... beginning and was before any beginning, infinite and sempiternal; but Matter also is an eternal entity. In the Parabrahman, the absolute inconceivable Self, Spirit and Matter are one and undifferentiated, but the moment evolution begins Spirit and Matter manifest equally and coevally. We have seen that the first spiritual evolution from the pure self-existent Atman is Prajna of the Sleep-State, Eternal Wisdom... natural outcome from the mutual relations of Spirit and Matter; these two they regarded as two terms—call them forces, energies, substances, or what you will,—of phenomenal existence; and psychical life only as one result of their interaction. They refused however to accept any dualism in their cosmogony and, as has been pointed out, regarded Spirit and Matter as essentially one and their difference as... material Energy. The spiritual entity does not work, but merely is and has a result; it is the material Energy, the manifestation of Spirit, which works or ceases from work. Eventually however Spirit and Matter are merely aspects of each other & of something which is behind both; that something is the motionless, actionless It. This which without moving is swifter than thought, is It; this which mind ...
... dualism of the thing and its shadow, Purusha & Prakriti, commonly called spirit and matter. Properly speaking, the distinction is illusory, since there is nothing which is exclusively spirit or exclusively matter, nor can the Universe be strictly parcelled out between these; from the point of view of Reality spirit and matter are not different but the same. We may say, if we like, that the entire Universe... Universe is matter and spirit does not exist; we may say, if we like, that the entire Universe is spirit and matter does not exist. In either case we are merely multiplying words without counsel, ignoring the patent fact visible throughout the Universe that both spirit and matter exist and are indissolubly welded, precisely because they are simply one thing viewed from two sides. The distinction between... artificial canals from the reservoir were not, indeed, wanting. Some by resolving that army of witnesses into a single Witness, arrived at the dual conception of God and Nature, Purusha & Prakriti, Spirit and Matter, Ego and Non-ego. Others, more radical, perceived Prakriti as the creation, shadow or aspect of Purusha, so that God alone remained, the spiritual or ideal factor eliminating by inclusion the ...
... identification cannot be convincing unless we recognize a series of ascending terms between Spirit and Matter. But here, again, the integral experience of the Veda and the Upanishads confirms a series of ascending terms, — Life, Mind, Supermind and the grades that unite Mind to Supermind between Spirit and Matter. In fact, not only the Veda and the Upanishads but several other theories also maintain that... The recent developments of the spiritual evolution have opened up the paths of the supramental descent and supramental manifestation on the earth so as to bring about largest synthesis of the Spirit and Matter, the boundaries of which, it is claimed, are constantly breaking so as to bring about on the earth a new species, the very nature of which will have inherent powers of the supramental consciousness... them were found to be as comprehensive as the demands of knowledge require, nor did they prove to be , as integral as full integrality that can be demanded in terms of the unity and integrity of Spirit and Matter. As a matter of fact, it was found that religions and paths of yoga that lie behind religions aimed at the attainment of Reality or Heaven beyond the earth, and even when there was occasionally ...
... n cannot be convincing unless we recognize a series of ascending terms between Spirit and Matter. But page - 100 here, again, the integral experience of the Veda and the Upanishads confirms a series of ascending terms, —Life, Mind, Supermind and the grades that unite Mind to Supermind - between Spirit and Matter. In fact, not only the Veda and the Upanishads but several other theories also... spirit in Matter would be the sign of the possibility and even eventual inevitability of the manifestation of the Supermind and of the transformation of Matter leading to true integration of the Spirit and Matter. That is the reason why he lays a great stress on the theme of spiritual evolution and regards a complete involution of all that Spirit is and its evolutionary self-unfolding as the secret meaning... distinctive and unprecedented aim that has been explicitly stated by Sri Aurobindo as the aim of his integral yoga. Full manifestation of Spirit in Matter as the culmination of integration of Spirit and Matter has sometimes been envisaged in the past, and in the earliest synthesis of yoga of the Veda this aim may have been, it appears, attempted. There is also a view that the kingdom of heaven is within ...
... and education. Much of it was recovered by the seers of the Upanishads, and the integrality of spirit and matter was preserved in some of their teachings. But already a kind of exclusivism had become manifest during the Upanishadic Age. Later, sharp distinctions came to be made between Spirit and Matter, and a denunciation of material life became more and more predominant. The call of the spirit... as though these rejections have brought us through their consequences to a point in Thought and in Life where we are necessitated to look afresh and to question the facile proposition that Spirit and Matter are irreconcilable realities. We need to ask the question: What is Matter? We need to ask: What is Spirit? It is possible that the reality is neither the one nor the other, but something in... must undergo an integral spiritual Page 60 transformation, not indeed by an escape into some far-off heavens, but here, in this physical earth itself, by a victorious union of Spirit and Matter. This, he has declared, is not an issue of an individual but of collectivity, not an issue of Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfillment. ...
... to the self-conscious. It is a cosmic change of state." 10 Here Teilhard makes a very pregnant pronouncement: "This irrefutably explains the links and also the contradictions between spirit and matter. And in a sense they are both fundamentally the same thing, as the neo-materialists allege; but between them lies also a point of deflection which makes them in some way the opposite of one another... is on a superficial impression, valid only for pragmatic purposes. It cannot be posited on a true envisagement of things. The true envisage-ment will show 'a point of deflection' which makes spirit and matter 'the opposites of one another'." But Wildiers forgets that if Teilhard's first declaration is to be considered in a certain limited context, the second is equally so to be considered... viewpoint, material determinisms cease to provide the skeleton of the world; they are only a secondary effect in the cosmos..." 20 Almost at the end of the essay we are told that the dualism between spirit and matter "is simply and harmoniously resolved...in a world in which consciousness and its appearance are regarded as the phenomenon. Every thing then takes its natural place in a universe in process ...
... dualism of the thing and its shadow, Purusha and Prakriti, commonly called spirit and matter. Properly speaking, the distinction is illusory, since there is nothing which is exclusively spirit or exclusively matter, nor can the Universe be strictly parcelled out between these; from the point of view of Reality spirit and matter are not different but the same. We may say, if we like, that the entire... entire Universe is matter and spirit does not exist; we may say, if we like that the entire Universe is spirit and matter does not exist. In either case we are merely multiplying words without counsel, ignoring the patent fact visible through the Universe that both spirit and matter exist and are indissolubly welded, precisely because they are simply one thing viewed from two sides. The distinction ...
... which pursues all mere compromises between Spirit and Matter. A compromise is a bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting powers; it is not a true reconciliation. True reconciliation proceeds always by a mutual comprehension leading to some sort of intimate oneness. It is therefore through the utmost possible unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling... upon Non-existence with the result of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being. Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions ...
... human incarnation in the present time, one has to be open and wide-ranging, therein following the example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. “We have to find a truth that can entirely reconcile Spirit and Matter and can give to both their due portion in Life and their due justification in Thought, amercing neither of its rights, denying in neither the sovereign truth from which even its errors, even the... superstition or hallucination, but of some sovereign fact disguised which demands our fealty and will avenge itself if denied or excluded. … It is therefore through the utmost unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling truth and so at some strongest foundation for a reconciling practice in the inner life of the individual and his outer existence.” 3 True... evolution, the beings of those worlds, the evolution of life on Earth, the past, present and future of the human being in its changing environments, life and death, the aspects and relation of Spirit and Matter, the meaning of it all and the ways of the Divine with it. And much more. Many statements refer directly to science in a positive or negative way. As Sri Aurobindo wrote for the future, this cannot ...
... mechanist and the machine, the music and the musician, the poet and the poem, supermind, mind, and life and matter, the soul and Nature. 18 But for Sri Aurobindo it was not enough to reconcile Spirit and Matter on paper. That the Spirit is or is not of this world does not make much difference, after all, knowledge of the Spirit in life is not associated with a power over life: Page 21 ... own dark whirl – an inexorable and ceaseless becoming. This is the first duality from which all others follow: the One and the Innumerable, the Infinite and the Finite, Consciousness and Force, Spirit and Matter, the Formless and a frenzy of forms – He and She. Our whole existence is caught between these two poles, some of us wishing to see only the Transcendent, which is then called the supreme Positive... more than the Neanderthal man leapt to Plato; he must first "supramentalize" all the previous levels. Certainly, his consciousness is the meeting point of the supreme High and the supreme Low, Spirit and Matter, Positive and Negative, and his own powers are, of course, considerably increased, but they are increased only in proportion to the new resistance he has to encounter. The more evolution progresses ...
... begin by accepting the possibility in case one finds it rational. The Life Divine gives the rationale. Now in the second chapter the opposition between Spirit and Matter is dealt with. There is an opposition between Spirit and Matter; and there is belief that the Spirit inhabits this bodily mansion. It is the Spirit that is really the living entity in the cosmos. And then the question is what... believes is real. Sri Aurobindo shows in this chapter that a reconciliation and a synthesis is possible. They are not two opposites in contradiction at work; the contradictions are only in the mind. Spirit and Matter being the extreme ends of the Reality carry a sense of concreteness to the human being. But the intermediate terms of the series cannot satisfy ultimately the sense of Reality in man. There are ...
... Savitri the true Reality that had eluded him so long. But now the gold link comes to me with thy feet And His gold sun has shone on me from thy face. 40 The two worlds of Spirit and Matter will be bridged, for every part of Savitri has the power to create that link. We can visualise her Might even better when we see that Truth-Consciousness is permanently lodged with her. Satyavan... the extreme experiences of spiritual 4ife. It has been earlier explored how Satyavan travels from Time to Eternity and then back gain, but cannot find the harmony between the two extremes of Spirit and Matter. Diamond has the capacity to resolve the impossible dichotomy. Take, for example, the following lines: Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain, Her sorrow into a magic crown ...
... the occult depths its assertive will. There is the opposition of force against force and the battle becomes fiercer as the core issue is approached. If there is a fundamental antagonism between Spirit and Matter, then it is inconceivable that they should ever be reconciled with each other. That is Death's postulate and he presses his argument forward almost with the thrust of violence: Where Matter... felicity through the door of soul's death is for Savitri no less terrifying than that of crossing the gate of peace by killing the body. In fact, logically speaking, this negative aspect cannot make Spirit and Matter self-exclusive; if they cannot be directly reconciled, it does not mean that they can cancel each other. Spirit or Matter is a wrong starting-point. True, in the evolutionary process what is ...
... bring about the needed integration of Spirit and Matter. Then only would it be possible for the supramental consciousness not merely to dwell in the cellular consciousness of the body and widen it or universalize it but also permeate that consciousness and thus fix itself in the physical consciousness of the human body; only then the integration of Spirit and Matter can be secured. That integration would ...
... and ambition. It gives one* the capacity to reject ignorance. What is, then, the solution of the opposition between Spirit and Matter ? Sri Aurobindo does not advocate a compromise. It is very often a bad bargain. It is necessary to reconcile the two—Spirit and Matter. The reconciliation is found in the Cosmic Consciousness which is the meeting point of Matter and Spirit; in the creation ...
... perfection and fulfilment in life. They are born with a sense of the indivisible unity of existence and cannot rest satisfied with any experience that cuts up this unity into pairs of opposites: Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, One and Many, Reality and Appearance, etc. And the unity they aspire after is not only the eternal and essential unity of all existence, but also the unity that breathes and blooms... single pilot of his life ? Will he not awake to the reason of his earthly existence, to the glory of his mission here, and grow into "the great X, the quaternary link," joining God and Nature, Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, Heaven and Earth ? Will he not become the gold-and-blue bridge, the intermediary between "That which has to be and that which is", the flame-channel at once of the highest aspiration ...
... begins with rigor mortis than the spirit begins at a certain altitude. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are the whole story of a new relationship between Spirit and Matter, the discovery of a third piece of data that modifies both Spirit and Matter and opens the door to a new species upon earth. The Clarification of Matter How was Mirra to proceed? What path was She going to follow? ... It ...
... Infinite, of life for its fount of Light, of the soul of man for the supreme Oversoul, has been usually characterised by a certain excess of stress and tension. The ancient Vedic balance between Spirit and Matter was soon lost in the subsequent ages, and a cleft was made between Purusha and Prakriti. The transcendence of the Brahman became the exclusive aim of all, or almost all, spiritual seeking,... manifestation of Spirit in Matter, and the other, intense and exclusive, renouncing life in its intolerant thirst for the Light, and creating a permanent divorce between Purusha and Prakriti, Spirit and Matter, the One and the Many. The Vedic Yoga, grown obsolete and somewhat obscure, survives in some of its lingering vestiges only in some forms of Paurânic Bhakti Yoga and Tantra, it is the Sânkhya ...
... identification convincing to the rational intellect if we refuse to Page 8 recognise a series of ascending terms (Life, Mind, Supermind and the grades that link Mind to Supermind) between Spirit and Matter. Otherwise the two must appear as irreconcilable opponents bound together in an unhappy wedlock and their divorce the one reasonable solution. To identify them, to represent each in the terms... inner and outer experience and to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfilment in an integral human existence for the individual and for the race. From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to the Unknowable which they both represent, there arises also a difference of effectiveness in the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of the materialist although more insistent ...
... outcome from the mutual relations of Spirit and Matter; these two they regarded as two terms, —call them forces, energies, substances, or what you will, — of phenomenal existence; and psychical life only as one result of their interaction. They refused however to accept any dualism in their cosmogony and, as has been previously pointed out, regarded Spirit and Matter as essentially one; and their ...
... the integrality of spirit and matter was preserved in some of their teachings. But 1. Taittiriya Upanishad, Brahmanandavalli, chapter I. Page 36 Hermitages in Bharhut sculptures (c. second century B.C.) already a kind of exclusivism had become manifest during the Upanishadic Age. Later, sharp distinctions came to be made between Spirit and Matter, and a denunciation ...
... transmuted into pure energy, but then it loses its materiality, it is dematerialised. That is what some of the old spiritual disciplines taught. Even if there is no unbridgeable gulf between Spirit and Matter, they said, even if they are not incommensurabies but form one reality, Spirit is the reality in essence, Matter is an inferior formulation. Matter has unrolled itself out of the infinite, it... The same may happen to the other parts and planes of human consciousness and existence. Of course, if one chooses, one can sidetrack these intervening ranges of consciousness between the Spirit and Matter, and strike something like a chord line between the two; but also one need not follow this bare straight ascetic line of ascension; one can pursue a wider, a cicular or global movement which not ...
... transmuted into pure energy, but then it loses its materiality, it is dematerialised. That is what some of the old spiritual disciplines taught. Even if there is no unbridgeable gulf between Spirit and Matter, they said, even if they are not incommensurables but form one reality, Spirit is the reality in essence, Matter is an inferior formulation. Matter has unrolled itself out of the infinite, it... The same may happen to the other parts and planes of human consciousness and existence. Of course, if one chooses, one can sidetrack these intervening ranges of consciousness between the Spirit and Matter, and strike something like a chord line between the two; but also one need not follow this bare straight ascetic line of ascension; one can pursue a wider, a circular or global movement which ...
... Other Writings from the Arya Essays in Philosophy and Yoga Chapter XXV The Knot of Matter Argument Spirit and Matter are the two ends of a unity, Spirit the soul and reality of Matter, Matter the form and body of Spirit. There is an ascending series of substance and Spirit at the summit is itself pure substance of being. Brahman is the sole material ...
... dynamic delight of being, but miss the pure existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss of being. If we concentrate on Purusha-Prakriti alone, we may see only the dichotomy of Soul and Nature, Spirit and Matter, and miss their unity. In considering the action of the Infinite we have to avoid the error of the disciple who thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the elephant-driver ...
... We who live in the age of Sri Aurobindo cannot be escapists. There is really nothing in mysticism to compel us to renounce earth and not attempt a radical reshaping of it. For, between Spirit and Matter no gulf yawns as between abstract and concrete. The Spirit is described by all who have realised it as more dense, more powerful, more actual to all our faculties than the table at which I am ...
... field of exploration opens in our consciousness just where the boundary fades between the profane and the sacred, while awaiting the disappearance of the boundary which Nature has traced between Spirit and Matter. It is important that we accept the idea that God is free to work where He wants and in the manner He chooses, and that this is no longer a time of rituals which sustain our thinking of Him, but ...
... Mother explained that this baby in Savitri's arms, or Satyavan, is the New World that she is bringing down. So the symbolism is that Savitri is bom as the wife of Satyavan and this union of Spirit and Matter is necessary for the New Creation. Savitri is the daughter of the supreme God; she is the Divine Word, meaning the Creative Power. And, specifically here in Savitri, she is the Word ...
... mean so much to her? If she believes in Matter then she must obey the laws of matter which are inscrutable. Death indicates to Savitri that she should be consistent in her argument. How can Spirit and Matter be brought together in a wedlock? For, such marriage is bound to prove most unhappy. Savitri replies to God: My heart is wiser than the Reason's thoughts, My heart is stronger than ...
... discover the true meaning of existence. It is that hope which is now getting kindled in him. Savitri shall bring about the miracle. In the union of Satyavan and Savitri shall be the union of Spirit and Matter. In the happy authenticity of such an intuition in their souls they pledge to join together. And the Gods of Nature and of the Sky shower marriage blessings on them. VI: 1 The ...
... mentality understands it better. But the future in its art and thought will totally surpass them and manifest a beauty and thought infinitely more integral, profound, rich and complete, in which spirit and matter will be united in perfect harmony. Blessings c. 1965 ...
... rise above, that is, to the Supermental level, it is hardly possible to know that last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible ...
... talking of Christ's cosmicity as such. For, the Cosmic Christ is, as Teilhard 29 avers, the Christ of Evolution, and pantheism demands to be recognised when Teilhard 30 lets himself declare: "Spirit and matter are contradictory if isolated and symbolised in the form of abstract fixed notions of pure plurality and pure simplicity... In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists ...
... the Energy must be spiritual; life and mind must be independent products of a spiritual energy and themselves powers of manifestation of the Spirit. It then becomes irrational to suppose that Spirit and Matter alone exist, that they are the two confronting realities and that Matter is the sole possible basis of the manifestation of spirit; the idea of a sole material world becomes immediately untenable ...
... we have the two terms of the finite and the infinite, of that which becomes and of that which does not become but for ever is, of that which takes form and of that which does not take form, of Spirit and Matter, of the supreme Superconscient and the nethermost Inconscience; in this dualism, and to get away from it, it is open to us to define Knowledge as the possession of one term and the possession ...
... even when largest in their view of the data and most careful in their survey Page 891 of possible consequence. Life and mind are a constant flux of possibles intervening between spirit and matter and at each step bring in, if not an infinite, at least an indefinite of possibles, and this would be enough to make all logical calculation uncertain and relative. But in addition there reigns ...
... present crown and head in the human being, other than an aimless circling and an individual escape from the circling, if the infinite potentiality of this creature, who alone here stands between Spirit and Matter with the power to mediate between them, has any meaning other than an ultimate awakening from the delusion of life by despair and disgust of the cosmic effort and its complete rejection, then ...
... sense-governed divisions, he still followed the same logical policy. Conceiving of spirit, he cut it off sharply as a thing by itself, the opposite of all that was not spirit; an antinomy between spirit and matter became the base of his self-conception, or else more amply between spirit on the one side and on the other mind, life and body. Then conceiving of self as a pure entity, all else being not-self ...
... lowest physical centre which, awakened in the Yoga, ascends in light through the opening centres to meet the Divine in the highest centre and so connect the manifest and the unmanifested, joining Spirit and Matter. The golden serpent in the Muladhara is a symbol of the energy of the transformed physical consciousness. The cobra is a symbol of the Energy in Nature—the upraised hood and light ...
... understanding things comes from an arbitrary simplification which puts spirit on one side and matter on the other. It is this foolishness that makes you incapable of understanding anything. There is spirit and matter—this is very convenient. So if one does not belong to spirit, one Page 86 belongs to matter; if one does not belong to matter, one belongs to spirit. But what do you call spirit and ...
... Flute-player, the mastering compulsion of the All-Beautiful, can only be seized and seize us through an occult love and yearning which in the end makes one the Form and the Formless, and identifies Spirit and Matter. It is that which the spirit in Love is seeking here in the darkness of the Ignorance and it is that which it finds when individual human love is changed into the love of the Immanent Divine incarnate ...
... supramental level, that is, it is hardly possible to know the world's final secret and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes ...
... from his book: "In his philosophy there is a wonderful synthesis, based Page 41 on the Vedanta, of ancient and modern thought. In him the values of being and becoming, of Spirit and matter, of the One and the many, of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the individual, of the personal God and the absolute Godhead, are integrated in a vision of the whole, which has ...
... new consciousness is the work she has undertaken. Because of the very nature of things, it is an ideal that seeks to broaden the base of the attempt to establish harmony between body and Soul, Spirit and Matter.... Undated The task of giving Sri Aurobindo's vision a concrete form has been given to the Mother. Page 383 × ...
... like to cull it for you from his book: "In his philosophy there is a wonderful synthesis, based on the Vedanta, of ancient and modern thought. In him the values of being and becoming, of Spirit and matter, of the One and the many, of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the individual, of the personal God and the absolute Godhead, are integrated in a vision of the whole, which has ...
... material sense until it is given by Energy the forms of Matter seizable by that sense." 2 "...The sharp division which practical experience and long habit of mind have created between Spirit and Matter has [not] any fundamental reality.... Substance is the form of itself on which it works, and of that substance if Matter is one end, Spirit is the other. The two are one: Spirit is the soul ...
... in your case? Why not? Always the idea that there must be an instantaneous absolute miracle or else nothing! What about process in things? You are ignorant of all that is between supreme Spirit and matter, it seems. You know nothing of the occult processes of mind, life and all the rest—so you can think only of miraculous divinity or else law of matter as known to Science. But for supramental Spirit ...
... given long quotations in order to dispel our ignorant notions that Yogis live in a rarefied atmosphere of the Spirit and are indifferent to what passes on this plane of Matter; we forget that Spirit and Matter are two ends of existence. I shall give another minor, even humorous, instance of Matter's reality to Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the poet and the philosopher. Sri Aurobindo was taking his meal, the ...
... people has either been acceptance of Matter as the basic reality of existence or its denial and the affirmation of the Spirit on the other hand, as the sole truth of life. The antinomy between Spirit and Matter was never entirely resolved though some efforts might have been made now and then to arrive at a compromise between the two. Sri Aurobindo has come to give us a complete synthesis between the ...
... world-disgust. For the last two thousand years India has lived in 'the shadow of the great Refusal' and laboured under the sense of the cosmic Illusion. A supposed metaphysical dualism between Spirit and Matter, Reality and Appearance, has created in the collective Indian mind a feeling of the vanity of earthly existence, of the unimportance of things in Time, of the essential illusoriness of human life ...
... Reality. There is an all-seeing purpose in the terrestrial creation. A divine plan is working itself out through contradictions and perplexities. All that is intermediate between Spirit and Matter has also to be perfected Page 24 and brought into unity in complete integration. To discover the Divine Reality and to work for its full manifestation in physical life ...
... Education", we are presenting three passages from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. As is well known, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have given to the world a new vision of the synthesis of Spirit and Matter as also a programme of supramental action on the earth aiming at the total transformation of the body and the mutation of the human species, which will have revolutionary consequences for the ...
... view is, I think, wrong, for the mystic has achieved a state characterized not by a repudiation of the flesh, but one in which he experiences the implicate union of opposites: body and nonbody, spirit and matter, health and illness, birth and death. If we begin to experience the domain in which the issues of health and disease cease to appear as absolutes, our ordinary health strategies can be seen ...
... directed that education in India should be science-based and yet in coherence with the spiritual values. Indeed, if this recommendation is to be implemented, the research in Yoga which reconciles Spirit and Matter is indispensable. Indeed, there has been a good deal of research in Yoga since a number of decades in the wake of the Renaissance in India, and a good deal of experimentation has been attempted ...
... entire life, his very body, must undergo an integral spiritual transformation, not indeed by an escape into some far-off heaven, but here, in this physical earth itself, by a victorious union of Spirit and Matter. This, he has declared, is not an issue of an individual but of collectivity, not an issue of Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfilment. ...
... India and in the attainment of freedom for India a great possibility of opening a new age in which India can, because of its treasures of spiritual knowledge, discover further secrets whereby Spirit and Matter can be synthesised, and the luminous knowledge of the spirit can illumine and transform the physical life of the earth. India has also the possibility of becoming a pioneering partner in the task ...
... and one does not know in what direction and how we should move forward. Time has come when it is perfectly possible for humanity to develop a comprehensive and integral culture where both spirit and matter can join together and create a spiritualised society that can at last answer to the perennial aspiration of humanity expressed in terms of a new earth and a new heaven, of the City of God and ...
... Vedantic as in the Gita, and the Tantrik. These four syntheses are fully reflected in the new synthesis, but the new synthesis also has its own distinctive aim and distinctive method. Spirit and Matter are synthesized in the new synthesis for purposes of the fullest manifestation of spirit in Matter and of establishing divine life on the earth. This yoga, therefore, does not reject life but ...
... world is looked upon as unreal, an illusion or Maya, and the aim is to realise the pure Spirit which is the sole Reality. In Sri Aurobindo's view, this ascetic renunciation is not necessary — Spirit and Matter, 'the two poles of existence', are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic, for Spirit is involved in Matter and is progressively manifesting itself in the material world through the evolutionary ...
... trying to intellectualise you," (and then softly) "but I find that you're a blockhead, a wooden head." But it is not so much the content that is important, though it is true that my knowledge of spirit and matter doesn't go beyond this book. He has given me more than His intellectuality; something else, which no words can describe. It is the tone, the attitude in which He wrote all this, that is the most ...
... and luminously named by Sri Aurobindo as the Materialist Denial and the Ascetic Refusal.* But there are other points of view, .other lines of approach which seek a harmony and union between Spirit and Matter, that envisage the marriage of Heaven and Earth. The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that ...
... methods of evolution and thoroughness with which these methods came to be applied right up to their minutest details for arriving at perfect Page 18 perfection and integration of Spirit and Matter through the transformation of the inconscience by the supramental consciousness is entirely new and unprecedented. The result of this vast and difficult endeavour is the effect it has produced ...
... them were found to be as comprehensive as the demands of knowledge require, nor did they prove to be as integral as full integrality that can be demanded in terms of the unity and integrity of Spirit and Matter. As a matter of fact, it was found that religions and paths of yoga that lie behind religions aimed at the attainment of Reality or Heaven beyond the page - 87 earth, and even when there ...
... our eyes to the reality and sanctity, if not yet the divinity of Matter. It has helped to restore the ancient Vedic and Upanishadic gospel of the unity of all existence and the identity of Spirit and Matter. Sri Aurobindo had full faith in the final triumph of the true scientific spirit, unfettered and unperverted by passing, material interests, in revealing to man the infinite greatness that ...
... the modern idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically expressed in every movement of human life. It was for the complete transformation of homo ...
... August 11, 1914. Page 58 But even this double identification, which is the secret of the Mother's mission on earth and her supreme power to act as an intermediary between the Spirit and Matter, does not ensure an easy accomplishment of her work. The stark resistance of Matter, the stubborn refusal of darkness to admit Light, the inertia of the long-established habits of Nature oppose ...
... But a fusion of Light and Life, of the One and the Many, of the Transcendent, the Universal and the individual, of utter silence and the stupendous stir and hum of the cosmic movement, of the Spirit and Matter in an integrated and divinised human consciousness, is an achievement yet unrecorded in the history of spiritual culture.¹ Let us now try to follow in the footsteps of the Mother as she proceeds ...
... writes Wilbur Marshall Urban, "becomes a natural symbol for the creating and eliciting power. Moreover, the contrasts bound up with it, light and darkness, power and weakness, life and death, spirit and matter, good and evil, become a natural vehicle for the expression and embodiment of moral and other value contrasts as they develop in the life of man." 43 Energy, creativity, life, power, knowledge ...
... soul of India at the fateful turning of its life was not for any narrow and one-sided achievement, however high it might be, but for the widest synthesis: for the reconciliation of Spirit Page 39 and Matter, Heaven and Earth, Light and Life, the One and the Many. As the most perfect embodiment of that decision of the national soul, an epitome of its past manifold achievements and ...
... , Conscious-Force, Bliss) towards Mind, and so Matter to Spirit is a whole arc of unity: ...the sharp division which practical experience and long habit of mind have created between Spirit and Matter has no longer any fundamental reality. The world is a differentiated unity, a manifold oneness.... An inalienable oneness generating infinite variety is its foundation and beginning; a constant ...
... city, Auroville, there was also the move for the establishment there of a Centre of Integral Culture suggestively named the Mandala. Entering upon an Age whose postulates were to be the unity of spirit and matter in the universe and in man, and the destined role of man to manifest and fulfil the Divine here on the earth, it was necessary to see the artist, the scientist and the technician creatively merging ...
... equal and opposite. The Divine's descent into Matter is the provocation or antecedent to Matter's ascent into the Divine, and this is possible because of the ultimate or quintessential oneness of Spirit and Matter in the universe. "All are linked together by a secret Oneness," says Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother is at pains to underline this mystic truth at the heart of Reality: You think you are separate ...
... an understanding of the rationale of the soul's descent into material birth: it is to awaken consciousness in the giant nescience of the material existence, and effect a dynamic union between Spirit and Matter, rendering the latter a plastic and transparent Page 181 medium of the Spirit's multiple self-expression. But this stupendous evolutionary work cannot obviously be done in a single ...
... supramental level, it is hardly possible to know the last secret of the world and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes ...
... are all qualitative in their essence and are called for that reason its gunas or qualities. In any spiritual conception of the universe this must be so, because the connecting medium between spirit and matter must be psyche or soul power and the primary action psychological and qualitative, not physical and quantitative; for quality is the immaterial, the more spiritual element in all the action of ...
... parts—in your case? Why not? Always the idea that there must be an instantaneous absolute miracle or else nothing! What about process in things? You are ignorant of all that is between supreme Spirit and matter, it seems. You know nothing of the occult processes of mind, life and all the rest—so you can think only of miraculous divinity or else law of matter as known to Science. But for supramental Spirit ...
... by the paths of divine communion and spiritual realisation followed till now in India, he passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and harmonising the two ends of existence, Spirit and Matter. Most ways of Yoga are paths to the Beyond leading to the Spirit and, in the end, away from life; Sri Aurobindo's rises to the Spirit to redescend with its gains bringing the light and power and ...
... possible and certain in an apparently inconscient world and compels a climb in Nature towards a supreme spiritual Reality. It is, in fact, an already and always existent plane of being, the nexus of Spirit and Matter, holding in its truth and reality and making certain the whole meaning and aim of the universe. Sri Aurobindo Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Supermind in the Evolution The descent of ...
... or movements. For what we call a state is only the organisation of a complex movement. This hierarchy is composed by a descending or involutive and an ascending or evolutive movement of which Spirit and Matter are the highest and lowest terms. Spirit is Sat or pure existence, pure in self-awareness (Chit), pure in self-delight (Ananda). Therefore Spirit can be regarded as a triune basis of all conscious ...
... possible and certain in an apparently inconscient world and compels a climb in Nature towards a supreme spiritual Reality. It is, in fact, an already and always existent plane of being, the nexus of Spirit and Matter, holding in its truth and reality and making certain the whole meaning and aim of the universe. If we disregard our present ideas of evolution, all changes,—if we can regard consciousness and ...
... which we have arrived is correct,—and there is no other possible on the data upon which we are working,—the sharp division which practical experience and long habit of mind have created between Spirit and Matter has no longer any fundamental reality. The world is a differentiated unity, a manifold oneness, not a constant attempt at compromise between eternal dissonances, not an everlasting Page 254 ...
... last stage in a series of grades downward - a Page 3 devolution - from the supreme Spirit, a series in which plane of mind and life occultly exist between Spirit and matter. Forces of these planes press upon matter and enter into it to assist the push within it to evolve life and mind in material terms. The supreme Spirit also has an involved figure of itself ...
... is everlasting power of the Self, eternal conscious-Force of the Spirit. Page 195 Mind, life and Matter are powers of that Power, energies of that Force, substance of that Spirit, Spirit and Matter are not separate and contrary creations, but Matter itself is a self-creation of the Spirit. Being and Becoming are the single One. The One does not become the Many, but the One is for ever ...
... operate. If finer invisible physical layers or couches did not exist supporting this gross visible physical world, that world could not abide; for then the fine operations of transmission between Spirit and Matter [could not] be executed at all and it is these that render the grosser visible operations possible. The evolution would be impossible; life and mind and beyond-mind would be unable to manifest ...
... would be arrested. He is the upholder, and if he ceased to sustain the ādhāra , the vehicle, it would fall and cease. He is the lord, and it is for his pleasure that Nature acts. He is the spirit, and matter is only his vehicle, his robe, his means of self-expression. But all his sanctions, refusals, behests act not at once, not there and then, not by imperative absolute compulsion, but subject to ...
... creative powers by whom a new age would be born. And it is to be noted that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been pursuing the inner life on essentially identical lines which would unite Spirit and Matter. So their joining of forces was the most natural thing. And it was not only a doubling of strengths but also a linking of complementaries. Sri Aurobindo's main movement of consciousness may be ...
... drew its inspiration from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and sought to deal with various problems, national and international, in the light of their world-vision, based on the synthesis of spirit and matter in the mind of the world, particularly of free India. The proposal was really mooted by a young businessman from Bombay, Keshavdeo R. Poddar, named by the Mother Navajata, The New-born ...
... her and therefore in humanity. Now she says that Matter is developing the Unity-Consciousness. Can a body cell contain the universe? Can a body cell contain the All in its complete aspects of Spirit and Matter? It is obvious that the cell must be capable of this if it is to be divinized, for the Divine is the All, and the All is the One, and the One is the Unity-Consciousness. We are entering a domain ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy And Yoga - Some Aspects The Divine Being - Spirit And Matter I had earlier written something of the nature of the Divine Being and His manifestations in myriads names and forms which constitute our Universe. Now, the mystery is how and why should the One Divine be manifested or manifest Himself into the 'Many instead of remaining ...
... rise above, that is, to the Supramental level, it is hardly possible to know the last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible ...
... touch. Of such is the kingdom of "the eternal bridegroom and the eternal bride." To read Savitri, as it ought to be read, is to be present at the marriage of time and eternity, the bridal of Spirit and Matter. It is to be bom anew, level after level. He stood alone on a high roof of things And saw the light of a spiritual sun. Aspiring he transcends his earthly self; He stands ...
... depending on the poet's intention of emphasis or on the receptivity and need of the reader, or a combination of both. Writing from the very highest summits of vision and inspiration, from which Spirit and Matter and all the intermediate planes of manifestation can be seen in a single gaze, Sri Aurobindo has found the mantric speech which enables all to be co-present on the page. To separate the various ...
... and how the secret God within makes himself felt in our lives. But still unexplained problems made Aswapati plunge into "unplumbed infinitudes" in order to find the key to what could join Spirit and Matter, join what is now parted, "opposed and twain" and fulfil the Oneness that was the stamp of Being. So Aswapati moves 6 into the freedom and greatness of his Spirit, dares "to live when ...
... are all qualitative in their essence and are called for that reason its gunas or qualities. In any spiritual conception of the universe this must be so, because the connecting medium between spirit and matter must be psyche or soul power and the primary action psychological and qualitative, not physical and quantitative; for quality is the immaterial, the more spiritual element in all the action ...
... enlarged by integrating with it the cosmic aim of life; the realizations of the Spirit have to be extended so as to cover the domain of Matter. And in doing so, all that is intermediate between Spirit and Matter has also to be perfected and brought into unity in complete integration. All this has to be done both at the collective level and at the individual level, and in doing so, we shall find it necessary ...
... and one does not know in what direction and how we should move forward. Time has come when it is perfectly possible for humanity to develop a comprehensive and integral culture where both spirit and matter can join together and create a spiritualised society that can at last answer to the perennial aspiration of humanity expressed in Page 169 terms of a new earth and a new heaven, ...
... entire life, his very body, must undergo an integral spiritual transformation, not indeed by an escape into some far-off heaven, but here, in this physical earth itself, by a victorious union of Spirit and Matter. This, he has declared, is not an issue of an individual but of collectivity, not an issue of Indian spirituality and culture, but of the entire world's upward aspiration and fulfilment. Page ...
... returning as soon as possible to its original home, which, in that case, it. need not have left at all. There must then be some deeper relationship between the soul and the earth, between Spirit and Matter. But this has not been admitted. Matter is seen either as a tomb of the soul or as a temporary instrument to be utilized for a release in some supra-terrestrial or supra- cosmic existence or ...
... philosophy of a denial of denials and a new synthesis of yoga in which spiritual disciplines of the past can all be reconciled and in which a path is opened up for an actual and living synthesis of Spirit and Matter. It is in the context of this great need that we need to turn to the great synthetic spirit that we find in the Gita and also to the "message of union with Para Prakriti, which is one of the ...
... The recent developments of the spiritual evolution have opened up the paths of the supramental descent and supramental manifestation on the earth so as to bring about largest synthesis of the Spirit and Matter, the boundaries of which, it is claimed, are constantly breaking so as to bring about on the earth a new species, the very nature of which will have inherent powers of the supramental consciousness ...
... ion of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth."19 Sri Aurobindo points out that although Spirit and Matter appear to be entirely opposed to each other, and although this direct contradiction between the two could be put forward as the final argument against the possibility of the manifestation of the ...
... evolutionary development that we see on the earth. The Mother collaborated with Sri Aurobindo in this new task and led it to its accomplishment. As a result, the true and full integration of the Spirit and Matter can now be said to have been achieved with their great accomplishment, and the boundaries of evolution and the limitations of the methods of evolution which have so far been at work have also ...
... Today it is finally recognized that the most ingenious machines are clumsy fixtures compared to living organisms. The most elaborate of all living organisms is surely the human body, in which spirit and matter are so delicately and intricately put together to produce this strange being called "human". In the modern age, following Descartes and Newton, the human body was seen as a machine in a universe ...
... where exclusivism of religions is overpassed so as to create a dynamic Dharma and dynamic spirituality, which does not shun material life but transforms it for the highest possible synthesis of Spirit and Matter. We want rapid social transformation, but we are still nourishing those institutions that foster casteism and narrow loyalties. We want rapid economic growth, but confine ourselves to the stifling ...
... the great wheel of his cosmic work. I am the living body of his light,... In me are the Nameless and the secret Name. 47 Once more Death sends out the cry that Spirit and Matter, being eternal foes, cannot be reconciled; either man dies in his body to live in the Spirit or dies in the Spirit to inhabit his body; he, Death, is the only God. Savitri retorts: ...
... of earthly life. On the other hand, she also possessed the Eastern or rather Indian spiritual knowledge and insight. This enabled her to see life from the point of view of both spirit and matter. She took a balanced view, blending detailed knowledge, structure and mastery of the practical side of life and the inner spiritual truth of everything. She wanted to mould in this way a ...
... other. It is an unreal distinction, due to mind's prejudice and preference, that says one is first and the other next or last, one is more important and the other less. The true truth is that Spirit and Matter are one: for Matter is Spirit involved and Spirit is Matter evolved. The position can be stated in this form also: without Spirit, Matter does not exist; without Matter, Spirit does not manifest ...
... been to divide our life between spiritual life and material life. But the great dream of Auroville, based on Sri Aurobindo's life-work, is to unite the two. With this reunion or marriage between Spirit and Matter we shall have truly the possibility of a new world and a new man, a Page 778 universal and integral man. Auroville is an attempt to realise Sri Aurobindo's philosophy on the ...
... and certain in an apparently inconscient world and compels. a climb in Nature towards a supreme spiritual Reality. It is, in fact, an already and always existent plane of being, the nexus of Spirit and Matter, holding in its truth and reality and making certain the whole meaning and aim of the universe. If we disregard our present ideas of evolution, all changes, —if we can regard consciousness ...
... But that “lodging” is what bothers us, along with the fact of death. Death is really a defeat: the defeat of the body, we might say, but this is not true; it is the defeat of the Spirit, for Spirit and Matter are one and the same thing, despite what our caterpillar eyes may see, and we die just because we have found neither the reality of the Spirit nor the reality of Matter. When the two are one ...
... brethren.38 Once the "supreme discovery" of the indwelling Divine has been made, once the missing link with the Divine source has been restored, once one has apprehended the unity of spirit and matter in the universe, then all ills and rages must be annulled, and a radiant new light and joy must manifest itself. The essay concludes with words that carry a vast power of conviction, prophecy ...
... tendrils of aspiration and effort meant to usher in a new world - a new Heaven and a new Earth. Again and again, the diary-entries for the latter half of May reiterate this tremendous equation of Spirit and Matter, the need to coax a descent of the Spirit from the sunlit heights of Sachchidananda to the lowest rungs of the ladder of consciousness, the abysm of the Inconscient, so as to compel an ascent ...
... creative powers by whom a new age would be born. And it is to be noted that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been pursuing the inner life on essentially identical lines which would unite Spirit and Matter. So their joining of forces was the most natural thing. And it was not only a doubling of strengths but also a linking of complementaries. Sri Aurobindo's main movement of consciousness may ...
... everywhere, in all things and at all times, sarvam khalvidam brahma. It gives a knowledge which is essentially perfect and definitive, a knowledge which does not divide existence into two. Spirit and Matter, or Reality and Illusion, but reconciles and fuses all apparent contraries and antinomies into an integral unity. "The knowledge that leaves a yawning gulf between the two can be no ultimate ...
... gift of the Time-Spirit, which insists on the discovery and realisation of unity and harmony in life and is loth to reject it out of hand as an ever-circling futility. A victorious unity of Spirit and Matter, Life and Light, Silence and Movement, One and Many, seems to be its master passion, which it cannot forswear simply because life confronts it with the lash of desire and the trail of tragic suffering ...
... are gained by the paths of divine communion and spiritual realisation till now in India, he passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and harmonising the two ends of existence, Spirit and Matter. Most ways of Yoga are paths to the Beyond leading to the Spirit and, in the end, away from life; Sri Aurobihdo's rises to the Spirit to re-descend with its gains bringing the light and power ...
... combination of the Vedânta and the Tantra was a prophetic achievement of supreme importance,—it, was, in truth, a combination of the Absolute and the cosmic manifestation, of Heaven and Earth, of Spirit and Matter. Is this transcendent and universal Shakti the Mother to whom we are called upon to surrender? Is She the sole pilot of the Integral Yoga? Were it only so, our Yoga would be identical with ...
... unifying movement of progress, and what is that plane of consciousness on which the final reconciliation between the One and the many, between Time and Eternity, silence and activity, and Spirit and Matter can be effected? We are awake on the physical, vital and mental planes of consciousness, all of them planes of the separative ignorance, which makes us see and feel things, not in their essential ...
... the modem idealists. They met to help man live in God and God in man; to convert human life into a vehicle of the divine Light, and human nature into divine nature. They met to declare that Spirit and Matter, Heaven and Earth, the One and the many are essentially one, and that their oneness can be dynamically expressed in every movement of human life. It was for the complete transformation of homo ...
... harmony. What is indispensable, in order to accelerate this evolutionary advance and lead if victoriously to its goal, is the spread-of a synthetic, spiritual culture, which aims at reconciling Spirit and Matter, Light and Life, and Heaven and Earth by an integration and transformation of all the parts of the being of man, and their perfect attunement to the supreme Divine Will. The Integral Yoga ...
... her birthright; but what she has steadfastly yearned for and willed is the manifestation of God in Matter through the liberated and transformed nature of man. It was the reconciliation of Spirit and Matter, the long-dreamed-of marriage of Earth and Heaven that was the problem the Mother set before herself early in life, and her work has been a progressive solution of it. "Do not revel in ...
... because his philosophy is one of fulfilment of the earthly life of man by the descent of the Divine consciousness. He has shown in his masterpiece, the Life Divine, that the opposition between Spirit and Matter is only apparent and that Matter holds within itself all the potentialities of manifesting the Spirit. From a study of universal evolutionary movement it is evident that there has been an evolution ...
... stance, life-substance, spirit-substance, and what men call physical or material substance. There is substance of truth-consciousness, and Satchidananda substance. So that substance connects Spirit and Matter, the two ends of the whole rung of existence. It is really a series of substance ascending from Matter to Spirit. Q: Is there a sharp line between the vital and the mental or is it a gradual ...
... with the living, in direct continuity with the rest of Matter. This is the great revolution of Sri Aurobindo and Mother, their stupendous discovery: the total Oneness of Matter, the fusion of Spirit and Matter into One—and not a philosophical fusion, but an experimental fusion, just as one discovers a new continent, or rather as one sees anew with other eyes the same eternal continent. Our next eyes ...
... even itself in its skin of being—it is no longer the same being! And it is no longer the same Matter, ft is something else ... something divine, She would say. A supreme conjunction in which Spirit and Matter merge into a third thing ... which is the secret of the Future. And which is perhaps total being. Something that transmutes all opposites: life-death, stillness-movement, time-eternity, bein ...
... necessity and its mortal feature. It has divided everything, not a single thing escapes its fragmentation: good and evil, truth and falsehood, time and space, far and near, hell and salvation, spirit and matter, and you and me and millions of little selves at sidereal distances from one another—but who know themselves as a self. And all the impotence of no longer knowing directly, and all the millions ...
... me the nightmare he had had. You know perhaps that Satprem was born on Giordano Bruno street in Paris. Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher who regarded God as the unity reconciling spirit and matter, was burned at the stake by the Inquisitors for his belief. Satprem saw the backs of two black-robed figures enter a white painted small church through a door, 1 about fifty metres or so from ...
... words, Spirit became forthright Matter. What seemed, however, to be nothing more than an accident is pregnant nevertheless with a profound meaning and significance. Indeed God has not created the world in fun. Spirit became Matter, that is to say, an apparent negation of the Spirit, to demonstrate that the negation is a way of affirmation, a more integral way of affirmation of the Spirit. Matter... 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: it is a spontaneous, almost a logical ... Matter has been brought out to express another poise of the spirit, spirit concretised and embodied. Page 4 ...
... words, Spirit became forthright Matter. What seemed, however, to be nothing more than an accident is pregnant nevertheless with a profound meaning and significance. Indeed God has not created the world in jest. Spirit became Matter, that is to say, an apparent negation of the Spirit, to demonstrate that the negation is a way of affirmation, a more integral way of affirmation of the Spirit. Matter... 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: it is a spontaneous, almost a logical ... Matter has been brought out to express another poise of the spirit, spirit concretised and embodied. Page 170 ...
... shifting; so is it with the sum of energy in the world, so is it with the spirit. Matter is only so much mobile energy vibrating intensely into form. Energy is only so much spirit manifesting the motion that Page 64 we call energy. Spirit is Force, Spirit Existence,—matter and energy are only motions in Spirit. Force and Existence made one in Bliss, Sachchidanandam, this is the eternal... is eternal in the eternal spirit. What was from of old? The spirit. What is alone? The spirit. What shall be for ever? The spirit. All that is in Space and Time, is He; and whatever there may be beyond Space and Time, that too is He. Why should we think so? Because of the eternal and invariable unity which gives permanence to the variability of the many. The sum of matter never changes by increase... from the Karmayogin (1909-1910) Essays in Philosophy and Yoga The Stress of the Hidden Spirit 26-February-1910 The world is a great game of hide and seek in which the real hides behind the apparent, spirit behind matter. The apparent masquerades as real, the real is seen dimly as if it were an unsubstantial shadow. The grandeur of the visible universe ...
... conquest and taking up of body by life, of life by mind, of all three by the spirit. This can seem possible only when we have found the real truth of Matter as of Soul, Mind and Life. As Life is found to be force of Spirit, and Mind to be consciousness of Spirit, so Matter is found to be body and substance of Spirit. Matter as a thing in itself is non-existent. What we see of it is a form or forms... ience and the all-existence in which we move. Science discovers that Matter resolves into forms of Energy; Philosophy discovers that Matter is only a substantial appearance and the one reality is Spirit. But what brings about this phenomenon of forms of Energy or this appearance of Spirit? There should be only states of spirit or currents of Energy; whence these phenomena of forms? It can be attributed... religions upon Matter. The conflict begins with Life and increases as higher principles evolve. There is a discord between Life and Matter ending in death, the defeat of Life; but really there is a constant compromise, Life usingMatter and even death for its own continuance: Mind struggles with the limitations of life and matter, and there is a half victory, a constant compromise. When spirit wakens to ...
... only is missing, The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum... The absolute index to the Absolute. 40 Anon Aswapati catches sight of the immense "high-curved world-pile", reared against the base of matter's plinth, and rising "towards breadths immeasurable". The descending stair from the summits of the Spirit to matter's abysses is balanced by this other, ... .. .single stair to being's goal. A summary of the stages of the spirit, Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies Refashioned in our secret air of self A subtle pattern of the universe. It is within, below, without, above. 41 In the occult world, as in the material cosmos, the centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere; the fully awakened... e as well! The budget of mankind's present discontents and failures is no permanent writ. There is this "ladder of delivering ascent" offering an escape from the abyss into the far plateaus of the Spirit. Man is not abandoned forever to his present fate. The assurance is given that This faint and fluid sketch of soul called man Shall stand out on the background of long Time A glowing ...
... ty, an initial disguise that is almost non-existence, the Spirit in Matter has chosen to evolve and slowly shape, as if in a grudging and gradually yielding material, its might and light and infinity and beatitude. The significance of the terrestrial evolution lies in this slow and progressive liberation of some latent indwelling Spirit. The heart of its mystery is the difficult appearance, the... Essays Divine and Human 1927 and after Essays Divine and Human The Involved and Evolving Godhead The involution of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret cause of this visible and apparent world. The keyword of the earth's riddle is the gradual evolution of a hidden illimitable consciousness and power out of the seemingly inert... physical Nature. The Spirit is there with all its potential forces in a first formal basis of its own supporting, yet resistant substance. Its greater subsequent and deliberately emerging movements, life and mind and intuition and soul and supermind and the light of the Godhead are already there, locked up and obscurely compressed into the initial power and first expressive values of Matter. Before there ...
... condemned to survive, a spirit of matter in pain. Now have I known myself as this boundless finite, this darkness Shadowily self-lit, grown content to strive without end and in vain. Fire that travellest from immortality, spark of the Timeless, Why hast thou come to my night, an unbearable Idol of Light? Ah from what happier universe strayedst thou kindling my torpor? Thou, O spirit of Light, perturb... morn? Autographs, hieroglyphs of the reflexes life has engendered, Spasms of matter caught into luminous figments of thought. Nay, is not God but myself, Death's euphemism fictioned immortal, Nothing eternalised, bare, yet as if one who is None, Death yet for ever alive, an Inconscient troubled with seemings, Matter tormented with life, a Void with its forces at strife? Page 667 O... was it life that He gave me? Pulse of my darkness, reflex and nerve-beat! More hopeless I suffer, Racked by the flame an obscure will in me kindled to save me. Life? or a sorrowful throb of my Matter teaching it anguish, Teaching it hope and desire trod down by Time in the mire? Life? this joy that weeps for its briefness, this foot-path for sorrow? Life, this embrace of a death treasuring some ...
... principles] implicit in itself … In fact, life, mind, Supermind are present in the atom.” Ultimately “Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realization of Spirit.” For “Matter itself is a substance and power of spirit and could not exist if it were anything else.” 933 ... and descending hierarchy of planes of consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit”. 931 This is how the gradations of existence as we know them came about: matter, life, mind, and the planes where all what surpasses the mind comes from. These gradations are also called... scientific outlook while at the same time exceeding it. In his view matter is not the only and sufficient reality, nor is it capable of providing an adequate explanation of the evolutionary process. The appearance of the evolutionary principle, “the creation of forms of Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and thinking Matter, the appearance of more and more organized bodies adapted to ...
... denial of the Spirit and even the enthronement of Matter as the sole reality. Spiritual perfection as the sole ideal on one side, on the other, the perfectibility of the race, the perfect society, a perfect development of the human mind and life and man's material existence have become the largest dream of the future. Yet both are truths and can be regarded as part of the intention of the Spirit in world-nature;... embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit. 11-8-49 Sri Aurobindo Page 553 ... supreme Spirit is that soul's highest aim and necessity, for that is the supreme reality; but there can be too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace ...
... one infinite multiplied itself into infinite atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon... individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even Page... along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums: it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace. The original individual was a hard concentrated point of ego, concerned wholly and absolutely ...
... the one infinite multiplied itself into infinite atoms. Not only so, in detaching itself from itself the consciousness became the very opposite of itself: consciousness became unconsciousness, spirit became matter, delight became pain, knowledge' became ignorance, and light became darkness. Boundless universality was the essential nature of the Divine, now it got clotted into the knots of egoism upon... individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even now ages for... gradually along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long, winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums; it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace. The original individual was a hard concentrated point of ego, concerned wholly and absolutely with ...
... denial of the Spirit and even the enthronement of Matter as the sole reality. Spiritual perfection as the sole ideal on one side, on the other, the perfectibility of the race, the perfect society, a perfect development of the human mind and life and man's material existence have become the largest dream of the future. Yet both are truths and can be regarded as part of the intention of the Spirit in world-nature;... embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit. 11.8.1949 ... supreme Spirit is that soul's highest aim and necessity, for that is the supreme reality; but there can be too the descent of the Spirit and its powers into the world and that would justify the existence of the material world also, give a meaning, a divine purpose to the creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest ideal, Spirit embrace ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Message Key-word of the Earth's Riddle The involution of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret cause of this visible and apparent world. The key-word of the earth's riddle is the gradual evolution of a hidden illimitable consciousness and power out of the seemingly inert yet furiously driven force of insensible Nature... unfolding of Spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this apparent animal being. * Evolution in its essence is not the development of a more and more organised body or a more and more efficient life — these are only its machinery and outward circumstance. Evolution is the strife of a Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake... ies to the very utmost and widest, to the very last and highest. Evolution is the emancipation of a self-revealing Soul secret in Form and Force, the slow becoming of a Godhead, the growth of a Spirit. In this evolution mental man is not the goal and end, the completing value, the highest last significance; he is too small and imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. ...
... India has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it. The West has the knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it. An integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised. This is in ...
... expansion, so that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of intelligence and even to break the prison walls of our matter-bound physical mentality. It is the pressure of the supramental and spiritual worlds which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the spirit and by it open our being on the physical plane into the freedom and infinity of the super conscient Divine; that contact... action from above can overcome the predominance of the material formula, diminish and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience, reverse the order of the consciousness, substitute the spirit for Matter as his conscious foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete and characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature. Sri Aurobindo The Life Divine... is the result of all the others, for the other principles have all descended into Matter to create the physical universe, and every particle of what we call Matter contains all of them implicit in itself; their secret action… is involved in every moment of its existence and every movement of its activity. And as Matter is the last word of the descent, so it is also the first word of the ascent; as the ...
... nature of mind, life, and body till it is fit to fulfil its mission: the manifestation of the Spirit in Matter. Man is not, therefore, a biological creature of a passing moment, but an immortal spark-soul, clad in mind, life, and body and charged with the mission of revealing in redeemed and purified Matter the supernal glories of the Divine he houses in himself. This divine revelation or manifestation... the Mother says, service is the great end, the End of all ends, the rapturous tryst of the Spirit with Matter, the sublimest expression of the eternal and ineffable relation between man and his Maker and Lover. Page 106 What is True Service ? Though the service done in the spirit of sacrifice and with love and devotion and psychological and practical disinterestedness is... and in this double identification discovers the "secret of Thy sovereign oneness.” This divine commerce between the Transcendent and the Immanent, between the ordaining and initiating Spirit and the actualising Matter through the medium of the surrendered and emancipated human individual, is what the Mother means by true service. Aspiration for Service Once we are convinced that ...
... a wider stage of what happened once before in India, more rapidly but to smaller issues, when the Buddha lived and taught his philosophy and ethics to the Aryan nations. Then as now a mighty spirit, it matters not whether Avatar or Vibhuti, the full expression of God in man or a great outpouring of the divine energy, came down among men and brought into their daily life and practice the force and impulse ...
... The Spirit of Auroville One more message from the Mother about India: India has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it. The West has knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it. An integral education which could, with some variations, be adopted to all nations of the world... world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised. Blessings . The Mother, Words of the Mother - I: India I was very much impressed to read in The Illustrated Weekly of India , January 26, 1964, The State of the Nation. There were questions by the Editor and the Mother's answers for which she won the first prize! "If you ...
... easy. The flesh is weak: it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so, it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought ...
... erect, the tail touching the lowest centre, the head the highest at the Brahmarandhra. Thus with all the centres open and active she unites the two poles, superior and inferior, of the being, the spirit with Matter. Sri Aurobindo 1 cannot undertake to guide you as your Guru, for the reason that he takes as disciples only those who follow his special path of Yoga; your experiences follow a different ...
... ignorance and inconscience. But the Force that has released the Spirit from the cavern of "supreme obscurity" can and will transform that cavern into an illuminated temple and install the Spirit there as the undisputed sovereign of the material world. Love, the initiator of evolution, will consummate its mission of divine manifestation in Matter as Love the Victor. Page 39 ... the Divine Love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.”¹ This long paragraph—is it not rather short, considering the great delivering knowledge it imparts in its pregnant words ... the questions we have put to ourselves. Love is not only joy and sweetness, but a supreme, probably the supreme Force of the eternal Consciousness. Its function is to release the submerged Spirit in Matter and carry it back to its infinity, not for extinction or immersion, but for a revelation of divine splendours in creation. We shall understand this better if we go a little deeper to glimpse ...
... the body". 2 Also, "the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit and affirm her own dominance" 3 will be reversed and in "the changed communion of the Spirit with Matter" 4 , in the new relation between the Spirit and the body it inhabits, Matter will be seen and felt "to be the Brahman, a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance... present physical life, the various inconveniences of our animal body, its unregenerate earth-nature and impulses and appetites that tend to drag down man's soaring spirit and frustrate the winged visions of his soul? As a matter of fact, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, 2 the material body of man confronts him with a dual difficulty, psychological and corporeal : psychological, because... These are in no way innate to animate Matter nor are they inexorable; they are rather of the nature of passing phenomena appearing in the as yet imperfect stages of the march of evolution and with the further elaboration of this evolutionary process leading to the descent and concomitant emergence in earth-nature, of a supreme power and light of the spirit, of what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind ...
... from the standpoint of the Spirit, ‘the material universe is only the facade of an immense building which has other structures behind it, and it is only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe.’ 25 (Sri Aurobindo) Science sees things exactly the other way around, because for science it is not the Spirit but Matter that is primordial and even... irresistibly drives evolution onwards and upwards, and works out every gradation of it. The origin and the goal of evolution on Earth are spiritual; the mechanisms of evolution are procedures of the spirit in matter, and its results are ever higher gradations of material forms. ‘A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must... being covered by what is called ‘spirit’ or by similar terms. The great confusion, with regrettable consequences, in every discussion about ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ has been caused by a philosopher who is generally thought of as the very epitome of clear thinking, René Descartes. To him man is a body, which is a machine composed of measurable substances, and ‘spirit’; what man thinks with, as well as ...
... in it by the forces inherent in inconscient matter." 1 (B) The Ascetic Refusal How canst thou force to wed two eternal foes ? How shall thy will make one the true and the false?... The Real with the unreal cannot mate. He who would turn to God, must leave the world; He who would live in the Spirit must give up life... (Savitri, Book X... discord and we shall best solve its perplexities by carrying the principle of discord itself to its extreme possibility, a cutting away and a final severance." 1 This 'revolt of Spirit against Matter', this metaphysical dualism, culminates in a second negation — at the other pole to the materialistic — of the eventual prospect of the divine transfiguration of the body and the physical... message of "renunciation [as being] the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter." 4 These, then, are the two great denials — the materialist's negation and the refusal of the ascetic — and it is obvious that if either of these represented the true truth ...
... substance of Reality into Matter, the dense and obscure primal substrate. In this fathomless night of existence or apparent non-existence, there is no stirring of life or mind, only a blind mighty Energy weaving stupendous systems of worlds and suns and moons and star-clusters and planets, as if in a dumb, creative sleep. Out of this tranced involution of the Spirit in Matter evolves Life, making the... forgetfulness of his divine origin and essence, his easy subjection to doubts and dull fatigue, to disease and death are all a trailing heritage from inconscient Page 179 Matter. Besides, there are in Matter the seed-impressions of all the past cycles of creation, the brute instincts and hungers, the falsehood, the ugliness, the ingratitude, and the perversity, which surge up to eclipse... of human nature into the divine, a complete conquest of the Subconscient and the Inconscient, as we have insisted above, is indispensable; otherwise half of our being will gleam in the light of the Spirit and the other half lie sunk in obscurity and be moved by the forces of Ignorance and False- hood. Inertia, weakness, dullness, an easy proneness to physical and psychological disturbances, inability ...
... material principle and are subject to their fundamental limitations. For life in Matter works in dependence on the body; mind in Matter works in dependence on the body and on the vital or nervous being; spirit itself in Matter is limited and divided in its self-relation and its powers by the limitations and divisions of this matter-governed and life-driven mind. This materialised soul lives bound to the physical... ng it at all, we must restate in a practical formula the relations of the worlds which constitute the two hemispheres. All is determined by the Spirit, for all from subtlest existence to grossest matter is manifestation of the Spirit. But the Spirit, Self or Being determines the world it lives in and the experiences of its consciousness, force and delight in that world by some poise—among many ... Purusha and Prakriti, Soul and Nature,—some basic poise in one or other of its own cosmic principles. Poised in the principle of Matter, it becomes the physical self of a physical universe in the reign of a physical Nature. Spirit is then absorbed in its experience of Matter; it is dominated by the ignorance and inertia of the tamasic Power proper to physical existence. In the individual it becomes a ...
... things.' Out of the Inconscient, Existence appeared in a first evolutionary form as substance of Matter, and an apparently inconscient Energy ...made in sleep this huge mechanical world 1 Thus In this whirl and sprawl through infinite vacancy The Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl, A body sleeping without sense or soul... Still consciousness was hidden... waken the 'earth-nature's heavy doze'. So, Matter's sleep was stirred by 'buried memories recalling the lost spheres' from which was taken The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall. 3 Then, A little the Dreamer changed his poise of stone. 4 And A scene was set for Nature's conscious play. Then stirred the Spirit's mute immobile sleep; The Force concealed... purlieus of mind, A greater vision meets us on the heights In the luminous wideness of the Spirit's gaze. At last there wakes in us a witness Soul. 2 Mind-consciousness appears thus to be only an intermediate stage ...through which we pass On our road from Matter to eternal Self, To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things. 3 The evolutionary ...
... materials of which it is compounded or the end of the function for which it came into being. If there is an exception to this law, it must be by a descent of spirit into matter animating matter with divinity or giving matter its own immortality; but the spirit itself which so descends is immortal, not made or created. If the soul was created to animate the body, if it depended on the body for its coming into... without soul, no body that is not itself a form of soul: Matter itself is substance and power of spirit and could not exist if it were anything else, for nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman; and if Matter, then still more clearly and certainly Life and Mind must be that and ensouled by the presence of the Spirit. If Matter and Life had not already been ensouled, man could not... the obvious dynamic process of such a manifestation in the material universe. Our explanation of the evolution in Matter is that the universe is a self-creative process of a supreme Reality whose presence makes spirit the substance of things,—all things are there as the spirit's powers and means and forms of manifestation. An infinite existence, an infinite consciousness, an infinite force and will ...
... that all is the Brahman; if so, then “Matter also is the Brahman and it is nothing other than or different from the Brahman.” “Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realization of the Spirit.” 940 “In Matter undoubtedly lies the crux; that raises the obstacle [to the spiritual effort]: for because of Matter Life is gross and limited and stricken... silence to the Spirit’s immobile liberty. But that is not the sole viewpoint, nor, because it has been sublimely held or glorified by shining and golden examples, need we consider it the integral and ultimate wisdom. Rather, liberating ourselves from all passion and revolt, let us see what this divine order of the universe means, and, as for this great knot and tangle of Matter denying the spirit, let us... For it may be remembered that any spiritual effort in the course of humanity’s existence has had the liberation from Matter, from this painfully burdensome world, as its aim. Sri Aurobindo, however, accords to Matter the recognition it intrinsically deserves as a form of the Spirit. In concrete terms: if the Divine has manifested this world, and if we are born in it, then there must be an intention ...
... —renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter. For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit—and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the... point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing... more complete, more final, more perilous in its effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its potent call to the wilderness,—the refusal of the ascetic. It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of ...
... Sat, Chit and Ananda, through the conscious and co-operating agency of the full-fledged psychic, the soul of man; of an unblemished transcription of the infinite glories of the Spirit in finite, living and thinking Matter. That which most impedes the attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, entrenched in its obscurity and inert conservatism, and reluctant to open or... birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect Page 21 Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material world. That is... union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity. It is only the rare heroic souls, the intrepid warriors of the Spirit, who have struggled to redeem the physical and render it capable of reflecting something of the light and power and ecstasy welling out of the union. But all that has been really achieved up to the ...
... Therefore all things here are expression, form, energy, action of the Spirit; matter itself is but form of spirit, life but power of being of the spirit, mind but working of consciousness of the spirit. All Nature is a display and a play of God, power and action and self-creation of the one spiritual Being. Nature presents to spirit at once the force, the instrument, the medium, the obstacle, the result... already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. The Spirit which manifests itself here in a body, must be involved from the beginning in the whole of matter and in every knot, formation and particle of matter; life, mind and whatever is above mind must be latent inactive or concealed active powers in all the operations of material... differentiated in the spectrum of Nature? When we say that Life is involved in Matter or in material Force, for of that Force Matter seems after all to be only a various self-spun formation, do we not mean that all this universal working, even in what seems to us its inconscient inanimate action, is a life-power of the spirit busy with formation, and we do not recognise it because it is there in a lower ...
... conscious and co-operating agency of the full-fledged psychic, the soul of man; of an unblemished transcription of the infinite glories of the Spirit in finite, living and ¹ Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Vol. IV. Page 342 thinking Matter. That which most impedes the attainment of this integral union is the dense physical being of man, en- trenched in its obscurity and inert ... of the soul's descent into birth and its evolution, the purpose of the immanence of the Divine in the world, the aim of creation itself—the perfect Manifestation, the intended Epiphany of the Spirit in Matter. According to Sri Aurobindo, the aim of his Integral Yoga is not only to seek and realise the Divine but to call upon Him to manifest Himself in and through us in the material world. That is not... divine union in the remote depths or on the lonely peaks of their being, leaving the physical part to vegetate in its habitual obscurity. It is only the rare heroic souls, the intrepid warriors of the Spirit, who have struggled to redeem the physical and render it capable of reflecting something of the light and power and ecstasy welling out of the union. But all that has been really achieved up to the ...
... at which we have arrived the essential nature of the divine life towards which we aspire. What then would be the existence of a divine soul, not descended into the ignorance by the fall of Spirit into Matter and the eclipse of soul by material Nature? What would be its consciousness, living in the original Truth of things, in the inalienable unity, in the world of its own infinite being, like the... is that which constitutes our mortality and our fall from the Divine. This is our "original sin", or rather let us say in a more philosophical language, the deviation from the Truth and Right of the Spirit, from its oneness, integrality and harmony that was the necessary condition for the great plunge into the Ignorance which is the soul's adventure in the world and from which was born our suffering ...
... other bright, who is the master of the magic that makes the worlds, is himself no more than a mediate power, and his worlds of night, twilight and day too are only mediating links between the Spirit above and Matter below. If Savitri is determined indeed to deliver humanity from its thrall of incapacity, misery and death, she should ascend into her timeless self, "choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will... not to thy everlasting Day, Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night... Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls; Page 228 Earth is the heroic spirit's battlefield, The forge where the Archmason shapes his works. Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King, Than all the glorious liberties of heaven. 78 She cannot... Wasn't it God Page 229 who made the earth and planted in it the seed for perfection? God has made earth, and earth must bring down her God. Savitri has actually "felt a secret spirit stir in things/Carrying the body of the growing God", and hence earth's climb to its own eternity is certain. Realising at last that Savitri's purpose holds despite the doubts posed ...
... line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Page 18 Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling... deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakenings — Matter awakening into life, life awakening into mind and mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the mind, into a power of conscious Spirit. The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescience—of Involution—has been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden... purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which Page 19 ...
... but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual... deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakenings—Matter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit. The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescience —of Involution—has been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden... purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret ...
... but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends' towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual... deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakenings – Matter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit. The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescience – of Involution – has been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden... purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret ...
... and who faithfully noted down the instructions of his spirit guide Geben, she finds once more the awareness of a new turn to take, together with the will to overcome the pure rationalism inherited from the Enlightenment and to go beyond the traditional religious forms. What counts is the unity of all that exists. “God is pure spirit; but as matter exists, his creation demands the perfection of God.”... concatenation of the spirits, the human beings, the animals, the plants, and matter. Life does not end with death, for after death the soul continues its evolution in a succession of supra-terrestrial worlds. The earth and humanity are part of the cosmic whole.” 707 The dictations Gumppenberg received from his spirit mentor seem almost classical in their genre. The spiritist séances in the Cosmic... in Schwabing these were intermingling with writers, poets and artists, among whom were some of the very greatest then alive. This colourful mixture of all expressions and explorations of the human spirit has lead many commentators on that period to stick the label “bohemian” on Schwabing, which is as misleading as calling Dietrich Eckart a comical, half-crazed poet. For sure, the whole fauna of the ...
... easy. The flesh is weak: it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so, it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought... consciousness) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and inconscience and inertia that is Matter: it is this that the submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not articulate and in the open. The... Godhead, the Divinity in pain - Mater Dolorosa - the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what Savitri, the universal ...
... easy. The flesh is weak: it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so, it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought... ss) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and I inconscience and inertia that is Matter: it is this that the I submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not articulate and in the open... Godhead, the Divinity in pain – Mater Dolorosa the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what Savitri, the universal ...
... Sadhana was not done for myself but for the earth-consciousness." The fulfilment of evolution. Concentrated into a brief period. To bring down the Spirit Divine into Matter. To raise up the Divine latent in Matter. To join the Two. The Life Divine upon Earth. Here and now. "It is now, in this life that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter... of true greatness and of thy true life in the community of the nations. Guide us so that we may be always on the side of great ideals and show to men thy true visage, as a leader in the ways of the spirit and a friend and helper of all the peoples." Like Sri Aurobindo — and Vivekananda before him — Mother too believed that India was destined to do a singular work for the human race: the sp... change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same." The next day, on 30 March 1914, Mirra wrote in her diary, Prayers and Meditations : "It matters not if there are hundreds of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth: His presence is proof enough that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into ...
... puts the Spirit on one side and Matter on the other, Mother added. It is because of that stupidity that we don't understand anything. There is spirit, and there is matter—it is quite convenient. So if you aren’t on the side of the spirit, you're on the side of matter; if you aren’t on the side of matter, you’re on the side of the spirit. But what do you call spirit? And what do you call matter? It is... The universe is made of an infinite gradation, as it were, of worlds and states of consciousness—and where does your matter leave off and your spirit begin in this increasingly subtle gradation P Then they say: free the spirit from matter—die and you will free your spirit from matter. These are the stupidities that prevent people from understanding anything at all! Yet they do not represent the world... failure—death—is also the key to a supreme victory. There perhaps lies the utility of our "scientific detour”·, to bring us back face to face with matter and force us to stumble upon our own mystery instead of soaring into the so-called heavens of the spirit, which have never saved anything. There is a long way to travel before reaching the heart of things, but all these detours, the thousand detours ...
... purpose in their action—and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work,—and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using a "tangle of ganglia", can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare... conditions and circumstances, pain, illness, assaults from men or forces. There too the possibility of suffering is evident. There are two ways to meet all that—first that of the Self, calm, equality, a spirit, a will, a mind, a vital, a physical consciousness that remain resolutely turned towards the Divine and unshaken by all suggestion of doubt, desire, attachment, depression, sorrow, pain, inertia. This... be eliminated; but however long they last, they cannot impede the sadhana, for Page 669 then even adverse things and happenings become a means for its advance and for the growth of the spirit. Pain and Suffering The sufferings and distress which come to people are part of their karma, part of the experience the being has to go through on its way through life after life till it is ...
... the contrary to establish from its data a comprehensive Adwaita. We have shown that mind and life and matter are derivations from the Self through a spiritual mind or supermind which is the real support of cosmic existence and by developing mind into that, man can arrive at the real truth of the spirit in the world and the real truth and highest law of life. The Self is Sachchidananda and there is no... nescience of Matter and on its way to a return to its conscious integrality. To accomplish that return and manifest the spiritual life in the human existence is the opportunity given by the successions of rebirth. We accept the truth of evolution, not so much in the physical form given to it by the West Page 107 as in its philosophical truth, the involution of life and mind and spirit here in... shows that the fundamental truth is truth of the Spirit; the other is the truth of life, truth of form and shaping force and living idea and action. Here the West and East have followed divergent lines. The West has laid most emphasis on truth of life and for a time come to stake its whole existence upon truth of life alone, to deny the existence of spirit or to relegate it to the domain of the unknown ...
... —it is seen that the creative Energy in Matter is a movement of the power of the Spirit. Matter itself cannot be the original and ultimate reality. At the same time the view that divorces Matter and Spirit and puts them as opposites is unacceptable; Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realisation of Spirit. It is true again that Life when it... in earth-life and in Matter not only of Mind but of all that is above it, all that has descended indeed but is still concealed in earth-life and Matter. Our theory of the integral knowledge admits Mind as a creative principle, a power of the Being, and assigns it its place in Page 690 the manifestation; it similarly accepts Life and Matter as powers of the Spirit and in them also is a... individual human spirit apart from the body is the keyword of this conception of life. That of itself necessitates its other belief in higher planes of existence than the material or terrestrial, since for a disembodied spirit there can be no abiding place in a world whose every operation depends upon some play of force, whether spiritual, mental, vital or material, in and with the forms of Matter. There arises ...
... They had the power of enforcing the public will without any fixed organisation, of associating without an association—without even the European refuge of a secret association. The spirit was what mattered, if the spirit were there, the movement would Page 16 find out its own channels; for after all it was the power of God manifested in the movement which would command its own means and ...
... perceive a complete aim for our synthesis of Yoga. Spirit is the crown of universal existence; Matter is its basis; Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eternal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is concealed and has to be revealed; mind and body are the means by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga; mind and body are... also to give the material man and his life a moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities. The creation of such spiritualised communities in the East has been one of the greatest triumphs of Spirit over Matter. Yet here, too, there is a defect; for this often tends only to the creation of a religious temperament, the... house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now concealed splendours. Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole ...
... Prakriti is complete; there the divine Purusha is entirely hidden in the blinding surge of her activities, in the gross pomp of her workings, and the individual soul emerging from her involution of spirit in matter, subject in all its activities to its entangling in the material and vital instruments is unable to experience the divine freedom. What it calls its freedom and mastery, is only the subtle subjection... aim of a mental being born into a physical body. First existence has formed itself here, fundamentally, as Matter; it has been objectivised, made sensible and concrete to its own self-experiencing conscious-force in the form of self-dividing material substance, and by the aggregation of this matter there has been built up for man a physical body separate, divided from others and subject to the fixed habits... abrogate these primary relations of ignorance and subjection. For this soul is living on a material plane of existence, a poise of Prakriti in which matter is still the chief determinant of its relations to Nature, and its consciousness being limited by Matter cannot be an entirely self-possessing consciousness. Even the universal soul, if limited by the material formula, could not be in entire possession ...
... in the higher or divine & now hidden hemisphere of his consciousness, having rent the veil, is the true superman and the last product of that progressive self-manifestation of God in world, Spirit out of matter, which is now called the principle of evolution. To rise into divine existence, force, light & bliss and recast in that mould all mundane existence is the supreme aspiration of religion &... we call humanity. He has manifested in the world through the play of all-governing Soul with its own formative Will or Shakti a rhythm of existence of which Matter is the lowest term and pure being the highest. Mind & Life stand upon Matter (Manas & Prana on Annam) and make the lower half of world-existence (aparardha); pure consciousness and pure bliss proceed out of pure Being (Chit and Ananda out... His being and bliss is perfect, pure as He is pure, blissful as He is blissful, and, when we are ourselves siddha in the purna Yoga, to bring all mankind to the same divine perfection. It does not matter if for the present we fall short of our aim, so long as we give ourselves whole-heartedly to the attempt and by living constantly in it and for it move forward even two inches upon the road; even that ...
... ent in Matter The integral aim that Sri Aurobindo came to formulate involves the realization of the divine consciousness in all its integrality, which can be possible only when a mental consciousness, even in its highest degrees of development, is transcended and the supramental consciousness is attained. page - 115 But this aim also includes the manifestation of the Spirit in Matter... that the full working out of this fulfilled object still remains a programme of colossal research, and thus the yoga-shastra of integral yoga is an open book which can be pursued in the spirit of research and in the spirit of making new discoveries and expansions of future realizations and achievements. Distinctive Features of the Object of the Integral Yoga The object of the integral yoga... consciousness, including the supramental consciousness, but earthly existence can never be made to receive higher and highest levels of consciousness and stabilize that consciousness in Matter to such a degree that Matter could manifest those highest levels of consciousness. The constant message of the past efforts was that one was required to leave the physical body in order to become permanently fixed ...
... not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities... of the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world... genius who has mastered matter can produce. It is not enough that "the Spirit bloweth", the instrument must also be capable of manifesting it. I believe that is one of the things Sri Aurobindo is going to explain: why it is necessary to give to the physical, external being, its full development, the capacity of controlling matter directly; then you put at the disposal of the Spirit an instrument capable ...
... descent from the spirit to matter and to pass on first to an intellectual endeavour to see life and the world and the self in all their relations as they present themselves to the reasoning and the practical intelligence. The earlier movement of this intellectual effort was naturally accompanied by a practical development and organisation of life consciously expressive of the mind and spirit of the people... Mahabharata, which gathered into its vast structure the greater part of the poetic activity of the Indian mind during several centuries, and the Ramayana. These two poems are epical in their motive and spirit, but they are not like any other two epics in the world, but are entirely of their own kind and subtly different from others in their principle. It is not only that although they contain an early heroic... remind one of the art of the Indian builders, the grandeur and boldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the Ramayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of Indian painting. The epic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa, an ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it in with detail from myth and ...
... the being separates itself from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself from the life-movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body-sense and knows itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being or a life-soul... life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient 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 even put aside all relation to form or... character of the evolution becomes evident; for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of the psychic Entity on the mind, life and body to develop a true soul-action, a pressure of the Spirit or Self for liberation from the ego, from the surface ignorance, a turning of the mind and life towards some occult Reality, — preliminary experiences, partial formulations of a spiritualised mind ...
... who urge him, perhaps since he ate of that tree of dual knowledge in the garden; for matter knows it not and life below man troubles itself but little, if at all, with moral differences. And it is said too that on the other side of human being and beyond its struggles is a serenity of the high and universal spirit where the soul transcends sin, but transcends also virtue, and neither sorrows nor repents... consciously in the greatness of the Spirit. May not that be the sovereignty we shall find here when we rise to the top of the soul's evolution? One thing we will note that this urge towards control and this impression of freedom are an orientation and an atmosphere which cling about the action of mind, and they grow in Nature as she rises towards mentality. The world of Matter seems to know nothing about... and my inmost spiritual self and I do not live in that outwardness with my whole being, but with a shape, turn and mental formation of myself which I call my ego or my personality. The cosmic spirit in matter seems itself to be so bound, for the same reason. It has started an outward compressed action, a law and disposition of material energy which must be allowed to unroll its consequences; itself ...
... point I want to make is that, when all is said and done, there is something in the submerged depths of the authentic Indian soul which cannot open permanently to any gospel other than that of the spirit no matter how high the stakes are. Apropos, I am reminded of a striking remark of Lowes Dickinson, the famous rationalist who, after touring the Far East, wrote that neither Japan nor China was inc... utterly alien, even terrifying, to the Occident! And that is precisely why Pundit Jawaharlal finds Hindu culture so foreign even bizarre, and fails to understand the diverse ways in which its religious spirit has helped humanity, a failure which prompted Sri Aurobindo to write to me (commenting on a few excerpts I had sent him from Punditji's views on religion): "I do not take the same view of the Hindu... fantastic with a significance —crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral-temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and Its real Presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.... "As for the other question — about the truth behind Hinduism — I can only say what to my view is the truth behind Hinduism, a truth contained in the very nature (not superficially seen of course) ...
... existence. In fact, the psychic is the bridge between the material world and the world of Spirit. It is because of the psychic that Matter rises towards Spirit in a growing élan of love and aspiration, ¹ On Yoga II—Vol. IV, by Sri Aurobindo. ² ibid. Page 343 and Spirit descends into Matter with its splendour of light and power and harmony and peace. The psychic or the soul... psychic is aware of its mission in the material world, and cannot remain content only with personal freedom and a passive union with the Divine. It has a will to fulfil the mission of its descent into Matter, which is the manifestation of the Divine here, on earth, and in the human body. It yearns to serve God by fulfilling His Will here.¹ The tendency in the individual towards the ¹ Cf. The Western... the Brahman, an oblique mental movement, and argues an imperfect psychic awakening. A fully awakened psychic is an. eternal warrior, fighting life after life, if need be, for the transformation of Matter and the revelation of God's Light and Love upon earth. For a perfect illustration of this psychic love and its will and aspiration to divine service, we can only refer to some of the Mother's Prayers: ...
... Energy does at every step the works of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every possible device to prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening of a life and a spirit in Matter; existence grows out of the Void, consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient; an ascending urge towards pleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy... based on the following: Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own self and spirit, and is, at its summits and in its essence, an infinite and eternal self-existent Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. But what we seem to... Chapter 2 The advent of the Muslims Later, however, sometime in the middle of the eighth century when the empires in India had grown weak, the regional spirit reawoke in separatist movements, disintegrating the unity or breaking down its large extension over most of the North. It left behind a certain number of great kingdoms in the east, south and centre ...
... because he mixes on one side in "high society" and on the other with cinema girls and singers. But that is from the point of view of social respectability. It is the spirit that matters. If X did it in the right spirit, it wouldn't matter whom he mixed with. It is true that he puts on a Sanyasin's dress which is absurd if he wants to go into that society—but that is an incongruity only. I admit that... exhausted my source and nothing new will come till after some time, i.e. by some growth of consciousness. Occasionally I may write when even a sameness won't matter much. But to be a "phenomenon" is impossible. The sameness does not matter much. The use of your writing is to keep you in touch with the inner source of inspiration and intuition, so as to wear thin the crude external crust in the ... I feel in my heart,..." I think the stars might just as well not be there. It is difficult for a heart-throb to be a star. July 27, 1938 "A silver-throated nightingale Has to my spirit brought Unimaginable ecstasy..." What's this nightingale doing here? Damned if I know, but let her sing. "My rock-white will manifests now Through grey barrenness of time Infinities ...
... transfiguration of life in the field of matter will necessarily signify "a union of the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights... not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals, and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden pos... "The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face. ........ A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell And take the charge of breath and speech and act And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns And every feeling a celestial thrill. .......... Nature shall live to manifest secret God, The Spirit shall ...
... material in our active and earthly living; we have to re-view and remould the lower living in the light, force and joy of the higher reality. We have to Page 421 realise Matter as a sense-created mould of Spirit, a vehicle for all manifestation of the light, force and joy of Sachchidananda in the highest conditions of terrestrial being and activity. We have to see Life as a channel for the... perfect transfiguration of the lower nature. We may feel imperfectly by the emotional mind, we may have a sense by the sense-mind or a conception and perception by the intelligent mind of the Spirit present in Matter and all its forms, the divine Delight present in all emotion and sensation, the divine Force behind all life-activities; but the lower will still keep its own nature and limit and divide in... complete or really executed without the awakening of the truth-mind which corresponds in the mental being to the Supermind and is capable of receiving mentally its illuminations. By the opposition of Spirit and Mind without the free opening of this intermediate power the two natures, higher and lower, stand divided, and though there may be communication and influence or the catching up of the lower into ...
... prefer to believe that it has to be pulled out altogether and thrown away. Page 72 But it is only through the vital that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit. If the vital is not there to infuse its dynamism and living force, matter will remain dead; for the higher parts of the being will not come into contact with earth, will not be concretised in life, and they... Page 74 love pours itself without limit back into the creation. The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete. Great beings have taken birth in this world who came to bring down here something of the sovereign purity and power of Divine love... manifests here upon this physical earth, in matter, but it must be pure of its human distortions, if it is to incarnate. The vital is an indispensable agent in this as in all manifestation. But as has happened always, the adverse powers have put their hold on this most precious thing. It is the energy of the vital that enters into dull and insensitive matter and makes it responsive and alive. But the ...
... s teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent —Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This is a truth, a fact of creation—giving the whole clue to the... essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy embedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward drive of evolution that brings out gradually, step by step, the various modes of the consciousness... himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable felicity in pain and suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in Page 2 another perspective, because Matter is essentially ...
... s teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga arid his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent—Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This is a truth, a fact of creation—giving the whole clue to the... creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward... but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has The Gita, IX. 33 Page 25 veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable ...
... Aurobindo's teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent-Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike. This is a truth, a fact of creation – giving the whole clue to the... creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in another perspective because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy imbedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward... but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has ¹ The Gita, IX. 33 Page 125 veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable ...
... not divided from God by these barriers of material & dimension. What is true [of] matter is not true of Spirit, nor do the standards of form become facts applied to the formless. For matter is conscious being confined in form, the spirit is conscious being using form but unconfined in it; & it is the privilege of Spirit that though Page 342 indivisible in its pure being, it is freely sel... Page 333 124 The human being on earth is God playing at humanity in a world of matter under the conditions of a hampered density with the ulterior intention of imposing law of spirit on matter & nature of deity upon human nature. Evolution is nothing but the progressive unfolding of Spirit out of the density of material consciousness and the gradual self-revelation of God out of this... supernatural in it & that [which] is natural. Everything in existence has something in it which seeks to transcend itself; Matter moves towards becoming Life, Life moves towards becoming Mind, Mind moves towards becoming ideal Truth, ideal Truth rises to become divine & infinite Spirit. Page 335 The reason is that every symbol, being a partial expression of God, reaches out to & seeks to become ...
... translation of the Divine into terms near the human formula: there is the original and authentic self-expression of the Spirit, the Divine uttered in the Divine's own way. A fine hierarchy climbs from intensity to greater intensity of divine substance and divine form, Spirit's matter and Spirit's manner — until the top is reached where abides what the Rishis named the Mantra, the divinest of all poetic words... to join the outwardly wakeful to the inwardly wakeful, the physical world to the supra-physical principalities and powers, the visible formulations to the occult structures of the one substance of Spirit that has emanated everything. The symbols of the Yogic surrealist are transcriptions of interrelated occult realities: either they are adapted, though never quite subdued, to the normal mind's manner ...
... not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities... the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material... Nature; for to be desireless, ego-less, equal of mind and soul and spirit and nistraiguṇya is in the idea of the Gita to be free, mukta. We may accept this description; for everything essential is covered by its amplitude. On the other hand, the positive sense of freedom is to be universal in soul, transcendently one in spirit with God, possessed of the highest divine nature, — as we may say ...
... force "...made in sleep this huge mechanical world" yet, it is this very matter which hides, behind its inertia, all the rich possibilities of life; mind and spirit. Thus, the universe is a process of mystery and "to live this Mystery out our souls came here". Aswapathy saw that he had travelled alone to this realm of the spirit's Infinity as yet unrealised by man where stillness, light and silence reign... he imitates the forms of subtle matter and subtle vital planes he succeeds in giving them some kind of shape in gross matter. But when he tries to embody things beyond the range of the earth-consciousness, beyond this material cosmos,—he finds that the stuff of this earth is too crude and the tools too rude. Even when he succeeds in embodying something of the spirit, with all his effort man is only... creativity is very difficult for the human being, because "a dire duality is our way to be". It was only in the very beginning of the cosmos that there was a complete immersion of Spirit in Matter and the imprisoned spirit had to cry to Life to invade the material realm so that the consciousness might be released from the material sleep. In response to this earnest appeal. Life left her native light ...
... traveller, made of Matter's world his starting-point: God covered his face in Matter, "infinity wore a boundless zero's form, eternity became a blank spiritual Vast". "The Timeless took its ground in emptiness" so "that the spirit might adventure into Time." The spirit built a Thought in Nothingness. Matter was made the body of the Bodiless and slumbering Life breathed in Matter. Mind lay asleep in... immortal heights",—"my humanity is a mask of God". Death cried out: You are living in imagination; how can you force two eternal enemies to join? For example: "Where Matter is all, there Spirit is a dream" "If all are the Spirit, Matter is a lie, "The Real with the unreal cannot mate. He who would turn to God must leave the world; and even "Sages exploring the world-ocean's... lodges in the relative world of Time; being omnipotent, he sports with chance and Fate; being spirit, he becomes Matter—he is animal, human and divine. As the Universal he is all,—as Transcendent he is none; and yet "There is a purpose in each stumble and fall." Even though to the outer view it seems that Matter is all and man's being is only a bubble on the ocean of Time still "the soul grows concealed ...
... is unfettered by human limitations and uses a body that has taken on itself the divine immunity of the Spirit — this is the Aurobindo-nian ideal. There is nothing fantastic here, once it is admitted that the Spirit is the supreme underlying reality. For, if everything has come from the Spirit, Matter too must be a diminished aspect of some divine truth and can by awakening to that truth get divinised... was not synonymous with the material, even as consciousness did not stop with the level of the elan vital and the mind. Beyond apparently unconscious Matter and the grades of organic evolution there was for the Indian a Power which was the Spirit And this basic stuff of being, this divine substance of consciousness, could be perceived by the subtle senses lying latent behind our imperfect... background a most necessary step, because the true genius of India was itself a background — the deep Spirit waiting secretly behind the clamour and conflict raging in the outer being of man. India's greatness in the past arose, according to Sri Aurobindo, from her possession of the hidden Spirit by Yogic experience. The Spiritual Background, however, was not his whole objective. In India's ...
... above—a descending point of view, from below, an ascending point of view. One can say it is a double ladder of ascent and descent—of involution and evolution. At one end in Matter the Spirit is involved, at the other end in Spirit, Matter is involved. All creation is nothing but self-manifestation: Existence acts and creates by its power of pure delight of conscious being. Satchidananda is the cause... is badge of imperfection on life. It is then that man realises the Truth of what Sri Aurobindo writes in Savitri : All is too little that the world can give; And cannot fill the Spirit's sacred thirst. Then one begins to seek the Reality, seek the Truth, the Purpose in life. When this seeking becomes steady it becomes an aspiration, a flame of inner life rising up to meet the... quite opposite of its own Self. Second is the process of Evolution or rather emergence. The One, Infinite that is involved in the inconscient is rising, emerging from there into the triple world of matter, life and mind. That has culminated into the living and thinking being, man. Third is the process which is working out the One at play in the World. It would end by the recovery of Satchidananda here ...
... archetype of the body in the Spirit. Give up illusionism and the logic crumbles down. Declare that it is the Spirit that has become all things immediately we unchain ourselves from Buddha's dictum. For then there must be, unknown to us, a connection between incorruptible substance of Spirit and matter's corruptible substance. Not only this, but, as the Spirit must be one-yet-multiple to... effective wideness and of practical simultaneity of presence everywhere through a sort of physical translation of the Spirit's consciousness. As impressive in diminishing the incubus of unconquerable inertia and grossness associated with matter in opposition to Spirit is dissolving of matter into pure energy - "radiant energy", as the suggestive technical designation goes. Lastly, we have the... task like laying the Spirit's touch on its old enemy and despised impediment, the body, for integral divinisation. Then there is the subconscious effect of Science's brilliant endeavour to see in the body the cause, function and aim of everything that we are: by. its advances towards proving all spiritual states to be material it also paved the way for a vision of matter as no utterly inc ...
... the story in the legend. Only, the poet of the epic has made a rearrangement of the subject matter in his presentation. The poem has definitely gained in its power of gripping the attention of the reader. The poem opens with the Symbol-Dawn that simultaneously ushers in the outbreak of the Spirit in Matter as that of the Sun from the dark Night. We see here Savitri face to face with the crucial... Supreme Creatrix, the power of the omnipotent Divine. At the end of his spiritual efforts he thus enters not a featureless Infinite and a void Absolute but a divine world of die Spirit—what the poet calls the House of the Spirit—where Truth and Knowledge, Power and Consciousness, divine Delight and Harmony are the constituent Page 5 elements. And he feels the possibility of bringing this... Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 3. (9) That is the highest place which is seen ever by the seers like an eye extended in heaven. Rig Veda, I. 22-20. (10) "Matter smitten by matter glimmered to sense". Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 4. (10) By the truth they hold the truth that holds all. Rig Veda, V. 12-2 (Here there is similarity of the ...
... which even the ghastly or the fearful or the uncouth in its naked bareness does not frighten us: Their bodies born out of some Nihil's womb Ensnare the spirit in the moment's dreams, Then perish vomiting the immortal soul Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought. Or There crawled through every tense and aching nerve Leaving behind in poignant quaking trail A nameless and unutterable... nothing could move or live. A hidden Bliss is at the root of things… The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house; He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs: His fires grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of... beams… Love is man’s lien on the Absolute. The Hymn proceeds to declare that the immortal Bliss in her "remembrance of the future" is working out a slow transfiguration of Matter's unknowing Force into the might of the Spirit. In fact for this In the vast golden laughter of Truth's sun Like a great heaven-bird on a motionless sea Is poised her winged ardour of creative joy On the still deep ...
... meaning is to an Oriental intelligence! The plasm of matter, the foodsheath of the universe to which bread and wine belong, is indeed the blood and body of God and typifies the great primal sacrifice by which God crucified himself so that the world might exist. The Infinite had to become finite, the Unconditioned to condition himself, Spirit to evolve matter. In the bread and the wine which the communicant... self-mastery that comes from long and patient accumulation of soul-experience, can keep us firm and help us over these temptations. "The Spirit is not to be won by eloquent teaching, nor by brain power, nor by much learning: but he whom the Spirit chooseth, he getteth the Spirit, and to him God discovereth His body." Truly does the Upanishad say "for sharp as a razor's edge is the path, difficult & hard to... breath or breath of life, because breath & life are merely subordinate aspects of the Prana. Atman again rendered indifferently by soul, spirit & self, must mislead, because what the West calls the soul is really the Atman yoked with mind & intelligence, and spirit is a word of variable connotation often synonymous with soul; even "self" cannot be used precisely in that way in English. Again the Hindu ...
... Energy does at every step the works of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every possible device to prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening of a life and a spirit in Matter; existence grows out of the Void, consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient, an ascending urge towards pleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy... into birth by his greatness,—by the might of his self-manifesting Energy. But the Inconscient, if a mask, is an effective mask of the Spirit; it imposes on the evolving life and soul the law of a difficult emergence. Life and consciousness, no less than Matter, obey in their first appearance the law of fragmentation. Life organises itself physically round the plasm, the cell, psychologically round... what seems to be its opposite. Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own self and spirit, and is, at its summits and in its essence, an infinite and eternal self-existent Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. But what we seem to ...
... and, if there are no gradations between the two levels of consciousness, a transition from one to the other, either in the descending involution of Spirit into Matter or the corresponding evolution in Matter of the concealed grades leading back to the Spirit, seems in the highest degree improbable, if not impossible. For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty... powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter Page 296 realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In... a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind ...
... of physical science. Matter itself is only an utility of Spirit or Being or Nature for physical process and action. Material energy is an instrumental dynamis for that utility or else an original dynamis which has no other sense of its operations. We get beyond to a higher sense only when [we] get beyond material to mental, psychical and spiritual energy, to mind, soul and spirit. Debateable it is... is whether if we knew the real essence of Matter and the basic, not only the apparent, relations of mind, soul and spirit to matter and material operations, we could not arrive at an infinitely more potent use of physical process and operations. But in any case these things cannot be discovered by physical science; it has its limits and cannot exceed its limits. Psychology may begin as a natural... and calls vaguely spirit or spiritual being. Spirit is found to have three tones of its being. Triune, it makes each successively a power of its energy, a status of spiritual experience and form of its action. Triune, they are inseparable, but one or other can be so stressed as to appear a leading principle. But we have to note three essential facts about spirit:— Spirit is infinite consciousness ...
... outermost. It thins itself out to utmost tenuity -even into nothingness, And it condenses itself to impenetrable solidity - It is Pure Consciousness and it is absolute Matter. Spirit is Matter sublimated, Matter is Spirit crystallised. Soul is Body introvert, Body is Soul extravert. October 16, 1932 XII THOU hast fashioned thy limbs into the curves of every human... n; It is Darkness that yearns for the Light And so the Soul has descended in answer Into the gloom - The gloom stretches interminable, The abyss seems fathomless, - Only to the spirit that ventures with its own lantern; But my Soul is never alone -the Mother of Light upbears it - A cataract of limitless blaze swirls behind And presses it forward in and through the gloom... secure and tranquil. I have heard His call and He has embraced me intimately from afar; Lo, I am grown into the translucency of His divine serenity, the earth-made cells of flesh are now spirit-stars that bear the undecaying lustres of immortality. April 30, 1935 XXIX GRACE is the golden lining to the dark cloud: it is the touch of love that rounds off all our faults ...
... outermost. It thins itself out to utmost tenuity -even into nothingness, And it condenses itself to impenetrable solidity - It is Pure Consciousness and it is absolute Matter. Spirit is Matter sublimated, Matter is Spirit crystallised. Soul is Body introvert, Body is Soul extravert. October 16, 1932 Page 313 XII THOU hast fashioned thy limbs into the curves... n; It is Darkness that yearns for the Light And so the Soul has descended in answer Into the gloom - The gloom stretches interminable, The abyss seems fathomless, - Only to the spirit that ventures with its own lantern; But my Soul is never alone -the Mother of Light upbears it - A cataract of limitless blaze swirls behind And presses it forward in and through the gloom... secure and tranquil. I have heard His call and He has embraced me intimately from afar; Lo, I am grown into the translucency of His divine serenity, the earth-made cells of flesh are now spirit-stars that bear the undecaying lustres of immortality. April 30, 1935 XXIX GRACE is the golden lining to the dark cloud: it is the touch of love that rounds off all our faults ...
... And man refuse his high spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail... And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face. 24 Was the "secret Truth in things” set in motion, that automatic supermind in Matter’s depths? Or was it to occur soon, through this plunge of conscious spirit into Matter's night? He looked at coming Fate. He looked at Mother, always in a hurry, always late, assailed... thousand times on Her way by one or another, the countless microscopic difficulties that had to be disentangled one by one, patiently, in each little consciousness, each little detail of Matter—the countless traps of Matter that cause an accident, a revolt or a sudden devastation only because that little speck has been overlooked —the very same traps He was disentangling, tirelessly clearing up, letter... 1973? What happened in 1950? He added the last punctuation marks, attended to each detail to the very end—it was his way of instilling truth into Matter. If truth does not begin with a semicolon, where does it begin? If it would never enter Matter—where could it get in? “Every word must be the mot juste, every line perfect,” His secretary commented, “even every sign of punctuation flawless. One ...
... made matter its formal basis; but eventually He intends the enjoyment of the object as a symbol of the spirit in the spirit, freely. God in us is the poet, is the musician who throws out some few forms of the infinite world within him into symbols of word or sound, so that the material enjoyment of the sound ceases to be material & becomes a form of spiritual enjoyment and an extension of spirit into... into matter. I am free at any moment to begin it, at any moment to suspend it; & even when I throw away the temporary outward form of the enjoyment, I keep always the inward eternal form of it in my spirit. So a man who has once seen the Matterhorn rising into the Swiss heavens, Page 481 keeps always that for which he was sent by the spirit within him to the toils & perils of Alpine climbing;... manomaya purusha, the spirit centred and veiled in mind. Humanity still imprisoned in its surroundings, servilely reflects in its mind the habitual impact of outward things, the bahyasparshah, & gives to them a fixed & conventional mental value. The more humanity moves towards freedom & perfection, the more it will live in the mind itself, use outward circumstances of life & matter only as symbols of ...
... the exclusive solution of the problems of human life in the attainment of world-negating spirit; it has rather affirmed the possibility of the highest spiritualising of life on the earth. The earliest preoccupation of India, as expressed in Veda, was the exploration of Spirit in Matter and of Matter in Spirit; the intermediate preoccupation was with the seeking and experimenting in a thousand ways... Savitri is followed and completed by the discovery and uncovering of the light in the very depths of darkness of the Inconscient, tamas. Not the rejection of Matter and material life but realisation that Matter too is Spirit and that material life too can bear and manifest the spiritual light and bliss - this seems to be the basis of the Vedic teaching. " Page 33 It i s ... that many must necessarily remain for ever on the lower rungs of life and only a few could climb into the free air and light, but were moved by the spirit to regenerate all and the totality of physical life on the earth. It is true that this spirit was not at all times and in all its parts consciously aware of its own total significance. But the total drift of the manifold sides and rich variations ...
... precise only in narrow limits and by imperfect piecings together. Even Page 260 in this diminished consciousness the Divine manifests as a Spirit in Mind, just as he moves as a Spirit in Life or dwells still more obscurely as a Spirit in Matter; but not here is his full dynamic revelation, not here the perfect identities of the Eternal. Only when we cross the border into a larger luminous ... separated from Prakriti, this dynamic imperfection might not matter. Calm, untroubled, not depressed, not elated, refusing to accept the perfection or imperfection, fault or merit, sin or virtue as ours, perceiving that it is the modes of Nature working in the field of her modes that make this mixture, we could withdraw into the silence of the spirit and, pure, untouched, witness only the workings of Prakriti... inconscience of Matter and its slow partial return towards itself into an effective Ignorance. For here in the world, though the Gnosis is there secretly behind existence, what acts is not the Gnosis but a magic of Knowledge-Ignorance, an incalculable yet apparently mechanical Overmind Maya. The Divine appears to us here in one view as an equal, inactive and impersonal Witness Spirit, an immobile ...
... the body of this inert and obscure matter. When it is touched by this transforming light, the atoms that constitute this matter awake to a New Consciousness. Like this the work continues and spreads or multiplies. You understand, Sri Aurobindo is the Soul of Matter, the aspiration of the whole humanity. He is the Light in Matter or the Spirit incarnated in Matter. Sri Aurobindo has separated himself... force must penetrate this solid, obscure, rigid matter which is obstinate in its perversion and engulfed in falsehood, in order to bring light into the very bottom of this mass of inconscience, of this eternal obscurity that opposes with its immense and impenetrable energies in their unrelenting dynamism. There is a Presence which is bound up in matter by millions of cords. It is imprisoned there by... from which it is very difficult to be free. Immobile, it rests in matter, forced by a blind compulsion in the insentient depths where nothing moves, where nothing ever can, there where everything disappears in a resistance that opposes with an invincible force. That is why this transforming force must act with a sustained power till matter feels and is made more conscious of my presence, of the light that ...
... all the operations of Spirit with Matter. The Spirit has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy, yogakṣema , of created beings, for a self. offering of universal physical utility and service. The gnostic being, using Matter but using it without material or vital attachment or desire, will feel that he is using the Spirit in this form of itself... tendency. For we stand Page 1012 now between these two terms, an outer world of Life and Matter that has made us and a remaking of the world by ourselves in the sense of the evolving Spirit. Our present way of living is at once a subjection to Life-Force and Matter and a struggle with Life and Matter. In its first appearance an outer existence creates by our reactions to it an inner or mental... qualities, the beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence. As a consequence of the total change and reversal of consciousness establishing a new relation of spirit with mind and life and matter, and a new significance and perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal, a perfecting new significance also of the relations between the spirit and the body it inhabits. In our ...
... all scientific investigation shows to be the one fundamental fact of the Universe. Science considers the One eternal & permanent reality to be eternal Matter, Vedanta for reasons already stated holds it to be eternal Consciousness of which Spirit-Matter are in phenomena the positive-negative aspects. This Brahman, this Sacchidanandam, this eternal Consciousness unknowable, unnameable and indefinable... for religion, for the spirit of man, for any idea of God? Who is the Lord, Isha, Maheshwar, Vishnu, Rudra, Indra, the Lord of the Illusion, the Ruler, the Mighty One of which all the Upanishads speak? Who is this triple Prajna-Hiranyagarbha-Virat? Who is this twofold Purusha-Prakriti, God & Nature, without which the existence of the phenomenal world and consciousness in matter would not be intelligible... existence and that to this goal his evolution moves. This consummation may be reached by ethical means through a certain manner of action and a certain spirit in action which is the essence of Karmamarga, the Way of Works, one of the three ways by which the spirit of man may see, embrace & become God. The first law of Karmamarga is to give up the natural desire for the fruits of our works and surrender all ...
... brief essays, but it is also a vast arc of comprehension: from Matter to Spirit, from the physical, vital and mental to the psychic, spiritual and supramental, from animal to man and from man to God! Education is a movement, an unfolding, a becoming; what is already involved as a result of the holocaust of the Spirit in inconscient Matter awakens and puts out its sticky leaves and bud of promise, and... to stress, now this and now another aspect. With children, and at school generally, physical, mental and vital education may have to take precedence, but psychic discipline is truly the heart of the matter. The journey to the soul may be long and difficult, yet the goal is not impossible of attainment. Once the way is open to the psychic centre, the other disciplines will be easy of mastery. Rightly... deformities. A basic knowledge of the human anatomy, of food and exercise, of health and hygiene, is certainly necessary, but there are always individual variations which must also be borne in mind. In the matter of food, tastes could differ, and what is appetising to one may be repulsive to another. It would be unwise therefore to force children to eat the kind of food which they intensely dislike. In all ...
... creation and solve its riddle. East and West could be reconciled in the pursuit of the highest and largest Page 43 ideal, Spirit embrace Matter and Matter find its own true reality and the hidden Reality in all things in the Spirit. 11-8-1949 * THE PRESENT DARKNESS AND THE NEW WORLD I am afraid I can hold out but... denial of the Spirit and even the enthronement of Matter as the sole reality. Spiritual perfection as the sole ideal on one side, on the other, the perfectibility of the race, the perfect society, a perfect development of the human mind and life and man's material existence have become the largest dream of the future. Yet both are truths and can be regarded as part of the intention of the Spirit in world-nature;... mistakes of nations; all have defects and commit serious mistakes; but what matters is on what side they have ranged themselves in the struggle. It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will ...
... exclusive solution of the problems of human life in the attainment of world-negating spirit; it has rather affirmed the possibility of the highest spiritualising of life on the earth. The earliest preoccupation of India, as expressed in the Veda, was the exploration of the Spirit in Matter and of Matter in Spirit; the intermediate preoccupation was with the seeking and experiment in a thousand ways... Surya Savitri is followed and completed by the discovery and uncovering of the light in the very depths of darkness of the Inconscient, tamas. Not the rejection of Matter and material life but realisation that the Matter too is Spirit and that material life too can bear and manifest the spiritual light and bliss — this seems to be the inner basis of the Vedic teaching. It is this unitive perception... which there meets the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountainheads of the spirit. The resultant Vedic poetry is seen as an epic chant of the spirit, its struggle and delight of ascent and victory, the secret of which is contained in self-consecration and surrender of the finite to the infinite, Yajna, where knowledge ...
... the consciousness coincided with the first attempt to traverse the physical Mind. On the other side of the cage, another time begins, another material time, not a spiritual one (unless the Spirit rejoins Matter). A massive time. Because I asked Mother, practical and materialistic as I was (but so was Mother, as much as me!): “But what happens, when everything is like that, immobile, does something... consciousness. A change of position on a terrestrial scale. Because, having the key to the consciousness of Matter, the beings of the supramental species will have the power to model Matter directly, by emitting the corresponding vibration in their own Matter: they will act from Matter to Matter in the same way that today we communicate and act from mental consciousness to mental consciousness. It was... modifying the structure of Matter except in a somewhat catastrophic way—they do not have the central lever. They do not have the lever of consciousness that produces the movement and all the forms of Matter that result from the movement. They do not have the secret: Matter = Consciousness. One can say that Mother’s whole experience consists in reaching the consciousness of Matter, the pure substratum, or ...
... darkness and laying on our minds a living touch through the swirl of stars. The sheer occult confronts us when Sri Aurobindo speaks of Shiva's creative force stirring within the core of Spirit merged in unconscious Matter: In that diamond heart the fires undrape. The finality of each word burns itself into the memory. "Undrape", with its hint of processes at once revelatory and creative, could... sight to which the Divine's will is a tremendous white lustre just as the Divine's knowledge is a gold blaze and the Divine's love a crimson flare—it is also extraordinarily apt when the Spirit concealed in Matter is visioned, a presence holding material Page 53 rigidness in a precious and transfigured form, a supreme strength dense with light and beauty. An equal art is employed... combination of sounds and a turn of phrase and a glow of insight which carry the inmost "feel" of those divine heights. The vision, the word, the vibration—all three must be intensities drawn from the Spirit's ether. But more even than the wide inwardness of the vision, Page 45 the mighty yet intimate grip of the word, it is the rhythm that marks the mantra, bearing as it does the precise ...
... has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it. The West has the knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it. An integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised. 5 Again... Advent of the Truth. It was India's unique role to end the dichotomy between matter and Spirit, and show that the former, so long as it didn't manifest the latter, would be false and impotent. The role of science and technology was to "make the material basis stronger, completer and more effective for the manifestation of the Spirit". The unity of all nations was certainly "the compelling future of the world"... and during the two decades following, the Mother refused to make any sharp distinction between study and relaxation. All study was to be undertaken without external pressure; in other words, in a spirit of adventure. And all relaxation had its educative value. One might almost say that life at the Centre of Education was organised - or, rather, organised itself, in the Mother's own words, "on a routine ...
... purpose in their action—and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work,—and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using "a tangle of ganglia", can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare... to have brought any matter of your action and self-development before her in the right spirit means to have put it under her protection, in the light of the Truth, under the rays of the Power that is working for the transformation—for immediately those rays begin to play and to act on the thing brought to her notice. Anything within that advises you not to do it when the spirit in you moves you to... ascetic in your habits than vulgarly animal in this part as you are now." To one who is not taking enough food or sleep and rest in the eagerness of his spirit, I might say "Eat more, sleep more, rest more; do not overstrain yourself or bring an ascetic spirit into your tapasya." To another with the opposite excess I Page 473 might speak a contrary language. Each sadhak has a nature or turn of ...
... example: 1) Matter is jaḍa only in appearance. As even modern Science admits, Matter is only energy in action, and, as we know in India, energy is force of consciousness in action. 2) Prakriti in the material world seems to be jaḍa , but this too is only an appearance. Prakriti is in reality the conscious power of the Spirit. 3) A bringing down of the Spirit into Matter cannot lead to a... prakṛti . A descent of the Spirit could only mean a descent of light, consciousness and power, not a growth of unconsciousness and inertia which is what is meant by the jaḍa laya . 4) The Spirit is there already in Matter as everywhere else; it is only a surface apparent unconsciousness or involved consciousness which veils its presence. What we have to do is to awake Matter to the spiritual consciousness... find after reading them that my own position was wrong and that only an obstinate mystic could still believe in such a conquest of Matter by the Spirit as I had dared to think possible. But I am just such an obstinate mystic; so, if I allowed your exposition of the matter to be published in one of our own periodicals, I would be under the obligation of returning to the subject in which I have lost interest ...
... Energy does at every step the works of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every possible device to prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening of a life and a spirit in Matter; existence grows out of the Void, consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient, an ascending urge towards pleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy... adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist. At the best even this futile labour can extract, can account for only the externals of the things it attempts to explain; the spirit is missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of that capital omission even the account of the externals is left without real truth and has only an apparent correctness.” 6 2. Sri Aurobindo, the... Science. But a solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes, and one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface: only then can we have a knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem ...
... change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as Page 701 an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden... of the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world... and be transformed into the character of a divine life. Matter after taking into itself and manifesting the power of life and the light of mind would draw down into it the superior or supreme Page 712 power and light of the spirit and in an earthly body shed its parts of inconscience and become a perfectly conscious frame of the spirit. A secure completeness and stability of the health and ...
... disintegration. It maintains unity in diversity and thus keeps stability in utmost mutability. Creation, therefore, is a movement between two involutions : that of the Spirit involved in Matter and of Matter involved in the Spirit. Every seed implies all infinity—all infinity of possibility. Nature really is seer-will, knowledge-force of the Conscious-being at work. In the mind thought seems separate... end what mind knows is its own analysis of the subject, it does not know the object. It happens so because in terrestrial evolution mind is embedded in matter and is limited by the inertia of matter to a great extent. Mind and life both enlighten matter but they are only passages, not the culmination of the process of enlightenment. In the Supermind, that is the Truth-Consciousness, there is unity... possible for it to project its perfection into the instruments of nature and make them participate in the immortality of the Spirit by a process of transformation. Immortality is not merely avoidance of death of the body, it is participation in the immortality of the Spirit by the instruments of nature. Ordinarily, the mind refuses to accept the possibility of attaining a Higher Consciousness and of ...
... poet, and has remained a child in spirit. You've Page 197 seen how he dresses himself; though in spirit he is young, his body has become old. But it doesn't matter if the body is old, so long as the spirit is young. I too feel quite fresh and young in spirit. It doesn't matter if you suffer, it doesn't matter if you fail, but freshness of the spirit is what you must have, what you... have been offered to God with prayers and then distributed among the worshippers as God's blessings. Page 196 came up running to the Mother: "Mother, Mother!" she said. "What's the matter?" "See, Mother." She was carrying a big bottle of medicine. "Doctor Nirod has given me this. How to take, how many times to take it, nothing has been said. Mother, Mother, he is no doctor, he is a... his path. He will have a lot of trouble, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, so let him go somewhere else. But Nishikanto was very stubborn, very strong - "Nothing doing, I'll stay here. It doesn't matter if I have suffering, I will stay here." Then it was told to Mother that he wants to stay here, and she wrote back; these were Her words: "All right, but tell him that he will see and know many things ...
... g., Spirit-Matter, Reality-Appearance, Faith-Reason, Freedom-Determination, etc. And the two ideals relative to 'Spirit-Matter-polarity' (Archie J. Bahm), that have most captivated man's imagination are the 'Extreme One-pole-ism' (one pole of the polarity, Spirit, exists; the other, Matter, does not exist) and the 'Extreme other-pole-ism' (the other pole, Matter, alone exists; the one, Spirit, does... treasures of the Spirit, - or of some of Page 26 them, - it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. Nor has the intellect, which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found satisfaction... supported by the latest (!) scientific discoveries. It is in this perverted way that the so-called modern age has come to lull itself into the conviction that Matter is the basic and unique Reality, and that the Divine, the freedom of the Spirit, the immortality of the Soul are all myths of an unscientific temperament and Honni soit qui trop y pense! Ivo Höllhuber has aptly termed this attitude espi ...
... heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world so that it becomes more and more divine. The transformation is not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its... its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities, uplifts, sublimates, discloses their innate divinity. The divine life will... vessel of a supreme beauty and bliss,—casting the beauty of the light of the spirit suffusing and radiating from it as a lamp reflects and diffuses the luminosity of its indwelling flame, carrying in itself the beatitude of the spirit, its joy of the seeing mind, its joy of life and spiritual happiness, the joy of Matter released into a spiritual consciousness and thrilled with a constant ecstasy. ...
... has or rather had the knowledge of the Spirit , but she neglected matter and suffered for it. The West has the knowledge of matter but rejected the Spirit and suffers badly for it. An integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised. This is in... direction be made? Make matter ready to manifest the Spirit. 3) What is India's true genius and what is her destiny? To teach to the world that matter is false and impotent unless it becomes the manifestation of the Spirit. 4) How does the Mother view the progress of Science and Technology in India? What contribution can it make to the growth of the Spirit in man? Its only use is... career and money. b) Insist on the paramount importance of the contact with the Spirit and the growth and manifestation of the Truth of the being. 5 August 1965 I would like them (the Government) to recognise Yoga as education, not so much for ourselves, but it will be good for the country. Matter will be transformed, that will be a solid base. Life will be divinised. Let India take ...
... not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast .away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden po... the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul. with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world... limitations and be transformed into the character of a divine life. Matter after taking into itself and manifesting the power of life and the light of mind would draw down into it the superior or supreme power and light of the spirit and in an earthly body shed its parts of inconscience and become a perfectly conscious frame of the spirit. A secure completeness and stability of the health and strength ...
... not change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities... the two ends of existence, the spiritual summit and the material base. The soul with the basis of its life established in Matter ascends to the heights of the Spirit but does not cast away its base, it joins the heights and the depths together. The Spirit descends into Matter and the material world with all its lights and glories and powers and with them fills and transforms life in the material world... limitations and be transformed into the character of a divine life. Matter after taking into itself and manifesting the power of life and the light of mind would draw down into it the superior or supreme power and light of the spirit and in an earthly body shed its parts of inconscience and become a perfectly conscious frame of the spirit. A secure completeness and stability of the health and strength ...
... infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought... beyond, however strongly grasped by the mind's interest, is ineffective unless it is seized on by the heart as the one thing desirable and by the will as the one thing to be done. For truth of the Spirit has not to be merely thought but to be lived, and to live it demands a unified single-mindedness of the being; so great a change as is contemplated by the Yoga is not to be effected by a divided will... men or from the more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication. On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service ...
... methods of philosophical thought practised in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity for either. To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary to the Western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the most important part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes it... endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided many-staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, sanātana dharma . It is only if we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture... fruitful life-power. But this by itself does not give an adequate account of its spirit or its greatness. One might describe Greek or Roman civilisation from this outlook and miss little that was of importance; but Indian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an immense religious effort of the human spirit. The whole root of difference between Indian and European culture springs from ...
... The man who is dedicated to machinery will have to bring into his life the Mahasaraswati aspect - perfect detail and organization in material life - so as to make matter a fit receptacle of the spirit, to make matter express the spirit perfectly. That is how the four aspects of the divine Nature have to come into the human being and embody humanity's work; then humanity will have perfection. ... is to reach "the indwelling God" O soul, intruder in Nature's ignorance, Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights, Thy spirit's fate is a battle and ceaseless march Against invisible opponent Powers, A passage from Matter into timeless Self. The whole of human life has been such a march from inconscience to a growing light. Well, Narada is giving a reply... consciousness of man having no say in it. That was one problem as we saw. The epic also concerns itself with the evolution of man from his natural self to his true being or his spirit./Aswapathy gets this realization of the spirit, leading to a widening of his true being, equating him with the cosmos, with the universal consciousness, the universal being. Marching through all the planes which have their ...
... greatness everywhere. This universe became "...a living movement of the body of God." The world was a conception and a birth of Spirit in matter from where rose "The divine Dwarf towered unconquered worlds". His spirit was the witness-spirit and— "Existence a divine experiment And cosmos the soul's opportunity." All the suppressed powers of the subconscient and... which nothing had yet emerged—not even matter—and yet everything was there from which the cosmos could emerge. These quotations are given just to help the reader to enter into the spirit of the first Canto. There is no question of the symbol-Dawn or the Night being derived from the Vedic symbol. It is quoted here in order to bring something similar in spirit and form to help the reader to appreciate... was "a Survivor of a slain and buried past". This persistent entity was "Condemned to resume the effort and the pang"—of the movement of evolution from inconscient to consciousness,—from Matter to Spirit. Page 135 In this great stir there was an aspiration for the Light, and Usha, the Dawn, comes in response to this aspiration. This aspiration was not merely an ignorant wish ...
... 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 limited and determined by the mental... the being separates itself from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself from the life movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body sense and knows itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being or a life-soul... sign of an indwelling Spirit, no being for whose delight it was made. A creation of this kind could only be the outcome of an inconscient Energy or an illusion-cinema, a shadow play or puppet play of forms reflected on a superconscient indifferent Absolute. He would have seen no evidence of a soul and no hint of mind or life in this immeasurable and interminable display of Matter. It would not have seemed ...
... into Divine Love, should withdraw from the physical or the vital, and confine itself to the psychic realm alone. "It is only through the vital," says the Mother,. "that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit." Divine Love, being integral love, knows no exclusions; it is from the human end that the distortions and perversions erupt, and these have to be eschewed. Then comes... forms". Love must one day return to the source itself, the Divine: The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete. 46 XI In Conversation X, the issue is between Spirituality and Religion. Certainly, all religions had their beginnings... its institutional apparatus, all of which are man-made with the inevitable egoistic distortions . And so the uniting fount of the Spirit flows in different directions as so many religions, and each religion pools itself into so many creeds, sects and schools. The spirit is thus dead or asleep in its encrustations of dogma, ritual, superstition, custom and blind observance: All religions have ...
... The spirit that gradually approached the creation of form in the subtle material kingdom is able to overcome the resistance of gross matter and bring out into expression some of its beauty in this gross material world. Above this subtle material plane comes the manifestation of Life on earth, and this life connects itself with the kingdom of the lower and the higher vital worlds of the Spirit. Similarly... which humanity will find its fulfilment. It sees the spirit, the divine, the supreme who is Absolute, that by a graded, self-regulated descent from its realms of highest infinities of knowledge, consciousness and bliss descends creating at each step of its descent a universe that manifests its glory. When it reaches the kingdom of the subtle matter in its descent, it takes, or seems to our mind to take... and surrenders its being and nature to the Page 99 Supreme and his Higher nature. It would then be possible to manifest the Divine in life, to establish the victory of the Spirit here in Matter, that is, to create a new humanity which is the intention of the Divine. Sāvitrī as a poem has many cantos of sustained height of inspiration and the reader should prepare himself ...
... wondering if anything is happening in any definite manner or all is simply a dubious play of words with high-sounding appellatives like Infinity, Eternity, Inconscience, Non-being, Void, Nature, Spirit, Matter, and so on. Frequently his charge is that, apart from the names of some Gods and Goddesses, there are only five proper names in the whole epic which runs to about twenty-four thousand lines: Satyavan... brief narrative, already full of spiritual glow, becomes in Sri Aurobindo a glorious and laurel-crowned Odyssey of mounting the mighty steep World-Stair that rises from Matter's inconscient base to the splendours of the superconscient Spirit. He goes yet beyond, crossing the triple Glory. Even as he approaches the Worlds of the Unknowable, the creative-executive power of the Supreme answers him and grants... bold characters. It is perhaps for this reason that its essential core has endured the long passage of time. But thick coats of unregenerate times have also accumulated over it. The living spirit of the story has got buried under the dense layers of ethical-moralistic ideas and notions. Sri Aurobindo himself says that originally the Mahabharata story was symbolic, but later it became socio ...
... have not to stop short with that realisation. We have, as I said just now, to transform our entire being. There is an idea that our yoga is an attempt at conscious evolution. The Spirit is here involved in Matter and appears subject to it. By the process of evolution the vital and the mental being have come into manifest existence here. Our effort is to evolve to the Supermind from mind. ... Light, Truth and Harmony to govern and transform our nature – that is, our mind, life, and body. There is thus an involution of the lower powers upward into the Truth from which the Spirit descends into Matter and then a manifestation of that Truth in all the nature. It is not all who can do this. There is an idea that everybody can do this yoga, but that is only partly true. All are not... descending into the physical, I may say that I am morally sure that the material will yield. Disciple : If the laws of Matter change, will not Matter cease to be Matter ? Sri Aurobindo : Why ? Disciple : Because certain laws define the nature of Matter. Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by laws ? What you call laws are mere habits. If you change your habits you still remain ...
... overcome and discarded than as an instrument of spiritual perfection and a field of the spiritual change.14 This contempt was a part of the general attitude towards matter as contrasted and opposed to spirit. Matter was looked upon as something gross, inert, unconscious, unchangeable, an insuperable impediment to spiritual realisation. We have seen that, according to Sri Aurobindo, this... instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-matter. Not knowledge or information, but self-realisation, is the goal. To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion. Moreover, subject-matter never can be got into the child from without. Learning is active. It involves reaching out of... mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance, drifting on the current of matter towards an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure ...
... room that nobody would have dreamed that a cyclone was raging outside. All the windows were wide open, not a drop of rain was coming inside". 1 What was this except the silent victory of the Spirit over matter and energy? And yet Sri Aurobindo was hardly the conscious or calculating miraculist: rather was he content to don humanity in all things. But however human he may have wanted to be in his... Refuge, and the world without him would lose its brightness". An English disciple, Morwenna Donnelly, recorded in great anguish of spirit: Faced by this event, I felt that for the first time I could understand a little of that desolation of spirit which the followers of Jesus must have endured between the terrible Friday and the evening of the 'first day of the week'. Jesus had... the spirituality of the renunciation of life and for the spiritual life of action. Works of all kinds - sarva karmāni including ghoram karma - were valid provided they were done in the right spirit. 36 LEARNING SANSKRIT THROUGH SONGSV Even before the war actually ended in 1945, it was already clear by mid-1944 that, sooner or later, the Allies were going to win, and it was not ...
... purpose in their action—and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work,—and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using "a tangle of ganglia," can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare... scope of Homer and Shakespeare. And beyond the Ideals and Idea-Forces even there are other presences, more inner or inmost realities, a soul behind things and beings, the spirit and its powers, which could be the subject-matter of an art still more rich and deep and abundant in its interest than any of these could be. A poet finding these and giving them a voice with a genius equal to that of the... 348 August 15, 1933 There are artists and artists. A real artist with the spirit of artistry in his very blood will certainly be artistic in everything. But there are artists who have no taste and there are artists who are not born but made. Your example of Tagore is a different matter. A mastery in one department of art does not give mastery on another—though there may be a ...
... in my mind. I said: "I am convinced that India has a great role to play in the emergence of a new world order. India has or rather had knowledge of the Spirit. But it has neglected Matter. The West has the knowledge of Matter but has neglected Spirit. Both have become bankrupt in their own ways. Both can be replenished by Page 57 each other. But who will take the lead? I think it is for India... politicians and Page 22 politics can be changed. Mere ideas and propagation of ideas will not do. That which is deeper than ideas and idealism is the substance and power of the Spirit. And it is not to be a matter of beliefs or dogma. For belief and dogma will again be nothing but ideas and idealism. No, just as electricity is a power that can give shock and energise, even so spirituality is a... history and tradition of this knowledge, it has stood the test of time and can even open the doors of profounder knowledge both of the spirit and of matter. It is also quite possible that this research might lead to the discovery of new methods and technologies of both spiritual and technological and material advancement. It might even teach how spirituality can embrace the totality of life and how m ...
... event, the possibilities of escape from fate, reconciliation & for these tragic lovers the life of an ordinary conjugal happiness. These unrealised possibilities & the secret inevitability—of Spirit, not of matter,—which prevents their realisation, which takes advantage of every trivial accident and makes use of it for the swift & terrible conclusion, make the soul of the tragedy. A mechanical fatality... to start with, this fundamental divergence already noted between ordinary psychology & the psychology of Vedanta,—the former recognising only three principles, Mind, Life and Matter, or adding at most a fourth, Soul or Spirit, while the latter, with a deeper inlook, a wider outlook, a firmer foundation of daring experiment and probing analysis, distinguishes between various workings of the supra-mental... world; matter is its first term, matter is its last. Life-energy and mind-energy seem to exist as middle Page 525 terms; but though their existence and activity cannot be denied or ignored, so omnipresent, insistent & victorious is the original element out of which they have emerged that we are led to view them as terms of matter only; originated out of matter, formulated in matter, resolved ...
... atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures?... To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo____ Hinduism has always attached to [the organisation of the individual and collective life] a great importance; it has left out no part of life as a thing secular... possible the element of external compulsion in human life by awakening the inner divine compulsion of the Spirit within. 64 Page 135 July, 1918 The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation... "A Preface on National Education.") The living spirit of the demand for national education no more requires a return to the astronomy and mathematics of Bhaskara or the forms of the system of Nalanda than the living spirit of Swadeshi a return from railway and motor traction to the ancient chariot and the bullock-cart.... It is the spirit, the living and vital issue that we have to do with, and ...
... the man to the God & of Godhead this preference is the perennial well & fountain, evolution meaning simply the wider and wider revelation of Brahman, the universal spirit, the progress from the falsehood of matter to the truth of spirit;—and this progress, however slow, is inevitable. It is natural because I am not really preferring another to myself, but my true self to my false, God who is in all... ordainer, not in His capacity as the source from which all things flow. As the source, substratum & container of things He is the Trinity, Prajna-HiranyagarbhaVirat, in whom the Male & Female, Spirit & Matter, the Soul & its Shakti are still one & undivided. He is therefore best spoken of in the neuter. But when we see Him as the Ruler & Ordainer, the Manifested Brahman dealing with a world of phenomena... ocean of spiritual force, the mightier will be your creation & your destruction, you will approach nearer and nearer to Godhead. For the Spirit is all & not the body, of which you should only be careful as a vehicle of the Spirit, for without the presence of Spirit, which gives Prakriti the force to act, Prakriti would be inert, nay could not exist. For what is Prakriti itself but the creation of the ...
... Page 10 matter with spirit, individualism with collectivism, or any other isms that proliferate in this sorry system. But one does not get out by the decrees of any ism pushed to its perfection: deprived of its heaven, our earth is a poor whirling machine; deprived of its matter, our heaven is a pale nebula filled with the silent medusas of the disembodied spirit; deprived of the individual... obstacles, the great ray of the original Force that fashions matter by the truth of matter. All the nerves, tissues, cells that we have demechanized, purified, freed from their congestion of unconsciousness will become free channels for the supramental Force and will flood our body with the lights of the Spirit, with the Joy of the Spirit, with the immortal nectar – until the day this golden Influx... right in it. Ironically, this is the greatest service this dark, materialistic and scientific age may have rendered us: to compel such a plunge of the spirit into matter that it had either to lose itself in it or to be transformed with it. Absolute darkness is but the shadow of a greater Sun, which digs its abysses in order to raise up a more stable beauty, founded on the purified base of our earthly ...
... unwholesome spirit of competition. This is a thing which Page 243 might easily happen, but must not be allowed to happen. I have told him that I would write to you and ask you to see that there is no misunderstanding in the matter, before giving him sanction to take up the possibility. Afterwards it will be for you and him to see that things on both sides are managed in the right spirit. This... sometimes He does not, but I have to act—or refrain from action—all the same, according as He wills. I shall write nothing about sadhan etc. until I am out of my present struggle to make the Spirit prevail over matter & circumstances, in which for the present I have been getting badly the worst of it. Till then you must expect nothing but mere business letters,—if any. Kali [10] [March 1914]... secondary or incidental value, a something that has to be stuck on as a sentiment or a bit of colouring matter. Our whole principle is different and you have to insist on our principle in all that you say and do. Moreover, you have got a clear form for your work in association and that form as well as the spirit you must maintain; any loosening of it or compromise would mean confusion and an impairing of the ...
... that matter is something different from the Spirit is also not true. It is One thing. Even science now finds it so. It is the One Spirit. You can say : in Matter the condensation of consciousness takes place. At each stage of manifestation there is a different vibration giving rise to different elements. Man is not a pure mental consciousness. He is a product of evolution from Matter to Life... may continue it, it may be for some people an introduction to "Life Divine". But you may draw his attention to the following points. i . He states : "there can be no escape for the Spirit embodied in matter except through an integral yoga". If we accept that position then the goal set forth by the Adwaitwadins becomes impossible of realisation. What I say is not that it is impossible but that... expanding? Is it Matter ? You will say : No. Then Energy ? You say : yes. But the energy is expanding into what? You say space is bent: the question is : is matter bent or space ? Disciple : The amount of Matter in the universe is limited – it is finite. Matter has weight arid the weight of all matter is known. Sri Aurobindo : But what is matter ? Is it a wave or ...
... became flesh', that Spirit entered into matter and transformed it from within. This is why I have a particular interest in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, because they both believed that the matter of the universe was to be transformed and a new kind of existence inaugurated. It is my belief that in the Resurrection of Jesus the matter of his body was transformed by the Spirit; the actual cells were... through the descent of the Holy Spirit. At the same time by his development of the idea of evolution seeing the Spirit at work in matter and life and mental consciousness leading to supermental consciousness, he has given an insight which Christians need into the means by which the transformation of matter and the body is to take place. It is here that the place of Teilhard de Chardin in Catholicism... is specially active in the Jews' outlook on the Holy Spirit's part in human procreation. Brown has failed to notice that outlook. William Barclay 97 puts the matter very well: "The Jews believed that no child was ever born without the Spirit of God. Since a child is not born from every act of intercourse when a child is born, the Spirit of God, the Glory, has been present there. The Jewish ...
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