliss and inviolable all-bliss; the human is sensation of mind and body seeking for delight, but finding only pleasure, indifference and pain. The divine is supramental knowledge comprehending all and supramental will effecting all; the human is ignorance reaching... a veil and a lid which prevent the human not only from attaining but even from knowing the divine. When, therefore, the mental being seeks to know the divine, to realise it, to become it, it has first to lift this lid, to put by this veil. But when it succeeds in that difficult endeavour, it sees the divine as something superior to it, distant, high, conceptually, Page 393 vitally, even... condemn the world and look forward only to a heaven beyond or else a void Nirvana or supreme featureless self-existence in the Supreme. But what under these circumstances is the human mind which seeks the divine to do with its waking moments? For if these are subject to all the disabilities of mortal mentality, if they are open to the attacks of grief, fear, anger, passion, hunger, greed, desire, it is ...
... as gleaming as well, goes on from the deepmost heart, seeking the Divine, carrying upon itself the whole sense of one's being and carrying in a movement of offering the sense of all events, persons, interrelations, problems. I said "seeking the Divine" but actually what is a seeking at one end is a finding at the other. The reality of the Divine's existence and presence is felt at all moments, and no... itself is Something of the Divine flowing out to Everything of the Divine beyond ourselves from the same Everything within Page 93 us. In order to be authentically psychic, the radiation you speak of has to be of a deep quiet intensity that gives and gives and never feels wasted if there is no response from the human recipient, for it really goes forth to the Divine who has worn the face... friendly consciousness. The question of being with them brings in your cry "Oh Divine! How far art Thou!" for a bit of comment. I know that the way your soul has expressed itself must cause what you call "a tint of pain" in your aspiration. But I should like to point out that it is not the Divine who is far: the Divine is always with us. His very attribute of "Omnipresence" assures this: it is we who ...
... process, which involves fleeing from difficulties, but this would only be a stage, a strategic 'retreat,' as it were. Mother, this is not a vital desire seeking to divert me from the sadhana, for my life has no other meaning than to seek the divine, but it seems to be the only solution that could bring about some progress and get me out of this lukewarm slump in which I have been living day after... say I am happy. I am not so absurdly pretentious as to blame the divine, nor yourself—and I remain quite convinced that all this is my own fault. Undoubtedly I have not known how to surrender totally in some part of myself, or I do not aspire enough or know how to 'open' myself as needed. Also, I should rely entirely upon the divine to take care of my progress and not be concerned about the absence... circles and taking one step backward for each one forward. Furthermore, instead of helping me draw nearer to the divine consciousness, my work in the Ashram (the very fact of working—for to change work, even if I felt like it, would not change the overall situation), diverts me from this divine consciousness, or at least keeps me in a superficial consciousness from which I am unable to 'unglue' myself ...
... the soul seeking always for the Divine and the Truth and answering to the Divine and the Truth whenever and wherever it meets it. All contact with the Divine through the essential substance of the consciousness is spiritual and it is that consciousness in the essential substance—what is called self—that is the spiritual consciousness. The soul or psychic being is a spark of the Divine that grows... psychological change or reversal alters the whole balance of the nature. Every soul is not awake and active; nor is every soul turned directly to the Divine before practising Yoga. For a long time Page 121 it seeks the Divine through men and things much more than directly. In the ordinary consciousness in which the mind etc. are not awakened, the psychic acts as well as it... accept the psychic motives or aims, partake of the nature of the psychic or follow its aims but with a modification in the manner which belongs to the mind, vital or physical. The psychic-vital seeks after the Divine, but it has a demand in its self-giving, desire, vital eagerness the psychic has not, for the psychic has instead pure self-giving, aspiration, intensity of psychic fire. The psychic-vital ...
... to disappear into the Indefinite—and I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life,—so vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for... as a result of a movement of the vital in place of the sattwic vairagya which is supposed to precede and cause or accompany or result from a turning away Page 389 from the world to seek the Divine. The tamasic vairagya comes from the recoil of the vital when it feels that it has to give up the joy of life and becomes listless and joyless; the rajasic comes when the vital begins to lose the... disappointment, a feeling of inability to succeed or face life, a crushing under the grips and pains of life. These bring a sense of the vanity of existence, a desire to seek something less miserable, more sure and happy or else to seek a liberation from existence here, but they do not bring immediately a luminous aspiration or pure aspiration with peace and joy for the spiritual attainment. No ...
... outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhāvena , 1 and so find it and live in it, that however—even in all kinds of ways—he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that, 2 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being. Page 231 ... sub-souls, as it were, means of a complex manifestation and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly Page 227 of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma. But it will not seek to enforce even this one uplifting dogma by any external compulsion upon the lower members of... of the good; it will rather hold up this creed and ideal as a light and inspiration to all his members to grow into the godhead from within themselves, to become freely divine. Neither in the individual nor in the society will it seek to imprison, wall in, repress, impoverish, but to let in the widest air and the highest light. A large liberty will be the law of a spiritual society and the increase of ...
... worship he gets his desire and the spiritual realisation for which he is at the moment fitted. By seeking all his good from the Divine, he shall come in the end to seek in the Divine all his good. By depending for his joys on the Divine, he shall learn to fix in the Divine all his joy. By knowing the Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know him as the All and the Transcendent who is the... the highest and the All and is close to the All-Power that brings all fulfilment. He has no doubts or baffled seekings left, for all knowledge streams upon him from the Light in which he lives. He loves perfectly the Divine and is his beloved; for as he takes joy in the Divine, so too the Divine takes joy in him. This is Page 287 the God-lover who has the knowledge, jñānī bhakta . And this... the highest mode of that Prakriti, the sattwic, which is seeking always for a harmonious light of knowledge and for a right rule of action. The Purusha, the soul within us which assents in Nature to the varying impulse of the gunas, has to give its sanction to that sattwic impulse and that sattwic will and temperament in our being which seeks after such a rule. The sattwic will in our nature has to ...
... rest. She almost did Page 394 not know how to express herself, and her intelligence, though evident, was untrained. Well, she was attracted like that and felt an imperious need to seek the Divine, to consecrate herself to Him. And she began to dance in His honour at first, like the juggler of Notre Dame; and she truly danced most remarkably. And then, suddenly, she wanted to express what... It depends on people, my child. There are people in whom the psychic movement, the emotional impulse is stronger than intellectual understanding. They feel an irresistible attraction for the Divine without knowing, without having the slightest idea of what it is, of what it can be, what it represents—nothing, no intellectual notion—but a kind of impulse, attraction, a need, an inevitable need... go very fast. And then, what is quite miraculous according to ordinary ideas is that as soon as they reach that degree of consecration which identifies them through their psychic being with the Divine Presence, suddenly they become endowed with capacities of expression absolutely unknown to their nature. I had a case like this in France, a long time ago, of a young, very young girl who had never ...
... but Nature herself find her deliverance. This is the Truth which has been seen in flashes, in more and more entirety of its terms by the line of seers whom the Tantra would call the hero-seekers and the divine seekers and which may now be nearing the point of readiness for its full revelation and experience. Then whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there... fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in whose infinite manifestation these things have come—it is the Divine itself that is here, behind us, pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If above... spirit, a central presence greater than the series of surface personalities which, like the supreme Divine itself, is not overborne by the Page 256 fate they endure. If we find out this Divine within us, if we know ourselves as this spirit which is of one essence and being with the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and in it we can remain ourselves even in the midst of this world's ...
... rime the other aspect too acts parallelly, with a comprehensive prospective vision of the future. This is the Divine's "Will for the future fulfilment." While seeking to know the Divine's Will at any given moment, the sadhaka should be cognisant of both these Wills of the Divine and develop a double attitude in his consciousness. Otherwise there will arise terrible confusion in his heart... renounce his self-will and seek to know the Divine Will in order to fulfil it? Is it for some personal interest, be that interest high and noble and Page 225 glorious or even garbed in some 'spiritual' guise? No, Surely not; for if such is the behind-the-screen motive of the sadhaka in his quest after the Divine Will, he can be sure that the Divine's Will will not normally... task set before him if he would attain the perfection in yoga. In all yoga, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, there are three essential objects to be attained by the seeker: (1) union or abiding contact with the Divine; (2) liberation of the soul or the self, the spirit; and (3) a certain change of the consciousness, the spiritual change. It is this change, which is absolutely necessary for ...
... The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness of possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, Page 143 our whole life becomes service and ... there must be accompaniment of self-purification and this purification will be much more than moralist's seeking for the right and blameless action; it is a constant effort to grow into likeness to Divine, it is a constant effort of liberation from our lower nature so to change into Divine nature. * * * Prayer is often supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and... out to be untenable in the light of the systematic body of knowledge with regard to spiritual experiences that has been developed over millennia by a large number of seekers in different parts of the world. Methods of spiritual seeking have been developed, and their assured results have come to be verified, repeated, reiterated and even expanded. In India, these systems have come to be grouped under ...
... the perfect life. But also, the Divine whom he thus sees in himself, he sees equally in all others and as the same Spirit in all. Therefore too is a growing inner unity with others a necessity of his being and perfect unity the sign and condition of the perfect life. Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation... outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhdvena,15 and so find it and live in it, that however - even in all kinds of ways - he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,16 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.17 Page 41 This at least is... liberation or perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being.... He who sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but the perfection of all. He will not feel his individuality perfect except in the largest universality ...
... your soul always aspires for the transformation, then that is what you have to follow after. To seek the Divine or rather some aspect of the Divine—for one cannot entirely realise the Divine if there is no transformation—may be enough for some, but not for those whose soul's aspiration is for the entire divine change. Unless the external nature is transformed, one may go as high as possible and... To talk about the supramental and think of bringing it down in yourself is the most dangerous of all. It may bring an entire megalomania and loss of balance. What the sadhak has to seek is the full opening to the Divine, the psychic change of his consciousness, the spiritual change. Of that change of consciousness, selflessness, desirelessness, humility, bhakti, surrender, calm, equality, peace, quiet... [ is absolute surrender to the Divine ] as anyone who has done it can tell you. It is also the easiest and most powerful way of "getting the Divine". So it is the best policy also. The phrase [ "for the Divine" ], however, means that the object of the Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine's sake alone, to be turned in our ...
... obvious answer is: The Divine. Secondly, the Agent: Who is doing the sadhana? Who is seeking the divine union? The answer is, of course, myself, the sadhaka. Thirdly, the World or the Nature: that is to say, all the rest, whatever I, in my ignorance, have been feeling as different and distinct from my personal self, all that can be labelled as "not-I" to toy ignorant perception. ... universe than the Divine, and so long as he labours in his active consciousness under the delusion of separativity, he has to necessarily start in his sadhana and continue for a long time with the clear idea of three distinctive elements: Firstly, the Goal: What is the destination of my sadhana? Who is the object of all my spiritual effort? And with whom am I seeking union? The obvious... of his action in accordance with the actual stage of his consciousness: he Should not seek to copy the mode of action of a siddha-yogī, a realised soul. In practical terms this means that he should not mistakenly abdicate his personal effort too soon but rather put it consistently at the service of the Divine. And as his consciousness grows and develops in spiritual awareness, his way of action ...
... strong as Christ." "But don't you think it's much better to seek the Divine for Himself than to seek Him for some power, even the power to assert his existence? My do you want to give proof every moment? And is it necessary to demonstrate it through healing?" "Of course you are right, there, when you say that one should seek the Divine for his own sake. For you people, it's easy to understand since... may have the divine consciousness and yet not see. How can it be? Because he has a divine consciousness, that's certain. But how can he not see? ( After a silence ) As I see him, it's because he needs the thing to be manifested through a personal consciousness. A "personal consciousness," I mean someone [Mother] who is "conscious of bearing the Divine," who feels, "I bear the Divine," you understand... understand? When that isn't there (the Divine is there, that's all, but there Page 397 isn't "I am the Divine"), he can't feel. And I'll go farther: I don't think there are many Europeans or Westerners who can feel it. Indians, it's because of atavism. But all those who are westernized cannot feel any longer. They need the sense of the person, the person who says, "I am," you understand. But ...
... may seek to reach the supreme supracosmic Sachchidananda direct from the spiritualised mind-range and in that process depart out of its cosmic formation into "the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Nonexistence, absolute and eternal." 3 But evidently this is not our line. Since we seek to possess divinely our... penetration, we seek to break asunder the wall separating our subliminal self from our present surface existence, leave the surface consciousness and live entirely in the realm of our inner mind, inner life, inner subtle-physical and finally in the inmost soul of our being. This inmost soul or the psychic being is the Purusha in the secret heart, hṛdye. guhāyām, a portion of the Divine Self supporting... transcending even the highest reach of spiritual mind and seek to realise Sachchidananda on the plane of Supermind. For, supermind is Sachchidananda's "...power of self-awareness and world-awareness, the world being known as within itself and not outside....[It is] the Truth-Consciousness whether above or in the universe by which the Divine knows not only his own essence and being but bis manifestation ...
... we accept the entire genuine self-expression of the spirit of life in poetry. We would range up and down the whole realm of poetic creation like free, unattached worshippers of the Divine Beauty and seekers of the divine Delight. Page 334 Later in the afternoon I was told by X that Y does not like love-poems and so he resented my remarks on them some days back. Yesterday too it appears... psychic being, and their seat is in the secret heart of man. (1) But what about the Divine who, it is said in the Gita and the Upanishads, dwells as the Lord in the hearts of men? (2) Is it the psychic entity that is meant here or the Immanent Divine? Can the psychic entity be called the Individual Divine? (3) Is it only the psychic being that evolves and the psychic entity from behind... and the same thing approached from a different point of view. It is not the immanent Divine but contains it so to say. Blessings. 6 July 1943 Mother, In our poetry class yesterday, I spoke about the object we have placed before us in our study of poetry: the perception and enjoyment of the divine Beauty and Delight which pervade the universe. And I said that as we embrace the whole ...
... after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. It is only at that stage that there comes about inner adoration of the Divine, an inner worship; one begins to make oneself a temple of the Divine; one's thoughts and feelings become a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, and the whole life becomes a means of service and worship of the divine. It is as this change or... al Divine, which leads to a further step of the reign of the divine consciousness on the psychological and even physical instruments and limbs of the individual in their action of transformation. It is true that as long as the divine consciousness is only an idea of the godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, there is not yet the beginning of yoga. The beginning is marked by a seeking after... When a prayer expresses the will and aspiration of the seeker to come into a living experience of the touch with the divine will, one enters into the yoga of realization. One begins to understand that the divine will is universal will, and it cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty; one begins to understand that the divine is not only universal but also transcendent who expresses ...
... Vasudeva, in the Alipore Jail. 101 But there is no hint of a 'Savitri' in these experiences. We have to wait till 1914 for the first definite clue. In that year Madame Mira Richard, who had been seeking the Divine for years, came to Pondicherry, and under date 30 March she recorded: It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is... itself upon the wax. 92 It was Quiller-Couch who categorically affirmed that, "philosophy and poetry work on different planes, and their terms belong to different categories. The one seeks to comprehend, the other to apprehend; the one moving round, would embrace the circumference of God's purpose, the other is content to leap from a centre within us to a point of the circumference... Aurobindo has tried to make poetry, partly out of his mystic experiences and realisations, partly out of the philosophy that he elaborated (plainly on the basis of these realisations) in The Life Divine, both sources of inspiration—the mystic and the philosophic—flowing into and filling with rich significance the mould of the ancient legend of Savitri and Satyavan. The question now arises: to what ...
... environments and circumstances and makes for a thorough purification and perfection of the seeker of the Divine. "He who, in all sincerity of his being, has given himself to Thee With all his conscious will, he who has resolved to make every effort to help in the manifestation and triumph of Thy divine law of Love in him and in the whole zone of his influence, sees everything change in his... though genuine in the beginning, proves transient: the highly gratifying result of the working of the divine power is at once misappropriated by the ego, neutralising the previous self-consecration. A vigilant constancy and a total sincerity in self-surrender alone can save the spiritual seekers from these pitfalls. A point of capital importance in regard to surrender is that, in a dynamic... : " once you have turned to the Divine, saying, 'I want to be yours,' and the Divine has said, 'Yes,' the whole world cannot keep you from it. When the central being has made its surrender., the chief difficulty has disappeared. The outer being is like a crust. In ordinary people the crust is so hard and thick that they are not conscious of the Divine within them. If once, even for a moment ...
... to height in a happy seeking for Divine transformation. [Regarding Savitri ] 1) The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written. 2) A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana. 3) The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine. 4) The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort... from you will lead me to the Divine Rapture. 9.3.1932 Greed, greed, always greed... is the response of material nature. In whatever way the Divine manifests there, it becomes at once an object of covetousness. A rush to appropriate, an endeavour to rob, exploit, squeeze, swallow and in the end crush down the Divine, this is the receptivity of matter to the divine touch. O My Lord, Thou... repeat what I wanted to say: In a year like this one when the adverse forces have decided to attack at the utmost of their capacity, it is required from all those who have decided to fight for the Divine Realisation, to avoid carefully all fear. When I spoke at the beginning of the year I insisted on the necessity of being especially vigilant because when times are bad whatever mistake one makes ...
... experience. Is the divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping Page 77 enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal... wants to disappear into the Indefinable — I object to it for those who come to yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life. So vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and, in a certain sense indispensable... concerned with the earth and not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other Yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental Yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object. The Supramental ...
... other confusing and disturbing feelings. Aspiration should be not a form of desire, but the feeling of an Page 60 inner soul's need, and a quiet settled will to turn towards the Divine and seek the Divine. It is certainly not easy to get rid of this mixture of desire entirely—not easy for anyone; but when one has the will to do it, this also can be effected by the help of the sustaining Force... for higher things—for the Divine, for all that belongs to the higher or Divine Consciousness. It [ aspiration ] is the call in the being for the Divine or for the higher things that belong to the Divine Consciousness. (To "aspire" always means to call for higher things.) Aspiration is a turning upward of the inner being with a call, yearning, prayer for the Divine, for the Truth, for the... sincerity a yearning after the Page 55 Divine and its aspiration towards the higher life. But why allow anything to come in the way between you and the Divine, any idea, any incident; when you are in full aspiration and joy, let nothing count, nothing be of any importance except the Divine and your aspiration. If one wants the Divine quickly, absolutely, entirely, that must be the ...
... ambition to be superman. "(2) One is ready to undergo the conditions and stages needed for the achievement. "(3) One is sincere and regards it as a part of the seeking of the Divine and consequent culmination of the Divine's Will in one and insists on no more than the fulfilment of that Page 23 Will whatever it may be: psychicisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation... labour as if nothing were achieved anywhere, and the utter selflessness which in spite of no need of one's own seeks to pioneer an impossible-seeming accomplishment in order to make easy for others the path to their perfection through a whole-hearted dedication on their part to serve the Divine Will and nothing else. The letter assures also that what Sri Aurobindo can have is essentially open to all his... no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only - I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others." The last sentence sounds crucial ...
... offered: the soul must lead the rest of the being to the sanctuary. And when the rest is touched by the Divine and called upon to co-operate, then if it has not trained itself to be fine and large outside the sanctuary it will tend to be resentful, angry, jealous, self-seeking with the Divine as it has been with the human. The soul's sweetness and light may fail to curb and convert it if that... freedom above cosmic existence, not only the inalienable divine presence within Page 158 the cosmos and the Lord and Lover of it: He also renders possible a fulfilment of the terrestrial adventure in its own terms of mind, life and body. The Supreme holds a divine mentality, a divine vitality, a divine physicality awaiting to manifest by a descent from above where... that sweetness and that light have not been accustomed to do so everywhere and at all times. Resentment, anger, jealousy, self-seeking on any occasion can be a secret seed of the same ego-expression against the Supreme. In the Integral Yoga, with its stroke on each part for response to the Supreme, the total self-offering is not possible unless one takes to heart Sri Aurobindo's command: "Always ...
... necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us because what the soul enjoys is no longer the object as an object but the Divine which it expresses. The inhibition of pleasure is no longer needed when the soul no longer seeks pleasure but possesses the delight of the Divine in all things equally without the need of a personal or physical possession of the thing itself; self-denial loses its field... worldly propensities? For if our activities are in their outer appearance the same as those of an ordinary man of the world, in which way can we claim to be distinct and different as spiritual seekers of the Divine? Surely we would not dare advance the hypothesis that the spirit of renunciation is now outdated in the life of sadhana. An unbridled enjoyment by the senses can never be the trait of anyone... behind us so long as we personally can be free from the monstrous ever-circling wheel of death and rebirth..." (pp. 311-12) Elsewhere, in his book The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo mentions that once the head and mind and soul of a seeker is overpowered by (i) spiritual enthusiasm, (ii) by the ardour of aspiration, (iii) by the philosophic aloofness, (iv) by the eagerness of will, or (v) by a sick ...
... religious instinct in man, which is to lead him towards the Divine Reality, to formulate all that he has yet achieved in that direction and to give to each human being a mould of spiritual discipline, a way of seeking, touching, nearing the Divine Truth, a way which is proper to the potentialities of his nature. The Life Divine, pp. 863-64 ...faith in the spiritual sense is not a... God exists, but if I have faith in God, then I can arrive at the experience of the Divine. Letters on Yoga, p. 572 ...in his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the Page 203 realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge. ... ask "undiscriminating faith" from anyone, all I ask is fundamental faith, safeguarded by a patient and quiet discrimination — because it is these that are proper to the consciousness of a spiritual seeker and it is these that I have myself used and found that they removed all necessity for the quite gratuitous dilemma of "either you must doubt everything supraphysical or be entirely credulous", which ...
... self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But man's present nature is limited, divided, unequal,—it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore... we must remember that our Yoga is not undertaken for the sake of the acquisition of supermind itself but for the sake of the Divine; we seek the supermind not for its own joy and greatness but to make the union absolute and complete, to feel it, possess it, dynamise it in every possible way of our being, in its highest intensities and largest widenesses and in every range and turn and nook and recess... perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in ...
... Love, the eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment; it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love divine gives itself and asks for nothing. What human beings have made of it, we do not need to say; they have turned it into an ugly and repulsive thing... in the world is trying to find consciousnesses that are capable of receiving this divine movement in its purity and expressing it. This race of all beings towards love, this irresistible push and seeking out in the world's heart and in all hearts, is the impulse given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking. It touches millions of instruments, trying always, always failing; but this constant... conscious of its own aim and seeking; it has not the knowledge that it is not the union of one being with another that it is seeking after but the union of all beings with the Divine. Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that Page 73 it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in ...
... our God and ourselves are one." And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity. Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to re-ascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that... forces of Page 44 the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light! If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve—for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach... dwelling-place and sanctuary. That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he! In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 Page 46 ...
... beyond itself in moments of absorbed concentration. It is only the seekers of the integral union, those who are resolved to turn their whole human consciousness into the divine consciousness, and their whole human life into the divine life, that aspire for transformation. The second condition is an integral surrender to the Divine śakti, the Mother. I have dwelt at length on this subject in some... aspire for the Divine and surrender to His supramental śakti, then only will that śakti descend Page 423 and act in the integral being. The supramental change is impossible of achievement with any part of our being remaining rebellious or unresponsive, or coerced into some kind of resigned or resentful submission. Even the body with its own consciousness must seek the Divine —His Light... TRANSFORMATION WE have already learnt that an integral and dynamic union with the Divine is the goal of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. What does this integral union mean? It means that we have to be united with the Divine in all the states, poises and modes of His being and our being. The Divine is not only the Transcendent Absolute; He is not only the infinite, impassive Impersonal; He ...
... blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search; He seeks and enjoys man's blindness like the hands of a little child that grope after its mother. Page 202 God and Nature are like a boy and girl... deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God only because it knows not itself; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being. Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret. God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering. Man seeks at first blindly... that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound for ever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility. Weakness puts the same test and question to the strengths and energies and greatnesses in which we glory. Power is the play of life, shows its degree, finds the ...
... The question: "If beauty is everywhere, as you say, then why does not everybody perceive it?" still remains in my mind. A. The devotee sees the Divine Beauty because he seeks the Divine as the All-beautiful {Bhuvana Sundara); he seeks Him as the " treasure of all Beauty" (Nikhila Saundarya Nidhi); as the " ambrosial ocean of the essence of all Beauty (Akhilarasāmrita sindhu) as the... infinite variations of beauty, with the word for its instrument, that is, after all, what the poet is and it is to a similar soul in us seeking the same spirit and responding to it that he makes his appeal...It is the impersonal sprit of Truth and Beauty that is seeking to express itself through personality and it is that which finds its own word and seems itself to create in highest moments of inspiration... by wanting it. It usually comes when one is prepared to pay for it by giving up all the cravings of the senses and the impulses and desires of the vital. Thus the spiritual seeker, the poet and the artist all seek the same Reality, and at times by very similar methods. Q. Does the Yogi then perceive the same Beauty everywhere irrespective of the outer form ? i. e. Is the beauty he per' ...
... can be only an intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour. The vision of God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate seeking of the Divine,—a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being, but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in all that is. To know with the intellect is simply to understand and may be an effective starting-point,—or, too, it may not be, and... the Page 322 Divine's being, the Divine's thought, will, action and enjoyment of Nature. To get back to this truth of himself is his direct means of salvation, his largest and nearest door of escape from subjection to the Ignorance. Since he is a spirit, a soul with a nature of mind and reason, of will and dynamic action, of emotion and sensation and life's seeking for the delight of existence... the Highest. Other religion, other worship, other knowledge, other seeking has always its fruits, but these are transient and limited to the enjoyment of divine symbols and appearances. There are always open for our following according to the balance of our mentality an outer and an inmost knowledge, an outer and an inmost seeking. Outward religion is the worship of an outward deity and the pursuit ...
... Wisdom-Power-Light-Bliss of God by which the Divine knows and upholds and governs and enjoys the universe[.] 160 The supramental Yoga is a path of integral seeking of the Divine by which all that we are is in the end liberated out of the Ignorance and its undivine formations into a truth beyond the Mind, a truth not only of highest spiritual status but of a dynamic spiritual self-manifestation... spiritual discovery. Again there is a constant confusion between the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his life-force seeking for its fulfilment and the true soul which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine. Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and experience it is itself looked at... into all-consciousness and God-consciousness, from the ignorant seeking of Mind into the self-existent knowledge of Supermind, from obscure half animal life into luminous God-force, from the material consciousness [ sentence not completed ] 161 It is at the high line where the surrender can become absolute that a divine gnostic consciousness commences and the first authentic and unconditioned ...
... but Nature herself find her deliverance. This is the Truth which has been seen in flashes, in more and more entirety of its terms by the line of seers whom the Tantra would call the hero seekers and the divine seekers and which may now be nearing the point of readiness for its full revelation Page 104 and experience. Then whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness... itself and divinely Page 93 transform by that light the life which is thus labouring to fulfil the purpose of its descent into the Inconscience. Not to return as speedily as may be to heavens where perfect light and joy are eternal or to the supracosmic bliss is the object of this cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge... fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat. The Divine we know is an Infinite Being in whose infinite manifestation these things have come it is the Divine itself that is here, behind us, pervading the manifestation, supporting the world with its oneness; it is the Divine that is in us upholding itself the burden of the fall and its dark consequence. If above ...
... knowledge. The Gita distinguishes between three initial kinds of Bhakti, that which seeks refuge in the Divine from the sorrows of the world, ārta , that which, desiring, approaches the Divine as the giver of its good, arthārthī , and that which attracted by what it already loves, but does not yet know, yearns to know this divine Unknown, jijñāsu ; but it gives the palm to the Bhakti that knows. Evidently... of love. "He who knows me" says the Gita "as the supreme Purusha,"—not only as the immutable oneness, but in the many-souled movement of the divine and as that, superior to both, in which both are divinely held,—"he, because he has the integral knowledge, seeks me by love in every way of his being." This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start from... the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover's being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation. Page 547 Since then in the union of these three powers lies our base of perfection, the seeker of an integral self-fulfilment in the Divine must avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the ...
... even going beyond the mind, and no formulation was possible, there was no possibility of understanding. It was really so absolute that helping others, making the world progress, spiritual life, seeking the Divine, all of that seemed idle talk, empty words! There was nothing in it, it was nothing, and there was nothing to understand, it was impossible to understand—it was impossible to BE. The feeling... world is a necessary preparation for this perfection to come. Yet at the same time, whatever exists is perfect at each moment, since it is ENTIRELY the Divine. There is nothing other than the Divine. So there is simultaneously this plenitude of Divine Joy in each second, in whatever exists, and the aspiration, the anguish—and the difficulty lies in joining the two, there you have it. Practically,... between an attitude quite ready to accept death (I am not talking about what happens in the story itself, but merely giving a case in point to make myself clear) because it is the divine Will, for this reason alone—it's the divine Will, so it's quite all right; since that's how it is, it's quite all right—and at the same time, the love of Life. This love of Life. 3 Following the story, you would say: ...
... only the first is in relation with the Divine and has love, faith, equality etc. But what is new in this? Every soul on earth contains these qualities even without practising Yoga. Every soul is not awake and active; nor is every soul Page 198 turned directly to the Divine before practising Yoga. For a long time it seeks the Divine through men and things much more than... between an aspect of the Divine known as the self and a portion of the Divine called the soul? The self feels always its unity with the Divine and is always the same. The soul is a portion of the Divine that comes down into the evolution and evolves a psychic being more and more developed through experiences of successive lives until it is ready for the divine realisation here. ... come out entirely, it can. When the psychic works on the external parts of the being they begin to aspire for the Divine. In my case, its influence seems to be spreading to the lower vital with the result that the latter is making demands on the Divine. Is that the usual movement? Yes, so long as the psychic ha? not transformed the lower vital. Page 190 ...
... What is a fact is that mental like physical work can be made a part of the sadhana,—not as a rival to the sadhana or as another activity with equal rights and less selfish and egoistic than seeking the Divine. I have no objection to mental development. It is the idea that doing sadhana earnestly is egoistic and selfish, and reading is an unselfish noble pursuit that is absurd. Reading... for this Yoga to those who Page 62 can do both. Reading also can be made helpful. Dedication to the Divine [ is the right attitude in reading ]. To read what will help the Yoga or what will be useful for the work or what will develop the capacities for the divine purpose. Not to read worthless stuff or for mere entertainment or for a dilettante intellectual curiosity which is of the... as part of the sadhana. Reading and Detachment You can remember at the beginning and offer your reading to the Divine and at the end again. There is a state of consciousness in which only a part of it is reading or doing the work and behind there is the consciousness of the Divine always. A time must come when the reading as well as any other outward occupation does not interfere with the ...
... self-giving there are no reactions of this kind, no despondency or despair, no saying, "What have I gained by seeking the Divine?", no anger, revolt, abhiman, wish to go away—such as you describe Page 74 here—but an absolute confidence and a persistence in clinging to the Divine under all conditions. That is what I wanted you to have; it is the only basis in which one is free from troubles... the psychic being is demanded, the surrender is to the Divine. One approaches the Divine through faith; concrete experience comes as a result of sadhana. One cannot demand a direct experience without doing anything to prepare the consciousness for it. If one feels the call, one follows it—if there is no call, then there is no need to seek the Divine. Faith is sufficient to start with—the idea that one... vital's desires and impulses, the physical's habitual actions, the life of the ego—all such insistence is contrary to surrender. All egoism and self-will has to be abandoned and one must seek to be governed only by the Divine Shakti. No complete surrender is possible without the psychic opening. It is impossible to become like a child giving oneself entirely until the psychic is in control and stronger ...
... darkness of night before dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come. 132 August 15, 1947 (A passage from Sri Aurobindo's message on the... in particular to the Allies.) If the nations or the governments who are blindly the instruments of the divine forces were perfectly pure and divine in their processes and forms of action as well as in the inspiration they receive so ignorantly they would be invincible, because the divine forces themselves are invincible. It is the mixture in the outward expression that gives to the Asura the right... perfection or as identical with it. There is the way of spiritual self-mastery and the way of spiritual self-giving and surrender to the Divine, abandoning ego and desire even in the midst of action or of any kind of work or all kinds of work demanded from us by the Divine.... The Indian scriptures and Indian tradition, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere, make room both for the spirituality of the renunciation ...
... and characteristically, of a Mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise, to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling... aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as... consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his self-revelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and blameless ...
... thirst for the real Love and seek union with the Divine, the Atman, who is always the real Lover behind the grotesque masks of various names and forms. As Sri Aurobindo reminds us: "... our aim is to go beyond emotion to the height and depth and intensity of the Divine Love and mere feel through the inner psychic heart an inexhaustible oneness with the Divine which the spasmodic leapings... "There is a thirst for Love which no human relation can quench . It is only the Divine' s Love that can satisfy that thirst." (The Mot her, M C W, Vol. 14, p. 127 The second reason is intimately connected with the first one, because it seeks to answer the very natural question: "How to ac-l quire this Divine's Love so necessary for the soul's satisfactions The first hint of the answer comes... Many", "aham bahu syām": that was the first Will of the Divine, the One without a second, ekam evādvitīyam. But because of the intervention of Cosmic Ignorance this 'many' thought itself to be different from the One, but the One continues to view the many as the One-in-many. As a result this One, the fundamental Reality, is always seeking to annul the veil of Ignorance and bring the many back ...
... descent into birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect Page 21 Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material... the peripheries. But nothing short of it can satisfy the Mother's being any more than Sri Aurobindo's. In her Prayer of the 19th November, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine: "I said yesterday to that Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious." A little farther... The Divine Collaborators CHAPTER II The Divine Union We have proposed to ourselves, first, a consideration of the essential identity between the Mother's conception of the divine Union as enunciated by her before her meeting with Sri Aurobindo and that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo's conception, evolved out of the all-embracing integrality of ...
... his outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhavena, and so find it and live in it, that however — even in all kinds of ways - he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that, in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being." Science, ethics and art in the spiritual society... change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form. In each power of our nature they will seek for its own proper means of conversion; knowing that the Divine is concealed in all, they will hold that all can be made the spirit's means of self-finding and all can be converted into its instruments of divine living. And they will see that the great necessity is the conversion of the normal into the... in order to find him; the finding is inevitable at the end of all earnest scepticism and denial." The spiritual aim will reject asceticism and seek to fulfil itself in fullness and transformation of life "The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself... in a fullness of life and man's being in the individual and the race which will be the base for the heights of the spirit, the base ...
... object of the soul's descent into birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material world. That is... the peripheries. But nothing short of it can satisfy the Mother's being any more than Sri Aurobindo's. In her Prayer of the 19th November, 1912, the Mother says to the Divine : " I said yesterday to that Englishman who is seeking for Thee with so sincere a desire, that I had definitively found Thee, that the Union was constant. Such is indeed the state of which I am conscious. A little farther... gospel of the constant, dynamic union and communion with the Divine in the physical being of man. This original contribution of his to the ideal of the divine Union opens up an infinite vista of spiritual perfection and explains and justifies the soul's descent into human birth. "These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action ...
... actions to the Divine and pray for the peace of the Divine within. When the mind becomes quiet, one can feel the Divine Mother supporting the life and put everything into her hands. In her condition the one thing by which she can enter into the sadhana is to remember the Divine always, taking her difficulties as ordeals to be passed through, to pray constantly and seek the Divine help and protection... or a general goodwill. Page 312 I would ask you not to let resentment or anything else rise or dictate your conduct. Put these things aside and see that peace within and the seeking of the Divine are the one thing important—these clashes being only spurts of the ego. Turn yourself in the one direction, but for the rest keep a quiet goodwill to all. You must certainly give up all... treatment of you, and think more of the Divine—living for the Divine, not for yourself. Indifference to What Others Think or Say It is not what others think of you that matters, but what you are yourself. Page 313 When you are doing sadhana, you have not to care what others want or think or say, but only for what is right and what the Divine wants of you. It is no use listening ...
... the divine to the human. As the consciousness has to rise to the higher level, so the activities of the heart also have to rise to that higher level and change their basis and character. Yoga is the founding of all the life and consciousness in the Divine, so also love and affection must be rooted in the Divine and a spiritual and psychic oneness in the Divine must be their foundation—to seek the Divine... Divine first leaving other things aside or to seek the Divine alone is the straight road towards that change. That means no attachment—it need not mean turning affection into disaffection or chill indifference. But X seems to want to take his vital emotions just as they are—tels quels—into the Divine—let him try and don't bother him with criticisms and lectures; if it can't be done, he will have to... two the first comes out. I have had therefore to reconstruct these last two which were out of harmony with what went before in their tone. I took the night as a lady who after long travails and seeking arrives at the peace of the Infinite and enjoys the fruit. Is it impossible to symbolise the night or day like that? The figure of the lady was terribly small and sentimental, much too domestically ...
... discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhāvena, 18 and so find it and live in it, that however - even in all kinds of ways - he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,18 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.19 And in the last six chapters of The Life Divine Sri Page 174 Aurobindo has... transformation of the individual man. This transformation, once generalised, will establish upon earth what ... might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.20 This at least is the highest hope, the possible destiny that opens out before the human... human view, and it is a possibility which the progress of the human mind seems on the way to redevelop. If the light that is being born increases, if the number of individuals who seek to realise the possibility in themselves and in the world grows large and they get nearer the right way, then the Spirit who is here in man, now a concealed divinity, a developing light and power, will descend more fully ...
... is a seeking after the Divine, a turn towards union with the Eternal. According to the adequacy of our perception of the Divine and the Eternal will be the way of the seeking, the depth and fullness of the union and the integrality of the realisation. Man, the mental being, approaches the Infinite through his finite mind and has to open some near gate of this finite upon that Infinite. He seeks for... intellectual thinking and distinctive experience. In the frame of its synthesis it admits the seeking of the abstractive thinkers for the Indefinable, anirdeśyam , the ever unmanifest Immutable, avyaktam akṣaram . Those who devote themselves to this search, find, they also, the Purushottama, the supreme Divine Person, mām , the Spirit and highest Soul Page 340 and Lord of things. For his... active will, his positive mind in search of some Truth to which his existence and the existence of the world is a manifold key, have their straining towards the Eternal and Infinite and seek to find in it their divine Source and the justification Page 338 of their being and their nature. From this need arise the religions of love and works, whose strength is that they satisfy and lead Godwards ...
... first thing he should do is to turn to the Divine and place before Him the entire situation in all its details and seek for the Divine's intervention. It is not that he will first seek the solution elsewhere through some human agencies and then only turn to the Divine as an alternative last resort. 2.The sadhaka will not seek to dictate to the Divine what the solution should be or how soon... that there is Someone called the Divine who really exists, loves him, and has the omnipotence to do anything and everything according to his divine Wisdom; and finally, (3) the sadhaka has to turn to the Divine and Divine alone as his sole and ultimate refuge. In the constant turmoils and vicissitudes of one's earthly existence a man looks around and seeks in vain for someone who can afford... the union with the Divine's Consciousness; his personal will is far from being identified with the Divine's Will. Sohe cannot try to behave in a way as if he has reached the end of the spiritual path. He is still living in his separative ego-consciousness ever impelled by the motions of desires; he is full of personal likes and dislikes, preferences and antipathies, and seeking always after fruit ...
... temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported;... will and sensational mind are still affected by the many impurities of the lower nature and they get back into the enlightened buddhi and prevent it from reflecting the pure truth for which we are seeking. But we have on the other hand this advantage that one important instrument sufficiently purified can be used as a means for the purification of the others, one step firmly taken makes easier all the... the prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God-desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things ...
... goal of the divine movement. But the power of this lord of Will and Light is also needed. Force and Love united and both illumined by Knowledge fulfil God in the world. Will is the first necessity, the chief actualising force. When therefore the race of mortals turn consciously towards the great aim and, offering their enriched capacities to the Sons of Heaven, seek to form the divine in themselves... horns. From that abundance he will foster the illumination in these Aryan seekers, swell the plenty of their divine faculties. By that fullness and plenty of his illumined perceptions he will unite thought with thought, word with word, till the human Intelligence is rich and harmonious enough to support and become the divine Idea. Page 284 ... passage, the transition from mind to supermind, the trans figuration of the intelligence, till now the crowned leader of the mental being, into a divine Light,—it is at this supreme and crucial point in the Vedic Yoga that the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, seeks in himself for the inspired Word. The Word shall help him to realise for himself and others the Power that must effect the transition and the state ...
... Does this show that they are seeking the Divine? He is in search of an absolute in life, that's obvious. Perhaps it is analogous, I don't know. It is this: "To enjoy him in all experience of passivity and activity, of peace and of power, of unity and of difference, is the happiness which the jiva, the individual soul manifested in the world, is obscurely seeking." Page 367 Yes.... is not the Divine. What were you trying to say? For each being there is a thirst for something. That the thirst for something is the Divine? No, my child. It can be quite simply a desire. How can the thirst for something be the Divine? I see clearly what you are trying to say, but truly you do not say it: that is, this inner flame of aspiration is what you call the Divine; this inner... burns, burns more and more; what in India is called Agni, you know, the will to progress, the power of aspiration; this is what you call the Divine. It is an aspect of the Divine, that's true, but it is not the Divine. It is only one aspect, that is, a divine way of being. Sweet Mother, in the individual do the past evolution and the present nature always decide the final intervention of a higher ...
... effort is hampered, the help of the Teacher can intervene and bring about what is needed for the realisation or for the immediate step that is necessary. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - II: Seeking the Divine One can concentrate in any of the three centres which is easiest to the sadhak or gives most result. The power of the concentration in the heart-centre is to open that centre and by the... experience and growth that it is done. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - III: Inner Experience and Outer Life You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the... opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being ...
... of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come. Page 207 July 24, 1947 It is no longer necessary... If they can achieve and preserve the attitude of the central surrender, if they can rely wholly on the Divine and accept cheerfully whatever comes to them from the Divine, then their path becomes sunlit and may even be straightforward and easy. They will not escape all difficulties, no seeker can, but they will be able to meet them without pain and despondency – as indeed the Gita recommends that... not, still this is a sufficient start to support us to the end without the sufferings and falls that happen so often to the ignorant seeker. In all yoga there are three essential objects to be attained by the seeker: union or abiding contact with the Divine, liberation of the soul or the self, the spirit, and a certain change of the consciousness, the spiritual change. It is this change ...
... the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge. Into all... the soul's realisation of the one Divine. There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the seeking of the All and Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a free and plastic opening of... trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes. When once the object ...
... undertaken, it is not difficulties or the threat of failure that can deter me. I hope however that you will get over this attack and see things one day as all the past seekers of the Divine have seen it, viz. that what one seeks is so precious and such a supreme thing Page 751 that a whole lifetime of effort however arduous or painful is not by any means too much to give to it. I say... to or in contact with the Divine Forces and the higher planes of consciousness. Find that part of your being and live in it; to be able to do so is the true foundation of the Yoga. By so standing back it will be easier also for you to find a quiet poise in yourself, behind the surface struggle, from which you can more effectively call in our help to deliver you. The Divine presence, calm, peace, purity... force of the constant rejection by the Purusha and by force of a divine intervention aiding this rejection and dissolving or destroying the difficulty each time it shows its face. Even so, the idea of getting rid of difficulties in a lump seldom works; something remains Page 743 and returns until suddenly there comes a divine intervention which is final or else a change of consciousness which ...
... Aurobindo had no doubt that the Dawn wouldn't be delayed long: I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come. 16 True enough, the 'leaders' of the country, having successfully if also purblindly... birthday) as his date with destiny was itself an indication that he was being blindly driven to hurl himself against the Divine. In a conversation on 20 May 1940, Sri Aurobindo had said that Hitler's fascination for 15 August was itself the sign that he was the enemy of the Divine's work that was being attempted in the Ashram; "and from the values concerned in the conflict it should be quite clear that... February explaining the Mother's view of Golconde and the paramount need for discipline in life: First, Mother believes in beauty as a part of spirituality and divine living; secondly, she believes that physical things have the Divine Consciousness underlying them as much as living things; and thirdly that they have an individuality of their own and ought to be properly treated, used in the right ...
... his poem "The Divine", (January 1,1944) in which Amal seeks the Divine that seems far far away and yet in the poem "Great Wings" (June 9,1948) he expresses his realisation that the Divine is within us! "The Divine" Frail boat of mine, Be brave! Far though you wander, Your prow will face a secret yonder: Ever the gleam of a new horizon-line Is the Divine. 10 ... expressions became beauty and truth of his inner being. I consider yogi Amal Kiran a seeker of the Truth and discoverer of cosmic splendour as a poet of Integralism. His characterisation of his own poems published under the title, The Secret Splendour, is clearly indicative of his pursuit, Poems seeking a new intensity of inner vision and emotion that would catch alive in words the deepest... as he: His human portion, we must grow divine. Our life is a paradox with God for key. 12 Regarding the influence of Sri Aurobindo on his quest, Amal conveys in his introspective Introduction of The Secret Splendour, "...he (Sri Aurobindo) has been the end of my quest for a life-transforming spirituality as well as a poetry seeking a new intensity of vision and emotion, an illumined ...
... misused by those who retain them. The seekers or keepers of wealth are more often possessed rather than its possessors; few escape entirely a certain distorting influence stamped on it by its long seizure and perversion by the Asura.”¹ We learn from the above quotation that money is a universal force and is derived, like every other force, from the Divine; but, equally, like every other force,... personality and the psychic; and there are besides, many sub-personalities within these main categories. These personalities hardly agree with one another. If the mental personality, for instance, seeks the Divine and hankers for a life of spiritual freedom and bliss, the vital opposes ¹ Words of the Mother. Page 254 it with its insistent desires and blind attachments. In the... it has to be reconquered for the Divine and used divinely for the divine purpose in human life. How to achieve this conquest ? Individually, he who is inwardly dedicated to the Divine must not fly away from the money-power in a spirit of ascetic aversion or fear, but endeavour with a perfect scrupulousness and vigilance to use all his money in the service of the Divine. In the beginning, it is true, ...
... other than Sachchidananda's power of self-awareness and world-awareness, and thus the dynamically integral liberation and fulfilment that we are seeking after can be achieved only in and through this supramental Vijñāna . 1 The Life Divine, p. 574. Page 144 We have seen how to retain the consciousness of the passive Brahman while at the same time participating... ty arises from the fact that ordinarily we identify ourselves with only a part of the totality of our consciousness — the mental or at its highest the spiritual-mental part of it — and seek to realise the Divine through this limited part alone. And since this is just a part and not the integral consciousness, it cannot simultaneously embrace both the aspects. Thus dynamis obliterates the... also get transformed and be moulded in the image of the Divine. But this is what we precisely need for the fulfilment of our goal. For it is not merely the liberation of our soul, but the liberation and the divine transfiguration of the whole of our Nature, prakṛti-mukti, prakṛti-rūpāntara, enabling the establishment of a Life Divine upon earth, that is the total content of our aim. Let us ...
... lost in His being. He wants to enjoy and not be obliterated, in the ecstasy of the divine union. Bhaktiyoga seeks a divine fulfilment of the emotional being of man, but leaves out his intellectual, volitional and physical parts in the cold shade of neglect. It envisages the love and delight of the Divine rather than His Light and Power. THE SYNTHESIS OF THE GITA The... it proceeds to lay the foundation of an integral divine fulfilment upon earth. The end of the Gitâ's synthetic Yoga has been left wrapped in a mysterious hint of a total divine living for man; but the uttamam rahasyam, the supreme mystery, has nowhere been resolved and outlined before the gaze of the spiritual seeker. A living in the Divine, a constant, blissful and dynamic living in the P... by a conscious subjection and merging of the natural man into the divine Self and eternal Spirit; it is the Spirit that for ever transcends and guides this world-Nature."¹ Jnânayoga or the Yoga of Knowledge takes its stand upon the mind, or rather the intelligence of man, and, turning his thoughts towards the Divine, seeks to lift his consciousness to the absolute Existence. By an act of ...
... realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the Divine in her own symbols; Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent, and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent... Page 11 higher spiritual values of human life have receded into the background, leaving only the animal appetites to rage and riot on the surface. On the other hand, there is a seeking, an aspiration, hardly definite yet, faint and flickering in the gusty darkness, but persistent and steadily insistent, for a thorough overhauling, a radical change of the ends and endeavours of... is only one alchemy, one irresistible power—it is Yoga. If the extinction of the .human race is to be avoided, an ascent to a higher consciousness and a divine conversion and transfiguration of the whole being of man by the power of the Divine is the only means. A desperate and pervasive degeneracy calls for a radical and revolutionary redemption—and that can only be Yoga. "All Yoga ...
... sex activity is the only means already provided by Nature for living beings and inevitably imposed upon the race. It is not indeed necessary for the individual seeker after a divine life to take up this problem or even for a group who do not seek after it for themselves alone but desire a wide acceptance of it by mankind as at least an ideal. There will always be the multitude who do not concern themselves... total mastery over it is essential for all spiritual seekers, the eradication of it for the complete ascetic. This much has to be recognised and not diminished in its obligatory importance and its principle. But all recognition of the sex principle, as apart from the gross physical indulgence of the sex-impulse, could not be excluded from a divine life upon earth; it is there in life, plays a large... lead the divine life can be maintained and increased as the ideal extends itself, by the voluntary adhesion of those who are touched by the aspiration and there need be no resort to physical means for this purpose, no deviation from the rule of a strict sexual abstinence. But yet there may be circumstances in which from another standpoint, a voluntary creation of bodies for souls that seek to enter ...
... sex activity is the only means already provided by Nature for living beings and inevitably imposed upon the race. It is not indeed necessary for the individual seeker after a divine life to take up this problem or even for a group who do not seek after it for themselves alone but desire a wide acceptance of it by mankind as at least an ideal. There will always be the multitude who do not concern themselves... strict sexual abstinence. But yet there may be circumstances in Page 547 which, from another standpoint, a voluntary creation of bodies for souls that seek to enter the earth-life to help in the creation and extension of the divine life upon earth might be found to be desirable. Then the necessity of a physical procreation for this purpose could only be avoided if new means of a supraphysical... a servitude to its mere animal part and hugs its bondage to Matter. The higher human in us seeks refuge in a temperate moderation, in abstemiousness and abstinence or in carelessness about the body and its wants and in an absorption in higher things. The spiritual seeker often, like the Jain ascetics, seeks refuge in long and frequent fasts which lift him temporarily at least out of the clutch of the ...
... outward things for their own sake and the seeking of the Divine for the sake of the Divine and without any tinge of ego motive is indeed the most difficult thing for the mind even of the Sadhak to learn; but it is the essence of the highest realisation and the condition of a perfect self-finding. When you come to the Divine, lean inwardly on the Divine and do not let other things affect you. ... the Divine without which the transformation is impossible. The aspiration could not be realised if you remained bound by your external self, tied to the physical mind and its petty movements. It is not the outer being which is the source of the spiritual urge; the outer being only undergoes the inner drive from behind the veil. It is the inner psychic being in you that is the bhakta, the seeker after... the Mahadeva image may mean that someone (not of this world, of course) wanted to mislead him and make him confuse some narrower traditional form of the past with the greater living Truth that he is seeking. The difficulty indicated by you in your last (long) letter indicates that you enter into the inner being and begin to have experiences there, but there is a difficulty in organising them or ...
... samādhi-sunk "cave-dweller" must be pronounced defective, but he is not more defective than those who never do Yoga of any sort. The former seeks the Divine and ignores the Divine's world; the latter acknowledges the Divine's world but ignores the Divine - except in the weak and watery way of popular religion. If God exists, to refuse to be mystically united with Him can be no less a shortcoming... rampant such a sense the better for humanity! But it is not true that such a sense is the real motive-power behind mysticism. The real motive-power is the divine origin of us all: we have come from the absolute Godhead and that is why we seek the absolute Godhead: if the Supreme Spirit is our starting-point, it is also our goal, and because it is our starting-point as well as our goal we ache... root of things is the lack of the divine consciousness in the inward and outward man. Without the divine consciousness in toto there will always be the poor, the naked, the sick, the stricken, no matter how much we go feeding, clothing, healing and sharing a tear with them. Over and above practising generosity and charity we must try to impart the divine consciousness, and how can we do this ...
... know it not. Some for beauty follow long Flying traces; some there be Seek thee only for a song: I to lose myself in thee. Four psychological motifs are to be observed in these lines. AE seeks the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their... my heart a rhyme, 'Tis but hide and seek we play In and out the courts of time. Fairy lover, when my feet Through the tangled woodlands go, Page 315 'Tis thy sunny fingers fleet Fleck the fire dews to and fro. In the moonlight grows a smile Mid its rays of dusty pearl — 'Tis but hide and seek the while As some frolic boy and girl... the full frenzy of that "multitudinous meditation" which is the Soul; but before the unearthly day breaks we shall have a constellation of singers whose voices float in a dim sky, the divine darkness heralding the divine dawn. Of such, AE is the leader, the evening star first plumbing the secret regions beyond the mere mind and the life-force. And among his achievements will rank, side by side with his ...
... life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman, 1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with... mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression. The... be revealed; mind and body are the means by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more and more successful reproduction of the divine image. But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow ...
... know it not. Some for beauty follow long Flying traces; some there be Seek thee only for a song: I to lose myself in thee. Four psychological motifs are to be observed in these lines. AE seeks the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their... my heart a rhyme, 'Tis but hide and seek we play In and out the courts of time. Fairy lover, when my feet Through the tangled woodlands go, Page 30 'Tis thy sunny fingers fleet Fleck the fire dews to and fro. In the moonlight grows a smile Mid its rays of dusty pearl — 'Tis but hide and seek the while As some frolic boy and girl... the full frenzy of that "multitudinous meditation" which is the Soul; but before the unearthly day breaks we shall have a constellation of singers whose voices float in a dim sky, the divine darkness heralding the divine dawn. Of such, AE is the leader, the evening star first plumbing the secret regions beyond the mere mind and the life-force. And among his achievements will rank, side by side with his ...
... suppose that a sâdhaka is working in an office. It is not enough for him to dedicate his work to the Divine, and do it as best he can in a spirit of disinterested sacrifice; he must seek the divine guidance at every step of his work, and be open enough to receive it when it comes. To open thus to the divine guidance is to qualify for being an inspired instrument of God. New ideas will come to him in the... with the Divine inspiring and impelling it, or when it is an expression of the union itself—the former is Karma yoga for union, and the latter Karmayoga in union. The common denominator between the two is the union; and any work that leads to it or stabilises and intensifies it is a yogic work. If the aspiration ¹ Sri Aurobindo. ² "All work done for the Divine is equally Divine, manual... this concentration on the Divine in the midst of the work. The attention and absorption that every yogic work demands may render it almost impossible. If we endeavour to' remain concentrated on the Divine, we may find, to our embarrassment, that we cannot attend to the minute details of the work; or, if we concentrate on the work and its details, we are apt to forget the Divine. This is a common enough ...
... elements in our being of which we are not conscious. Isn't that so? Yes, many. Page 385 Can there be some parts which serve the Divine without our being aware of it? Yes, yes. In fact there are some which not only always seek the Divine but have an intense aspiration, and one is not aware of them. The psychic being is like that, and it is always there. But one becomes aware of it... quiet in your mind, sometimes they bring an indication of what they mean. Many things are possible and you must observe very attentively, but very quietly, without any mental activity, without seeking to understand at that time; because as soon as your mind becomes active and tries to understand, it will jam everything and probably you will not see anything any more. But if you remain very quiet... not wanting any support except one's own, and being free, independent in one's movements: this is to stand back from the divine solicitude. To want to do what one likes, one's own will, in quite a free and independent way—"only doing what I want"—this is to stand back from the divine solicitude. One does it quite frequently! ( To a child ) You? Sometimes when we ask you a question, you do not ...
... that much appears now very little compared with the infinitely more which was left aside and ignored and which now invites our search. The description which the old Vedic poet once gave of the seeking of divine Truth, applies vividly to the mind of our age, "As it climbs from height to height, there becomes clear to its view all the much that is yet to be done." But also it is beginning to be seen that... speech of it cast up by the divine Agni, the sacred Fire in the heart of man. The Mantra in other words is a direct and most heightened, an intensest and most divinely burdened rhythmic word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the... Now that we have seen minutely what is the material reality of the world in which we live and have some knowledge of the vital reality of the Force from which we spring, we are at last beginning to seek again for the spiritual reality of that which we and all things secretly are. Our minds are once more trying to envisage the self, the spirit of Man and the spirit of the universe, intellectually, no ...
... "Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,/For I am here to do thy will," 13 is the the spiritual charge for every soul seeking to serve the Divine and conquer Darkness. Next we are given a picture of what Savitri sees when she looks into herself and seeks her soul. Closing the door to the God within are serpents of temptations of all kinds, limitations luring to the easier paths... word, that the escape into this glad divine abyss is not the crown of the self s mission or the self s power, or the meaning of this great mysterious world. Verses of challenge ring forth to the soul who might seek the end of his being in Nirvana. Passages pregnant with deep meaning then flow forth from the poet as he narrates the drawing near of the Divine Presence behind the Godhead, that... paths of the all-negating absolute, to escape from the battle with life and to Nirvana. How she answers these and pushes them away is told. In the course of her seeking the occult fire within, three Soul-Forces appear: the Mother of Divine Pity, the Mother of Might, and the Mother of Wisdom. Each relates her various forms and works in the world. Finally the poet chants of Savitri's finding of her Secret ...
... total consciousness, there is in Nature a secret universal seeking for the whole Divine, an impulsion towards some entire awareness and delight and power of existence; this need of a whole being, a total knowledge, this integral will in us is not fully satisfied by these solutions. So long as the world is not divinely explained to us, the Divine remains imperfectly known; for the world too is That and... we are obliged to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world, a divine government of its workings, the presence of evil, the insistence on suffering, the large, the enormous part offered to pain, grief and affliction in the economy... as we can to a deepening sense of the joy of the pure and essential Presence and do the best we may with the discordant externality, until we can impose in its place the law of its divine contrary. Or else we have to seek for an escape rather than a Page 407 solution. For we can say that the inner Presence alone is a Truth and the discordant externality is a falsehood or illusion created ...
... fulfilment, not only in knowing and possessing the Divine but also in divinising totality of our entire being and nature: "Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a seeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for mutual possession... types of seekers. There are those who love the Divine and seek the Divine out of the irresistible attraction because they have heard the enchanting flute of the Divine call or have on some occasions seen with the inner eye the irresistible Form of the Divine and have Page 46 fallen in the love of the Divine. But there are those who have known the Divine and known the Divine as the One... nisthā bhakti, the state of bhakti where the seeker decides that he would be worshipping the Divine and the Divine alone. (iii) The next stage is known as prasādasthala, where the seeker begins to feel that everything that he attains in life and every experience that he enjoys or suffers is given to him through the grace of the Divine. (iv) The next stage is known as prāṇalingasthala ...
... crowded, the past lived again in a flash, having lost nothing of its savour, its richness." Underneath the variety and complexity of the experiences there had run a single thread: the integral seeking of the Divine. What though there had been such a tally of struggle, turmoil and effort? They were but "jewels of price" offered at the altar of her heart "as a living holocaust": Errors have become... distances. X It would be interesting in this connection to look into Sri Aurobindo's own "controlled experiments" during his early years at Pondicherry. Page 148 His intention in seeking a place of refuge in what was then French India was to be able to complete his Yoga undisturbed by the attentions of the British bureaucracy, and also to "build up other souls" around him. Writing... to scour the depths, and hers is the "God's Labour" to track evil to its source, and although she is a little diffident, she also knows that it is the Divine that is using her, and the Divine will see her through. She has only to surrender to the Divine with the total trust of a child as it runs to the arms of its mother. The bleakness, the diffidence and the sense of precipitate retreat into the ...
... The outer light is gone and the inner light is not yet visible: the night, the desert, the great Nought, stretches between these two lights. But the true seeker goes through and comes out of the tunnel. And there is happiness at the end. "The seeking is 1 "Ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus canticum graduum." Confessions of St. Augustine XIII. 9. Page 115 travaillous,... stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and... world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Chris6an discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but ...
... sadhaks of this Asram realised what they have come here for;—it is not to nourish the ego and Page 437 to insist on its being considered and fondled, but to abnegate the ego and seek only after the Divine. 10 November 1936 It is very good that you have spoken and cleared up things. Certainly, it is quite true that the inner being should be turned to the Mother and her alone. As for... look at it from that standpoint or regard anybody's personality. In her view people's personalities which means their ego ought to have no place in the work. It is not your work or X 's work, but the Divine work, the Mother's work and it is not to be governed by your ideas or feelings or X 's ideas or feelings or Y 's or Z 's or A 's or anybody else's, but by the vision, perception and will of the... work will better serve the purpose for which the Mother created it. That is why I have been trying to explain to you about the necessity of subordinating the personality and doing the work for the Divine, not insisting on one's own personality, ego, ideas, feelings as the important thing. P. S. When I say that you are mistaken or do not agree with you, you seem to think my letters show displeasure ...
... necessary for the complete rejection of this basis of ego. If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for nothing else, because that is the supreme call of our being, the deepest truth of the spirit. The pursuit of liberation, of the soul's freedom, of the realisation of our true and highest self, of union with the Divine, is justified only because it is the highest law of our nature... warring, working, loving, serving, is always divine, towards the fulfilment of God in the world, an expression of the Eternal in Time. A divine action arising spontaneously, freely, infallibly from the light and force of our spiritual self in union with the Divine is the last state of this integral Yoga of Works. The truest reason why we must seek liberation is not to be delivered, individually... given to us, but that we may be one with the Divine, the Supreme, the Eternal. The truest reason why we must seek perfection, a supreme status, purity, knowledge, strength, love, capacity, is not that personally we may enjoy the divine Nature or be even as the gods, though that enjoyment too will be ours, but because this liberation and perfection are the divine Will in us, the highest truth of our self ...
... and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it Page 32 alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error." 8 Sri Aurobindo ... Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital p... presence of a sinister farce invented by goodness knows what divine masochist. If God exists, he must be a little less foolish than that, and we are entitled to think that this material evolution has a divine sense and that it is the field of a divine manifestation in Matter. Our spiritual discipline must therefore aim at gaining this divine man or perhaps that other, still unknown being who will emerge ...
... call upon his highest destiny by aspiration, prayer and trustful surrender to the divine will. 32 The Mother's was no coward median goal, she was for the summit itself: We are not aiming at success - our aim is perfection. We are not seeking fame or reputation; we want to prepare ourselves for a Divine manifestation. 33 Again, in the August issue of the Bulletin, the Mother pleaded... viewed as a happy marriage by worldly-wise people; and so indeed it is, till the Clairvoyant Musician arrives. Then the Poet and the Clairvoyant awaken to the true love, and on her part She seeks the Love Divine. In a message given to the daughter of a sadhak on the occasion of her marriage, the Mother has said that the union of physical existences and material interests, the sharing of defeats and... consciousness you put into it. Remember always the Divine and all you do will be an expression of the Divine Presence. 4 II Sri Aurobindo's "Message" was only the starting-point, for the subsequent issues of the Bulletin carried a series of remarkable essays by him on '"Perfection of the Body", "The Divine Body", "Supermind and the Life Divine", "Supermind and Humanity", "Supermind in the ...
... midst of a rapt ¹There is always a mental or vital alloy in such a one-sided seeking. Page 177 divine union, the psychic control and transformation of nature, and the unwearied insistence on service, on the perfect fulfilment of the divine Will and the manifestation of the supernal glory of the Divine upon earth, except in the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother ? THE PSYCHIC... surrender, which are natural and spontaneous in the psychic, begin to infect the other parts of the being, so that the mind may turn its thoughts to the Divine and seek to know and understand His Will; the heart may turn its emotions to the Divine and seek its highest satisfaction, its termless delight in loving and adoring Him and Him alone, in Himself and in all; and the life and the body find their... psychic is in the Divine and in the fulfilment of His Will in the world. Fully conscious of the reason of its existence, it does not count it a sacrifice to forgo even the highest ecstasy of a rapt union with the Divine for the sake of accomplishing His work and promoting His manifestation. It is a mistake to think that the soul or the psychic seeks only the absorbed bliss of the divine union and has a ...
... Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? "If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before the tribunal, summon it to appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or... after this game of nature was over, till the earth dried one had to seek refuge in reflection leaving aside all hope of sleep. The only dry areas were near the W.C, but one did not feel like placing the blankets near that area.... "The causes of hardship that I have described were no doubt there, but since my faith in divine mercy was strong, I had to suffer only for the first few days; thereafter... viz-d-vis Divine Consciousness: "I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness ...
... waves, but it is all sea. And there are rich men and poor men, but they are all the Divine’s children seeking their Divine Mother. “As they come nearer, the waves all come together, and joyfully they rush on to the beach. People coming near to the Divine collect together. They bend down and all becomes love for the Divine.” Will you please share your experience of the first darshan with Sri Aurobindo... plenty of free time in India and read Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Ramana Maharshi. Soon he discovered Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine. While in Calcutta, he went to the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan and met Rajen-da and Madan-da, who settled later in the Ashram. They encouraged him to seek permission to visit Sri Aurobindo Ashram. So on August 15, 1943 he had his first darshan of Sri Aurobindo and was completely... I spent a great deal of time on their terrace looking out on the sea and I began to write again. I began to see everything turning itself to the Divine; the waves, the clouds. Everything gave me the sense of self-giving and offering of itself to the Divine. I used to sit quietly and receive these impressions. Since I was so shy I preferred to stay by myself. [The following is an example of Richard’s ...
... don't want to be sugar, I want to eat sugar." We stand on human feet, and it is as humans that we seek to know the Divine. Not merely to know Him, but if possible to see Him, touch Him, kiss and embrace Him. All India's vaunted spirituality would amount to little or nothing if not for the divine cowherd with his entrancing flute, who had once inundated the groves of Brindavan in, to use a line... Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic Forerunner of the Divine Word I LOVE and admire Amal Kiran, not only for himself, bur for the entire context of space, time and atmosphere which engendered so variegated a flower. And for the fact that I personally came to know this phenomenon and to partake of some at least of its hues and scents. I deliberately use... dwelling a little more on the spiritual spark-plug of Amal's creative might than on Amal himself, indubitably, Sri Aurobindo was at once the first prophet and practitioner of the WORD of a new divine dawn of consciousness on our planet. He had seen, like the Vedic rishis, that all our dawns had always been early prefigurements of wider and more brilliant dawns to come. Following the ...
... little ego in union with the Divine, purification, surrender, the substitution of the Divine Page 752 guidance for one's own ignorant self-guidance based on one's personal ideas and personal feelings is the aim of Karma Yoga, the surrender of one's own will to the Divine Will. If one feels human beings to be near and the Divine to be far and seeks the Divine through service of and love... setting the Divine and the Divine's work first and oneself last, harmony, patience, forbearance etc. When the workers learn these things and cease to be egocentric, as most of you now are, then will come the time for work in which capacity can really be shown—although even then the showing of capacity will be an incident and can never be the main consideration or the object of divine work. 28 August... s between the sadhaks and an expression of the vital movements, a free vital interchange whether with some or with all. The work was meant as a service to the Divine and as a field for the inner opening to the Divine, surrender to the Divine alone, rejection of ego and all the ordinary vital movements and the training in a psychic elevation, selflessness, obedience, renunciation of all mental, vital ...
... never fail to assure the Grace and protection of the Divine; but it must be an integral and unflawed sincerity, which seeks the Divine and nothing but the Divine. 2) The second danger is a great magnification of the ego at this stage, when the sâdhaka is feeling the influx and operation of the Mother's Force in him. His experience of being a divine instrument may stimulate and inflate the ego, and the... something transcending our ignorance and mortality; when, more or less released from the thralldom of the body and the vital desires, it seeks an Absolute of Light or an Absolute of Peace or an Absolute Bliss, it is invariably the soul that has inspired the seeking. But our egoistic personality is not aware of this occult influence and inspiration. It feels that it is itself thinking of the Eternal... individual offers all his mind's thoughts, all his heart's love and devotion and all his works to the Divine Mother, and transforms his whole existence into a Page 118 happy and loving sacrifice, into an unremitting yajña, as the Gitâ calls it. At this stage of surrender, the seeker and lover of God becomes His servant; therefore, we call it the stage of the servant,—the long and ...
... be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values—it would mean that the seeker was actuated not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body—such a spirit could not bring the supramental change. Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing... offended palate, then certainly they were quite unfit for Yoga and this was not the place for them. For it means that a mutton chop or a tasty plate of fish was more important for them than the seeking of the Divine! It is not possible to do Yoga if values are so topsy-turvy in the consciousness. Apart from such extravagance, these things which ought to be only among the most minor values even in the human... anybody else may have. All that is utterly false for the spiritual life. These are the aims that selfish, worldly and ambitious men seek in the ordinary life. The spiritual life has nothing to do with these things. One is here only for two things, to realise the Divine and to transform the consciousness and nature into the higher consciousness and nature. That is what the Power that works on you intends ...
... a shadow that conceals half the globe of truth from its own sunlight; but divine knowledge embraces opposite truths & reconciles them, divine strength grows by the prodigality of its self-expenditure, divine love can squander itself utterly, yet never waste or diminish. 534) The rejection of falsehood by the mind seeking after truth is one of the chief causes why mind cannot attain to the settled... the mischance; then He sees He is found out and takes His ghosts & bugbears away from me. 481) The seeker after divine knowledge finds in the description of Krishna stealing the robes of the Gopis one of the deepest parables of God's ways with the soul, the devotee a perfect rendering in divine act of his heart's mystic experiences, the prurient & the Puritan (two faces of one temperament) only... the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude. 501) Yet, O soul of man, seek not after pain, for that is not His will, seek after His joy only; as for suffering, it will come to thee surely in His providence as often and as much as is needed for Page 493 thee. Then bear it that thou mayst ...
... .. three notions about spiritual seeking which are somewhat extraordinary. 1.It is the same love which is addressed to a 'carnal prize' and towards the Divine. I should imagine that one who approached the Divine with a 'carnal' or untransformed vital love would embrace something of the vital world but certainly get nowhere near the Divine. 2.The Divine in itself is something cold and empty... experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or He is something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? "If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. "If it is equal... white horse is not a horse.": I say a white horse is not a horse. For, if you are seeking a horse, a yellow or a black one will do, but they will not answer if Page 150 you want a white horse, O.K.? Now, if it be assumed for a moment that a white horse is a horse, then what one is seeking is one thing, namely a white horse, which, as it is a horse by assumption, is not different ...
... goes and lights the fire, And asks each one to seek her Child Divine. "Search, search," she says, "the night falls dark, Without the Child Divine your gardens bloom not, Nor in your fields can any harvests come. Your works will barren lie, your mind and life; The springs will fail, the waters cease to flow. Awake, 0 men, and find the Child Divine." - Thus speaks her ardent love to everyone... and a hymn of praise arises. Immortal Love, O Love Divine, Compassion endless, pure, Vast Wisdom, Majesty benign, Thee Goddess we adore. Queen of the Sun-World, Knowledge, Light, Creatrix great and wise, Spouse of the Truth, Supernal Might, Who mak'st this sacrifice; Immortal Love, 0 Love Divine, Who giv'st thyself for us, Enthroned within our heart's... unseen and giving ear; I listen when the elders talk! I mean My Titan masters - they, I guess/ should know. Zeus flung them down into the nether pits, And they are wroth with him and seek revenge. But though they haunt the human world for this, Their strongholds are deep in the inconscient realms. It's there she's gone. - I must say she is brave! Cyane (climbs ...
... a greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than intuitive, a gnostic consciousness. He will be able to perceive a higher divine end, a divine sanction, a divine light of guidance for all he seeks to be, think, feel and do, and able, too, more and more to obey and live in this larger light and power. That will not be done by any rule of infrarational religious... life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabh ā vena, 9 and so find it and live in it, that however — even in all kinds of ways — he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that, 10 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being. Social and Political Thought, pp. 208-213... something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities — the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and ...
... Gita recognises four kinds or degrees of worshippers and God-seekers. There are first the arthārthī and ārta , those who seek him for the fulfilment of desire and those who turn for divine help in the sorrow and suffering of existence; there is next the jijñāsu , the seeker of knowledge, the questioner who is moved to seek the Divine in his truth and in that to meet him; last and highest, there... seen and the Upanishads took shape, was, as we can discern from such records as the Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka, an epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense and ardent seed-time of the Page 203 Spirit. In the stress of that seeking the truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary men broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and fertilised the... Knowledge. Only by penetrating into the esoteric sense of this worship can we understand the full flowering of the Vedic religion in the Upanishads and in the long later evolution of Indian spiritual seeking and experience. For it is all there in its luminous seed, preshadowed or even prefigured in the verses of the early seers. The persistent notion which through every change ascribed the foundation of ...
... for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring down the Supermind. I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense.... If human reason regards me as a fool for trying to do what Krishna did not try, I do not in the least care. There is no question of X or Y or anybody else in that. It is a question between the Divine and myself - whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent... this part of his Legend and Symbol. Everything goes to prove that what happened in the small hours of that December day was no purely physical casuality, no fell accident to the seeker of the life divine on earth, but a dreadful gamble freely accepted, an awesome trial undergone for a set purpose, a battle faced in every wounding detail with open eyes and joined with the explicit possibility... not do." A clearer hint of unexpected turns in the Divine's dealings is contained in a letter of 1935: "Why should the Divine be tied down to succeed in all his operations? What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose? What rigid primitive notions are these about the Divine!" This suggests that apparent defeat of the Divine's grandest goal could even be a concealed victory, ...
... for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring down the Super-mind. I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense... If human reason regards me as a fool for trying to do what Krishna did not try, I do not in the least care. There is no question of X or Y or anybody else in that. It is a question between the Divine and myself - whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent... this part of his Legend and Symbol. Everything goes to prove that what happened in the small hours of that December day was no purely physical casuality, no fell accident to the seeker of the life divine on earth, but a dreadful gamble freely accepted, an awesome trial undergone for a set purpose, a battle faced in every wounding detail with open eyes and joined with the explicit possibility... clearer hint of unexpected turns in the Divine's dealings is contained in a letter of 1935: "Why should the Divine be tied down to succeed in all his operations? What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose? What rigid primitive notions are these about the Divine!" This suggests that apparent Page 126 defeat of the Divine's grandest goal could even be a concealed ...
... any except those who follow his own path and are capable of it. The right thing for a seeker is to find the Guru destined for him. Usually one who has been in search for twelve years finds the way and the leader of the way long before the end of that period. Probably a more whole-hearted and concentrated seeking is needed. 4 August 1927 Answer that I am ready to help him in his aspiration. But... altogether ready for the spiritual life. His idea of life seems to be rather moral and philanthropic than spiritual at present; and behind it is the attachment to the family life. If the impulse to seek the Divine of which he speaks is more than a mental turn suggested by a vague emotion, if it has really anything psychic in it, it will come out at its own time; there is no need to stimulate, and a premature... has, he should seek their solution from his guru. 25 June 1936 Reply that the Mother is not able to write letters herself, and you are writing on her behalf. What is given by the Mother is not a development of supernatural force, but if someone is accepted to take up this path of Yoga he is led towards a deeper and higher consciousness in which he can attain union with the Divine Mother. This however ...
... possible, then I agree—I have myself spoken of farther divine progression, an infinite development. But the question is not that; the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from Page 190 an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation... deep and find the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be instead of a blind and always repeated confused blur of the inadequate and imperfect thing we were. The choice is between remaining in the old jumble and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and... home-internee really—at his residence. I wonder what work he will be doing now.... He used once to meditate and see light and had a real bhakti—had even turned a sannyasi once. And now he says that seeking the Divine is useless inactive work! I had never a very great confidence in Subhas's yoga-turn getting the better of his activism—he has two strong ties that prevent Page 195 it, ambition ...
... What is a fact is that mental like physical work can be made a part of the sadhana, - not as a rival to the sadhana or as another activity with equal rights and less selfish and egoistic than seeking the Divine. One has to do some physical work as part of the Karma Yoga, also some personal work. Where is the time then to read for one's mental development except at the cost of the time... and puts that down as the whole meaning of what has been written. Each mind puts its own ideas in place of the Truth. About my recent questions you wrote, "They are mental questions seeking a mental answer." Are questions regarding things of the sadhana considered as mental ones? Mental questions are questions put by the mind which expects them to be answered according to its... that Nature does that. The subconscient is the basis of conservation and the mechanical mind is the means of repetition. Only they have to be enlightened and change and conserve and repeat the new divine things and not the old undivine ones. When I asked if the subconscient and mechanical mind could be changed by a direct higher action, you replied, "It is possible if you can bring the ...
... potentialities of the human being, through whom it seeks its divine fulfilment. The unilateral drive of the thought-mind culminated in the discovery or recovery of the apex of the ultimate Reality, but its mass, its infinite, living body and face of light remained undiscovered. The seeking of the thought- mind was, therefore, supplemented by the seeking of the awakened heart, and there seemed to be... for their exploration, purification and sublimation into the eventual glory of the integral union with the Divine. The age of the intellectual seeking was followed by the age of the steadily developing yearning of the human heart of love and delight. If the bare altitudes of the omnipresent Reality seemed to suffer a slight eclipse, its massive ranges and shining uplands, its colourful plateaus and... totality in realisation. The entire being of man yearning for the Divine shall attain the most perfect union with the entire being of the Divine. Sri Aurobindo stands for this entire turning, this completest synthesis and integral spiritual fulfilment of man. Having realised it in himself, he calls upon humanity to proceed towards the Divine by the way of this synthesis. His call is the call of God, ...
... iousness. This outbreak of the light of life was the coming of a "a scout in a reconnaissance from the sun" "to seek for a spirit sole and desolate". This spirit which the light of life was seeking is the same that is spoken of in the beginning as the "fallen boundless self". In seeking for the fallen spirit the ray of light called upon the Page 129 Night to take up "the adventure of... deals with the vast background which compelled her birth. Aswapathy's character as a seeker of the Divine and as an adept of the great spiritual and mystic realisation of the past gives us a wonderful picture of man's growth from mental consciousness through various intermediate stages to the Supreme Divine Mother Consciousness. "The Yoga of the Soul's Release" is the subject of... Light penetrated into all the parts of his being and as a result, his soul "...was torn out from its mortality". And he was drawn back from seeking loneliness to a great spiritual Power which was wide and pure. Henceforth his mind became a blank to this Divine Spirit and opened to cosmic widenesses and the sweep of the Transcendent. This experience completely revolutionised his consciousness and its ...
... object of our seeking. What we seek after is to be united with the Divine always and under all circumstances, whether in silent meditation or in active waking life. As the Mother has reminded us: "Whether you sit down to meditation or go about and do things and work, what is required of you is consciousness; that is the one need, — to be constantly conscious of the Divine.'' {Questions... every day almost as a discipline, she answered: "But a discipline in itself is not what we are seeking. What we are seeking is to be concentrated on the Divine in all that we do, at all times, in all our acts and in every movement.... The final aim is to be in constant union with the Divine, not only in meditation but in all circumstances and in all the active life." (M C W, Vol. 3, p.... world. But we must remember that this is only one specialised form of a successful meditation. As we are sadhakas of the Integral Yoga and seek the establishment of spiritual consciousness even in the waking state, and since we aim at the divine transformation even of our external nature, the connotations of the terms 'meditation', contemplation' and 'Samadhi' or trance should be much more ...
... darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; after a time, the darkness will fade and begin to disappear and the Light will come. 9 April 1947 If I had been standing on the Supermind level and acting on the... is a sweet and quiet sorrow, not distressing. It must be something in the mind and vital which is not yet awake to what has happened within you and gives this colour of dissatisfied and distressed seeking. You have certainly made a great progress since you came and there is no reason to fear any setback of the sadhana. I don't think you need attach any value to what X professes to think about... there will be no more chance of any success or survival for the Asuric Maya. The rest that I spoke of about the human and the divine had to do with the intermediate period between before it is down. What I meant was that if the Mother were able to bring out the Divine Personalities and Powers into her body and physical being, as she was doing for several months without break some years ago, the ...
... darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming. Those who seek for the Divine have to stand firm and persist in their seeking; ¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Himself , pp. 469-70. ² Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga , Part One, p. 469. Page 282 after a time, the darkness will... I know something about them and, if I did not try to repeat them, it is because I do not find in them the solution, the reconciliation I am seeking. ² 14-1-1932 In the beginning, before I discovered the secret of the Supermind, I myself tried to seek the reconciliation through an association of the spiritual consciousness with the vital, but my experience and all experience show that this... 121 Page 270 terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. ¹ 14-1-1932 I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only – I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to ...
... her Soul-evolution: First, the human in Savitri seeks the Divine. Second, she weds Satyavan in order to realise through their 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. p. 17. 38 Ibid., p. 19. 39 Ibid., p. 21. Page 135 mutual adoration the Presence of the Divine in every heart of love. Third, Satyavan dies and she... as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me once in a letter — the Divine subjects His Incarnations to the fieriest of ordeals; so He asks her once again to reconsider her refusal to comply with His invitation: A third time swelled the great admonishing call: "I spread abroad the refuge of my wings." 64 In other words, He asks her to seek final asylum under His wings where there is only peace... wanted the Divine Bliss and Light for all, not for himself and his countrymen only. That is why he heard the Voice also ascending in pitch and deepening in timbre as he progressed more and more in his Sadhana, till he compelled as it were the last sanction of the Supreme to his summit prayer voiced through Savitri: Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men. 68 "Seek and thou shalt ...
... y change of consciousness and such a great change cannot be effected by a divided will or by a small portion of the energy or by a hesitating mind. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'He who seeks the Divine must consecrate himself to God and to God only.'² II The first steps of Yoga present us serious difficulties and obstacles. We begin to look within ourselves and we are brought face... considers itself erroneously to be self-existent. Of this ego we Page 52 are conscious as the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness. The egoistic ignorance in the mind of thoughts, in the heart of emotions and in the senses responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted... by contact and daily influence. According to the nature and the circumstances the call will come."¹ But this call must be distinguished from a mere idea or Page 53 intellectual seeking of something higher beyond. This call is truly a decision of the mind and the soul and has, as its results, a complete and effective self-consecration. This call is a unifying single-mindedness of ...
... reign of reason should not end until the coming of the psychic law which manifests the Divine Will. The Mother Words of the Mother - III: The Divine's Help to Man Every soul is not evolved and active; nor is every soul turned directly to the Divine before practising yoga. For a long time it seeks the Divine through men and things much more than directly. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga... contact with divine Love"—you are in a state in which everything appears to you to be this divine Love and nothing else. And yet it is only a covering, but a covering of a beautiful texture. So, divine Love need not be sought and known apart from the psychic being? No, find your psychic being and you will understand what divine Love is. Do not try to come into direct contact with divine Love because... Your psychic being is there precisely to put you in contact with the divine forces. And if you are in contact with your psychic being, you begin to feel, to have a kind of perception of what divine Love can be. As I have just said, it is not enough that one morning you wake up saying, "Oh! I would like to be in contact with divine Love", it is not like that. If, through a sustained effort, a deep c ...
... of mental encouragement or acceptance of their suggestions to persist or grow chronic. It is hardly a fact that sorrow is necessary in order to make the soul seek the Divine. It is the call of the soul within for the Divine that makes it turn, and that may come under any circumstances—in full prosperity and enjoyment, at the height of outward conquest and victory without any sorrow or dis... conceptions. Something in you was harking back to one kind of Vaishnava sadhana, and that tended to bring in it its pain-giving feeling-elements of abhimāna , revolt, suffering, the Divine hiding himself ("always I seek, but never does he show himself")—the rarity of the unfolding and the milana . Something else in you was inclined to see as the only alternative some harsh, grim ascetic ideal, the... to you that to be able to wait for the Divine Grace (not in a tamasic spirit, but with a sattwic reliance) was the best course for you. Prayer, yes—but not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment—but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and the heart with the Divine and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in His own time. Meditation? Yes, but ...
... action ? The Mother's words depict two successive states of the Yogin: —first, that in which he is seeking union and identification with the Divine through Yogic action as well as through love and knowledge, and, second, that in which he acts in the Divine, by the direct dynamisation of the divine Will. The whole attitude of the Yogin in the first state is summed up in the the following words, ... the flawless expression of the divine Will in the liberated and transformed individual. The fullness of the self-giving is the most important condition of this double fulfilment—divine union and divine self-expression. But what usually happens in many spiritual seekers is that the most developed and enlightened part of their being surrenders itself to the Divine, but the other parts comprising... God's "gifts to us at every instant.” It would be suicidal for a seeker of the integral union and perfection to squander or to be negligent or indifferent to the gifts of the Divine, whether they are material or spiritual, Even the material things that come to him for his use are not only from the Divine, but afire with the Divine, and have, there- fore, to be handled in the right spirit and with ...
... petty desires and corroding incapacity. An aim higher than personal salvation would be service of humanity or service of the Divine: The desire of personal salvation, however high its form, is an outcome of ego... If we seek the Divine, it should be for the sake of the Divine and for nothing else... all other motives are excrescences.... Often we see this desire of personal salvation... aspire, acts by unification and transcendence of limitation, is of the nature of Knowledge and culminates in the life divine. The passage from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga... the whole difference between the Yogin and the natural man will be this, that the Yogin seeks to substitute in himself for the integral action of the lower Nature working in and by ego and division the integral action... only for the Divine Sri Aurobindo would have us do Yoga; after all, isn't humanity too comprehended in the Divine's play of manifestation? What is necessary, what is crucial, is the annulment of the ego through union with the Divine, and once this has been achieved, action would arise "spontaneously, freely, infallibly from the light and force of our spiritual self in union with the Divine". 17 ...
... it, that is to say to give it to Him who is moving by His divine Shakti both you and myself whether secretly or openly. But you must know the necessary result will be that you will have to follow that special way which He has given to me and which I call the integral Yoga. What I began with, what was given to me by Lele, that was a seeking for the path, a wandering around in this and that direction... Aurobindo 18 May 1930 The protection and help will be there as they were here. You have to keep yourself open to them and live inwardly seeking to become more and more conscious so that you may feel the Divine Presence and Power. As to the Bombay atmosphere, keep inwardly separate from it, even while mixing with others, see it as a thing outside and not belonging to the inner world in which... offended palate, then certainly they were quite unfit for yoga and this was not the place for them. For it means that a mutton chop or a tasty plate of fish was more important for them than the seeking of the Divine. It is not possible to do Yoga if values are so topsyturvy in the consciousness. Apart from such extravagance, these things which aught to be only among the most minor values even in the human ...
... be able to meet women without seeking out their company, to meet without being preoccupied with the sex. Shyness and uneasiness are usually signs of the sex-preoccupation unless they are constitutional, when they will be there for other things also, not for women only. What is sublimation of sex as some people put it? If the sex seeks the Divine Love and Ananda, it must be the... for the Divine. How is it that the "subconscient root" has been reached while the purification of the vital is still to be completed? The descent into the subconscient was a necessity of the general sadhana, i.e. of the Divine Work. That descent could not be held up till everybody had conquered his vital nature or till you personally had done so. What "Divine Work"... physical collapse, I suppose he has to be put together again somehow. Some sadhaks hold the belief that an illness is a cherishable thing, that it comes from the Divine to test our faith: it makes us remember the Divine more often than otherwise! All that is quite wrong. Illness is a wrong movement of the body and is no more to be cherished than a wrong movement of the mind or vital ...
... conceptual knowledge'. It can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeking at a _____________________________________________ ¹ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Centenary Library, Vol. 19, p. 938. Page 263 single view, the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth, are not established by logic... ary change of consciousness and such a great change cannot be effected by a divided will or by a small portion of the energy or by a hesitating mind. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: He who seeks the Divine must consecrate himself to God and to God only.² (b) The first steps of Yoga present us serious difficulties and obstacles. We begin to look within ourselves and we are brought... consciousness that considers it self erroneously to be self-existent. Of this ego we are conscious as the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness. The egoistic ignorance in the mind of thoughts, in the heart of emotion and in the sense responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted ...
... his sacrifices, O gods rich in the force of the plenitude? (8) Most mobile for our paths of all divine chariots is the chariot of your movement, O Riders on the Life, let it come to us, seeking us, breaking through that world of the multitude and becoming a movement of power in mortals. (9) O seekers of honey, let our constant action be wholly full of bliss; downward yet keeping the wide and complete... luminous strength, the inspired knowledge that is the supreme good, may our mind realise in its heavens the word of divine affirmation. SUKTA 36 (1) May the God-Mind come to us, he who awakes in us to knowledge of our treasures to give of the giving of his felicities; like a bull that seeks its delight but has wandered in the desert thirsting and desiring, so let him drink of the wine of delight that... the Thought that discerns and Page 286 disparts he shall be joined to them in their light of knowledge, in their inspiration of movement, in their gleamingsout. (16) That I might seek the divine Friend, they illumined, declared to me first their many-hued Mother, 1 yea, they declared the bright Mother of the herds; then their Father who gives us his impulsions they declared, the Terrible ...
... premature claim has obscured the true work of the religious instinct in man, which is to lead him towards the Divine Reality, to formulate all that he has yet achieved in that direction and to give to each human being a mould of spiritual discipline, a way of seeking, touching, nearing the Divine Truth, Page 896 a way which is proper to the potentialities of his nature. The wide and supple... power or ecstasy. The sage and seer live in the spiritual mind, their thought or their vision is governed and moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of knowledge; the devotee lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking; the saint is moved by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being; the others stand... evolution of the spiritual man, and it is this and the urge of that consciousness towards contact with the Reality, the Self or the Divine Being that must be the first and foremost or even, till it is perfectly accomplished, the sole preoccupation of the spiritual seeker. It is the one thing needful that has to be done by each on whatever line is possible to him, by each according to the spiritual capacity ...
... from the human into the Divine. It is dangerous to think of giving up "all barrier of discrimination and defence against what is trying to descend" upon you. Have you thought what this would mean if what is descending is something not in consonance with the divine Truth, perhaps even adverse? An adverse Power could ask no better condition for getting control over the seeker. It is only the Mother's... there is the greatest havoc. Even the attempt to sublimate it by turning it towards the Divine as in the Vaishnava madhura bhāva carries in it a serious danger, as the results of a wrong turn or use in this method so often show. At any rate in this Yoga which seeks not only the essential experience of the Divine but a transformation of the whole being and nature, I have found it an absolute necessity... would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error. Page 500 The transformation of the sex-centre ...
... the Divine or get- ting the Divine consciousness which enables one to live in or with the Divine, then a flood of pseudos or mixtures comes in, one is led into the mazes of the intermediate zone or spins in the grooves of one's own formations. There is the truth of the whole matter. Then why does Krishnaprem say that one should not hunt after experiences, but only love and seek the Divine? It... wants to disappear into the Indefinite— I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life—so Vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for my... radically his nature and get the concrete decisive experience of the Divine would have to be considered as one of the rare gallopers of the spiritual Way. Nobody has ever said that the spiritual change was an easy thing; all spiritual seekers will say that it is difficult but supremely worth doing. If one's desire for the Divine has become the master desire, then surely one can give one's whole life ...
... can utterly lay down the burden of his works on the Divine. At every moment he must proceed with a vigilant eye upon the deceits of the ego and the ambushes of the misleading Powers of Darkness who ever represent themselves as the one source of Light and Truth and take on them a simulacrum of divine forms in order to capture the soul of the seeker. Immediately he must take the further step of relegating... the well- springs of the comprehension of love,... and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means."14 I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life.15 Our time would not suffices, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that... distinguish her interweaving of light and night, the divine and the undivine, and detect her formidable Powers and Beings that use the ignorant human creature. Nature works in us, says the Gita, through the triple quality of Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the quality of passion and desire and the quality of obscurity and inertia. The seeker must learn to distinguish, as an impartial and discerning ...
... to bear it, trusting to Divine Grace to intervene when it will. No, I didn’t say that you chose the rajasic or tamasic vairagya. I only explained how it came, of itself, as a result of a movement of the vital in place of the sattwic vairagya which is supposed to precede and cause or accompany or result from a turning away from the world to seek the Divine. The tamasic vairagya comes... against the Divine. In essence it is an attempt to force the divine to do what one wants instead of trusting to him to do what is best according to his own divine will and wisdom; it is a culminating act of vital impatience and disappointed desire, while the true movement is a pure aspiration and an ardent surrender. After all, one has not a right to call on the Divine to manifest... vSb – and I don’t regret to have to leave this life. “ He had become a sort of mystic after his marriage and left business and lived in seclusion. He cast a deep influence on Bharati whose seeking dates from her dear gifted brother’s conversion. She does want to visit Pondicherry next November and I offered to ask her to be my guest in my flat as I have always looked upon her as a little ...
... but also help the Truth-seeking Life-Soul with the reflected light of the God-Mind Indra in man's intelligence. Verse 4 in Sri Aurobindo 519 has the depth-revealing version: "May he who answers to me with assent give to the illumined giver of the Horse-sacrifice, by the word of illumination, possession of the goal of his journey; may he give power of intelligence to the seeker of the Truth." Keeping... into many realms of consciousness and from each of these there go up its words that express the impulses in it which seek a divine fulfilment. The Mind-Soul answers to these and gives assent, it supplies to the word of expression the answering word of illumination and to the Life that seeks the Truth it gives the power of intelligence that finds and holds the Truth." Sri Aurobindo's esoteric reading... reach that Ultimate without submitting itself to an intermediary power - the Divine Mind which 389. Ibid. p. 299. 390. Op. cit. , p. 224, col. 2. Page 360 could organize and transform that mental faculty and make it naturally participate in the Ultimate. In verse 2 Agastya appeals: "Why dost thou seek to smite us, O Indra? The Maruts are thy brothers. By them accomplish perfection; ...
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