... deliverance are the promise. It is a Master of our works, a Friend and Lover of our soul, an intimate Spirit of our life, an indwelling and overdwelling Lord of all our personal and impersonal self and nature who alone can utter to us this near and moving message. And yet this is not the common relation established by the religions between man living in his sattwic or Page 541 other ego-mind... delight of the Divine in us and, unafraid and ungrieving, accept only his guidance, then that is the truest, the greatest release and that brings the absolute and inevitable perfection of our self and nature. This is the way offered to the chosen of the Spirit,—to those only in whom he takes the greatest delight because they are nearest to him and most capable of oneness and of being even as he, freely ...
... should be felt in the waking state also; for both movements are necessary, the coming out of the inner being to the front as well as the going in of the consciousness to become aware of the inner self and nature. But for many purposes the ingoing movement is indispensable. Its effect is to break or at least to open and pass the barrier between this outer instrumental consciousness and that inner being... in your inner being which is your true being and of looking at everything from there. It is from there that you get the true thought, the true vision and understanding of things and of your own self and nature. You must have somehow externalised yourself too much. It is only by living in one's inner consciousness and doing everything from there that the right psychic condition can be kept. Otherwise ...
... develops always the true workings in life of the self and nature. The highest state of the assent, the śraddhā of the being will be when we feel the presence of the Ishwara Page 781 and feel all our existence and consciousness and thought and will and action in his hand and consent in all things and with every part of our self and nature to the direct and immanent and occupying will of ...
... is a condition of his perfection. The difficulty of the ascent is due to a natural ignorance. He is the Purusha, witness of mental and physical Nature, sākșī , but not a complete knower of self and Nature, jñātṛ . Knowledge in the mentality is enlightened by his consciousness; he is the mental knower; but he finds that this is not a real knowledge, but only a partial seeking and partial finding... body. But for participation in an effective all-awareness with this essential self-awareness as the soul of its action he must rise to supermind. To be lord of his being, he must be knower of self and Nature, jñātā īśvaraḥ . Partially this may be done on a higher level of mind where it responds directly to supermind, but really and completely this perfection belongs not to the mental being, but to ...
... is a constant aspiration to that Godhead and that Mother, a surrender of the whole self and nature into their hands and a consecration of all activity to them so that they may take it up and make Page 20 us their perfect instruments. In more concrete terms we may say that our entire self and nature have to flow towards the Avatar of that Godhead — Sri Aurobindo — and the incarnation ...
... your soul, even though it has descended into mind and body, will already be living in the vast eternity of the Spirit. "This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of your whole self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature. If you can once achieve it, whether at the ...
... that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature ...
... the mental -vital plane and indicates the saving power of an absolute faith. The other shows the ascent to the highest levels of the earth-consciousness, but there is still something of the old self and nature clinging and trying to pull downwards; it refuses to let go, but finally it has to fall off and the being can ascend without downward pull or fear of fall into the skies of the higher consciousness ...
... experiences you felt it in the waking state; for both movements are necessary, the coming out of the inner being to the front as well as the going in of the consciousness to become aware of the inner self and nature. But here what was done, initially at least, was to break or at least to open and pass the barrier between this outer or instrumental and that inner which it very partially strives to express and ...
... always the same—supporting the different beings, mental etc. which act here. The psychic is what has come down here—its function is to offer all things to the Divine for transformation. The Self and Nature or Prakriti The Self or Atman is inactive, Nature (Prakriti) or Shakti acts. When the Self is realised it is first an infinite existence, wideness, silence, freedom, peace that is felt—that ...
... It is a much greater ecstasy to be thus surrendered and possessed by the Divine than oneself to be the possessor. At the same time by this surrender there comes also a calm and happy mastery of self and nature. No surrender to 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 ...
... into the intuitive mentality and that again into the supramental movement. Only as we rise we grow more intimately and integrally into the infinite consciousness and it becomes more fully our own self and nature. And also, on the other, the lower side of existence which it might seem would then be not only beneath but quite alien to us, even when we live in the supramental being and even when the whole ...
... its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature. But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure ...
... being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our 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 ...
... free from the previous limitation, free from the results of Nature's forgetfulness of the indwelling Spirit. Or it may quiet the whole working it has manifested, concentrate on a higher level of Self and Nature, raise the being to it and bring down the powers of the higher level to transform the previous manifestation: all that is so transformed is still included, but as a part of the higher dynamism ...
... growing truth continually seeks to express itself. Hence the supreme importance to man of Knowledge, not what is called the practical knowledge of life, but of the profoundest knowledge of the Self and Nature 1 on which alone a true practice of life can be founded. The error proceeds from a false identification. Nature has created within her material unity separate-seeming bodies which the Soul ...
... truth-vision of things, a massed movement or subtle body of gnosis. Its action is a self-fulfilling and radiating action of the truth-power of things according to the inner law of their deepest truest self and nature. This truth of things at which we must arrive before we can enter into the gnosis,—for in that all exists and from that all originates on the gnostic plane,—is, first of all, a truth of unity, ...
... cosmic manifestation of his own being and nature in Space and Time. He is the supreme spirit who ensouls the forms and movements of the universe, Paramatman. He is the supernal Person of whom all self and nature, all being and becoming in this or any universe are the self-conception and the self-energising, Purushottama. He is the ineffable Lord of all existence who by his spiritual control of his own ...
... mind of Arjuna, the divine Teacher sets out by removing the source of two remaining difficulties, the antinomy between the impersonal self and the human personality and the antinomy between the self and Nature. While these two antinomies last, the Godhead in Nature and man remains obscure, irrational and unbelievable. Nature has been represented as the mechanical bondage of the gunas, the soul as the ...
... had rejected or breaks forward to some new truth and power, but is always in search of the same thing, the law of its perfection, its rule of right living, its complete, highest and essential self and nature. This movement begins with the individual, who is no longer satisfied with the law because he finds that it no longer corresponds to his idea and largest or intensest experience of himself and ...
... become the pure self and the pure self is described as inactive, akartā , the answer is that that inactivity and divorce of self from Nature are not the whole truth of our spiritual release. Self and Nature are in the end one thing; a total and perfect spirituality makes us one with all the Divine in self and in nature. In fact this becoming Brahman, this assumption into the self of eternal silence ...
... in this equal self, we too are at peace; our works continue so long as Nature's impulsion prolongs itself in our instruments, but there is a spiritual freedom and quiescence. This duality of Self and Nature, quiescent Purusha, active Prakriti, is not, however, the whole of our being; these are not really the two last words in the matter. If it were so, either all works would be quite indifferent to ...
... soul and nature are the Brahman, but the true truth of the world of Nature can only be discovered by the liberated sage who possesses also the truth of the spirit. One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge. The Gita then tells us what is the spiritual knowledge or rather it tells us what are the conditions of knowledge, the marks, the signs of the man whose soul ...
... substituting Līlā, or God's play in the world, for Māyā or the universal illusion of activity. Līlā too looks beyond, it does not offer a complete fulfilment here and now of the whole self and nature of us, it does not provide for total divinisation. And inasmuch as it does not, it stresses the Beyond as the goal and puts earth life into a minor place and tends to see it as less real than ...
... Supermind which holds the divine original of the world not only in essence but also in formulation is realised, with the transcendental Existence, Consciousness and Delight as its base, the Universal Self and Nature as its one instrument and the inmost soul as its other medium that man reaches a Supermanhood most dynamic for world-uses. And because Sri Aurobindo's Yoga puts so much emphasis on such ...
... are in the grip of a profound sleep as to our inner and higher existence, so much so that we have been sometimes called 'gambh ī rabhed ī ' 2 elephants vis- à -vis the whole truth of our self and nature. Hence it is that throughout the ages the exhortation has gone forth to the somnolent souls to arise and awake (utti ṣṭ hata j ā grata), for the heavenly dawn has come upon the scene ...
... necessary action by a summary process. Your mind and inner being must impart their will to the whole. I have always said that it is not P and his vital which upset my sadhana but my own self and nature. Certainly, it is the vital ego that is the cause and there is no need of bringing in P's vital. You have to get rid of it altogether. It is this kind of thing that must be preventing the ...
... amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with the drive of a still more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire of the life-being and the urge and instinct of the flesh, but first from a spiritualised self and nature and, last, from a supramental Truth-Consciousness and its divine force of supernature. Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is face to ...
... Subconscient the nursery where our animal-human traits and proclivities are developed. Heaven is our eternal father and the divine qualities are the stuff and composition of our essential self and nature. It is not the Inconscient and the Subconscient that are the ultimate determinants of our destiny, but the Superconscient, the Divine. Fear is one of the gifts of the Subconscient to the body ...
... The rest would follow, for now the Divine would take up the responsibility. Krishna tells Arjuna in effect: This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of your whole self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature...This is the supreme way because ...
... its petty and narrow mould for the full and wide reception of that which it seeks, that which, being universal, exceeds and, being transcendent, surpasses even the largest and highest individual self and nature. 40 The "personal effort" required is described more concretely and with much greater particularity in The Mother which Sri Aurobindo wrote almost immediately after going into retirement ...
... his edition of the Gita with translation and Notes compiled from Essays on the Gita and his The Message of the Gita (as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo). Page 468 self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature. If you can once achieve it, whether at the ...
... on earth are really symbolic of the One who manifests himself as Many. In order to create a world of complex relations and harmony the One becomes Two and manifests the Many. The Two are the Self and Nature—Nature both lower and higher. Behind the external appearance of ignorance there is the Divine Presence that works in silence. And yet evolution is not really a process that denies the Light ...
... its own immanence in the world was more or less completely ignored. Therefore, we meet with two divergent lines of Yoga in India— one inclusive and comprehensive, embracing Light and ¹ Self and Nature. Page 18 linking it to life, and aiming at a marriage of Heaven and "Earth and the manifestation of Spirit in Matter, and the other, intense and exclusive, renouncing life in ...
... will not effect it for us by an act of caprice or an arbitrary sanad of his favour. Divine works are effective for salvation because they lead us towards this perfection and to a knowledge of self and nature and God by a growing unity with the inner Master of our existence. Divine love is effective because by it we grow into the likeness of the sole and supreme object of our adoration and call down ...
... motives of desire and passion. But our second completer vision reveals to us a living Infinite, a divine immeasurable Being from whom all that we are proceeds and to which all that we are belongs, self and nature, world and spirit. When we are one with him in self and spirit, we do not lose ourselves, but rather recover our true selves in him poised in the supremacy of this Infinite. And this is done at ...
... in the one Godhead,—in the Divine known as all being and consciousness and delight and as all things and beings and happenings, known in Nature, known in the self, known for that which exceeds self and Nature. He is ever in constant union with him, nityayukta ; his whole life and being are an eternal Yoga with the Transcendent than whom there is nothing higher, with the Universal besides whom there ...
... yet only the one inactive Purusha and the lower Prakriti and not yet the distinction of the triple Purusha and the double Prakriti. It is true the Ishwara is spoken of, but his relation to the self and nature is not yet made definite. The first six chapters only carry the synthesis so far as it can be carried without the clear expression and decisive entrance of these all-important truths Page 83 ...
... perfection. But in this yoga we become aware not only of this taking up but of a pouring down of the power of the higher Self, so that there comes in the possibility of a descent of the supramental Self and Nature to dominate and change our present nature and turn it from nature of Ignorance into nature of Truth-Knowledge (and through the supramental into nature of Ananda)—this is the third or supramental ...
... perfection. But in this Yoga we become aware not only of this taking up but of a pouring down of the powers of the higher Self, so that there comes in the possibility of a descent of the Supramental Self and nature to dominate and change our present nature and turn it from nature of Ignorance into nature of Truth-Knowledge (and through the supramental into nature of Ananda)—this is the third or supramental ...
... circle, but a means for the discovery of a greater Truth behind mind and life and the bringing of its power into our human existence. And this discovery is that of our real, because our highest self and nature. Page 164 However, that self which we are not yet, but have to become, is not the strong vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritual self and spiritual nature. For as soon as we ...
... enough as a first step, cannot be the real and final solution; if our effort ends there, we shall not arrive. The solution lies, we have said, in an awakening to our real, because our highest self and nature,—that hidden self which we are not yet, but have to become and which is not the strong and enlightened vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritual self and spiritual nature that will use the ...
... the fulfilment of some idea of right, good or interest which is inflicted on them by a restraining and fashioning power rather than developed in them and by them as a thing towards which their self and nature are impelled to grow. Life is to be managed, harmonised, perfected by an adjustment, a manipulation, a machinery through which it is passed and by which it is shaped. A law outside oneself,—outside ...
... divine love and absolute delight,—and even through an absorbing concentration of the psychical and the vital and physical being,—the soul turns towards the Supreme and that on each part of our self and nature and consciousness there can come a call and irresistible attraction of the Divine. Indeed, an uplift of all these, an imperative of the Divine upon all the ways of our being, is the impetus of ...
... , inherent in physical Nature: but, fundamentally, all pain and suffering are the result of an insufficient consciousness-force in the surface being which makes it unable to deal rightly with self and Nature or unable to assimilate and to harmonise itself with the contacts of the universal Energy; they would not exist if in us there were an integral presence of the luminous Consciousness and the divine ...
... amalgam of an ignorant mind and will with the drive of a still more ignorant heart of emotion and the desire of the life-being and the urge and instinct of the flesh, but first from a spiritualised self and nature and, last, from a supramental Truth-consciousness and its divine force of supernature. Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is face to face ...
... turned and made effective. This is worsened by the imperfection of our self-knowledge which, such as it is, meagre and pitifully insufficient, is of our surface only, of our apparent phenomenal self and nature and not of our true self and the true meaning of our existence. Self-knowledge and self-mastery are wanting in the user, wisdom and right will in his use of world-power and world-knowledge. ...
... originating supermind that contains within itself the true values, significances and relations of the other parts of our being and its unfolding is the condition of the integral possession of our self and nature. The complete transformation comes on us by a certain change, not merely of the poise or level of our regarding conscious self or even of its law and character, but also of the whole substance ...
... species into two sexes is some kind of representation of a twofold basic reality of being. Within each of us, spiritual experience reveals a twofoldness - Purusha and Prakriti, being and becoming, self and nature. In spiritual knowledge the creative world-principle is seen to be biune - Ishwara-Shakti - a two-in-one put forth from the Oneness in which manyness lies implicit. When the Ishwara-Shakti manifests ...
... knowledge. In everything that exists phenomenally, or, as I shall prefer to say, going deeper into the nature of things, symbolically, there are two parts of being, thing in itself and symbol, Self and Nature, res (thing that is) and factum (thing that is done or made), immutable being and mutable becoming, that which is supernatural to it and that which is natural. Every state of existence has some ...
... occult height; what in outward fact, in appearance, in present self-awareness man is not but must become, is already there within him; he has only to find himself in order to become that greater self and nature. 80 Man [is a] transitional being, not the final end of the evolution and the crown of terrestrial existence. This ignorant, imperfect and divided being, with his labouring uncertain ...
... being and nature has always a much less fettered gait: it awakens easily enough, receives freely the higher spiritual influences and gets more or less transformed. But the external surface self and nature are mostly moulded by the forces of the established Ignorance and the original Nescience. And hence they are tardy in awakening, sluggish in receiving and impervious to uninhibited assimilation ...
... intolerant of all relations. ... It is a Master of our works, a Friend and Lover of our soul, an intimate Spirit of our life, an indwelling and over dwelling Lord of all our personal and impersonal self and nature . .. . 5 In Eckhart's view, the false egoic self is due to an identification of oneself with the mind. Though Eckhart speaks of the bodily and emotional aspects of the egoic self, he ...
... the mental-vital plane and indicates the saving power of an absolute faith. The other shows the ascent to the highest levels of the earth consciousness, but there is still something of the old self and nature clinging and trying to pull downwards; it refuses to let go, bur finally it has to fall off and the being can ascend without downward pull or fear of fall, into the skies of the higher consciousness ...
... slowly seeks to find its heaven of joy and light even in the oppositions offered by the terms of embodied material existence; and it accepts the process of struggle in order to discover its true self and nature and develop even in the material body a temple of the Divinity. As Sri Aurobindo points out: "That purpose for which all this exclusive concentration we call the Ignorance is necessary, is ...
... soul, even though it has descended into mind and body, will already be living in the vast eternity of the Spirit. "This then is the supreme movement, this complete surrender of your whole self and nature, this abandonment of all dharmas to the Divine who is your highest Self, this absolute aspiration of all your members to the supreme spiritual nature. If you can once achieve it, whether at the ...
... the One Mahashakti who is infinitely greater than all his supposed imperfections, infinitely more powerful than all his imagined incapacities, and who can change his destiny and perfect his self and nature provided he prays in a way so that his prayers may be heard. Therefore, whenever the sadhaka's consciousness tends to get clouded, whenever the black mood of doubt and depression threatens ...
... fundamental nature of the spiritual perfection of Sri Ramakrishna consists in the realisation of God in his Absoluteness. He exemplified, philosophically speaking, the unity and synthesis of the Self and Nature, existence and power, the immutable and its dynamis. He used to say that the Eternal and its manifestation .always go together. The Transcendent is inherent in the manifest; again, the manifest ...
... radically purify or transfigure it. We have to rise above rajas and sattwa to enter a domain where one meets the source of inevitable harmony, where the units without losing their true self and nature and returning to the undifferentiated primordial mass, fulfil themselves and are yet held together in a rich and faultless symphony. This is Dharma, that which holds together. Dharma means the ...
... is a power of Matter itself, its most secret power. Truth-Consciousness or Supermind congealed, solidified or crystallised under certain conditions becomes Matter: now to re-become its own true self and nature is the very drive of Matter, that is the true sense of evolution. The very nature of Matter makes its transformation absolutely inevitable. It obeys no alien force or rule, its achievement means ...
... "cosmos is soul's opportunity". He saw in the Vision that only by bringing down a higher Power than the Mind can man realise his divine destiny. He sees the dual aspect of Purusha and Prakriti—Self and Nature —working throughout the universe and he found that behind the duality, which to the outer view, wears the aspect of an opposition and even conflict, a purpose, is working out. He comes to know ...
... enjoys Immortality. THE BIRTH AND THE NON-BIRTH The Self outside Nature does not become; it is immutable as well as eternal. The Self in Nature becomes, it changes its states and forms. This entry into various states and forms in the succession of Time is Birth in Nature. Because of these two positions of the Self, in Nature and out of Nature, moving in the movement and seated above the movement... its opposite. The opposite of existence can only be the Night of negative consciousness, a state of ignorance and not of release. On the other hand, attachment to Birth in the body means a constant self-limitation and an interminable round of egoistic births in the lower forms of egoism without issue or release. This is, from a certain point of view, a worse darkness than the other; for it is ignorant... pursued as the goal of Birth and a higher, fuller and truer existence may lead to withdrawal into the silent Brahman or into the pure liberty of the Non-Being. Birth, pursued as a means of progress and self-enlargement, leads to a greater and fuller life which may, in its turn, become a vestibule to the final achievement. THE PERFECT WAY But neither of these results is perfect in itself nor the true ...
... two beings in my single self. A Godhead watches Nature from behind At play in front with a brilliant surface elf, A time-born creature with a human mind. Tranquil and boundless like a sea or sky, The Godhead knows himself Eternity's son. Radiant his mind and vast, his heart as free; His will is a sceptre of dominion. The smaller self by Nature's passions driven, Thoughtful ...
... Pondicherry (Circa 1927-1947) Sonnets from Manuscripts (Circa 1934-1947) Collected Poems The Cosmic Spirit Know more > I am a single Self all Nature fills. Immeasurable, unmoved the Witness sits: He is the silence brooding on her hills, The circling motion of her cosmic mights. I have broken the limits of embodied mind And ...
... is of Sat. *** Beauty is delight organised. Poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech. Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The nature of the speech shows the nature of the self-consciousness. The degree of perfection in utterance measures also the extent to which one is conscious of oneself. *** Beauty is the... knowledge manifest and embody the dynamic Brahman. *** The stress of Life is to reveal and incarnate more and more of the dynamic Divine, the creative Ananda of consciousness in its self-nature. The progress of art too consists in recording this march of .the soul in its ever-growing consciousness and ever-deepening Ananda towards a higher incarnation of the Divine. Page 359 ... Beauty self-governed. Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate. Love is Beauty enjoying itself. Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates. Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts. *** All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty. Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with Delight. The Truth of a thing is its native substance, the being in its absolute self-law. ...
... its absolute self-law. Satyam is that which is of Sat. * Beauty is delight organised. Page 20 Poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech. Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The nature of the speech... speech shows the nature of the self-consciousness. The degree of perfection in utterance measures also the extent to which one is conscious of oneself. * Beauty is the soul's delight perfectly articulate and organised. Where the soul does not speak out, where the rhythm of the spirit does not manifest, there comes in ugliness. ... * The stress of Life is to reveal and incarnate more and more of the dynamic Divine, the creative Ananda of consciousness in its self-nature. The progress of art too consists in recording this march of the soul in its ever-growing consciousness and ever-deepening Ananda towards a higher incarnation of the Divine ...
... that man, the mental being, is sublimated by the endeavour of the Energy to evolve out of him as the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 ... we would still not have understood, it would still seem impossible to us that the hidden spirit could wholly emerge, complete in its consciousness, and dwell upon the earth as the self-known and world- knower, Nature's ruler and possessor. We would have said: 'Impossible! all that has happened is nothing much, a little bubbling of sensitive grey stuff of brain, a queer freak in a bit of inanimate ...
... gives the offering. त्वमर्यमा भवसि यत् कनीनां नाम स्वधावन् गुह्यं बिभर्षि । अञ्जन्ति मित्रं सुधितं न गोभिर्यद् दंपती समनसा कृणोषि ॥२॥ Page 401 2) O thou who possessest self-ordering Nature, thou becomest the might of the Aspirer 4 when thou bearest the secret Name of the Virgins. 5 They brighten thee with the Light in her rays as Love 6 perfectly founded when thou makest... the godheads the self-expression of the being. न त्वद़्धोता पूर्वो अग्ने यजीयान् न काव्यैः परो अस्ति स्वधावः । विशश्च यस्या अतिथिर्भवासि स यज्ञेन वनवद् देव मर्तान् ॥५॥ Page 402 5) There is none that precedeth thee as the priest of the oblation nor any mightier for sacrifice; O Flame, none is supreme over thee in the things of the Wisdom, thou who possessest the self-ordering power... when aspiration arrives at the light of knowledge and Mitra harmonises soul and nature. × Mitra. × The Soul and Nature. The mansion is the human body. ...
... the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Page 100 Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet. Breaking... on some unknown wings? Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, ... has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic and non-poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic and ...
... experience of the Self through Love and through emotional delight, love and delight of the Self in us, of the Self in the universal and of the Self in all with whom we have relations: thus the heart is satisfied of God. We can have an aesthetic experience of the Self in beauty, a delight-perception and taste of the absolute reality all-beautiful in everything whether created by ourselves or Nature in its appeal... reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. 2 And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the Page 303 process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand... in utilising for human ends the overt or secret forces of Nature and in helping or hurting, in saving and ennobling or in oppressing and destroying our fellow-men. Yoga, indeed, is commensurate with all life and can include all these subjects and objects. There is even a Yoga 1 which can be used for self-indulgence as well as for self-conquest, for hurting others as well as for their salvation ...
... and peace, a bliss of release from the siege of our imposed fantastic self-torturing nature, the deep undisturbed exceeding happiness of the touch of the eternal and infinite replacing by its permanence the strife and turmoil of impermanent things, brahmasaṁsparśam atyantaṁ sukham aśnute . The soul is fixed in the delight of the self, ātmaratiḥ , in the single and infinite Ananda of the spirit and hunts... because the world, Nature, action are not in fact a quite separate thing, but a manifestation of the Self, the All-Soul, the Divine. The reactions of the normal mind are a degradation of the divine values which would but for this degradation make this truth evident to us,—a falsification, an ignorance which alters their workings, an ignorance which starts from the involution of the Self in a blind material... principle in the three great powers of knowledge, will and feeling. All emotion, feeling, sensation is a way of the soul meeting and putting effective values on the manifestations of the Self in nature. But what the self feels is a universal delight, Ananda. The soul in the lower mind on the contrary gives it, as we have seen, three varying values of pain, pleasure and neutral indifference, which tone ...
... fastening only on a little of our experience of self and things, memorising less, using still less for knowledge and action. What we reject, Nature stores and uses in our development, for the most part by her subconscious action. Our waking self is only a superimposition, a visible summit; the great body of our being is submerged or subliminal.—The subliminal self perceives, remembers, understands, uses all... one indivisible Spirit. Yet it is only by knowing the One that this individual mind, life, body, soul can know itself or its action.—Thus ignorance of self is the nature of our mind, but an ignorance full of the impulse towards self-possession and self-knowledge. A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge is the definition of man the mental being. Page 496 ... For our superconscient Self is eternal Page 495 in its being and Time is only one of its modes, our subliminal is eternal in its becoming and Time is its infinite field of experience.—We are equally ignorant of the world, holding it to be not-self, ignorant of ourselves in Space; for the world is one Self developing the movement of its conscious force in its self-conceptive extension as ...
... tasthatuh, but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony. The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature, swabh ā va; then indeed even the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all, swadharma, will not cause dash or conflict:... What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility ? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature. We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Consciousness... of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey; it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows; it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly. (Cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras.) The principle ...
... well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.² Breaking the silence of the seas . Among the farthest Hebrides, ¹ Prelude, III. II. 62-63. ² "Nature herself... far away on some unknown wings? Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 4... has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic and non-poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic and ...
... but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony. The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each one will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature (swabhava); then indeed the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all will not cause clash or conflict; on the contrary... What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature. We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. ... of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice, which is the very soul of the conception of duty. The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate ...
... the same time he realises the unity of himself and Nature in the first three steps of knowledge, of himself and God in the others; of himself with all beings relatively in Nature and absolutely in God; of God and Nature because it is the Self who has become all these beings and the nature of the Lord which is apparent in cosmos.—The knowledge of Nature leads him to the same results as soon as he goes... psychological by enlarging his self-knowing beyond the waking self into the subconscient and superconscient; of the constitutional by realising his spiritual being and its categories; of the cosmic by discovering his timeless self; of the egoistic by Page 499 realising the cosmic consciousness; of the original by opening to the Absolute of whom Self, individual and Nature are so many faces.—At the... beyond Matter and Life to Mind; for he discovers a subconscient and superconscient, a soul in Matter, and perceives a supernature in which he realises the Self, the Spirit, the Absolute.—In the quest of God he begins by seeing him through Nature and himself, crudely and obscurely at first, till he finds more luminously the one Truth behind all religions; for all seize on the Divine in many aspects ...
... his spiritual nature which is his true nature. In isolating himself from the Master of nature, man becomes a slave of nature, this ignorant external nature. To attain freedom is to rise out of this lower status into the domain of the higher status which is man's own true nature, the Divine nature. The body can be remoulded and reconstituted by the soul and self; the inferior nature can be rebuilt... Will and His Will manifests in yours. Freedom does not consist in doing as one likes but in doing what the Divine likes. In following your will you follow nature's will – nature's determinism; being part of nature in following nature's will you have an illusion that you are following your will and that you are freely choosing, whereas in following God's Will you follow truly your own will, for... Truth in one's being and infallibly expresses the Truth in becoming, when one is identified with Satyam and Ritam, there is founded the true freedom and its supreme status. Freedom therefore is utter self-discipline; for it means following the rhythm of the Truth. To follow the rhythm of the Truth is to follow the Divine. In being obedient to the Divine Will one acts absolutely freely, for obedience ...
... the present moment, a limited portion of the past held fragmentarily and nothing at all of the future, while it is unable to know any timeless eternity of conscious being, any real eternal Self. Therefore the nature of our Mind is an Ignorance seizing at knowledge by successive action in the moments of Time.—If mind is all, then we must remain for ever in this Ignorance which is not absolute nescience... the self within as real and the rest as not-self and illusion. But the distinction is illusory and self-absorption in the stable self within is only one state of consciousness like self-dispersion in thought and memory and will. The real self is the Eternal who is capable simultaneously of the mobility in Time and the immobility basing Time. All object of knowledge is that real and eternal self whether... is directly conscious of existence in the present, holds existence in the past by its substitute memory, infers its future existence from this direct present self-consciousness and the memory of its continuity in the past.—This sense of self-conscious existence it extends into the idea of eternity, but the only eternity the mind really seizes is a continuous succession of moments of being in eternal ...
... and indivisible and form one indissoluble identity with the Divine's pure essence and absolute unity. The differentiation or variability there in the Immutable is a play immanent in the integral self-nature of the Supreme. The one and the many form on that level a single entity, an undivided whole: the unity running in and through and holding the multiplicity and the multiplicity being the playfulness... Page 1 freedom of movement in the Unique. In other words the very character of variability is the absolute freedom of the variables; the play consists precisely in the free choice and self-determination of the partners, the differentiated units. For a formation in the Divine Consciousness, an individualised formulation of its being must necessarily have the Divine's own freedom. Now,... individual formation in its urge crosses, as it were, a borderline, passes from the safe zone within the Divine's own status into a different zone, creates it, as a matter of fact, by that overzealous and self-concentrated free movement. But, as I have said, there is no premeditation or arri è re pens é e or "bad will" or spirit of contradiction there at the origin of the deviation. It is no original sin: ...
... and indivisible and form one indissoluble identity with the Divine's pure essence and absolute unity. The differentiation or variability there in the Immutable is a play immanent in the integral self-nature of the Supreme. The one and the many form on that level a single entity, an undivided whole: the unity running in and through and holding the multiplicity and the multiplicity being the playfulness... however, implies freedom of movement in the Unique. In other words, the very character of variability is the absolute freedom of the variables; the play consists precisely in the free choice and self-determination of the partners, the differentiated units. For a formation in the Divine Consciousness, an individualised formulation of its being must necessarily have the Divine's own freedom. Now... individual formation in its urge crosses, as it were, a borderline, passes from the safe zone within the Divine's own status into a different zone, creates it, as a matter of fact, by that overzealous and self-concentrated free movement. But, as I have said, there is no premeditation or arrière pensée or "bad will" or spirit of contradiction there at the origin of the deviation. It is no original sin: ...
... of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. " But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer,—first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the process... gradation emerges not only out of its precedent grade but in it, as Life emerges in Matter and is largely limited and determined in its self-expression by its material conditions, as Mind emerges in Life-in-Matter and is similarly limited and determined in its self-expression by life-conditions and material conditions, so Spirit too must emerge in a Mind embodied in Life-in-Matter and must be largely ...
... and develops the movement of the nature. It is a principle in each creature that derives from and is immediately related to a transcendent divine Becoming, that of the Ishwara, madbhāvaḥ . In this relation of the divine bhāva to the svabhāva and of the svabhāva to the superficial bhāvāḥ , of the divine Nature to the individual self-nature and of the self-nature in its pure and original quality... immutable self and that in him lies the key to cosmic existence. Therefore by rising to him through the Self it is possible to have spiritual freedom from our works and yet to continue in the works of Nature. But it has not yet been stated who is this Supreme, incarnate here in the divine teacher and charioteer of works, or what are his relations to the Self and to the individual being in Nature. Nor is... above this nature of the gunas, to the one immutable Self and silent Spirit, because then one gets beyond that action of the ego and desire which Page 264 is the whole root of the difficulty. But since this by itself seems to lead straight towards inaction, as beyond Nature there is no instrumentality of action and no cause or determinant of action,—for the immutable self is inactive, ...
... result, a transformation of our whole being, a growth into a new being, a new self, a new nature. Tamas A quality of Nature: the force of inconscience and inertia which translates in quality as incapacity and inaction. transformation In an individual, transformation means that the higher consciousness or nature is brought down into the mind, vital and body and takes the place of the lower... mental, vital and physical self. Not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above, a spiritual and supraphysical force acting on the physical world directly; a Force for illumination, transformation, purification. The help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift an individual beyond the present possibilities of his nature. Page-252 ... Glossary of Sanskrit and Other Terms The following definitions are based upon the writings of Sri Aurobindo. The self-aware force of existence; its essence is the power to be aware of itself and its objects, but it is not only power of awareness of self and things, it is or has also a dynamic and creative energy. Consciousness is not synonymous with mentality. The Supreme Being ...
... its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body ... It is a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or awakening to a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature." Religionists, on the contrary, who count by millions all over the... and denominational religions of the world, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and others, spiritual institutions on such organised scale are not many. For, at the head of a spiritual institution there must be a self-realised man, the Guru or the Teacher who is very rare and difficult to find. A Ramakrishna-Vivekananda or a Sri Aurobindo appears once in many centuries to lead the benighted humanity to the path of... here. The Swami defines religion in the following terms in his Raja Yoga : Page 5 Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divine within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this work, or worship, or psychic control or philosophy—by one, or more, or all o£ these—and be free. This is the whole of religion, Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals ...
... compelling Nature in all souls and in all happenings. This thing our outward mind cannot see easily because the practical truth which it feels is the energy of Nature at once working on us from without and forming too our action from within and reacting upon herself by the mental will, her instrument, to continue her self-shaping for farther Karma and farther consequence. Yet are we aware of a self and the... according to a fixed law of its self-governed workings. But since this Eternal and Infinite, our greater Self, is also the universal being, man in the universe is inseparably one with all the rest of existence, not a soul working out its isolated spiritual destiny and nature while all other beings are nothing but his environment and means or obstacles,—that they are indeed, but they are much more to... presence of this self imposes on our minds the idea of someone who wills, someone who shapes even the nature and is responsible for consequence. To understand one must cease to dwell exclusively on the act and will of the moment and its immediate consequences. Our present will and personality are bound by many things, by our physical and vital heredity, by a past creation of our mental nature, by environmental ...
... touch with the Self—the lower is separated from it by the activities of the Ignorance. When one becomes aware of the Self calm, silent, wide, universal, it is no longer covered over by the ignorance; when one identifies with the Self and not with the mind, life and body and their movements or with the small ego, that is the release of the Self. And how is the outer nature to rise into the... manifest. The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos—it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the Overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature. A Vision of the Universal Self What you saw in the vision was the wide and luminous infinite of what is called the universal Self or spirit. It is that which is one... the higher Prakriti before you realise the Self? The higher nature is that of the higher consciousness of which the first basis is the peace and wideness and realisation of the Self, the One that is all. The gaining of peace makes it easier to get the experience of the pure and free Self. Page 391 If not aspiration, at least keep the idea of what is necessary—(1) that the silence ...
... its Karma may have their origin in the free spirit and by arriving at myself by experience and self-finding I can exalt my state beyond all bondage of Karma to spiritual freedom. These are the four pillars of the complete theory of Karma. They are also the four truths of the dealings of Self with Nature. Page 337 ... which mechanically we return by physical dissolution or laya , but the unknown of Buddhism is a Permanent beyond the Law to which we return spiritually by an effort of self-suppression, of self-renunciation and, at the latest end, of self-extinction, by a mental dissolution of the Idea which maintains the law of relations and a moral dissolution of the world-desire which keeps up the stream of successions... ignorance and self-will and violence dashes up in the end, as the old Greek poet said of the haughty insolence and prosperous pride of man, against the very foundation of the throne of Zeus, the marble feet of Themis, the adamantine bust of Ananke. There is the secret of an eternal factor, the base of the unchanging action of the just and truthful gods, devānāṁ dhruvāṇi vratāni in the self-sufficient ...
... transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and the self of things and the self of nature; it will be a creative and interpretative revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty and of a greater spiritualised vision and power... Shelley an attempt at communion with a universal presence in Nature and a living principle of peace or light and love or universal power or conscious delight and beauty. A more deeply seeing and intimate poetry will take up these things into a yet greater Nature sense and vision and make us aware of the very self and soul and conscious being of Nature, her profoundest psychic suggestion and significance,... satisfaction, express a more richly filled content of self-experience raised to a more persistent sight of things absolute and infinite and a more potent and all-comprehending release into the calm and delight of the spirit. And this poetry must bring with it too a new depth of the intimacies of the soul with Nature. The early poetry of Nature gave us merely the delight of the forms of objects and ...
... begin to feel and think, or is he in his real self that inner Being and Power which is the whole sense of the evolution and the master of Nature? Is Nature only the force of self-expression, self-formation, self-creation of a secret spirit, and man however hedged in his present capacity, the first being in Nature in whom that power begins to be consciently self-creative in the front of the action, in this... becoming with the fullness of the spiritual being. The constant self-creation which we call birth finds there the perfect evolution of all that it held in its own nature and reveals its own utmost significance. The complete soul possesses all its self and all Nature. Therefore all this evolution is a growing of the Self in material nature to the conscious possession of its own spiritual being. It begins... this Spirit who is housed within us but not bound or shut in by mind or body, is our own self and to find and be our self was, as the ancient sages knew, always the object of our human striving, for it is the object of the whole immense working of Nature. But it is by degrees of the self-finding that Nature enlarges to her spiritual reality. Man himself is a doubly involved being; most of himself ...
... vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her,—it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and... Purusha is not the surface ego, but a silent Self, a source of Power, an originator and receiver of Knowledge behind the ego. Our mental "I" is only a false reflection of this Self, this Power, this Knowledge. This Purusha or supporting Consciousness is therefore the cause, recipient and support of all Nature's works, but he is not himself the doer. Prakriti, Nature-Force, in front and Shakti, Conscious-Force... mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process. In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the ...
... The soul does not move, but motion of Nature takes place in its perfect stillness. The motion of Nature is not real or material motion, but vibration of the soul's self-consciousness. Nature is Chit-Shakti, the Lord's expressive power of self-awareness, by which whatever He sees in Himself, becomes in form of consciousness. Every thing in Nature is a becoming of the one Spirit who alone... of the stream of Nature's movement & subject to Nature & the process of the movement, falsely believes the soul to be the subject of Nature & not its lord, anish and not Ish. This is the illusion of bondage which the manomaya Purusha either accepts or seeks to destroy. Those who accept it are called baddha Jivas, souls in bondage; those who seek to destroy it mumukshu Jivas, self-liberating souls,—those... not a condition of existence. That which inhabits the forms of Kali is Self and Lord of the Movement. Purusha is master of Prakriti, not her subject; Soul determines Form & Action & is not determined by them. Spirit reflects in its knowledge the activity of Nature, but only those activities which it has itself compelled Nature to initiate. The soul in the body is master of body and not subject to ...
... 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 in Nature, the always intended goal of a progressive manifestation in the universe. The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the individual... feeling and impulse. No doubt, we can feel that in a sense even in the nature of the Ignorance, but it is the divine Power and Presence in a disguise, a diminution, an inferior figure. Ours is a greater demand, that our nature shall be a power of the Divine in the Truth of the Divine, in the Light, in the force of the eternal self-conscient Will, in the wideness of the sempiternal Knowledge." 39 ... Page 52 and the child. The soul turns to the Mother-Soul because of the self-existent nature of this love and because that points us to the home towards which we turn from our wanderings in the world into the bosom in which we find our rest. But the highest and the greatest relation springs from the very nature of love itself; it is the passion of the Lover and the Beloved. For love is a passion ...
... Varuna in it, it cannot attain to the self-effulgent nature of Truth, it can only grope after & grasp portions of Truth, not Truth in itself & in its nature. And so long as it clings Page 70 to any one thing in wish & enjoyment, it must by the very act shut out others & cannot then embrace the divine vast & all-comprehending love & bliss of the immortal nature which it is, as I shall suggest... from the self-existent truth & right of the divine or immortal nature; the lords of knowledge dwelling in the human consciousness as the prachetasah , informing its acts of consciousness which include in the ancient psychology action & feeling no less than thought & attuning them to follow spontaneously the just rhythm of the divine right & truth, deliver effectually this human & mortal nature from evil... rik of the Sukta. The traveller is one who is journeying towards the Truth, the ritam. We have already hazarded the conception of the Ritam as the principle of Mahas, the spontaneous, self-existent, self-efficient nature of the infinite & divine consciousness, satyam ritam brihat, to which right action, right emotion, right knowledge, right enjoyment belong inalienably & result naturally & without effort ...
... 622 All are deceived, do what the One Power dictates 626 All here is Spirit self-moved eternally 597 All is abolished but the mute Alone 561 All is not finished in the unseen decree 595 All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour 578 All Nature is taught in radiant ways to move 601 All sounds, all voices have become Thy voice... 256 Here in the green of the forest . . . 680 How hast thou lost, O month of honey . . . 34 However long Night's hour, I will not dream 602 I am a single Self all Nature fills 619 I am filled with the crash of war . . . 679 I am greater than the greatness of the seas 626 I am held no more by life's alluring cry 606 I... gathered my dreams in a silver air 534 I have sailed the golden ocean 638 I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind 604 I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self 603 I heard a foghorn shouting at a sheep 658 I heard the coockcouck jabbering on the lea 659 I housed within my heart the life of things 605 I look across ...
... our index and our foundation. The Self of man is a thing hidden and occult; it is not his body, it is not his life, it is not—even though he is in the scale of evolution the mental being, the Manu,—his mind. Therefore neither the fullness of his physical, nor of his vital, nor of his mental nature can be either the last term or the true standard of his self-realisation; they are means of manifestation... more are his heritage from the subhuman origins of his life and body and physical mind. It is because of this heritage that he finds self-exceeding the most difficult of lessons and the most painful of endeavours. Yet it is by exceeding of the lower self that Nature accomplishes the great strides of her evolutionary process. To learn by what he has been, but also to know and increase to what he can... have to try to see more clearly what we mean when we say that self-realisation is the sense, secret or overt, of individual and of social development. As yet we have not to deal with the race, with mankind as a unity; the nation is still our largest compact and living unit. And it is best to begin with the individual, both because of his nature we have a completer and nearer knowledge and experience than ...
... reaching a state in which the true individuality can be attained. That individuality is vast, infinite, and can contain the whole world within itself. It is not the small narrow limited individual self in Nature. When you attain that true individuality you can remain in the world and yet be above it. You can act and still be not bound by your action. For getting rid of the separative personality Nirvana... can see these things in one's nature. NIRODBARAN: He had a double strain in his being—the turn inward and the urge towards work. Moreover, he admitted that he was doing things driven blindly by some unseen Force. SRI AUROBINDO (after some time) : It is not easy to get rid of these things. Even when the higher consciousness comes, they can go on in the lower nature. And if Vivekananda found himself... carry my boat to the other shore.' "After all, Joe, I am only the boy who used to listen with rapt wonderment to the wonderful words of Ramakrishna under the Banyan at Dakshineswar. That is my true nature; works and activities, doing good and so forth are all superimpositions. Now I again hear his voice; the same old voice thrilling my soul. Bonds are breaking—love dying, work becoming tasteless—the ...
... emotions and transiences of life which can then be seen and sung as succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation. Its object is to express the very self of man and the self of things and the self of Nature. And, finally, it aims at a creative and interpretative revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty and of a greater spiritualised... Poetry, too, is a quest of truth or feature of the truth which is inspired by inmost possible experience of any object, — even a leaf or a stone or an event or Nature, or God or Spirit, provided that the experience is turned inward so as to create self-vision in the profounder depths of the inner being of the poet, which is thrown out in rhythmic movement by the discovery of the word or image or a figure... nothing can be sustained. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of the knowledge of the Self, which opens the door to the self which is bliss, and points out that he who knows the Bliss and the Eternal, he fears not anything in this Page 75 world or elsewhere. The poet who celebrates the bliss of the self is, therefore, fearless victor.² Beauty is but a form of bliss, and wherever there ...
... belongs. Nothing pertaining to Time and Space can determine his movements. His actions well straight out of his swabhāva , his essential self-nature, which is in perfect union with the Will of the Divine. His life is a spontaneous flowering of his self-nature, revealing a distinctive individual aspect of the Divine. His swabhāva and swadharma furnish the force, the form, and the right rhythm to... . The whole organism of our nature must undergo a total transmutation, a supramental conversion, before it can become a perfect instrument of divine manifestation. And it is not enough that the conscious nature is transformed, even the subconscient and the inconscient ranges, too, must become conscious and luminous. There must be nothing left anywhere in the nature which can respond even in the... consciousness has moved away from human law and limits and passed into the divine liberty; away from government by the external and the transient into the self-rule of the inner and the eternal; away from the binding forms of the finite into the free self-determination of the Infinite. 'Howsoever he lives and acts,' says the Gitâ, 'he lives and acts in Me'.... It is immaterial whether he spends his days ...
... and who is engaged in works as an offering to the Master of self-energising and all-giving sacrifice. That is the path that leads to the state of immortality, the state of union with the divine Being, identity with the Self and oneness with the supreme dynamic divine Nature, and the state of transcendence of the three gunas of lower nature, — the state of trigunātita, and the state of sādharmyam. ... indwelling Lord of all Nature and turn to Him with one's whole being, — with the life and body and sense and mind and heart and understanding, — with one's whole dedicated knowledge and will and action, sarvabhāvena, in every way of conscious self and instrumental nature. For all other Dharmas or norms of action are only a preparation for that highest Dharma which is the law of divine nature and divine action... Purusha and Prakriti, and the precise relations between the supreme Page 24 Purusha (Purushottama), 5 the immutable Self (Akshara Purusha), 6 and the mobile Self (Akshara Purusha), as also the intimate relations between Purushottama and the higher nature, Para Prakriti, which manifests multiplicity of individual souls (parāprakrtir jīvabhotā). 7 This standpoint also clarifies the ...
... that stage passed, the higher realisation is to be the natural expression of ordinary earth-life: its normal state is to be the state of the higher consciousness, its life naturally moved by its self-nature expressing its own truth. If there is to be a Divine destiny for earth, it must be because of its free choice. There must be no pressure or even solicitude from any agent outside itself... she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice... As the original birth of Ignorance was a free choice of Page 101 Ignorance, even so the return of Ignorance to consciousness is to be a matter of spontaneous self-seeking. It may be true or it is true in a deeper way that a mortal is chosen whom the Divine has already chosen, but that is another matter. Here upon earth we, mortal souls, are free agents, we choose ...
... May none bring hurt to us. (19) Upon the earth they offered to the Gods the sacrifice and the oblation perfectly prepared. Upon earth men, mortals, live by their own inner nature and outer need (self-nature and food). May that wide earth establish in us the vital force and a long span of life. May Earth grace me with a ripe old age. (20) The aroma, O Earth, that rises out of thee ...
... " At first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his normal mind and life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a life-form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly... itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel... union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature." The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 856-57 In fact, so long as there is any doubt or hesitation, so long as one asks oneself the question of whether one has or hasn't realised ...
... that stage passed, the higher realisation has to be the natural expression of ordinary earth-life: its normal state has to be the state of the higher consciousness, its life naturally moved by its self-nature expressing its own truth. If there is to be a Divine destiny for earth, it must be because of its free choice. There must be no pressure or even Page 14 solicitude from any... she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice... the line of destiny it has itself chosen. As the original birth of Ignorance was a free choice of Ignorance, even so the return of Ignorance to consciousness has to be a matter of spontaneous self-seeking. It may be true or it is true in a deeper way that a mortal is chosen whom the Divine has already chosen, but that is another matter. Here upon earth we mortal souls are free agents, we choose ...
... express itself fully and wholly in a special manner. But what is that work? The kartavyam karma —the work that demands to be done—deriving from your swa-dharma —your Self-nature? Evidently, it is not that of your superficial nature, which the mind chooses, the vital prefers and the body finds convenient. To come by your true or soul work, you have to pass through a considerable discipline, a rigorous... You should try to bring out the best in you and put it into your work. In other words, the Page 33 work becomes an instrument of progress. The goodwill, attention, concentration, self-forgetfulness and the control over yourself, over your organs and nerves —the "smaller" the work the more detailed is the control gained—all that are involved in doing a work perfectly, with as much... make it as attractive as a romance, as significant as a symbol. Page 32 How to do it? How to find interest in any thing or all things? Is there not a work that conforms to your nature, adapted to your character and capacity? And are there not works that are antagonistic to your grain, that lie outside your scope and province? The question is not about your scope and capacity ...
... express itself fully and wholly in a special manner. But what is that work? The kartavyam karma – the work that demands to be done – deriving from your swadharma – your self-nature? Evidently, it is not that of your superficial nature, which the mind chooses, the vital prefers and the body finds convenient. To come by your true or soul work, you have to pass through a considerable discipline, a rigorous... is the crux of the matter. You should try to bring out the best in you and put it into your work. In other words, the work becomes an instrument of progress. The goodwill, attention, concentration, self-forgetfulness and the control over yourself, over your organs and nerves – the "smaller" the work the more detailed is the control gained – all which are involved in doing a work perfectly, with as... upon it; you can choose to make it as attractive as a romance, as significant as a symbol. How to do it? How to find interest in any thing or all things? Is there not a work that conforms to your nature, adapted to your character and capacity? And are there not works that are against the grain with you that lie outside your scope and province? The question is not about your scope and capacity. ...
... mind and memory mainly in regard to the primary phenomenon of mental self-consciousness in Time. But if we consider them with regard to self-experience as well as self-consciousness and other-experience as well as self-experience, we shall find that we arrive at the same result with richer contents and a still clearer light on the nature of the Ignorance. At present, let us thus express what we have seen... It is Self that is the man: or, if we regard only our normal surface existence, Mind is the man,—for man is the mental being. Memory is only one of the many powers and processes of the Mind, which is at present the chief action of Consciousness-Force in our dealings with self, world and Nature. Nevertheless, it is as well to begin with this phenomenon of memory when we consider the nature of the... the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter VIII Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance Some speak of the self-nature of things, others say that it is Time. Swetaswatara Upanishad. (VI. 1.) Two are the forms of Brahman, Time and the Timeless. Maitri Upanishad ...
... the source and law and aim of our ethical being and from this there can come the knowledge of him as the highest Self to which our active nature aspires, the Will to which we have to assimilate our will, the eternal Right and Purity and Truth and Wisdom into harmony with which our nature has to grow and towards whose being our being is attracted. By this way we arrive at the Yoga of works, and this... even awe and reverence for the divine Power are a sign of distance and division and they disappear in the intimacy of the union of love. Moreover, fear belongs to the lower nature, to the lower self, and in approaching the higher Self must be put aside before we can enter into its presence. This relation of the divine fatherhood and the closer relation with the Divine as the Mother-Soul of the universe... because of the self-existent nature of this love and because that points us to the home towards which we turn from our wanderings in the world and to the bosom in which we find our rest. Page 568 But the highest and the greatest relation is that which starts from none of the ordinary religious motives, but is rather of the very essence of Yoga, springs from the very nature of love itself; ...
... universe which inhabits also our being, to be in communion with It and union with It; (d) A turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being into a new becoming, or a new being, a new Self, a new nature. In the literature relating to the realm of spirituality and spiritual experience, one of the relevant works that stands out is William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience that... its means are distinctively spiritual. Distinguishing features of what we call spirituality are toe following: (a) Awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, Page 1 Self, Soul, which is other than our mind, life and body; (b) An inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that; (c) A quest for entering into the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe... are four main features: (i) A feeling of being in a wider life of the existence of an ideal power; (ii) A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control; (iii) An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down; and (iv) A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious ...
... Virat. Paribhu The Almighty. Mahat. The Self in creatures. God in Man (Avatars.) The Self in Nature. Images God as Fate God as Providence Worship (Prayer & Praise) Purusha & Prakritih. III. Vidya & Avidya Salvation. Escape from Avidya. Knowledge, Love & Works. Nirguna & Saguna Brahman. Self-realisation in Virat. States of moksha (Hir[ ...
... escape from them into scholastic or aesthetic prettinesses or extravagance. But an age which brings in large and new vital and spiritual truths, truths of our being, truths of the self of man and the inner self of Nature and opens vast untrod ranges to sight and imagination, is not likely to be an age of decadence, and a poetry which voices these things,—unless its creative power has been fatally atrophied... action of man; and in this type we have Homer. Arrived to a greater depth of living, seeing from Page 206 a vivid half outward half inward turn of mind his thought and action and self and world and Nature, man begins to feel more sensitively the passion and power of life, its joy and pain, its wonder and terror and beauty and romance, to turn everything into moved thought and sentiment and... its half spiritual turn, by Wordsworth's force of ethical thought and communion with Nature, by Shelley's imaginative transcendentalism, Keats' worship of Beauty, Byron's Titanism and force of personality, Coleridge's supernaturalism or, as it should more Page 208 properly be called, his eye for other nature, Blake's command of the inner psychic realms. Only in drama was there, owing to the ...
... sound order is that which comes from within as the result of a nature that has discovered itself and found its own law and the law of its relations with others. Therefore the truest order is that which is founded on the greatest possible liberty; for liberty is at once the condition of vigorous variation and the condition of self-finding. Nature secures variation by division into groups and insists on liberty... intellectual, aesthetic and expressive bond which tempers division where division exists and strengthens unity where unity has been achieved. Especially it gives self-consciousness to national or racial unity and creates the bond of a common self-expression and a common record of achievement. On the other hand, it is a means of national differentiation and perhaps the most powerful of all, not a barren... human life is the cause of its most deep-seated maladies; it is not faithful to itself or sincere with Nature and therefore it stumbles and suffers. The utility, the necessity of natural groupings may be seen if we consider the purpose and functioning of one great principle of division in Nature, her insistence on diversity of language. The seeking for a common language for all mankind was very strong ...
... स्वधावोऽमृतस्य नाम । याश्च माया मायिनां विश्वमिन्व त्वे पूर्वीः संदधुः पृष्टबन्धो ॥३॥ 3) Many are the names of thee, the Immortal, O Fire, O knower of the births, O god who bearest with thee the self-law of nature; all the manifold magic of the Lords of magic they have combined in thee, O all-ruler, O builder of the levels. अग्निर्नेता भग इव क्षितीनां दैवीनां देव ऋतुपा ऋतावा । स वृत्रहा सनयो विश्ववेदाः... स्तोकाः श्चोतन्ति मेदसः । स्वधर्मन् देववीतये श्रेष्ठं नो धेहि वार्यम् ॥२॥ 2) O purifying Fire, full of light there drip for thee drops of understanding; give us the supreme desirable thing in thy self-law for the advent of the gods. तुभ्यं स्तोका घृतश्चुतोऽग्ने विप्राय सन्त्य । ऋषिः श्रेष्ठः समिध्यसे यज्ञस्य प्राविता भव ॥३॥ 3) To thee, the illumined seer, come these drops dripping light ...
... lower nature,—a separation that must be effected by self-knowledge through the discriminating reason and by transcendence of our subjection to the three gunas constituent of that nature. It has been completed and its limitations exceeded by a large revelation of the unity of the supreme Soul and supreme Nature, para puruṣa, parā prakṛti . Vedanta of the philosophers has been admitted for the self-effacement... and puts forth the power of his Nature in all action. Yoga has Page 355 been admitted for the self-surrender of the will, mind, heart, all the psychological being to the Ishwara, the divine Lord of the nature. It has been completed by the revelation of the supernal Master of existence as the original Godhead of whom the Jiva is the partial being in Nature. Its possible limitations have been... divine Self hidden from the mind and heart which he inhabits, this luminous Inhabitant concealed from the view of the soul in Nature which he has put forth into Nature as his representative, who is all the time evolving the mutations of our personality in Time and our sensational existence in Space,—Time and Space that are the conceptual movement and extension of the Godhead in us. All is this self-seeing ...
... individual will be the sole, the first and the last unit. The individual, it is said, will have so developed and perfected its self-nature that by following the law of that nature, it will automatically and spontaneously live and move harmoniously with all the rest; each will be a self-contained unit and there will be a kind of pre-established harmony among all. Even if it be so, however, a hierarchical form... temporary and contributory function. Nationhood, however, developed into such a firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1 The Ideals of Human Unity THE unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and ...
... the individual nature. You are seeking for Self-realisation — but what is that Self if not the Mother's self. There is no other. As the soul, the psychic being, is in direct connection with the Divine and is a part of Him, so too is Page 150 Self the Atman. Why then does one not feel intimacy with the Divine while realising the Self as one experiences... the outer nature rising upward to the higher Prakriti? And how is the outer nature to rise into the higher Prakriti before you realise the Self? The higher nature is that of the higher consciousness of which the first basis is the peace and wideness and realisation of the Self, the One that is all. In the quietness or silence, should not one feel the Mother's Force working... what is being done. Being in the Self, am I now living in the Mother's consciousness? And are not all actions coming from that true consciousness? What do you mean by coming from the true consciousness? The pure existence consciousness does not initiate any action. Actions come through it either from the ordinary nature or from the Mother's Force. In fact ...
... individual will be the sole, the first and the last unit. The individual, it is said, will have so developed and perfected its self-nature that by following the law of that nature, it will automatically and spontaneously five and move harmoniously with all the rest; each will be a self-contained unit and there will be Page 98 a kind of pre-established harmony among all. Even if it be so,... only a temporary and contributory function. Nationhood, however, developed into such a firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels... PART II TOWARDS A NEW SOCIETY The Ideals Of Human Unity The unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation. Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and ...
... evolves, because the soul-consciousness is the first cause, inconscient Nature-force only the second and dependent cause; but still it is Nature and not Soul which supplies the instruments of our subjectivity. First in order come Buddhi, discriminative or determinative power evolving out of Nature-force, and its subordinate power of self-discriminating ego. Then as a secondary evolution there arises ... intelligent will, is he,"—is the conscious self, the Purusha. Therefore, says the Gita, it is this Purusha, this supreme cause of our subjective life which we have to understand and become aware of by the intelligence; in that we have to fix our will. So holding our lower subjective self in Nature firmly poised and stilled by means of the greater really conscient self, we can destroy the restless ever-active... possessed of his self." For what gettings and havings has the free soul? Once we are possessed of the Self, we are in possession of all things. And yet he does not cease from work and action. There is the originality and power of the Gita, that having affirmed this static condition, this superiority to nature, this emptiness even of all that constitutes ordinarily the action of Nature for the liberated ...
... and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in Page 196 the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things, who awaits them... power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind and reflective reason towards an intimate self-experience, from thought to vision, from intellectual experiment to intuitive experience, from life and Nature as observed by the eye of the intellect in their appearance to life and Nature as seen and felt by the soul in their spirit and reality. Mankind is still engaged in thinking and searching... psychological and the spiritual sense of his past, to the deeper significance of his present, to his self-creation. The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our kind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the finer impressions by which we ...
... therefore they must live egoistically rather than not at all, with whatever curb of law, ethics and practical common sense of self-restraint nature and experience have taught them. But subjectivism is in its very nature an attempt at self-knowledge and at living by a true self-knowledge and by an inner strength, and there is no real gain in it if we only repeat the old error in new terms. Therefore we... best realised the purpose of Nature and whose victory and rule is therefore the will of God. For all organised lives, all self-conscious egos are in a state of war, sometimes overt, sometimes covert, sometimes complete, sometimes partial, and by the survival of the best is secured the highest advance of the race. And where was the best, which was the most advanced, self-realising, efficient, highes... and therefore to live from within. It is a step towards self-knowledge and towards living in and from the self, away from knowledge of things as the not-self and from the living according to this objective idea of life and the universe. Everything depends on how that step is taken, to what kind of subjectivity we arrive and how far we go in self-knowledge; for here the dangers of error are as great and ...
... which is at its lowest the strong nature's pride in self-mastery, self-control, superiority to passion and weakness; but the Stoic ideal seizes upon this point of departure and makes it the key to an entire liberation of the soul from subjection to all weakness of its lower nature. As the tamasic inward recoil is a generalisation of Nature's principle of jugupsā or self-protection from suffering, so... of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character its pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery by austere endurance; the happier and serener philosophic equality prefers self-mastery by knowledge, by detachment, by a high intellectual indifference seated above the disturbances to which our nature is prone, udāsīnavad āsīnaḥ , as the Gita expresses... The mind recoils by pain and dislike from the adverse strokes of life; that is Nature's device for enforcing a principle of self-protection, jugupsā , so that the vulnerable nervous and bodily parts of us may not unduly rush upon self-destruction to embrace it: it takes joy in the favourable touches of life; that is Nature's lure of rajasic pleasure, so that the force in the creature may overcome the ...
... is left for the soul after liberation and to what purpose? Equality has been seated in the nature or governs the whole nature; there has been achieved a radical deliverance from the ego-idea, from the pervading ego-sense, from all feelings and impulsions of the ego and its self-will and desires. The entire self-consecration has been made not only in thought and heart but in all the complexities of the... 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 in Nature, the always intended goal of a progressive manifestation in the universe. The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the individual... are used or that act of themselves, and the spirit and knowledge of the worker. For in reality, no man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live in the presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free from desire and the illusion of personal impulsion, is the one thing needful. That and not the bodily cessation ...
... then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another... ess and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal śakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the cosmic Self or fall of ecstatic bhakti or ānanda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling... realisation which is almost universally regarded as the summit experience of spiritual life—and yet remain untransformed in his nature. "One can realise the Self in all and all in the Self"; "one can realise the universal śakti doing all things"; "one can feel merged in the cosmic Self", and yet, paradoxical as it may sound, none of these realisations, not even the sum-total of them, will constitute the ...
... there was for me no God. An idealistic vein in my nature loved great poetry and kindled up to great art: their "immortal longings" struck a responsive chord in my heart, but the modern temper held sway on the whole and the name of Sri Aurobindo receded into the background. A series of unexpected events jolted my intellectual self-sufficiency and sent my emotional part looking for... wide freedom lay at the basis of this "Integral Yoga". Yes, it was not a smooth canter all the way. But the returns were great. There were intense inner experiences. The discovery of an inmost self whose very nature is bliss, the sense of being free from the shackles of the body, the enlightening influx of a force from above the brain-mind — these were no small rewards. And the rewards were all the more... transformed my nature from what it was to what it was not. Page 14 I did it by a special manner, not by a miracle and I did it to show what could be done and how it could be done. I did not do it out of any personal necessity of my own or by a miracle without any process. I say that if it is not so, then my Yoga is useless and my life was a mistake, — a mere absurd freak of Nature without ...
... real forms of the self- aware existence of the Divine. In another yogic experience there are relations of differences between individual souls and the Divine, and there are also relations of differences between the Divine and all the other living or inanimate powers of the Eternal, and there are also relations in the dealings of the individual with the cosmic self in the nature of the universe... concerning the ascent to and the descent of the supramental consciousness into the human instrument that can enable the evolutionary nature in the human instrument so that the supramental being could be created as a first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe. All this could be a part of another book in the future. See also a Synoptic Note at the... the Divine. Another yogic experience affirms one self of all and of all that we have consciousness and the vision. In the light of that experience, we can no longer say or think that we are entirely different from him, but that there is self and there is a phenomenon of self- Page 61 existence.There is also an experience that all is one self, but all is variation in the phenomenon. There ...
... performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order. Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even. Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet. Breaking the silence... given the choice of a number of subjects. I chose "Self-Realisation or God-Realisation". I do not now remember which of the two I supported, Self or God! Perhaps I said that Self-Realisation really meant God-Realisation, for the Self was nothing but an illusi'on. Or did I say that to realise God was nothing but Self-Realisation, for God was nothing, Self alone was the reality? I must have introduced a... could draw the students towards him. J. C. Bose was a somewhat different type. I did not have the luck to meet him in class more than once or twice, for he left for England soon. But he was by nature of a serious temperament; Page 435 and in contrast to P. C. Ray who never bothered about his dress or appearance, he was always neat and prim and proper. But he too was equally worthy ...
... caused by adverse forces of a consciousness of a self-contradictory nature. I have no inner knowledge to that effect—that it was intended to be worked out by these three forces alone. The whole thing looks like an intended perfect manifestation perverted in its surface mental and vital consciousness by the power of a self-contradictory hostile nature that was a possibility of God's being. If... 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 with the ignorance of the nature; it is only self-giving to the Mother that can do that. 7 November 1935 Why is the sex-force working so vehemently... possible, but if it resists, then there is in the nature of things difficulty and struggle and the Asuric forces have their chance. 25 December 1933 It may be that a God-man was created first. But by "interference" he degenerated into the present man in his surface mental and vital consciousness. And this same spirit of a self-contradictory hostile nature created in his surface consciousness the exclusive ...
... imperfect possession of our self and our nature. A complete self-knowledge in all things and at all moments is the gift of the supramental gnosis and with it a complete self-mastery, not merely in the sense of control of Nature but in the sense of a power of perfect self-expression in Nature. Whatever knowledge of self there would be, would be perfectly embodied in the will of the self, the will perfectly... is self-existent and manifests itself according to the order self-determined by the Will of the Infinite in the Page 1038 supernature. This self-determination according to a self-existent knowledge replaces the automatism of Nature and the standards of Mind by the spontaneity of a Truth self-aware and self-active in the very grain of the existence. In the gnostic being this self-determining... would be real to his self-awareness and realised in his inner life. All his existence would be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit; all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance of Nature. All life would have to him the sense of the Conscious Being, the Purusha within, finding its self-expression in Nature; his life and all ...
... able to see, though in another way than that of philosophy and religion, the self of the Eternal, to know God and his godheads, to know the freedom and immortality which is our divinest aim, to see in the delight of a union in beauty the self of the Infinite, the self of Nature and the whole self of man. But so to see the self is to meet the spirit in everything and the spirit reveals to us the inner... mean that, but only that art is not an imitation or reproduction of outward Nature, but rather missioned to give by the aid of a transmuting faculty something more inwardly true than the external life and appearance. Page 227 And next, there is the quite opposite idea, which one finds sometimes rampant and self-confident in an age of realism and the cult of vital power, that the truth which... there is too a high final intention to hold the truth, the light found in our inner power of being and turn it to a power of Page 233 our psychical self, our spirit, our self of knowledge and will, our self of love and joy, our self of life and action. This too, though not the same thing in form, is akin to the higher work of poetry when it acts, as the ancients would have had it consciously ...
... all of them, self-answering, through the analysis of the concept of a self-answering question is one of the major problems of meta-philosophy. In this paper I shall be concerned mainly with the analysis and explanation of the view that questions in philosophy, as distinguished from meta-philosophy, provide their own answers. This will raise the question, what is the nature of reasoning... the real nature of things. On this view of logic it would follow that philosophical questions are self-answering. If philosophical propositions are propositions of logic they are, according to this view, analytic which means that they are necessarily true. If an answer to a philosophical question is a proposition which is necessarily true there can be only one logically self-consistent... Each of these two logics claims further, either implicitly or explicitly, that the questions of philosophy are self-answering, but fails to make good its claim. What then is the nature of the logic of philosophical reasoning? In what sense are philosophical questions self-answering and how can we show that they are so? I have suggested that the logic of an argument is internal ...
... insecurely the potentiality at which it works; there must be Page 38 a faculty or principle of conscious effective force which corresponds to the unconscious automatic principle of self-fulfilment in Nature, and this principle must be sought for in the form of consciousness that exceeds Mind. Mind, finally, aspires to seize and enjoy the essential delight-giving quality, the rasa of things... Page 41 × Cf. for example, the Aitareya Upanishad which shows us the Atman or Self using the Purusha as that in which all the operations of Nature are formed. × I use the language of the materialist Haeckel in spite... one reasoning animal upon earth, the thinking race; he is essentially the mental being in a terrestrial body, the manu . Quite apart from the existence of a soul or self one in all creatures, the body is not even the phenomenal self of man; the physical life also is not himself; both may be dissolved, man will persist. But if the mental being also is dissolved, man as man ceases to be; for this is ...
... only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another... ess and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling... For certain ways of thinking liberation is a throwing off of all nature, a silent state of pure being, a Nirvana or extinction, a dissolution of the natural existence into some indefinable Absolute, mok ṣ a. But an absorbed and immersed bliss, a wideness of actionless peace, a release of self-extinction or a self-drowning in the Absolute is not our aim. We shall give to the idea of liberation ...
... The Mother favoured the "Free Progress" System of education for the outstanding students for the full flowering of all their potential and for the development of their true swadharma, self-nature. But it is not very easy on the part of an untrained average student to utilise the methodology of free progress in the right way. For example, in the Higher Course of SAICE, where the free progress... appeal to the tiny tot four or five times to stop crying or to go away from our classroom. But the boy, being a sample of egoistic human consciousness, has already developed a budding personal vanity and self-importance and does not want to tolerate any contradiction coming from any quarter. Its spontaneous tendency is to oppose it. It has developed no psychological freedom to curb this tendency. And I... without delay. We won't allow you to go out of this room until you have carried out my order. Start crying, I say, without any further delay." The boy may get puzzled for a moment but then his self-pride becomes active with redoubled force. In his egoistic blindness, he cannot see through the game I have been playing and vehemently protests: "No, I will not cry; I cannot bear carrying out at ...
... Power". It becomes conscious of a Light which is the source of all, it searches for One who is a real doer of all works, it seeks for "The unfelt Self within who is the guide, The unknown Self above who is the goal." Nature's labour in the cosmos becomes significant and full of purpose and we see that "A mystic motive drives the stars and suns". The purpose of human life gradually... eternity of rapture's moods : Age never came, care, never lined the face." This life played with danger and sported with elements of nature; it conquered space and created sciences, giving man the mastery of the world. Here life was true to self, it was entirely sincere, without falsehood and crookedness. "There freedom was sole rule and highest law". This life did not require any other... the Light supreme is far away" and generally "Our conscious life obeys the inconscience's law". This fate lasts so long as man's soul does not attain its freedom. When man awakes to his free Self, then, "Nature steps into the eternal Light", "Then only ends this dream of nether life". At the outset, he saw that in the Eternal consciousness there appeared something which can be called an infinite ...
... and Darkness are organised in the same Sachchidananda. Even all the movements in time are only the movements of the Divine Consciousness. Nature and the Self, Prakriti and Purusha are no longer separate but the whole of Nature is felt in the self. All Nature's happenings were events in her, The heart-beats of the cosmos were her own, All beings, thought and felt and moved in her. ... peace, and the characteristic smiling old beauty of the landscape. Nature, the Ancient Mother, continued to be passionately attached to Savitri and responded in a thousand different ways revealing her possessive love and ignorance of the changes within or the possible and inevitable mutations without. She too was her old gracious self to men.... To all she was the same perfect Savitri: A... abroad—That which is bright, bodiless, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal." The problem arises because the Reality and the Manifestation are seen not as the Reality sees but as the faculties or the instruments in man's ...
... adapts itself to the formations of Nature. Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something... calculable or controllable, and many incoherent and inharmonious mental elements use his reason and will, enter into and determine his self-building, his nature-development, his life action. Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs... on the nature and environment and arrive at a strong self-affirmation in life and action. This is the second step of harmonised formulation possible in the ascent of the nature. At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical nature. The mental ...
... qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for... consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with Prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated... tranquillity of the sage; and tranquillity is a sign of increasing self-mastery and purity. The preoccupation with universal beauty even in its aesthetic forms has an intense power for refining and subtilising the nature, and at its highest it is a great force for purification. Even the scientific habit of mind and the disinterested preoccupation with cosmic law and truth not only refine the reasoning ...
... Human reason understands moral self-discipline, which is, to quote William James's apt words, "but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure". It understands too something of religious fervour in which the fire of Godward emotions burns up some of the dross of human nature. But it has no idea of the elemental forces that go to constitute human nature, and does not know from what murky depths... view; and unless we plumb the depths and scale the heights, we live in a woeful ignorance of our self, of our nature, and of the world in which we are set to evolve. Most of these motive forces surge up from the subconscient and the inconscient layers of our being, and if we want to transform our nature, it cannot be done by any surface adjustments and reforms, but by a thorough exploration of those... gift to them—to the service of their animal self ? Human reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing, problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery; the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it, Page 363 Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our f ...
... the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ego is a superficial construction of Nature. It is only when we have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as well as on the surface, that we can acquire a true basis of knowledge. The... disaster or at the least an exaggeration of ego, self-affirmation and desire, an enlarged and more powerful ignorance instead of an enlarged and more powerful knowledge. Moreover, we find in this inner or subliminal being the means of directly distinguishing between what rises from within and what comes to us from outside, from others or from universal Nature, and it becomes possible to exercise a control... limited self-knowledge; our self-view is vitiated by the constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental structure of apparent self that will ...
... reason understands moral self-discipline, which is, to quote William James's apt words, "but as a plaster Page 39 hiding a sore it can never cure". It understands too something of religious fervour in which the fire of Godward emotions bums up some of the dross of human nature. But it has no idea of the elemental forces that go to constitute human nature, and does not know from... view; and unless we plumb the depths and scale the heights, we live in a woeful ignorance of our self, of our nature and of the world in which we are set to evolve. Most of these motive forces surge up from the subconscient and the inconscient layers of our being, and if we want to transform our nature, it cannot be done by any surface adjustments and reforms, but by a thorough exploration of those... God's precious gift to them—to the service of their animal self? Human reason can only marvel, but find no solution of this distressing problem; for the solution lies beyond it. It lies in a double discovery: the discovery of that which is beyond the level of our mental consciousness and of that which is below it. Our present active self is but an outer fringe and surface of our far-ranging ...
... reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine.... 26 Sri Aurobindo's views regarding the nature of self, ego and individuality stem from his view of reality just stated. Integral View of Self Identity of Reality and Self ...all this that is... is the Brahman, the Reality. The Brahman becomes all these beings, all beings must be seen in the Self, the Reality... varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one's own greater reality. 8 Regarding the way in which ego, self and individuality are experienced in the cosmic consciousness as described above we may note the following: (i)Ego and self are not felt to be the same as in the... individuality are unreal, the One Self alone is real. Page 374 Integral View of Reality The theories of Nihilism and Illusionism show that the view regarding the nature of self is inextricably tied up with the view of Reality. The two theories view Reality in seemingly opposite ways and consequently assert opposite views regarding the nature of self. Nihilism regards Reality as ...
... bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation... Or with another human being—a generalised phenomenon often dismissed as a purely 9 Savitri, pp. 294-96. Page 327 biological device employed by evolutionary Nature to ensure the self-renewal of the race. But, like the purest white bloom that I once saw emerging from a dung-heap in an Indian village, a rarer love can also emerge from that 'evolutionary device'. The Taj... man's soul with life and death... Iclimb not to thy everlasting Day, Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night. To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way, Give back the other self my nature asks, Thy spaces need him not to help their joy; Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee To fling delight down like a net of gold... O thunderer with the lightnings of ...
... ruled, Her conscious automaton, her desire's dupe". —Book VII, Canto 4. Compare: GITA:—actions are being done by qualities of Nature on all sides yet the soul bewildered by ego believes "I am the doer". also:— "It is the self-nature that dominates". —Book VII, Canto 4. "God made experiments with animal shapes" —Book VII, Canto 4. Compare: A similar... Belphegore grains of fire Circling in a comer of its boundless self, The world's destruction a small transient storm In the calm infinity it has become". — Book I, Canto 6. Page 386 Compare also: "He who would the bring heavens here Must descend himself into clay And the burden of earthly nature bear And tread the dolorous way." — God's Labour. ... "All this is for habitation by the Lord" Isha The difference is "Manifest home" in Savitri "In Nature's fixed inevitable course Decreed since the beginning of the worlds In the deep essence of created things" —Book XI Canto I Compare: "The Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal" Isha 8 Page ...
... it is only after liberation that he can really and effectively fulfil the self-law of his essential Nature, swabhāva and swadharma. If liberation meant a disappearance from the field of life, which is a field of self-expression and divine manifestation, thea the self-nature of the soul would find no opportunity for self-unfoldment, but would be condemned to eternal sterility. swabhāva and swadharma... dynamism of the parā prakrti, the supreme Divine Nature, the Mother. The soul of man in its evolution inevitably passes through the lower Nature of the three guṇas, but when it is liberated, it does not shuffle off all Nature and retire into its immutable unembodied essence, but, seated securely in the higher, converts and perfects his lower Nature of mind, life and body, and, manifesting God's glory... of the soul or the purusa from the meshes of Nature, but the emancipation of Nature herself from her own lower formulation of the three gunas into the illimitable freedom of her creative Consciousness-Force. This release and transmutation of Nature demand an uninterrupted Karmayoga, a free exercise of all the parts and elements of the human nature in a growing spirit of dedicated service and in ...
... belonging to the lower nature; it can be a wide gate opening on the Infinite, but in itself it is a dealer in finite virtues, and cannot move in the infinitudes of Spirit. By Supernature Sri Aurobindo means the authentic, eternal Nature of the Supreme, the Consciousness-Force of saccidānanda as the creatrix of the world. Supernature is the supramental Nature, the self-Nature ( prakṛtim swām ) of... creation of apt machinery, but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being, it cannot perfect our nature and therefore 'cannot perfect our life.¹ "It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true... fact remains that the work of purifying and transforming the lower nature into the higher is a long and extremely arduous work, entailing, as it does, first, the purification of each element, each fibre, each energy of the complex human nature by a synthetic self- discipline through knowledge, love and works in a growing attitude of self-surrender; and, next, the transformation of them all by the descent ...
... know his real nature; not only what is overt and superficially or deceptively evident, but also what is deep down in him, vibrant or latent in his being, and subtly influencing his thoughts and feelings. There is no possibility of error in this identification: for, it gives me a knowledge of the man as he is, and not only as he appears to be. In identifying myself with him, I become his self and his nature;... greater the possibility of my union with the world and with God; for. God is my own supreme Self and the world is nothing but His manifestation in Himself in terms of His own multiplicity. Indeed, I can know only myself and nothing else. I can have no knowledge of an object which is fundamentally alien to my nature and consciousness—two disparates having nothing in common between them can never meet; and... be no knowledge. If contradictories are found to meet and unite in life, it is because fundamentally they are one, meant to act as complementaries in the manifold patterns of Nature. The Upanishads say that the Atman or Self has become all these beings and things (becomings)— ātmā abhūt sarvabhūtāni; and, basing their ontology on this truth, they declare that when That is known all is known, tasmin ...
... of suffering. The body has its own consciousness—though much of it is still submerged and can be evolved—its own mode and rhythm of action and its characteristic way of expressing the self-nature of the being. If patiently and intelligently trained, it can respond to most of the psychological movements of our composite personality and reproduce them in a growing beauty of poise and form.... of human life—and for the fulfilment of this demand, what is essential is a physical frame capable of holding the heightened powers of life and responding to its varied urges towards self-development and creative self-expression. The studied neglect and high disdain of the traditional religious outlook are being replaced by an earnest plumbing of the physical possibilities of the human body, and though... abated zeal. Nor did Christianity improve upon this pagan attitude, rather its later development tended to put a premium on the contempt and chastisement of the body, culminating Sometimes in a positive self-torture, In India the whole post- Page 261 Upanishadic period of philosophical thought and spiritual practice has been marked by a growing and glorified aversion to the body, and even ...
... things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things, who awaits them and in... and stern for your vengeance Self-gathered work in the night and the secrecy shrouding your bosoms 1 — or it is the temple-rapt enthusiast with his huge reveries and god-gilded delusions, brave with a desperate passion— Storm is the dance of the locks of the God assenting to greatness, Zeus who with secret compulsion orders the ways of our nature;... Death? I have faced it... A third Whitman-line, from outside Sri Aurobindo's quota tions, may be adjoined for being a full unconscious hexameter Page 110 Silent, a voiding the moonbeams, blending my self with the shadows. Sri Aurobindo works out the conscious and complete theory of true English quantity in which stress suffers no cavalier dismissal and yet serves a quantitative end. It ...
... incomplete mental nature as that is above the nature of animal life and animated Matter, as it is immeasurably above the mere material nature. The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and worl... an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit... of the Divine in self and the Divine in Nature. All that is sought by the God-seeker will be fulfilled in his spirit and in his life as he moves towards spiritual perfection. He will become aware of the transcendent reality, possess in the self-experience the supreme existence, consciousness, bliss, be one with Sachchidananda. He will become one with cosmic being and universal Nature: he will contain ...
... going and leads towards a better, a more rational, temperate, sympathetic, self-restrained dealing with our fellows. But ethics in the spiritual point of view is much more, it is a means of developing in our action and still more essentially in the character of our being the diviner self in us, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead. So with all our aims and activities; spirituality takes... discovery and expression of the divine self in man. Śarīraṁ khalu dharma-sādhanam , runs the old Sanskrit saying, the body too is our means for fulfilling the dharma, the Godward law of our being. The mental, the emotional, the aesthetic parts of us have to be developed, is the ordinary view, so that they may have a greater satisfaction, or because that is man's finer nature, because so he feels himself more... relation to the one Truth, the one supreme and universal reality. Eventually, its real value is to prepare a basis for spiritual realisation and the growing of the human being into his divine self and divine nature. Science itself becomes only a knowledge of the world which throws an added light on the spirit of the universe and his way in things. Nor will it confine itself to a physical knowledge and ...
... Transcendent’s action is going to yield the Transcendent’s result. Arjuna is called, explains Sri Aurobindo, …to self-knowledge; he must see God as the Master of the universe and the origin of the world’s creatures and happenings, all as the Godhead’s self-expression in Nature, God in all, God in himself as man and as Vibhuti, God in the lowness of being and on its heights, God on the topmost... ( Jnaneshwari :11.29) Page 21 He has already been told about the Power that upholds dynamic omnipotence in the manifold nature of its being; he knows also about the Vibhutis, the special souls who take birth to accomplish special works in this world, transient and unhappy, full of sorrow and suffering as it is. But now it... ever-auspicious and benign, you are the imperishable substance and cause of what is; you are the Being and the Non-Being; verily, you are beyond the reach of them all. In you is the origin of Soul and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti; what defines the creative principle in its power of manifestation, that you are; you yourself are without a beginning, O Ancient of Days. You are the life-breath of this entire ...
... various sources, which it can proudly store and trot out at will. The egoistic drive is always for self-gratification, whether it is on the physical level or the vital or the mental, and so long as this drive is not detected and stopped, the soul cannot come forward and assume the reins of the nature. "Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.”¹ Let us first pass in brief and rapid review the... for it arbitrarily cuts up the unity of existence into two. Light and Life, and ignoring God's purpose in the world, lures the soul away from the field of its divine perfection and creative self-expression in Nature. "Even he who might have arrived, at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from the body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus... force and benediction in order to conquer and transform our material life for Its self- revelation. We cannot, therefore, afford to coerce the mind into a complete inaction and impose upon it a progressive atrophy in order to transcend it. The mind has its essential, indispensable function in the economy of our triple nature and must be developed to its highest perfection, so that with all its faculties ...
... mastery is gained, then the process by its self-effective rapidity may seem a miracle to the intelligence, but it still proceeds by law of the truth of Spirit,—when the Divine within us by close union of our will and being with him takes up the Yoga and acts as the omnipotent master of the nature. For the Divine is our highest Self and the self of all Nature, the eternal and universal Purusha. Purusha... The Yoga of Self-Perfection The Synthesis of Yoga Chapter III The Psychology of Self-Perfection Essentially, then, this divine self-perfection is a conversion of the human into a likeness of and a fundamental oneness with the divine nature, a rapid shaping of the image of God in man and filling in of its ideal outlines. It is what is ordinarily termed... being. In Yoga we have to travel beyond the physical nature and the superficial man and to discover the workings of the whole nature of the real man. In other words we must arrive at and use a psycho-physical knowledge with a spiritual foundation. Man is in his real nature,—however obscure now this truth may be to our present understanding and self-consciousness, we must for the purposes of Yoga have ...
... incomplete mental nature as that is above the nature of animal life and animated Matter,.. as it is immeasurably above the mere material nature. The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free .from the Ignorance which. is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and ... an .ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit... the Divine in self and the Divine in Nature. All that is sought by the God-seeker will be fulfilled in his spirit and in his life as he moves towards spiritual perfection. He will became aware of the: transcendent reality, possess in the self-experience the supreme existence, consciousness, bliss, be one with Sachchidananda. He will become one with cosmic being and universal Nature: he will contain ...
... be accomplished by his growing into a larger being and a larger consciousness: self-enlargement, self-fulfilment, self-evolution from what he partially and temporarily is in his actual and apparent nature to what he completely is in his secret self and spirit and therefore can become even in his manifest existence, is the object of his creation." (SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 684) Page 6 ... consciousness and an adventure of self-discovery. The partial consciousness already evolved upon earth is a portent for further evolution and must surely develop in the very nature of things into complete consciousness with all its attendant accomplishments. A perfected and divinised life is what the earth-nature has always been seeking. In its progressive evolutionary development, consciousness... The teacher must not seek to hammer the child into the shape desired by the parent or teacher: the student himself must be induced to expand according to his own nature. Otherwise, if we try to disregard the child's svadharma or self-nature and attempt to bring him up in a way not congenial to his divinely ordained turn and temperament, the results can only be disastrous to a great extent. As Sri Aurobindo ...
... human individual in calmness because within him is the realisation of the Lord. It is the true Being that is in him. This self can smile at nature, and it can live in the delight Self, the ā nanda-maya —behind the mental—consciousness, ever blissful. This Self is the truth of self. It is within ourself though not easily available to at present to our surface consciousness. Now we come to the problem... by our intellect, but is only a shadow of the Infinite seen by our own mental self. Actually, it partakes of the substance of the original Truth and Reality. Even if it is an illusion of Infinite Consciousness, it is only phenomenal, but it is the substance of the Real. It partakes of the nature of the Self,—the nature of the Infinite Reality. Then, if we accept this world as a creation of the Co... unreal. When it is actually being seen by the self then the self and the dream are one. It is a part of the self, in fact, and therefore partakes of the reality of the self. It is therefore real because the self is real. The form and the world, therefore, are eternal complements of this process of self-unrollment of an original Reality. It is a creation of Self-conscious Being out of Its own eternal Truth ...
... Page 119 the back when we find someone below our self-assessment or to hang our jaw down face to face with a person evidently better-gifted - this tendency is natural and proves helpful at times, but on the whole it is mistaken, for each of us is unique and has to develop according to a "pattern inherent in our nature. This does not mean that we should turn a deaf ear to people's ideas... become whatever your "consciousness" gets fixed on. Each of us is essentially a consciousness moving from one shade to Page 120 another of what we ordinarily regard as our self. The general nature we take to be our own is the ego-formation which demarcates each of us from his fellows and stamps on certain shades of mental, vital and physical being the sense that we are those shades... normal self. The sense of identity must not waver. A detachment has to be practised from the less normal, less Yogic personality - a detachment which tends to forget that there is anything of such a character. The less one is preoccupied with something to be avoided, the firmer gets one's sense of the right self. There is also the need to recognise that actually you are neither the right self nor the ...
... Page 132 this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which... ng agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially... which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more and more aware ...
... he has just this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the Whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint Page 16 instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's a... ng agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially... artisan-ship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more ...
... the three Page 116 guṇas , first qualities or modes of Nature, traiguṇyaviṣayā vedāḥ . This Brahman or Divine in the workings of Nature is born, as we may say, out of the Akshara, the immutable Purusha, the Self who stands above all the modes or qualities or workings of Nature, nistraiguṇya . The Brahman is one but self-displayed in two aspects, the immutable Being and the creator and... enumerated, akṣara (brahma), svabhāva, karma, kṣara bhāva, puruṣa, adhiyajña . Akshara is the immutable Brahman, spirit or self, Atman; Swabhava is the principle of the self, adhyātma , operative as the original nature of the being, "own way of becoming", and this proceeds out of the self, the Akshara; Karma proceeds from that and is the creative movement, visarga , which brings all natural beings and all... existence we live and move; unified with Him in our nature and with all existence in Him, we become one soul and one power of being with Him and with all beings; with His supreme reality we identify and unite our self-being. By works done for sacrifice, eliminating desire, we arrive at knowledge and at the soul's possession of itself; by works done in self-knowledge and God-knowledge we are liberated into ...
... new becoming, a new being, a new self, a new nature. There are several tentative beginnings, and they are followed by slow processes of growth and evolution at the high levels of which there emerge ranges of spiritual experience and realization. At earlier stages, a certain kind of religiosity may become predominant; this kind of religiosity is marked by the nature of mind or life seeking and finding... tends to veil the integral Reality and to bind human nature to the imperatives of the laws of the body, life and mental operations, while the spirit is self-luminous and its increasing light reveals luminously various facets of Reality and opens up the gates, even the flood-gates, of the vision of the integral Reality, and it liberates human nature progressively and more and more fully from the imperatives... liberation of the soul or of the Self from the laws of the body, life and mind can be followed by the liberation of the mind, life and body from the yoke of their own respective laws; liberation of the spirit is followed by the liberation of nature, and there are achievements of total liberation of soul, mind, heart and action, a casting of them all into the sense of the Cosmic Self and the Divine Reality. ...
... Page 81 this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress, upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisanship, which... ng agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially... which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more and more aware ...
... mass of unconscious suggestions from the sitters or the contributions of the medium's subliminal consciousness one gets into contact with a world of beings which is of a very deceptive or self-deceptive illusory nature. Many of these come and claim to be the departed souls of relatives, acquaintances, well-known men, famous personalities etc. There are also beings who pick up the discarded feelings and... planes. Nature-forces are conscious forces—they can very well combine all that is necessary for an action or a purpose and when one means fails, take another. They [ general forces and impulses in the atmosphere ] are able to act with a greater force if they can make a special formation Page 559 than by a general psychological action common to all human nature. The forces... circumstances, conditions etc. as if they were fundamental things. One can not only receive a force, but an impulse, thought or sensation. One may receive it from others, from beings in Nature or from Nature herself if she chooses to give her Force a ready-made form of that kind. The force "created" is not yours—it is Prakriti's—your will sets it in motion, it does not really create it; but ...
... the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite... egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight 7 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable... common power from which all derive their being and tendency, towards which all subconsciously move and in which, therefore, it is possible for all consciously to unite. The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements. There is that which is already evolved; there is that which, still imperfect, still ...
... determining harmony which the whole rhythmic Idea of a universe must contain in its very birth and self-conception and which must therefore inevitably work out by the interplay of its constituents. It is the source and keeper of Law in the world; for that law is nothing arbitrary—it is the expression of a self-nature which is determined by the compelling truth of the real idea that each thing is in its inception... the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal. 3 Each thing in Nature, therefore, whether animate or inanimate, mentally self-conscious or not self-conscious, is governed in its being and in its operations by an indwelling Vision and Power, to us subconscient or inconscient because we are not conscious of... is the source of all. Mandukya Upanishad. (Verses 5, 6.) We have to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously this is not the too personal and limited Deity ...
... terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and... egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight 8 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable... recovers its highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their powers here in Matter. Letters on Yoga, pp. 1-2 (b) The Three Steps of Nature — Body, Mind, Spirit The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements. There is that which is already evolved, that which is ...
... disappearance reveal the spirit's unclouded substance. That substance is the self of the man called in European thought the Monad, in Indian philosophy, Jiva or Jivatman, the living entity, the self of the living creature. This Jiva is not the Page 360 mental ego-sense constructed by the workings of Nature for her temporary purpose. It is not a thing bound, as the mental being, the vital... are bound, by her habits, laws or processes. The Jiva is a spirit and self, superior to Nature. It is true that it consents to her acts, reflects her moods and upholds the triple medium of mind, life and body through which she casts them upon the soul's consciousness; but it is itself a living reflection or a soul-form or a self-creation of the Spirit universal and transcendent. The One Spirit who... is the very Self of our self, the One and the Highest, the Supreme we have to realise, the infinite existence into which we have to enter. And so far the teachers walk in company, all agreeing that this is the supreme object of knowledge, of works and of devotion, all agreeing that if it is to be attained, the Jiva must release himself from the ego-sense which belongs to the lower Nature or Maya. But ...
... material limit, habit, purpose and formula. Observance of Nature but also transcendence of first nature is continually the purpose of the Spirit within him. A continuous series of transcendences is the most significant thing in the world action and evolution itself is only Nature's constant impulse and effort of self-exceeding, of a greater self-becoming, her way of expressing more and more, getting out... moral sense in a non-moral world of Nature. Its essential rule is rather a turning of a conscious intelligence and will on life and matter, morality itself only this knowledge and will seeking for a rule of truth and right of action, satyam ṛtam , in his relation to his inner self and to his fellow-beings. But his dealings with the purely physical lines of Nature are non-moral, a matter at first of... the material universe are the first apparent conditions of our birth and create the practical basis and the original mould of our earthly existence. And what is the law of this first energy, its self-nature, swabhava and swadharma? It is evidently not moral in the human sense of the word: the elemental gods of the physical universe know nothing about ethical distinctions, but only the bare literal rule ...
... one has the cosmic consciousness, one can feel the cosmic self as one's own self, one can feel one with other beings in the cosmos, one can feel all the forces of Nature as moving in oneself, all selves as one's own self. There is no why except that it is so, since all is the One. The ordinary consciousness of man is confined to his own individuality—he can enter into the consciousness of others... it breaks down he becomes aware of the cosmic Self, of the consciousness of the cosmic Nature, of the forces playing in it etc. He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts. He finds it all to be one with his larger or universal self. Page 269 There is the universal mental, the universal vital, the universal physical nature, and it is out of a selection of their forces... The soul comes from beyond this nature of mind, life and body. It belongs to the Transcendent and because of it we can open to the higher Nature beyond. The Divine is always One that is Many. The individual spirit is part of the "Many" side of the One, and the psychic being is what it puts forth to evolve here in the earth-nature. In liberation the individual self realises itself as the One (that ...
... within their specific boundaries. It replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. In this operation, no more is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the nature of an individual. The spiritual law respects the individual nature, modifies it and, perfects it, and in this sense, it is unique for each individual... union with It and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature." Page 82 ... action. When man is primitive, historically or psychologically, he tends to be Page 76 individualistic and egoistic and tends to create standards of action, which result in self-seeking and self-aggrandisement. • But no individual can live in isolation, and no individual can be allowed by the very fact of his social existence, to impose upon others what an individual considers ...
... will. It is intimately conscious of God absolute, God as self, God as spirit, soul and nature. Even this external Nature it knows by identity and self-experience, but an identity freely admitting variation, admitting relations, admitting greater and lesser degrees of the action of the one power of existence. For Nature is God's power of various self-becoming, ātma-vibhūti . But this spiritual con... seed of his self-expression, becomes an operative portion of his Swabhava, his law of self-becoming, and determines his Swadharma, his law of action. And if that were all, there would be no perplexity or difficulty; the life of man would be a luminous unfolding of godhead. But this lower energy of our world is a nature of ignorance, of egoism, of the three Gunas. Because this is a nature of egoism,... in it and its immanence in the Divine, the essential unity of all existence, the relation of the human soul obscured in Nature to the Godhead, its awakening to self-knowledge, its birth into a greater consciousness, its ascension into its own spiritual heights. But when this new self-vision and consciousness have been acquired in place of the original ignorance, what will be the liberated man's view ...
... change in all four fields. As the Divine manifest in cosmic Nature he acts in close identity with Nature. He is himself then Nature, so to speak, but with a spirit within her workings which foresees and forewills, understands and enforces, compels the action, overrules in the result. As the one silent self of all he is the non-doer, and Nature alone is the doer. He leaves all these works to be done by... being. The silent self that pervades and supports the cosmos is not affected by its changes because, though supporting, it does not participate in them. This greatest supreme supracosmic Self also is not affected because it Page 320 exceeds and eternally transcends them. But also since this action is the action of the divine Nature, svā prakṛtiḥ , and the divine Nature can never be separate... perfection is an adoration by our whole nature and its self-surrender to its divine source and possessor. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our entire existence in the world, and not merely of this or that in it, into a single movement towards the Eternal. By the power and mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out of his inexpressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenal things. By a reverse ...
... calculable or controllable, and many incoherent and inharmonious mental elements use his reason and will, enter into and determine his self-building, his nature-development, his life action. Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a multi-person; he will never succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his multi-personality and governs... altogether act in the same way without forfeiting his prerogative of manhood; he cannot leave his being to be a chaos of instincts and impulses regulated by the automatism of Nature: mind has become conscious in him and is therefore self-compelled to make some attempt, however elementary in many, to see and control and in the end more and more perfectly harmonise the manifold components, the different and... stream of our nature and act from whatever in it comes uppermost at the time and seizes the instruments of thought and action,—even our seemingly deliberate choice is more of an automatism than we imagine; our co-ordination of our multifarious elements and of our consequent thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions by the reason and will is incomplete and a half-measure. In animal being Nature acts by her ...
... Jivatman or Individual Self By Jivatma we mean the individual self. Essentially it is one self with all others, but in the multiplicity of the Divine it is the individual self, an individual centre of the universe—and it sees everything in itself or itself in everything or both together according to its state of consciousness and point of view. The self, Atman, is in its nature either transcendent... that are separated from the Truth by the Ignorance. The body is not the individual Self—it is the basis of the external personality or of the physical self, if you like so to express it; but that is not the individual Self. The individual Self is the central being (Jivatma) manifesting in the lower nature as the psychic being—it is directly a portion of the Divine. The soul, representative... Jivatman or spirit is self-existent above the manifested or instrumental being—it is superior to birth and death, always the same; it is the individual self or Atman, the eternal true being of the individual. The soul is a spark of the Divine in the heart of the living creatures of Nature. It is not seated above the manifested being; it enters into the manifestation of the self, consents to be a part ...
... this which we must regard as our subliminal self and set Page 72 apart the subconscient as an inferior, a lowest occult province of our nature. In the same way there is a superconscient part of our total existence in which there is what we discover to be our highest self, and this too we can set apart as a higher occult province of our nature. The Life Divine, p. 557 The... ly this circumconscient envelope and more and more enlarge its self-projection into the cosmic existence around it. A point comes where it can break through the separation altogether, unite, identify itself with cosmic being, feel itself universal, one with all existence. In this freedom of entry into cosmic self and cosmic nature there is a great liberation of the individual being; it puts on... subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner ...
... limited within their specific boundaries. It replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. No more in this operation is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the individual nature. The spiritual law respects the individual nature, modifies it and perfects it, and in this sense, it is unique for each individual and can... urge to arrive at the fullest possible perfection of the individual and the society and the perfection of the relationship between the individual and the society. Self-exceeding or self-transcendence is the fundamental law of the nature of the human being, and if humankind comes to the paralyzing situation where the urge to exceed the limits of the mental Page 15 human being is buried under... becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature." 1 Spirituality and spiritual values and the methods of realizing them are distinctive. A mere learning about spirituality is not spirituality; even the most catholic book on spirituality cannot be a substitute for the direct practice of inner change of consciousness by which one can perceive and realize the inner and higher Self and transform the workings ...
... sense of the ever-living universal Whole that is Page 261 the Spinozistic "superior mind" self-revealed in Nature. And in this touch, which is organic to the totality of the scientific posture of consciousness associated with Einstein, we have once again a sympathetic... harmonizations of opposites: the accord of apparently brute matter with sentient life and the accord of instinctive and apparently non-reasoning vitality with self-aware, nature-probing, value-questing, ever-aspiring intelligence. Sri Aurobindo is not essentially tied up with one explanation or another which science at the moment... Aurobindo's philosophy is? According to Sri Aurobindo, the ultimate Reality is an Absolute, an Eternal, that is at once a self-merged freedom beyond conception and a fullness self-manifested in a multiple unity as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and Vijnana, a creative Supermind or Gnosis which brings forward ...
... Person, by which He evidently means the psychic being, and which, He says, grows and develops and "is the traveller between birth and death". We have then the psychic entity and, as its self-projection in Nature, the 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... to a loss of vitality. Sweet Mother, I am sure that my complaint will be gone for ever by the end of the year. If You approve, I will continue the Nature Cure; otherwise I will stop it. I trust myself entirely to Your Force. Continue the Nature Cure since you find it helpful, and keep your faith intact and living, because it is essential to the cure. Blessings. 2 October 1965 Sweet... 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 of life in Yoga, so 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. ...
... into Nature or what the Gita terms as Apara Prakriti or lower nature, but the utilization of the attainment of liberation as a step towards the movement by which hierarchies of mind, overmind and supermind are attained, so that one is enabled to manifest the higher nature, divine nature or Para Prakriti. The Gita replaces the obsessive idea of self-annulment of nature by the principle of self-fulfilment... manifestation of him, a being of his being, a consciousness of his consciousness, a nature of his nature, but in the obscurity of this mental and physical existence self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original nature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, and the derived in which it... egoism and ignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual has to be inwardly recovered, fulfilled, made dynamic and active. Through an inner self-fulfilment, the opening of a new status, our birth into a new power, we return to the nature of the Spirit and re-become a portion of the Godhead from whom we have descended into this mortal figure of being." 58 In the object of the yoga that ...
... fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One thing indeed becomes clear; Page 323 it is self-evident here that both the individual and the cosmos come from a transcendent Reality which takes form in them: the mind and life of the individual being, its self in nature must therefore be a partial self-expression of the cosmic Being and, both through that and directly, a self-expression of the transcendent... warranted by anything perceptible in the nature of the Infinite, but seem to be imposed—or, it may be, self-imposed—upon it. We give to the Energy which produces them the name of Nature, but the word conveys no meaning unless it is that the nature of things is what it is by virtue of a Force which arranges them according to an inherent Truth in them; but the nature of that Truth itself, the reason why... Person, the mind Purusha, is truly a self-expression, a self-determination proceeding from some truth of his own spiritual being, a manifestation of that truth's dynamic possibilities, or whether it is not rather a creation or construction presented to him by Nature, by Prakriti, and only in the sense of being individualised in his personal formation of that Nature can it be said to be his own or dependent ...
... elements of his evolutionary existence. In the same way as the powers of Life are self-founded, perfect and full in a greater Life beyond us, so too the powers of Mind, its ideas and principles that influence our earth-being, are found to have in the greater Mind-world their own field of fullness of self-nature, while here in human existence they throw out only partial formations which have much... an action, such a constant pressure and influence, is an inevitable consequence, must be inherent in the very nature of the manifested universe. A secret continuous action of the higher powers and principles from their own planes upon terrestrial being and nature through the subliminal self, which is itself a projection from those planes into the world born of the Inconscience, must have an effect... , or on any of them, there could be only two planes of existence: on one side there is the material universe created out of the Inconscient by the blind nescience of Force or Nature obedient perhaps to some inner unfelt Self which governs its somnambulist activities; on the other side there is the superconscient One to which we return out of the Inconscience and Ignorance. Or else we may imagine that ...
... eater in our gated dwelling, the spoiler of our self-expression. (9) Who shall hedge in his force and his heroic strength? Alone, irresistible he brings to us our possessions; yea, and even these two Goddesses hasten forward now in fear pursued by this rapidity of the God-mind and his mightiness. (10) And for him the goddess, self-disposing Nature, hastens forward and she is a path for the God-mind... sentences of light, gods of the sacrifice who have rapture of an inspiration that betrays them not, for it follows Nature’s self-forming force. (2) Violent are they, yet comrades of a firm gleaming Strength; full of boldness in their driving, but linked each to each they protect by their self-truth thy march. (3) Swift-charging bulls of the diffusion, they leap beyond our Nights; then in their heaven... strengths, O God-in-Mind; for when thou deemedst thyself alone and without any opposer, lo, from him that was slain another was born mightier than he! (4) Him too, as he drew intoxication from the self-nature of these peoples, a Son of the Mist, who increases mightily in his march towards the Night, Sushna’s evil strength that is the flame and light of the Titan Divider,—him too the Bringer forth of the ...
... honeyed wave of you; that wave of yours in which Indra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we who seek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundred purifiers, ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and move to the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme ocean); they limit not the workings of Indra: offer to the rivers a food of oblation full of the clarity ( ghṛtavat... material sense. We have for instance a hymn (VII.49) of Vasishtha to the divine waters, āpo devīḥ, āpo divyāḥ , in which the second verse runs "The divine waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born, they whose movement is towards the ocean, pure, purifying,—may those waters foster me." Here, it will be said, the sense is quite clear; it is to material waters, earthly rivers, canals,—or, if... greatest) of the ocean from the midst of the moving flood that go purifying, not settling down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, the Bull, clove out. The divine waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean,—may those divine waters foster me. In the midst of whom King Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of creatures, they that stream honey ...
... being, a new self, a new nature. VIII Values of Indian Culture It is natural that Indian education underlines the importance of what can be called Indian values. In Indian thought, a distinction has been made between the ego and the self. According to Indian thought, egoistic personality is ridden with self- contradiction and conflicts and true self is the integrating... within their specific boundaries. It replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. In this operation, no more is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the nature of an individual. The spiritual law respects the individual nature, modifies it and perfects it, and in this sense, it is unique for each individual and... universal law of action. When man is primitive, historically or psychologically, he tends to be individualistic and egoistic and tends to create standards of action or conflict, which result in self-seeking and self-aggrandisement. Page 406 But no individual can live in isolation, and no individual can be allowed by the very fact of his social existence, to impose upon others what ...
... action of knowledge in man, this coordinating intelligence, this formulation of self-consciousness and self-experience is higher than the memory-ego and sense-ego of the animal and therefore, we may suppose, nearer to real self knowledge. We may even come to realise, if we study the veiled as well as the uncovered action of Nature, that all ego-sense, all ego-memory has at its back, is in fact a pragmatic... ; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ego is a superficial construction of Nature. It is only when we have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as well as on the surface, that we can acquire a true basis of knowledge. Page 542... ess which I assume in the waves of the sea of conscious force which is the stuff of my mental and life nature. It is when I entirely detach the mental person from his act of self-experience that I become fully aware first, of the sheer ego Page 533 and, in the end, of the witness self or the thinking mental Person, the something or someone who becomes angry and observes it but is not limited ...
... expressing itself through individual nature. The spiritual law that yoga presents respects the individual nature, modifies and perfects it. And in this sense, it is flexible for each individual and can be known and made operative only by a gradual progression of consciousness and, more and more, by an entry into the real self. In its progressive movement, it may, if necessary, permit a short or a long period... God's Presence or the Presence that Page 84 seems vibrating in Nature. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, you may acquire some distant idea of what yogic realisation is. First of all, W6 see that Wordsworth had the vision of something in the world which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious force and presence other than its... unworkable and are, therefore, rejected by Nature. Or, sometimes, they are turned into a series of compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. In the Yogic consciousness and in the knowledge and the effectivity that it produces the highest elements that morality in the deepest core seeks are fulfilled. But Yoga replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self- perfection, spontaneously expressing ...
... becomes God. By yielding to Nature, we fall away both from Nature & from God; by transcending Nature we at once fulfil all the possibilities of Nature & rise towards God. The human touches first the divine & then becomes divine. There are those who seek to kill Nature in order to become the Self; but that is not God's intention in humanity. We have to transcend Nature, not to kill it. Every movement... experience. We become aware of a cosmic Consciousness which is the secret of the cosmic Energy, a cosmic Self or Spirit, the cosmic Divine, the universal Godhead. But by Yoga we become aware also that our own Self or true being is one with the cosmic Self and Spirit, our nature a play of the cosmic Nature; the wall between ourselves and the Page 330 universe begins to disappear and vanishes... things. Yoga is a passage from ignorance to self-knowledge, from our apparent to our true being, from an outer phenomenal mental vital material life-existence to an inner spiritual existence and a spiritualised nature. By Yoga we pass from the phenomenal to the real Man, from the consciousness of our own apparent outer nature to the consciousness of our real self, Atman, an inner and inmost man, Purusha ...
... the conditions imposed by a world of physical Nature; this manifestation takes the form of a structure of frontal personality which is a translation of the inner self into the terms and possibilities of the physical existence. In fact we must accept the ancient idea that man has within him not only the physical soul or Purusha with its appropriate nature, but a vital, a mental, a psychic, a supramental... because there is a solidarity and a continuity of life in Nature and the individual cannot altogether, even if he so wills, live for himself alone. But, Page 837 if there is a continuity of his own life by rebirth for the individual and not only a continuity of the mass life and the cosmic life, if he has an ever-developing self, nature and experience, then it is inevitable that for him too... observed that when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without restraint or scruple all that op poses its will or desire, it raises a mass of reactions against itself, reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may have their result now or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to ...
... mind becomes a nursery in which Nature and soul carry on their play: A blindfold search and wrestle and fumbling clasp Of a half-seen Nature and a hidden Soul, A game of hide and seek in twilit rooms, A play of love and hate and fear and hope Continues in the nursery of mind Its hard and heavy romp of self-bom twins. 151 Nature and soul play on their game of... The image of a ship foundering occurs in two places: A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered there. 136 In the second place where it is used there is a double image: His self-bound nature foundered as in fire. 137 The image of a house also is used twice. Once in the following lines, where it is a mixed image: Our mind is a house haunted by the slain past, Ideas... his tireless Grace. Along all Nature's lines they have set their posts And intercept the caravans of Light. 140 Then there is a beautiful image drawn from colonisation: Ourselves are citizens of that mother State, Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night. But now our rights are barred, our passports void; We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home. ...
... Realisations are the reception in the consciousness and the establishment there of the fundamental truths of the Divine, of the Higher or Divine Nature, of the world-consciousness and the play of its forces, of one's own self and real nature and the inner nature of things, the power of these things growing in one till they are a part of one's inner life and existence,—as for instance, the realisation of... the psychic being in you—surrender, self-giving, psychic humility, devotion. It is a consciousness made up of these things, cast in this mould that can bear without breaking, stumbling or deviation into error the rush of lights, powers and experiences from the supraphysical planes. An entire perfection in these respects is hardly possible until the whole nature from the highest mind to the subconscient... have looked and found the cause. It is perfectly true that so long as there is not an unreserved self-giving in both the internal and external, there will always be veilings, dark periods and difficulties. But if there is unreserved Page 35 self-giving in the internal, the unreserved self-giving in the external would naturally follow; if it does not, it means that the internal is not ...
... his assumption that human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and this can lead to a edge. But for him self-knowledge meant "the knowledge of personal causes, not transcendent needs, of organic appetites, not spiritual purpose. Freud's conviction was that the quest for the self must take us down and back - into the juice and tissue of our physical nature, into its infantile fantasies... material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being". Sri Aurobindo has given to the world his Integral Yoga which is a methodised effort at individual as well as cosmic fulfilment. All life is in fact Nature's yoga undertaken to manifest the Divine involved in Nature. This is in fact the true aim of all religion. However, religions... pointed out, Freud gave to the West a whole new concept of mental health and of the therapies needed to combat such cultural ailments as loneliness, boredom, anxiety, alienation from self, others and nature. The basis of these therapies is the analysis of the subconscious and the raising of the suppressed cause of the ailment to the plane of consciousness. In recent years there has been ...
... then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another... ss and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer active parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best Page 273 the intuitive mind, willing... complete nature. Along with the mental evolution of man there has been going forward the early process of another evolution which prepares the spiritual and supramental being. This has had two lines, one the discovery of the occult forces secret in Nature and of the hidden planes and worlds concealed from us by the world of Matter and the other the discovery of man's soul and spiritual self. If the ...
... in our sadhana is to purify and transform the nature, our self-nature and world-nature, as far as possible, and then offer them to the Divine as a fit instrument for his divine manifestation upon earth. Our aspiration is not merely to enjoy the delight of spiritual realisation in our inner consciousness; what we aim at in our yoga is that our outer nature and being too should fully and integrally participate... tangles disentangled, their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and Page 9 removed..." (The Life Divine, pp. 907-08) From the above citation from Sri Aurobindo we can easily see that, under the psychic's active guidance, it becomes a child's play for the sadhaka to know at every moment the nature of the right attitude he is required to adopt and e... endangered but completely destroyed the spiritual life of many a sadhaka. It is what we may call a deplorable state of 'self-oblivion', of forgetfulness of one's goal. It is not that the sadhaka theoretically loses sight of the spiritual goal. He quite remembers the precise nature of this goal which he set before himself when he first entered the spiritual path. He continues to have a clear intellectual ...
... itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to, the mental evolution,-the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body. An inner aspiration to know, ... union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature."23 Sri Aurobindo warns : " The danger is that the pressure of dominant European ideas and motives, the temptations of the political needs of the hour, the velocity of rapid inevitable... . An immortal Power is Page 31 working in you ". This faith was common to all the nationalist leaders. They strengthened the faith in the ultimate victory, taught the nation self-reliance, self-sacrifice and organisation. Their patriotism had the fervour of religion. The farewell message which Sri Aurobindo gave to the students of the First National College in India in 1906 remains ...
... potentialities of Nature which he feels within his own Self. Nature is felt within the Self of the Purusha and when the potentialities are seen in Nature, there is an attraction on the part of the subjective consciousness to accept the lure and the consequences that follow. Redemption comes by the Self rejoining the Divine Consciousness and bringing it into life, into Nature. That is the real... not losing of yourself, but gaining a higher self. When you surrender you gain. A constant aspiration has to be maintained in order to make the surrender effective. Aspiration and surrender are the two processes of our nature, of the mental and the vital being. They are—even when they act powerfully in nature, from the true being, the true Self trying to express itself. The constantly awake... oneness. Knowledge by identity is the remedy, which means increase or expansion of self-awareness. When one says "man", or "I", or "I am the body", "I am desire", "I am impulses", "I am ideas", "I am thoughts", "I am feelings", "I am emotions", etc., that is the limitation of the present nature. When this self-awareness is widened, and when the "I" becomes the All,—the all are included in the ...
... apparent existence, imperfect and mortal, to his essential divine nature of immortality and perfection. This Godhead is one in all things that are, the self who lives in all and the self in whom all live and move; therefore man has to Page 343 discover his spiritual unity with all creatures, to see all in the self and the self in all beings, even to see all things and creatures as himself... realisation of the self-existent Immutable. That immutable Self of all existences seems indeed to stand back from any active intervention in the workings of Nature; but it is not void of all relation whatever and remote from all connection. It is our witness and supporter; it gives a silent and impersonal sanction; it has even an impassive enjoyment. The many-sided action of Nature is still possible... exceeding, yet intimately related to this Nature and closely one with her creatures, their Page 350 Spirit, Self, highest Soul, Lord, Lover, Friend, Refuge, he is ever leading them from within them and from above through the mortal appearances of ignorance and suffering and sin and evil, ever leading each through his nature and all through universal Nature towards a supreme light and bliss and ...
... अनुष्वधमा वह मादयस्व स्वाहाकृतं वृषभ वक्षि हव्यम् ॥११॥ 11) I pour on him the running light; for the light is his native lair, he is lodged in the light, the light is his plane. According to thy self-nature, bring the Gods and fill them with rapture. O Male of the herd, carry to them our offering blessed with svāhā . 11 SUKTA 4 हुवे वः सुद्योत्मानं सुवृक्तिं विशामग्निमतिथिं सुप्रयसम् । मित्र... Nights and the Dawns have lowed to thee as the milch-cows low towards a calf in their lairs of rest. O Fire of many blessings, thou art the traveller of Heaven through the ages of man and thou shinest self-gathered through his nights. 5 तं देवा बुध्ने रजसः सुर्दससं दिवस्पृथिव्योररतिं म्येरिरे । रथमिव वेद्यं शुकशोचिषमर्ग्नि मित्रं न क्षितिषु प्रशंस्यम् ॥३॥ 3) The Gods have sent into the... बर्हिरेदमच्छिद्रं पान्तु शरणं निषद्य ॥८॥ 8) May Saraswati effecting our thought and goddess Ila and Bharati who carries all to their goal, the three goddesses, sit on our altar-seat and guard by the self-law of things our gapless house of refuge. पिशङ्गरुपः सुभरी वयोधाः श्रृष्टी वीरो जायते देवकामः । प्रजां त्वष्टा वि ष्यतु नाभिमस्मे अथ देवानामप्येतु पाथः ॥९॥ 9) Soon there is born a Hero of ...
... words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that... affair; for all this evolution is in its essential truth a growing of the Self in material Nature to the conscious possession of its spiritual being. But evolution carries with it, in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root, the necessity of a previous involution. For the spiritual process of evolution is a self-creation, not a making of what never was, but a bringing out of what was... process of progressive self-revelation, all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either 21, 22. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 25. 23.Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth (1969 ed.), p. 75. 24.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p, 42. Page 197 case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. "Matter could not ...
... and the self of things and the self of Nature; it will be a creative and interpretative revelation of the infinite truth of existence and of the universal delight and beauty and of greater spiritualised vision and power of life." 38 To create the poetry of the future the expressions of the four powers have to be harmonised in a new expression. Sri Aurobindo himself says that Savitri ... VII. 19. Page 454 lower nature to dwell in the still and inalienable calm and light of the self-existent spirit." 63 We can also say that the man of poetic taste ( rasika ), one who can be of one mind with the poet ( sahṛdaya ) can also experience the joy of calmness ( śānta rasa) and the withdrawal from the whirl of lower nature. 64 This bare strength of expression can be... also the nature of the poetry of that future age. "This poetry will be," he writes, "a voice of eternal things raising to a new significance and to a great satisfied joy in experience the events and emotions and transiences of life which will then be seen and sung as the succession of signs, the changing of the steps of an eternal manifestation; it will be an expression of the very self of man and ...
... India first, to air his superiority and lastly, "to have a good time." My friend was, in his own way, a thoughtful man and had a certain respect for India's wisdom. But although not quite self-complacent by nature, he had come to take it for granted that the Western outlook on life was essentially healthier and sounder than that of "the Oriental quietists", as he dubbed us, superiorly. I showed him... disappear altogether. Our love is there for you and has always been there. I cannot believe that you will reject it. For God's sake throw aside these misunderstandings and these movements, recover your true self and face out firmly, with the Mother's help and mine, the difficulties of the Yoga. "Your poem entitled 'In Darkness' is a very moving one — delicate, true and beautiful in every line." On another... I am not very receptive to your helping Force, which shows (does it not?) that I am essentially unfit for your Yoga which aims at making us non-human? "Only", I wrote in a sudden revulsion from self-pity, "you will have to concede, Guru, that I did not come here an utter failure, frustrated by life, a useless floatsam, stranded by tides of circumstances on the shoals of your Yoga. I was wanted ...
... .what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and... Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature. 64 ... the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent ...
... of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature. But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer,—first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the process and... being or a life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient Page 886 discovery of the true self and in a certain sense they are right; for it is the self or spirit that so represents itself in regard to the activities of Nature, and this revelation of its presence is enough to disengage the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther, it can... a new self, a new nature. In fact, the creative Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has to lead forward, in an almost simultaneous process but with a considerable priority and greater stress of the inferior element, a double evolution. There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental being in the life and body, and there is within it, pressing forward for self-revelation ...
... the body's self Are seized unalterably and he endures An ecstasy and an immortal change; He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power, All knowledge rushes on him like a sea: Transmuted by the white spiritual ray He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm, Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech. 19 These lines very clearly state not only the nature of the mantric... eternities. 47 In his yogic vision Sri Aurobindo sees that the World-Stair is the only means and mechanism of reaching the Supreme: "Alone it points us to our journey back/Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps." (Ibid.) By another image he gives the composition of the symbol. The stair consists of all the levels of consciousness and all these levels or rungs of the stair have to be climbed;... stepping into Space and Time after the epiphany of the Symbol Dawn. Disclosed stood up in a gold moments blaze White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite. Along a naked curve in boumeless Self The points that run through the closed heart of things Shadowed the indeterminable line That carries the Everlasting through the years. 23 This is the regal entry of the King of kings ...
... as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable.’ 26 ‘The decision lies between God and our self … It is altogether from within... aim, “to become ourselves,” “to exceed ourselves,” implying, as it does, that man has not yet found his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?’ 51 We are now familiar... yourself’. Nowadays, this adage is generally understood in the humanistic, psychological sense, but it was the key word from the core of the secret Greek mysteries: know your Self and you will know the world and God, because your Self is the world and God. That concise Greek formula contains also, for instance, the whole message of the realized soul that was Ramana Maharshi, a contemporary of Sri Aurobindo ...
... ss in which all self-variation ceases. Unable by the claim of the Infinite upon us to dwell for ever in the bonds of the finite or to find there satisfaction and largeness and peace, we have to break all the bonds of individual and universal Nature, destroy all values, symbols, images, self definitions, limitations of the illimitable and lose all littleness and division in the Self that is for ever... not be made a basis for the self-expression of the Spirit. The apparent Inconscience of the material universe holds in itself darkly all that is eternally self-revealed in the luminous Superconscient; to reveal it in Time is the slow and deliberate delight of Nature and the aim of her cycles. But there are other conceptions of reality, other conceptions of the nature of knowledge which demand c... separation of the being from its own integrality and entire reality; its boundaries are determined by this separative development of the consciousness, for it shuts us to our true self and to the true self and whole nature of things and obliges us to live in an apparent surface existence. A return or a progress to integrality, a disappearance of the limitation, a breaking down of separativeness, an ...
... part of yoga. Letters on Yoga, pp. 1604-05 When one has the cosmic consciousness, one can feel the cosmic Self as one's own self, one can feel one with other beings in the cosmos, one can feel all the forces of Nature as moving in oneself, all selves as one's own self. Letters on Yoga, p. 1071 The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and... oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one's own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one's whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are... anywhere in the being from the lower nature and one may become in one's extended consciousness the playground of all kinds of forces without being able to be either free or master. On the other hand, if there has been Self-realisation, there is one part of the being that remains untouched amid the play of the cosmic forces — while if the peace and purity of the self has been established in the whole ...
... within their specific boundaries. It replaces the moral law by a progressive law of self-perfection spontaneously expressing itself through the individual nature. In this operation, no more is the imposition of a rule or an imperative on the nature of an individual. The spiritual law respects the individual nature, modifies it and perfects it, and in this sense, it is unique for each individual and... a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature." VIII VALUES OF INDIAN CULTURE a. It is natural that Indian education underlines the importance of what can be called Indian values. b. In Indian thought, a distinction has been made between the ego and the self. According to Indian thought, whereas egoistic personality is ridden with self-contradiction and internal conflict... universal law of action. When man is primitive, historically or psychologically, he tends to be individualistic and egoistic and tends to create standards of action or conduct, which result in self-seeking and self-aggrandisement. b.But no individual can live in isolation, and no individual can be allowed Page 618 by the very fact of his social existence, to impose upon others what ...
... aim, ‘to become ourselves’, ‘to exceed ourselves’, implying, as it does, that man has not yet found his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?” 44 The gist of Sri Aurobindo’s... than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he... Reality is in its nature a self-concealing”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “and in the descent there are successive levels, in the concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form of an ascent; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive” – which summarises the process of involution and evolution. “We have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption ...
... sovereign right" "to cancel Nature and deny the soul". In that Void the world appeared a dream, and her soul something impersonal,—only a name. Sense was not able to act in the all", negating Void, therefore, there was no "form", but only "A sheer self-sight", a "self-seeing", a self-view. Events .could not provoke it into action; there was no response to external touches of Nature. Savitri acted, thought... into the mental plane "in imagination's car" and is able to conceive "ideals". But this mental being is not the true Self of man; true Self is hidden and lives within. Human nature holds within itself both the divine and the undivine powers: "Careless guardian of his nature's powers". "Man harbours dangerous forces in his house". These lower powers "can act in his acts, infest his... and movements rejected from the surface or from outer life persist in "our unconscious selves": "Old thoughts, old longings, dead passions live again". "An old self lurks with new self we are; "The old rejected nature still survives, "in dim tunnels of the world's being and ours". Very often, "Our dead selves come to slay our living soul". Thus seen, man is not a free ...
... (A. 36): "It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary... of existence." (Ibid.) In such cases there would be immediate rebirth for the individual. "For the soul personality, as it develops, must get sufficient power over its own nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental and vital individuality to persist without the Page 155 support of the material body, as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to... instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self- Page 165 expression. All this it does from behind a veil..." (Letters on Yoga, p. 438) "But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life ...
... What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his back look upon the past, his sweep of vision over the present, his eye of aspiration and prophecy cast towards the future, his passion of self-finding and self-exceeding, his reach beyond the three times to the eternal and immutable, this... hammer's; Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots. 68 At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision, Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature. Page 637 All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness. 69 I saw the spirit... Byron and Wordsworth are the two poets who are the most hampered by this difficulty of finding and keeping to the native speech of their greater self, most often depressed in their elevation, because they are both drawn by a strong side of their nature, the one to a forceful, the other to a weighty intellectualised expression; neither of them are born singers or artists of word and sound... but ...
... ordinary human mind has Page 25 an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is another, a hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we can become aware of the real Self and of a larger deeper truth of nature, can realise the Self and liberate and transform the nature. To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object of this concentration... heavenly Psyche must put off her veil And step into common nature's crowded rooms And stand uncovered in that nature's front And rule its thoughts and fill the body and life. It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent... activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord the nature with the inner realisation so that one may not be divided into two discordant parts. There are here several disciplines or processes possible. One is to offer all the activities to the Divine and call for the inner guidance and the taking up of one's nature by a Higher Power ...
... through him that the cosmic spirit organises its collective units and makes them self-expressive and progressive and through him that it raises Nature from the Inconscience to the Superconscience and exalts it to meet the Transcendent.” 27 “It is always the individual who receives the intuitions of Nature and takes the step forward dragging or drawing the rest of humanity behind him …... itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution, – the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening of the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel... union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature .” 45 All Christians will assert that they have a soul, but few will be able to say what it is, except that it is in some way immortal. The soul, the real individual and, according to Sri ...
... what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes possible; for Page 943 as it opens us to... deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface Page 929 in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being... calculable or controllable, and many incoherent and inharmonious mental elements use his reason and will, enter into and determine his self-building, his nature-development, his life action. Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs it: ...
... Truth that fulfills and releases. According to one school or sect, the real self of man is indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. According to another school or sect, the individual is one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. According to a third school or sect. God, Nature, and the individual soul in man are three eternally different powers of being... becoming, a new being, a new self, a new nature. There are several tentative beginnings, and they are followed by slow processes of growth and evolution at the high levels of which there emerge ranges of spiritual experience and realization. At earlier stages, a certain kind of religiosity may become predominant; this kind of religiosity is marked by the nature of mind or life seeking and finding... tends to veil the integral Reality and to bind human nature to the imperatives of the laws of the body, life and mental operations, while the spirit is self-luminous and its increasing light reveals luminously various facets of Reality and opens up the gates, even the flood-gates, of the vision of the integral Reality, and it liberates human nature progressively and more and more fully from the imperatives ...
... es of indefinite sound. Self-luminous conscious being precedes, contains and manifests in self-intelligent & selfeffective Force; self-intelligent and self-effective Force at once conceals and manifests itself in the mask of Prakriti, the mask of a motional and mechanical working of Nature. We arrive then at this formula of the conception of Law in Nature. Law of Nature is a fixed process formed... out in itself by a cosmic Will of its own fixed and predetermined self-perceptions. It accepts the idea of a principle of unerring self-guidance in Nature, but is unable to regard that principle as in any way a mysterious agency or an inexplicable birth; Nature guides itself unerringly only because Nature is the self-working of a Self-luminous conscious Existence formulating its Will in fixed processes... of escape. Law of Nature in Vedanta is the normality of a regular or habitual process in self-intelligent World-Force; in other words,—for Chit-Shakti, self-intelligent World-Force can mean nothing else than this,—in the cosmic Will-Power of universal self-existent Being,—of God, of Brahman. The process of Force, then, however fixed, however imperative, is neither mystically self-existent nor mechanically ...
... cannot mean food. स्व-धा is self-placing or holding and therefore the action of the self-nature, स्वभाव, धर्म. अनुष्वधम् here is equivalent in idea to अनु स्वराज्यम्, in the law of thy self-empire, in the last hymn. Indra is great by will or action, क्रतु, and in verse 7 he is described as ऋजुक्रतु, straight in will or action. His nature like that of the other gods is the nature of the Truth, ऋतवृध्; the... cleave to either side the lower; then shall we sinless in thy law, O son of the supreme Nature, abide in it for a higher existence. SUKTA 25 (1) Whatsoever thy peoples, whatever their nature, thou,OGod Varuna, measurest out to them accordingly in sky and sky Page 210 the law of their nature. (2) Let not thy delight in us be for the mortal piercing of him who is heedless nor for... earth the Serpent, singing the word of illumination in the law of thy self-empire. (2) That intoxicating Soma which was pressed, which was brought by the Falcon, had made thee drunk with rapture, by which thou smotest the Coverer out from the waters, O Thunderer, by thy might, singing the word of illumination in the law of thy self-empire. (3) Advance, approach, be violent; thy thunderbolt cannot ...
... and who is engaged in works as an offering to the Master of self-energising and all-giving sacrifice. That is the path that leads to the state of immortality, the state of union with the divine Being, identity with the Self and oneness with the supreme dynamic divine Nature, and the state of transcendence of the three gunas of lower nature, — the state of trigunātīta, and the state of sādharmyam... indwelling Lord of all Nature and turn to Him with one's whole being,— with the life and body and sense and mind and heart and understanding, — with one's whole dedicated knowledge and will and action, sarvabhāvena, in every way of conscious self and instrumental nature. For all other Dharmas or norms of action are only a preparation for that highest Dharma which is the law of divine nature and divine action... Purusha and Prakriti, and the precise relations between the supreme Page 23 Purusha (Purushottama),¹¹ the immutable Self (Akshara Purusha),¹² and the mobile Self (Kshara Purusha), as also the intimate relations between Purushottama and the higher nature, Para Prakriti, which manifests multiplicity of individual souls (par ā prakrtir jīvabh ū t ā ) ¹³ This standpoint also clarifies ...
... which is its true nature. Its true nature is to be wholly aware of its objects, and of these objects the first is self, the being which is evolving its consciousness here, and the rest is what we see as not-self,—but if existence is indivisible, that too must in reality be self: the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to become perfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware... the liberation, perfection, self-fulfilment for which the being in the Ignorance is seeking can only be reached by passing out of his present nature of Ignorance into a nature of spiritual self-knowledge and world knowledge. This greater nature we speak of as Supernature because it is beyond his actual level of consciousness and capacity; but in fact it is his own true nature, the height and completeness... structure of life. It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it ...
... immobile and One. Purusha or Spirit is therefore the noumenon of the true Self, Prakriti the noumenon of not-Self or apparent Self. It is in this true Self of Parabrahman that the evolutions of apparent Self take place. In It Matariswan ordereth the waters. XI. Long and difficult to follow as has been this account of the Nature of Things according to Vedic philosophy, it was necessary so that we might... Universe, others hold it to be the fulfilment under self-rule and guidance of man's nature, others a natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties. The Hindus perceived that it was all these at once but they discovered that the law with which the soul must put itself in relation was the law of the Eternal Self, that man's nature must seek its fulfilment in that which is permanent... Aryans of India raised the veil completely and saw Him as the Universal Transcendent Self of all things who is at the same time the particular present Self in each. They reached His singleness aloof from phenomena, they saw Him in every one of His million manifestations in phenomena. God in Himself, God in man, God in Nature were the "ideas" which their life expressed. Their civilisation was therefore more ...
... determined by Nature; of what avail is the effort to control ?" "At the same time, the Gita says that the self is the enemy of the self and the self is the friend of the self. And it further says that by the self one should control the self. This means that there is a lower self and there is a higher self and that there is in the higher self a Will which can rise above Prakriti, Nature, and can control... activities of Nature, Page 172 which impels also the return of the energies and activities of Nature towards the will and being of Purusha. The Divine Himself plunges into Nature and Nature offers herself to the Divine : this is the law of sacrifice which synthesises and coordinates all the processes of law in the world. It is fundamentally the law of self-giving or the law of mutual self-giving... control the lower self. I am in search of that Free Will, and I am in search of that kind of work which will be in harmony with that Free Will. I think that when the Gita speaks of Swabhava and Swadharma, it really means to refer to the movement of Free Will emerging from the inner self, from the higher self, Swabhava, and to the law of development of the nature of the inner self, Swadharma. Right now ...
... After completing the series on Bankim Chandra, Sri Aurobindo stopped contributing to the Indu Prakash. At this time, both the political and spiritual sides of his nature were pressing forward for free self-expression and self-realisation. It was a simultaneous development, marked by an increasing effort of his intrinsic spirituality to prevail over his ardent spirit of nationalism. Even when... suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable 157 ... just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of the pressure on his throat by any means in his power. It is the nature of the pressure which determines the nature of the resistance." 158 Enlarging upon the necessary evil of war and aggression... transgressing the law of their own nature. If we were not dazzled by the artificial glare of English prestige, we should at once acknowledge that these men are really not worth being angry with: and if it is idle to be angry with them, it is still more unprofitable to rate their opinion of us at more than a straw's value. Our appeal, the appeal of every high-souled and self-respecting nation, ought not ...
... Realisations are the reception in the consciousness and the establishment there of the fundamental truths of the Divine, of the Higher or Divine Nature, of the world-consciousness and the play of its forces, of one's own self and real nature and the inner nature of things, the power of these things growing in one till they are a part of one's inner life and existence. As for instance, the realisation of... certitude would rather be called a response of your own nature to the Divine. There is a Peace or a Light which is the response of the Divine, but that is a wide Peace, a great Light which is felt as a presence other than one's Personal self, not part of one's personal nature, but something that comes from above, though in the end it possesses toe nature—or there is the Presence itself which carries with... Freedom with the phenomenon of the Determination of nature — in a different way from his, but to the same purpose. It would be a little long and I had no time. In reality, the freedom and the determination are only two sides of the same thing — for the fundamental Page 120 truth is self-determination of the cosmos and in it secret self-determination of the individual. The difficulty ...
... are in a world and nature where there is so much to oppose them—it is also the promise and surety of emergence and victory in the future. Page 27 January 22,1936 You stick to your intellectual ethical version of the inner self-vision ? Dry ? policeman ? criminal ? Great Lord! If it were that, it would cease to be self-vision at all—for in the true self-vision there is no... even if at present only a slight beginning has been made; but a beginning is enough, once the Force, the Power are there". It is not really on the capacity of the outer nature that success depends (for the outer nature all self-succeeding seems impossibly difficult), but on the inner being and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the... ? Only the few. What the Mother spoke of was not self-analysis nor dissection. Analyses and dissection are mental things which can deal with the inanimate or make the live dead; they are not spiritual methods. What the Mother spoke of was not analysis, but a seeing of oneself and of all the living movements of the being and the nature, a vivid observation of the personalities and forces that ...
... then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another... consciousness and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of nature thinking with the intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling... that though indivisible in its pure being, it is freely self-divisible in its conscious experience and can concentrate itself in many states at a time. It is by this Page 138 tapas, by this varied concentration of self-knowledge that Divine Existence creates and supports the world and is at once the same God and Nature and world, Personal and Impersonal, Pure and Varied, Qualified ...
... begins to feel Page 148 others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one's own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one's whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut... desires; this is our own sensitive nature, not some kind of telegraphic machinery! True, it is our nature, in the sense that we have grown accustomed to responding to certain vibrations rather than to others, to being moved or pained by certain things rather than by others; and this set of habits has, apparently, crystallized into a personality we call our "self." Yet, if we look more closely, we can... only a realizing of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process. 157 We have become separated from the world and other beings through the ...
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