... regards man as a divine spiritual being involved in mind, life and body; it aims therefore at a liberation and a perfection of his divine nature. It seeks to make an inner living in the perfectly developed spiritual being his constant intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind, life and body only its outward human expression. In order that this spiritual being may not be something vague... for it and to get rid of all in him that belongs to a lower working, of all that stands in the way of his opening to the spiritual truth and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and turn all his natural movements into free means of its self-expression. It is by this turn that the self-conscious Yoga aware of its aim begins: there is a new awakening and an upward change... limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life, but takes account of the large supraterrestrial action behind the earthly material living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from whom the supreme origination of all ...
... and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this emergence will go, whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a subsequent question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of spirit as something else than mind and greater than mind, spirituality as something other than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as something distinct... Mundaka Upanishad. (III. 2. 6.) He strives by these means and has the knowledge: in him this spirit enters into its supreme status.... Satisfied in knowledge, having built up their spiritual being, the Wise, in union with the spiritual self, reach the Omnipresent everywhere and enter into the All. Mundaka Upanishad. (III. 2. 4, 5.) In the earliest stages of evolutionary Nature... this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer,—first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the process and method of the evolution of the spiritual out of the mental man. It would at first sight seem evident that as each gradation emerges not only out of its ...
... supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature. All spiritual life is in its principle a growth into divine living... rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to transcendence; on the other side there is... and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation, insists on a ...
... the fullness of the spiritual being. The constant self-creation which we call birth finds there the perfect evolution of all that it held in its own nature and reveals its own utmost significance. The complete soul possesses all its self and all Nature. Therefore all this evolution is a growing of the Self in material nature to the conscious possession of its own spiritual being. It begins with f... whole mounting creation a spiritual evolution. The word evolution carries with it in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root the necessity of a previous involution. We must, if a hidden spiritual being is the secret of all the action of Nature, give its full power to that latent value of the idea. We are bound then to suppose that all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise... life opening to mind, the evolution of mind opening to the soul of its own light and action, the evolution of soul out of the limited powers of mind to a resplendent blaze of the infinities of spiritual being are the more significant things, give us greater and subtler reaches of the self-disclosing. Secrecy The physical evolution is only an outward sign, the more and more complex and subtle development ...
... Life Divine, p. 561 In the superconscience beyond our present level of awareness are included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being. The first indispensable step in an upward evolution would be to elevate our force of consciousness into those higher parts of Mind from which we already receive, but without knowing the source... is at present possible in an absorbed superconscience; but that could lead only to an entry into the higher levels in a state of immobile or ecstatic trance. If the control of that highest spiritual being is to be brought into our waking life, there must be a conscious heightening and widening into immense ranges of new being, new consciousness, new potentialities of action, a taking up, — as... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into ...
... account, in a complete liberty without any determination other than its own choice and single unrelated movement. This idea ignores the fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic Nature and our spiritual being exists only by the supreme Transcendence. Our total being can rise out of subjection to fact of present Nature only by an identification with a greater Truth and a greater Nature. The will of the... potency of knowledge, that they Page 972 are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us... cosmic centre and circumference of the specialised action of the Infinite. These are the general first results and create the normal foundation of the overmind consciousness in the evolved spiritual being, but its varieties and developments are innumerable. Page 986 The consciousness that thus acts is experienced as a consciousness of Light and Truth, a power, force, action full of Light ...
... patience from one's own body. Katha Upanishad. (II. 1. 12, 13; II. 3. 17.) An intuition in the heart sees that truth. Rig Veda. (I. 24. 12.) I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge. Gita. (X. 11.) These rays are directed downwards, their foundation is above: may they... still further deviation and mixture. A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong application, a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual physical... the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of the mental creature is turning or has been already turned wholly into the consciousness of the spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations; uniting the manifested existence with what is above it, it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually evolving ...
... activity, a new stadium or spiral curve in the individual evolution of the embodied spirit. For when we say that the soul on earth evolves successively the physical, the vital, the mental, the spiritual being, we do not mean that it creates them and that they had no previous existence. On the contrary, what it does is to manifest these principles of its spiritual entity under the conditions imposed... existence. In fact we must accept the ancient idea that man has within him not only the physical soul or Purusha with its appropriate nature, but a vital, a mental, a psychic, a supramental, a supreme spiritual being; 1 and either the whole or the greater presence or force of them is concealed in his subliminal Page 834 or latent and unformulated in his superconscient parts. He has to bring forward... is born of the physical mind's inability to look beyond its own apparent self-formation in this single existence. In its conception, what returns in the reincarnation must be not only the same spiritual being, the same psychic entity, but the same formation of nature that inhabited the body of the last birth; the body Page 847 changes, the circumstances are different, but the form of the ...
... to give up the problem as insoluble, life and action as an illusion or an inferior movement of existence to be abandoned as soon as we can rise out of the snare of the world into the truth of spiritual being. That is the ascetic solution, if it can be called a solution; at any rate it is a decisive and effective way out of the enigma, a way to which ancient Indian thought of the highest and most meditative... action, attaining in the mind to some knowledge and harmony, but only with difficult effort and by a constant struggle with its own disabilities. And there is the higher nature and self of our spiritual being, self-possessed and self-luminous but in our ordinary mentality inaccessible to our experience. At times we get glimpses of this greater thing within us, but we are not consciously within it, we... convert the soul into a pure spiritual existence. That is what is called becoming Brahman, brahma-bhūya . It is to put off the lower mental, vital, physical existence and to put on the pure spiritual being. This can best be done by the intelligence and will, buddhi , our present topmost principle. It has to turn away from the things of the lower existence and first and foremost from its effective ...
... for their dominant principle. It is a partial, a limiting, a dividing and, very largely, a falsifying knowledge; out of that limitation and falsification we have to grow into the truth of our spiritual being. This preoccupation with life and matter is at the beginning right and necessary because the first step that man has to take is to know and possess this physical existence as well as he can... processes alone: to know, to use rightly we must go beyond the truth of physical phenomenon and process, we must know what is within and behind it. For we are not merely embodied minds; there is a spiritual being, a spiritual principle, a spiritual plane of Nature. Into that we have to heighten our force of consciousness, to widen by that still more largely, even universally and infinitely, our range of... the Spirit. Page 764 In the superconscience beyond our present level of awareness are included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being. The first indispensable step in an upward evolution would be to elevate our force of consciousness into those higher parts of Mind from which we already receive, but without knowing the source ...
... inner life against the intrusion and influence of the darker forces of the Ignorance: he is out of the world even when he is within it; if he acts upon it, it is from the fortress of his inner spiritual being where in the inmost sanctuary he is one with the Supreme Existence or the soul and God are alone together. The gnostic life will be an inner life in which the antinomy of the inner and the outer... also the very stuff and constituting nature of the action. To grow into this nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual truth and oneness, is the liberation attained by an evolution of the spiritual being: the gnostic evolution gives us the complete dynamism of that return to ourselves. Once that is done, the need of standards of virtue, dharmas, disappears; there is the law and self-order of the... the Infinite acting directly upon its own finites. This movement will not create a flux or chaos, but a liberated and harmonic Truth-expression; there would be a free self-determination of the spiritual being in a plastic entirely conscious nature. In the consciousness of the Infinite individuality does not break up nor circumscribe cosmicity, cosmicity does not contradict transcendence. The gnostic ...
... greater truth of all that is imperfectly figured now in mind, life and body. Arisen from the lower mental to this supreme spiritual nature, he is delivered there from all ego. He knows himself as a spiritual being, in his essence one with all existences and in his active nature a power of the one Godhead and an eternal soul of the transcendent Infinite. He sees all in God and God in all; he sees all things... into a great release, a wide freedom and a deep peace. Then you will be aware of God and immortal, possessed of your dateless self-existence, independent of mind and life and body, sure of your spiritual being, untouched by the reactions of Nature, unstained by passion and sin and pain and sorrow. Then you will depend for your joy and desire on no mortal or outward or worldly thing, but will possess... Power and Presence within you will free you from sin and evil and lift you far above human standards of virtue. For you will live and act in the absolute and spontaneous right and purity of the spiritual being and the immaculate force of the divine nature. The Divine and not you will enact his own will and works through you, not for your lower personal pleasure and desire, but for the world-purpose and ...
... participates in its action without being fully taken into confidence, — it is an evolution slowly becoming conscious of itself; the future must be a more and more conscious evolution of the spiritual being until it is Page 395 fully delivered into a self-aware action by the emergent gnostic principle. 12 An important dynamic in the evolution of spiritual consciousness... or to grow upwards and ascend to the higher planes above the mind. Only thus can a radical change be brought about in human consciousness, transforming the human being from a mental into a spiritual being. ...if we can live thus deeper within and put out steadily the inner forces into the outer instrumentation or raise ourselves to dwell on higher and wider levels and bring their powers... Page 398 ...what do we mean by the individual? What we usually call by that name is a natural ego... but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual ...
... a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the Divine”. “To follow the path of spiritual experience”, she said, “one must have within oneself a ‘spiritual being,’ 32 one must be ‘twice born’, as it is said. For if one does not have a spiritual being within which is at least at the point of becoming self-aware, one may try to imitate these [spiritual] experiences, but it will only be a crude imitation... × Words of the Mother , CWM 13, p. 112. × By “spiritual being” the Mother here means a soul, or divine spark, that in the course of its reincarnations has developed a mature “psychic being”. ...
... all Yoga is the liberation of the soul of man from its present natural ignorance and limitation, its release into spiritual being, its union with the highest self and Divinity. But ordinarily this is made not only the initial but the whole and final object: enjoyment of spiritual being there is, but either in a dissolution of the human and individual into the silence of self-being or on a higher plane... oneness with the Divine in all souls and all Nature and we give this extended view its entire practical consequence. The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight must always be the first object of the Yoga; its free enjoyment of the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; but out of that a third appears, the effectuation ...
... there is only the will and the executive power of the Purusha, his activity of being,—not a separate entity, but himself in Power. This supreme Prakriti is not merely a presence of the power of spiritual being immanent in cosmic activities. For then it might be only the inactive presence of the all-pervading Self, immanent in all things or containing them, compelling in a way the world action but not... to be nature of body, life, mind, reason, ego and the senses. But these are phenomenal derivatives, they are not the essential truth of our nature and our existence. The supreme nature of spiritual being gives us then both an original truth and power of existence beyond cosmos and a first basis of spiritual truth for the manifestation in the cosmos. But where is the link between this supreme nature... circumstances. Therefore the Gita throws in as the most general statement in the series, "Know me to be the eternal seed of all existences, O son of Pritha." This eternal seed is the power of spiritual being, the conscious will in the being, the seed which, as is said elsewhere, the Divine casts into the great Brahman, into the supramental vastness, Page 273 and from that all are born into ...
... deeper than the mind that offers and something greater than the Ishta-deva that receives the surrender. That which surrenders here is the Jiva, the essential soul, the original central and spiritual being of man, the individual Purusha. It is the Jiva delivered from the limiting and ignorant ego-sense who knows himself not as a separate personality but as an eternal portion and power and soul-becoming... Jiva released and uplifted by the passing away of ignorance and established in the light and freedom of his own true and supreme nature which is one with that of the Eternal. It is this central spiritual being in us who thus enters into a perfect and closely real relation of delight and union with the origin and continent and governing Self and Power of our existence. And he who receives our surrender... Prakriti, the original spiritual nature of the supreme Purusha that holds together the universe and appears in it as the Jiva. This Jiva then is a portion of the Purushottama's original divine spiritual being, a living power of the living Eternal. He is not merely a temporary form of lower Nature, but an eternal portion of the Highest in his supreme Prakriti, an eternal conscious ray of the divine existence ...
... cosmic centre and circumference of the specialised action of the Infinite. These are the general first results and create the normal foundation of the overmind consciousness in the evolved spiritual being, but its varieties and developments are innumerable. The consciousness that thus acts is experienced as a consciousness of Light and Truth, a power, force, action full of Light and Truth, an aesthesis... is used to include the planes beyond our pre-sent level of awareness, namely, those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind, and the other heights of the pure spiritual being. A basic sense and knowledge of unity is the general characteristic of all the grades of the Superconscience. They are not only states of consciousness but also grades of being and power. In the... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us ...
... sense of the word; they were man's first business, but not his chief business. The ancients regarded this life as an occasion for the development of the rational, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual being. Greece and Rome laid stress on the three first alone, Asia went farther, made these also subordinate and looked upon them as stepping-stones to a spiritual consummation. Greece and Rome were proudest... grow slowly in an external formulation till it is ready to break the crust between this petty outer figure of ourselves, which we think to be the whole, and the concealed self within us. Even the spiritual being seems to obey this law of fragmentation and manifest as a unit in the whole a spark of itself that evolves into an individual psyche. It is this little ego, this fragmented consciousness, this... under the pressure of inner and outer Nature till it can become one with all existence. It has to grow into self-knowledge and world-knowledge, to get within itself and discover that it is a spiritual being, to get outside of itself and discover its larger truth as the cosmic Individual, to get beyond itself and know and live in some supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss of existence. For this immense ...
... again, what is it that brings about this connection of a spiritual being and higher mental nature and a physical being and lower animal nature? what necessitates this taking up of the lower life by the spirit which here becomes man? It would seem surely that there must have been some previous connection; the possessing mental or spiritual being must all the time have been preparing this lower life it... which we call death. But this limiting idea can only stand if we credit a creative biological evolution and its instrument of physical heredity with the whole causation of all our mental and spiritual being; but in that case we have no real soul or spirit, our soul personality or spiritual becoming is a fruit of our life and body. Now the question of rebirth turns almost entirely upon the one fundamental... then some kind of soul birth becomes a logical necessity. Now it is just here that the claims of physical and vital evolution and heredity seem to fail,—as a cause of our whole mental and spiritual being. Certainly it has been shown that our body and the most physical part of our life action are very largely the results of heredity, but not in such a way as to exclude an Page 289 assisting ...
... and the two which are apparent opposites prove to be only confronting faces of the third which is the highest. "There is the immutable and impersonal spiritual being (Purusha)," says Krishna later on, "and there is the mutable and personal spiritual being. But there is too another Highest ( uttama puruṣa ) called the supreme self, Paramatman, he who has entered into this whole world and upbears... brought out and we begin to see more fully the Gita's purpose. We have now set before us three interdependent movements of our release out of the normal nature and our growth into the divine and spiritual being. "By the delusion of the dualities which arises from wish and disliking, all existences in the creation are led into bewilderment," says the Gita. That is the ignorance, the egoism which fails ...
... all points and regions would be contained in a single survey. There would be an eternal present infinitely stretched out, an infinite expanse eternally indivisible—and both would be a fact of Spiritual Being. Again, inasmuch as the Consciousness of Supermind is a cosmic vision which is all-comprehensive, all-pervading, all-inhabiting and upholds by its immutable unity the variation of its self-deployment... self-deployment it exceeds the successions of time and the divisions of space: it is in that respect timeless and spaceless. Yet this is not a pure unitarian Consciousness, in which Spiritual Being does not cast itself out into any kind of self-extension and, if it contains cosmos at all, contains it in potentiality, not in actuality—in an implicit rather than an explicit form. The sheer timelessness and ... this space-ether in mind, makes room there for even our Swan by name: "The Swan that settles in the purity...born of the Truth—itself the Truth, the Vast." The Page 297 ever-free Spiritual Being, the unsullied Soul, the inmost Perfection which is the source and the goal of all phenomenal existence is, of course, what Sri Aurobindo, following ancient Indian symbolism, calls "Swan"—and it ...
... body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there Page 135 is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual... constitute it. The Life Divine, pp. 465-66 This individual being of ours is that by which ignorance is possible to self-conscious mind, but it is also that by which liberation into the spiritual being is possible and the enjoyment of divine immortality. It is not the Eternal in His transcendence or in His cosmic being who arrives at this immortality; it is the individual who rises into s... being that this trance or this liberated play is realised; the trance is this mental being's immersion in the sole experience of unity, the liberated play is the taking up of his mind into the spiritual being for the free realisation and delight of oneness. For the nature of the divine existence is to possess always its unity, but to possess it also in an infinite experience, from many standpoints ...
... greater truth of all that is imperfectly figured now in mind, life and body. Arisen from the lower mental to this supreme spiritual nature, he is delivered there from all ego. He knows himself as a spiritual being, in his essence one with all existences and in his active nature a power of the one Godhead and an eternal soul of the transcendent Infinite. He sees all in God and God in all; he sees all things... into a great release, a wide freedom and a deep peace. Then you will be aware of God and immortal, possessed of your dateless self-existence, independent of mind and life and body, sure of your spiritual being, untouched by the reactions of Nature, unstained by passion and sin and pain and sorrow. Then you will depend for your joy and desire on no mortal or outward or worldly thing, but will possess... Power and Presence within you will free you from sin and evil and lift you far above human standards of virtue. For you will live and act in the absolute and spontaneous right and purity of the spiritual being and the immaculate force of the divine Page 100 nature. The Divine and not you will enact his own will and works through you, not for your lower personal pleasure and desire, but ...
... whole general character of the application of Indian ideals to life became throughout of this one texture, the constant, subtly graded, subtly harmonised preparation of the soul of man for its spiritual being. First, the regulated satisfaction of the primary natural being of man subjected to the law of the Dharma and the ethical idea and besieged at every moment by the suggestions of religion, a religion... beyond themselves to their own heights of spiritual direction and potentiality. Finally, each of these growing powers in man was made on its own line of approach a gateway into his divine and spiritual being. Thus we may observe that there was created a Yoga of knowledge for the self-exceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a Yoga of works for the self-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical ...
... us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self evident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable; for that spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not other than this Supreme Existence. But although thus indeterminable to Mind, because of its absoluteness and ...
... our wheel of nature. The necessity of centralisation around the ego continues until there is no longer need of any such device or contrivance because there has emerged the true self, the spiritual being, which is at once wheel and motion and that which holds all together, the centre and the circumference. 43 Liberation from Ego As our consciousness changes into the height... [individuality] is a natural ego, a device of Nature which holds together her action in the mind and body...; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual which ...
... is helpful in separating oneself to some extent from body, feelings and thoughts, and thereby partially freeing oneself to a small extent from their sway or domination. But as long as the true spiritual being remains veiled by body, feelings and mind, one is inevitably more or less identified with the physical, emotional and mental parts of the surface being. Therefore the partial disidentification... a spiritual practice, disidentification involves not merely the negative process of distinguishing body, feelings and mind as the not-self, but rather, a positive identification with the true spiritual being. Such an identification can be achieved, not by mere mental exercise, but by an all-absorbing concentration and an all-consuming aspiration for transcendence of the mind and dissolution of the ...
... action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual... thence into the perfect consciousness which is beyond the mental, into the Supramental Consciousness and the Supramental Being, the Truth-Consciousness which is the integral consciousness of the spiritual being. Mind cannot be our last conscious expression because mind is fundamentally an ignorance seeking for knowledge; it is only the supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and ...
... far as it affects the theory of evolution and rebirth in material Nature. The descent of the Soul into the Ignorance can be thought of as an abrupt precipitation or immediate lapse of a pure spiritual being out of the superconscient spiritual Reality into the first inconscience and the subsequent evolving phenomenal life of material Nature. If that were so, there might be the Absolute above and the... s, it is not bound to involve itself in the nescience of Matter before it can at all manifest. It is possible for it to create just the contrary order of things, a world in which the unity of spiritual being is the matrix and first condition of any formation or action, the Energy at work is a self-aware spiritual existence in movement, and all its names and forms are a self-conscious play of the spiritual ...
... and participates in its action without being fully taken into confidence,—it is an evolution slowly becoming conscious of itself; the future must be a more and more conscious evolution of the spiritual being until it is fully delivered into a self-aware action by the emergent gnostic principle. The first foundation in this emergence, the creation of forms of Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate... below or aspired above him; she has pointed man to a yet higher and more difficult Page 749 level, inspired him with the ideal of a spiritual living, begun the evolution in him of a spiritual being. The spiritual man is her supreme supernormal effort of human creation; for, having evolved the mental creator, thinker, sage, prophet of an ideal, the self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonised ...
... of that Delight: this is the root principle of our existence. But our surface formulation of these things is not that, it is a mistranslation into the terms of the Ignorance. Our I is not that spiritual being which can look on the Divine Page 712 Existence and say, "That am I"; our mentality is not that spiritual consciousness; our will is not that force of consciousness; our pain and pleasure... instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance ...
... not the material cause of the universe: our nature—as opposed to our self—is not made of its spiritual substance; it is constructed out of the unreal reality of Maya. But, on the contrary, our spiritual being is of that substance, is indeed the Brahman; Brahman is above Maya, but he is also the percipient of his creations both from above and from within Maya. This dual consciousness offers itself as... being's totality; they are accepted and self-imposed, not imposed from outside, they are a means of expression of our totality in the movement of Time, an order of things imposed by our inner spiritual being on our outer nature-being, not a bondage inflicted on the ever-free spirit. There is therefore no reason to conclude from the limitations of perception and action that the movement is unreal or ...
... a higher spiritual plane and then lowers it back into the inferior levels. These alternations must be regarded as the natural vicissitudes of a process of transformation from the normal to the spiritual being. The transformation, the perfection cannot for the integral Yoga be complete until the link between the mental and the spiritual action is formed and a higher knowledge applied to all the activities... witness and observe and know himself and the workings of Nature in the lower, the normal being; but this must be combined, for perfection, with a will to raise the purified nature into the higher spiritual being. When that is done, the Purusha is no longer only a witness, but also the master of his prakriti, īśvara . At first it it may not be apparent how this ideal of active self-mastery can be reconciled ...
... doctrine is identical with the later doctrine of Ramanuja. Still this much is clear that there is an eternal, a real and not only an illusive Page 445 principle of multiplicity in the spiritual being of the one divine Existence. This eternal individual is not other than or in any way really separate from the Divine Purusha. It is the Lord himself, the Ishwara who by virtue of the eternal... by the eye of knowledge. Never can they have sight of him, even if they strive to do so, until they learn to put away the limitations of the outward consciousness and build in themselves their spiritual being, create for it, as it were, a form in their nature. Man, to know himself, must be kṛtātmā , formed and complete in the spiritual mould, enlightened in the spiritual vision. The Yogins who have ...
... prayers and bribes of man or presented with an immutable Sphinx face of stone,—but names only in fact for his own ignorance. And especially when we come to the pressing needs of our moral and spiritual being, no theory of chance or probability will serve at all. Here Science, physical in her basis, does not help except to point out to a certain degree the effects of my physicality on my moral being... of the lowest psycho-physical being. But here I need guidance more than anywhere else and must have the recognition of a law, the high line of a guiding order. To know the law of my moral and spiritual being is at first and last more imperative for me than to learn the ways of steam and electricity, for without these outward advantages I can grow in my inner manhood, but not without some notion of ...
... emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this emergence will go, whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, Page 331 is a subsequent question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of Spirit as something else than Mind and greater than Mind, spirituality as something other than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as ...
... is, then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our surface mental personality. " The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 855 Sweet Mother, is there a spiritual being in everybody? That depends on what we call "being". If for "being" we substitute "presence", yes, there is a spiritual ...
... And finally, Sri Aurobindo has told us somewhere in The Life Divine that to follow the path of spiritual experience, one must have within oneself a "spiritual being", one must be "twice born" as it is said, for if one doesn't have a spiritual being within, Page 344 which is at least on the point of becoming self-aware, one may try to imitate these experiences but it will only be crude ...
... have been some and there still are. This is what men usually take for the spiritual life. When they meet a man of this type, they say, "Oh! He is a great spiritual being." He may be a great saint, he may be a great sage but he is not a spiritual being. And yet it is already very good and very difficult to realise this. And there comes a time in the inner evolution when it is very necessary to try ...
... meeting with the object of discussing a possibility to start a University of the Spirit - a small university - a sort of Santiniketan - where the teaching will be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being and not in the materialist humanism that has brought so low our present universities and schools and media and journalism, and indeed the arts themselves which for the most part only reflect the... present-day notion of a great unfoldment of knowledge but also beyond the finest New- Page 202 manian 'idea of a University". If teaching is to be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being, then what could be more apt than a course of certain writings of Sri Aurobindo which hold this view and apply it to several fields of man's activity with a vast and penetrating knowledge and with ...
... soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment bf the true personality. There is, of course, a spiritual path that turns the soul away from its instruments and demands that it should ...
... collectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the common aims and total interest of the organised Page 118 society, and much less or not at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power of existence. Again, under the same circumstances, the modern State erects its godhead and demands his obedience, subjugation, and self-immolation. The individual is... arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life of unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth ...
... us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable; for that spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not other than this Supreme Existence. 8 Sri Aurobindo's philosophy has been rightly described as a ...
... with the Divine in all souls and all nature with all its practical consequences. As Sri Aurobindo explains: "The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight must always be the first object of the Yoga; its free enjoyment of the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; but out of that a third appears, the effectuation... Upanishad; it is Purushotamma of the Gita; it is the Supreme Lord of the Shakti of the Tantra. It is unknowable to our mental consciousness but self-evident to knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us is capable. It is That which is known to us when it is manifest Page 63 to us as Sachchidananda, an Eternal and the Infinite and Absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight ...
... supramental transformation from their limitations and rendered into their supernal equivalence of the Divine Page 84 supramental nature. As Sri Aurobindo points out: "Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of... being on the supramental Gnostic basis. And this integrality of perfection would mark the status of the siddha or perfected soul who will live in union with the Purushottama in the fullness of spiritual being, consciousness and bliss of Sachchidananda or eternal Brahman. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "The Siddha or perfected soul will live in union with the Purushottama in this Brahmic consciousness ...
... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us... "The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enables her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe." 56 It is then by the descent of the supramental consciousness that the third and final ...
... souls and all-Nature with all its practical consequences. Page 6 As Sri Aurobindo points out: "The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight must always be the first object of the yoga; its free enjoyment of the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; but out of that a third appears, the effectuation... involves, first, psychic transformation, secondly, spiritual transformation, and thirdly, supramental transformation. This entire process is based on the discovery of the psychic being, of the spiritual being in its multisidedness and integrality, and of the supramental consciousness and power in its plenitude. The discoveries made by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in regard to these three realms of psychic ...
... ' is used to include the planes beyond our present level of awareness, namely, those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind, and the other heights of the pure spiritual being. A basic sense and knowledge of unity is the general characteristic of all the grades of the Superconscience. They are not only states of consciousness but also grades of being and power. In the... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us ...
... towards the Godhead. 27 The snapped link with the divine source will then be restored, the obscuring veil torn asunder, the hiatus finally closed: ...the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible... it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic... ... The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe. 54 The so-called ascending and descending movements are really the two ends of a ...
... powers of a soul that manifests through them and grows with their growth, and yet they are not all the soul, because at the summit of its ascent it arises to something greater than them all, into a spiritual being, and it is in this that she has found the supreme manifestation of the soul of man and his ultimate divine manhood, his paramārtha and highest puruṣārtha . And similarly India has not understood... and its dharma and raise both into powers of the life and ascending mind and soul of humanity. And at no time will it lose sight of man's highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being. Page 427 ...
... XVII Deva and Asura The practical difficulty of the change from the ignorant and shackled normal nature of man to the dynamic freedom of a divine and spiritual being will be apparent if we ask ourselves, more narrowly, how the transition can be effected from the fettered embarrassed functioning of the three qualities to the infinite action of the liberated... the ministers of our restless and ill-balanced kinetic desire or our self-indulgent indolence and static inertia, can only be, one would imagine, a temporary characteristic of our undeveloped spiritual being, a rawness of its imperfect evolution and must disappear when our consciousness rises in the spiritual scale. But we actually see that men, at least men above a certain level, fall very largely ...
... can be only a more or less clear twilight. Its pleasure can only be a passing intensity or a qualified ease. Other is the infinite spiritual knowledge and the free self-existent delight of our spiritual being. But then there is the question, how does our infinite and imperishable spirit, even involved in Nature, come thus to confine itself to the lower action of Prakriti and undergo this bondage... Page 434 × Mark that nowhere in the Gita is there any indication that dissolution of the individual spiritual being into the unmanifest, indefinable or absolute Brahman, avyaktam anirdeśyam , is the true meaning or condition of immortality or the true aim of Yoga. On the contrary it describes immortality later ...
... a member of the collectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the common aims and total interest of the organized society, and much less or not at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power of existence. This tendency has not yet reached its acme everywhere, but everywhere it is rapidly increasing and heading towards dominance. ... arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. Page 23 ...
... powers of a soul that manifests through them and grows with their growth, and yet they are not all the soul, because at the summit of its ascent it arises to something greater than them all, into a spiritual being, and it is in this that she has found the supreme manifestation of the soul of man and tus ultimate divine manhood, his paramartha and highest purusarrha. And similarly India has not understood... and its Dharma and raise both into powers of the life and ascending mind and soul of humanity. And at no time will it lose sight of man's highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being. Page 16 ...
... her action in the mind and body. This ego has to be extinguished, otherwise there is no complete liberation possible; but the individual self or soul is not this ego. The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal portion of the Divine but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation as the Many. This is the true spiritual individual... thence into the perfect consciousness which is beyond the mental, into the Supramental consciousness and the Supramental being, the Truth-Consciousness which is the integral consciousness of the spiritual being. Mind cannot be our last conscious expression because mind is fundamentally Page 396 an ignorance seeking for knowledge; it is only the Supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring ...
... the law of the workings of the breath and the elemental forces within him, the relation of the various parts of his psychical anatomy to each other, and the law of his thought and action as a spiritual being having one side of itself turned to phenomena and this transient life in society and the world, the other to the single and eternal verity of things. Speculating and experimenting on these psychical... social and individual life which, while satisfying the legitimate demands of his body and his vital impulses, will admit of the extreme and unhampered perfection of his intellectual, moral and spiritual being. He must discover and practise some method of maintaining the harmony and soundness of the vital and bodily instruments and processes without for a moment allowing the care for them to restrict ...
... complete renouncement of desire for the fruits as the motive of action, a complete annulment of desire itself, the complete achievement of a perfect equality are put forward as the normal status of a spiritual being. A perfect spiritual equality is the one true and infallible sign of the cessation of desire,—to be equal-souled to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success... within of Life outwardly unchanged cannot be the law or the aim of the Yoga. All life must be taken up but all life must be transformed; all must become a part, a form, an adequate expression of a spiritual being in the supramental nature. This is the height and crowning movement of a spiritual evolution in the material world, and as the change from the vital animal to mental man made life another thing ...
... overcoming the obstacle of the body, casting away the obscure vital, getting rid of the ignorant mentality, the necessity to attain first and foremost, by a rejection of all these impediments to spiritual being, to a spiritual status. The other, the dynamic side of the spiritual urge has not been absent,—the aspiration to a spiritual mastery and mutation of Nature, to a spiritual perfection of the being... God not only within us but outside, in a collective human life. However obscure may have been some of the forms taken by this aspiration, the indication they contain of the urge of the occult spiritual being within to emergence in earth-nature is unmistakable. If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that ...
... arises from the fact that the buddhi is only a pratiṣṭhā or chief support of the ego-sense in its manifold play, ahaṅkāra ; but in its source it is a degradation or deformation of a truth of our spiritual being. The truth of being is that there is Page 677 a transcendent existence, supreme self or spirit, a timeless soul of existence, an eternal, a Divine, or even we may speak of it in relation... the time the spiritual and universal Ananda is within, in the self, in the spirit, in its secret unity with God and existence. To cast away the chain of ego and go back to free self, immortal spiritual being is the soul's return to its own eternal divinity. The will to the imperfect separative being, that wrong Tapas which makes the soul in Nature attempt to individualise itself, to individualise ...
... its action upon the Unity from which it proceeds and takes up everything into that Unity. Personality and impersonality, the two eternal aspects of existence, are made one by its action in the spiritual being and Nature body of the Purushottama. Page 694 The gnostic perfection, spiritual in its nature, is to be accomplished here in the body and takes life in the physical world as one of... universe in the highest terms of the union of the universal Purusha and Prakriti. All the gnostic evolution opens up into the divine principle of Ananda, which is the foundation of the fullness of spiritual being, consciousness and bliss of Sachchidananda or eternal Brahman. Possessed at first by reflection in the mental experience, it will be possessed afterwards with a greater fullness and directness ...
... inner awareness of something which he more essentially is, something as high above mind as mind is above the physical life and body. This inner awareness is his intuition of his supramental and spiritual being. The mental Purusha can at any time involve himself again in the superficial action from which he has drawn back, live for a while entirely identified with the mechanism of mind, life and body... his mental consciousness, but then he is only a mould, channel or instrument, not a possessor or participant in the power. He can arrive at identity by an absorption of his mentality in inner spiritual being, but then the conscious action ceases in a trance of identity. To be active master Page 637 of the nature he must evidently rise to some higher supramental poise where there is possible ...
... exist as human beings even in this material world. This individual being of ours is that by which ignorance is possible to self-conscious mind, but it is also that by which liberation into the spiritual being is possible and the enjoyment of divine immortality. It is not the Eternal in His transcendence or in His cosmic being who arrives at this immortality; it is the individual who rises into self... being that this trance or this liberated play is realised; the trance is this mental being's immersion in the sole experience of unity, the liberated play is the taking up of his mind into the spiritual being for the free realisation and delight of oneness. For the nature of the divine existence is to possess always its unity, but to possess it also in Page 438 an infinite experience, from ...
... his being? Not the Spirit, for the Spirit contains the universe, creates and combines all relations. All personalities act in the one spirit, as our own multiple personalities act in one being. Spiritual being is their continent, they are not its constituents, but its outer results and the diverse representative selves of its consciousness and action. Not, either, the supramental being. For the s... being. This we will call the supermind. This supermind lives and acts natively in a domain of experience of which the mind becomes aware by a reflective experience 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 ...
... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us... character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us ...
... this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable..." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 322) "Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass... ascending climb a series of hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of pure spiritual being. These planes are in the ascending order: (i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, the plane ...
... form-evolution - that is the real significance of the whole affair; for all this evolution is in its essential truth a growing of the Self in material Nature to the conscious possession of its spiritual being. But evolution carries with it, in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root, the necessity of a previous involution. For the spiritual process of evolution is a self-creation, not... the phenomenon of a thinking life and body: so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body.... Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what ...
... willed arrangements, so that we can generate electricity or steam at will and in the measure of requirements, even so Yoga observes and deals scientifically with the ranges of the psychical and spiritual being, and it arrives at the discovery and utilization of greater secrets of physical, psycho-physical and other higher realities. viii As in all true science, the object is an assured method of personal... admit that every individual soul is immortal and that through a protracted series of births in the terrestrial plane, every soul is required in due course of its evolution to develop ethical and spiritual being as a means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of life in this world of Matter. Finally, in all these theories, the role of the individual and the way in which the individual can ...
... divine in all souls and in all-Nature with all its practical consequences. As Sri Aurobindo points out: "The human soul's individual liberation and enjoyment of union with the Divine in spiritual being, consciousness and delight must always be the first object of the Yoga; its free enjoyment of the cosmic unity of the Divine becomes a second object; but out of that a third appears, the effectuation... its action upon the Unity from which it proceeds and takes up everything into that Unity. Personality and impersonality, the two eternal aspects of existence, are made one by its action in the spiritual being and Nature body of the Purushottama." 64 Gnostic Perfection and Divinizing the law of the Body The fourth element of perfection relates to the supramental Page 74 or ...
... of planes and powers of consciousness — an intervening spiritual mind-range — serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind and 'the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being.' It is in these 'radiant altitudes' of the Spirit that "we find the secret we are seeking, the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental transformation; for... 1 Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI, p. 549. (Italics Ours). 2 The Life Divine, p. 277. Page 130 domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status.... Each stage of this ascent is a general, if not a ...
... conscious manifestation in Nature of the universal self and spirit; at the summit of his ascent man is bound to rise to something greater than his physical, vital and mental personalities, to his spiritual being. And therein lies the supreme manifestation of the soul of man, his ultimate divine manhood, his real paramārtha and the highest puruṣārtha. Sri Aurobindo sees in the nation or the people... fellow-men and with the ordering of his individual and social life. The aim of education should be to help every individual child to develop his own intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, moral, spiritual being and his communal life and impulses out of his own temperament and capacities. Thus the distinctive individual psychology of the child should be the guide in the matter of his upbringing and education ...
... soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment of the true personality. There is, of course, a spiritual path that turns the soul away from its instruments and demands that it should ...
... of a soul that manifests through them and grows with their growth, and yet they are not all the soul, because at the summit of its ascent it arises to something greater than them all, into a spiritual being, and it is in this that she has found the supreme manifestation of the soul of man and his ultimate divine manhood, his paramārtha and highest purusārtha . And similarly India has not ... its Dharma and raise both into powers of the life and ascending mind and soul of humanity. And at no time will it lose sight of man's highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being.5 In accordance with this view, the great purpose of education is to help the soul to come forward, to assert its mastery over its instruments, gain experience and grow, and eventually manifest ...
... psychic being is what is "behind" the mental and the vital and the physical being, but not "above". Disciple : What is the difference between the psychic and spiritual being ? Sri Aurobindo : You can't speak of the spiritual being except, of course, the being of Sat-Chit-Ananda which is not individual. These three principles are above the Mind and then the mental, the vital and the physical ...
... kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other than the empirical ego that man normally is-"not this that one worships" as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete ...
... powers of a soul that manifests through them and grows with their growth, and yet they are not all the soul, because at the summit of its ascent it arises to something greater than them all, into a spiritual being, and it is in this that she has found the supreme manifestation of the soul of man and his ultimate divine manhood, his paramartha and highest purushartha. And similarly India has not understood... and its dharma and raise both into powers of the life and ascending mind and soul of humanity. And at no time will it lose sight of man's highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being. Page 47 ...
... ASHWAPATHY'S YOGA Ashwapathy's Yoga starts by the release of his soul from the bondage and limitations of the body, life and mind, the apparent being of man. He feels within him a spiritual being, and also experiences new faculties and states of consciousness beyond mind as a result of his upward effort. He ascends from his mere human status, expands out of his ego-personality, grows... Sri Aurobindo warns against the error— "They are not merely methods, way of knowing, or faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the Spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status."— Life Divine. "In the descent of these higher grades ...
... resurgence of the dark or violent life-forces which are always there subdued or subordinated or somnolent in the make-up of civilised man—and the first promptings of the deeper and higher psychic and spiritual being which it is his ultimate destiny to become. Page 328 Persons of the Drama PALLAS ATHENE. POSEIDON. PERSEUS - son of Zeus and Danaë. CEPHEUS - King of Syria. IOLAUS - ...
... also cannot conceive of it as anything else, an infinite Self, an eternal Spirit. Moreover in our most secret essence we are convinced of perfection or of perfectibility—perfection in our deepest spiritual being, perfectibility in our nature; we have the instinct and intuition of the Divine. Even to Time and Space our mind cannot fix or conceive a beginning or an end; it cannot conceive a first bound ...
... like Nature at its summit, seeks to break this mould of ego, this mould of mentalised life body and materialised mind, in order to achieve ideal action, ideal truth and infinite freedom in our spiritual being. To effect so enormous an end great and dangerous processes have to be used. Those who have been eager on this road or have opened up new paths towards the goal, have had to affront as a possibility ...
... ignorance, they pass through it by following the divine Force which is born to their activities. कुपयं is of doubtful significance. The father is the Purusha or else Heaven in the sense of the higher spiritual being.) 4) For the thinker becoming man his swift-hastening impulsions dark & bright desire freedom; unequal, active, rapid-quivering, they are yoked to their works, swift steeds and driven forward ...
... action or in inaction, in withdrawal from life or possession & mastery of life, by this outer consciousness which we call our waking self as it is eternally possessed in our wide & true effulgent spiritual being which lives concealed behind the clouded or twilit shiftings of our mental nature and our bodily existence. Page 505 × ...
... in heart guided by reason is a transition, not his final nature; in mentality he is tied to desire, in body to limitation and in both to suffering, but when he evolves from the mental into the spiritual being, he will be free from grief because, living in infinite Spirit, he will have done with desire and limitation. In the true Vedantic view of things we must express it otherwise. Man is Anandamaya ...
... either be a high unattainable ideal or the detached remote passion of a few exceptional spirits. Or even it would discourage the springs of our natural life by the too great contrast between this spiritual being and our own poor imperfect nature. Something of the kind has happened in later times; the current Western impression about the exaggerated asceticism and otherworldliness of Indian religion and ...
... whether the building of thought, experience, world of perceptions of the mental Person, the mind Purusha, is truly a self-expression, a self-determination proceeding from some truth of his own spiritual being, a manifestation of that truth's dynamic possibilities, or whether it is not rather a creation or construction presented to him by Nature, by Prakriti, and only in the sense of being individualised ...
... this man alone in our night knowing why he acts as he does, or if his loss is not at an end. Assailed by interdictions from all forms of spirituality which have existed or still exist, his spiritual being revolts and trembles. But what causes him to gasp also obliges him to descend farther, always lower, and to tear away by shreds his ancient cloak of virtue—and at the same time it supports and ...
... vital and mental modes dominating its usual physico-chemical ones. Lecomte du Nouy calls himself a "telefinalist", meaning that the ultimate aim of evolution - namely, man striving to be a perfect spiritual being - has been fixed by God and certain crucial transitions depend on Him but what he works upon is a movement of matter whose details develop by purely natural means and are ruled by "chance". He ...
... ascending climb a series of hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of pure spiritual being. These planes are in their ascending order: (i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, this last ...
... possibilities gives prominence to each. (f) Doubt may be due to the physical mind having positive side. We have to see, what is the source of faith. There is no absolute rule or law. 2) Spiritual being is Sachchidananda, which can be realised on the mental plane. One need not go to the Supermind at all. 3) First the whole physical being must be opened up; the Supermind must come and change ...
... ion of the earth-nature into the divine nature. K. D. Sethna in his book says: "Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Over and above opening up such movements, Sri Aurobindo stands as a creator of new Vedic and Upanishadic ...
... possibilities gives prominence to each. (f) Doubt may be due to the physical mind having positive side. We have to see, what is the source of faith. There is no absolute rule of law. 2) Spiritual being is Sachchidananda, which can be realised on the mental plane. One need not go to the Supermind at all. 3) First the whole physical being must be opened up; the Supermind must come and change ...
... conceive of it while in this universe. This Nothing is merely a something beyond positive conception. Atman — the Self; the Spirit; the original and essential nature of our existence; the spiritual being above the mind. In its nature the Atman is transcendent or universal (Paramatma, Atma); when it individualises and becomes a central being, it is then the Jivatman. Avidya — ignorance; ...
... evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being. In Yoga we have to travel beyond the physical nature and the superficial man and to discover the workings of the whole nature of the real man. In other words we must arrive at and use a psy ...
... further deviation and mixture. A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong application, a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual physical ...
... clairvoyants, mediums and others this is often, and indeed usually, a specialised faculty limited though often precise and accurate in action, and implies no development of the inner soul or the spiritual being or the higher intelligence. It is a door opened by chance or by an innate gift or by some kind of pressure between the waking and the subliminal mind and admitting only to the surface or the ...
... struggling to evolve." 35 "In the superconscience beyond our present level of awareness are included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being." 36 Among the higher planes of mental being, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various distinct levels which he terms Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, culminating in what ...
... “The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being, for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also there are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of experience and expression: the centralization ...
... what precedes and follows the absent words or lines so as to kindle or conjure up the connection between them; or I gather myself into a deep silence and cast a hook, as it were, into the inner spiritual being and wait for the necessary words or lines to get caught and give a pull which immediately enlightens my consciousness with their essential form and substance. * I believe that ...
... picked out the attempt to cast off the more externalised forms of poetic expression and to seek for a pure and authentic intuitive language, to bring forth the living truths of the inmost spiritual being, to reveal its light and vision, not in the inadequate speech of the surface mind but in the inspired and revelatory accent of Spirit itself. This attempt has not always been successful. ...
... hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry. Three tiers ...
... cosmic experience due to a division and-a diminution of consciousness in the manifestation but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being." However, Sri Aurobindo 6 is careful to note in consonance with the ancient Vedanta: "...it is not, as some religions 3.On Yoga Il, Tome One, p. 44 4.Ibid., p. 280 ...
... occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these Page 193 ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry." I do ...
... conscious being fortuitously engendered as part of an inconscient creation. In these views, whether we suppose the one Eternal Existence to be a vital Becoming or an immutable and unmodifiable spiritual Being or a nameless and formless Non-being, that which we call the soul can be only a changing mass or stream of phenomena of consciousness which has come into existence in the sea of real or illusory ...
... her three steps of ascent. And we have consequently as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to ...
... higher world or some supreme Absolute. The old Yogas (not quite all of them) tended the other way—but that was, I think, because they found the earth as it is a rather impossible place for any spiritual being and the resistance to change too obstinate to be borne; earth-nature looked to them in Vivekananda's simile like the dog's tail which every time you straighten it goes back to its original curl ...
... sometimes called the void centre, śūnya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being. There is one centre below the navel (lower vital), another at the navel (central vital), another in the chest (emotional vital, heart centre), another in the throat (physical mind), another ...
... clairvoyants, mediums and others this is often, and indeed usually, a specialised faculty limited though often precise and accurate in action, and implies no development of the inner soul or the spiritual being or the higher intelligence. It is a door opened by chance or by an innate gift or by some kind of pressure between the waking and the subliminal mind and admitting only to the surface or the outskirts ...
... the infinite above with some limited or veiled or lower and deformed manifestations in the individual being and nature, but largely and totally in the individual as a conscious and self-knowing spiritual being and a living and acting power of the infinite and universal spirit. The character of this action, so far as it can be expressed, may be spoken of more fitly afterwards when we come to speak of ...
... guidance of the inner spirit, the Antaryamin. It will not limit itself by the passive way, for that would lead only to some individual quietistic salvation or negation of an active and universal spiritual being which would be inconsistent with the totality of its aim. It will use the method of endurance, but not stop short with a detached strength and serenity, but move rather to a positive strength and ...
... indeterminate Being or Non-Being from which all thought and life fall away into cessation. The buddhi casts itself into a luminous sleep and the soul passes away into some ineffable height of spiritual being. Therefore in dealing with the buddhi, we must either take Page 672 one of these choices or else try the rarer adventure of lifting the soul from the mental being into the spiritual ...
... object of our enjoying and things only as form and symbol of the spirit, waves of the ocean of Ananda. But this Ananda can only come at all when we can get at and reflect in our members the hidden spiritual being, and its fullness can only be had when we climb to the supramental ranges. Meanwhile there is a just and permissible, a quite legitimate human enjoyment of these things, which is, to speak in the ...
... nature. The necessity of centralisation around the ego continues until there is no longer need of any such device or contrivance because there Page 574 has emerged the true self, the spiritual being, which is at once wheel and motion and that which holds all together, the centre and the circumference. But the moment we study ourselves, we find that the self experience which we thus co-ordinate ...
... bliss-sheath, through the causal or spiritual body, and less directly through the mental body, nor are their secret powers absent from the workings of the vital and material existence. Our conscious spiritual being and our intuitive mind awaken in us as a result of the pressure of these highest worlds on the mental being in life and body. But this causal body is, as we may say, little developed in the majority ...
... "his getting and his having of good, yogakṣemaṁ vahāmyaham ." The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his ...
... gives him a rule of mortal life by which he shall prepare himself for immortality. He is a soul and not a body and his earthly life is a means by which he determines the future conditions of his spiritual being. So much is common to all religions; beyond this we get from them no assured certainty. Their voices vary; some tell us that one life on earth is all we have in which to determine our future existence ...
... what would otherwise seem inert and inanimate existence or the mere blind play of mechanical forces; Hiranyagarbha, the Lord of Dream-Life who takes from this ocean of subconsciously intelligent spiritual being those conscious psychic forces which Page 176 He materializes or encases in various forms of gross living matter; and Virat, Lord of Waking-Life, who governs, preserves and maintains ...
... purified and illumined nature and no Page 333 longer belong to the limited personal ego. The finite nature thus surrendered becomes a free channel of the Infinite; the soul in its spiritual being, uplifted out of the ignorance and the limitation, returns to its oneness with the Eternal. The Divine Eternal is the inhabitant in all existences; he is equal in all and the equal friend, father ...
... its upward soul-movement, but it gives to each a profounder root, a larger outlook, a more universal and transcendent significance. For to each it gives the values of the spirit, its power of spiritual being beyond the strain of character, beyond the difficult poise of the understanding, beyond the stress of the emotions. The ordinary human soul takes a pleasure in the customary disturbances of ...
... have become to his consciousness an inseparable part of the universal mind, life and will. His separative egoistic personality will have been taken up and extinguished in the impersonality of spiritual being; his separative egoistic nature will be unified with the action of cosmic Nature. But this liberation is dependent on two simultaneous, but Page 304 not yet reconciled perceptions ...
... determine by it the ethical type, function and place in the society. Nor did it consider man primarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existence as the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in process of formation and development and his social life, ethical law, play of temperament and exercise of function as means and stages of spiritual formation. Thought and knowledge, war and ...
... to knowledge and growing constantly in knowledge they followed after him to divinise themselves in the planes of immortal being, their objective a felicity of vast riches, an immense wealth of spiritual being. This sense is inevitable, if we accept the psychological indications in मनोता, देवयंतः, चितयंतः and all that immediately follows this Page 739 verse. How, in any case, can this insistence ...
... completer nature of Divinity, the eternal infinite nature or absolute self-power of the Godhead, devātmaśakti . The perfect, integrally conscious soul hidden in man, an eternal portion of Deity, a spiritual being of the eternal Divine Being, can open in us and can too open us to him if we live constantly in this true truth of his action and our existence. The seeker of Godhead has to get back to the reality ...
... of existence which is the starting-point of the whole thought of the Gita. The Soul which finds itself here embodied in Nature has a triple reality to its own self-experience. First it is a spiritual being apparently subjected by ignorance to the outward workings of Prakriti and represented in her mobility as an acting, thinking, mutable personality, a creature of Nature, an ego. Next when it gets ...
... mandate. Then life itself would be in reality for man only a field of action for the evolution, the opportunity of new experience, the condition of difficult effort and mastery of the mental and spiritual being. What then will be the lines of this mental energy and how will they affect and be affected by the lines of the vital and physical Karma? Three movements of the mental energy of man projecting ...
... with her obscurer subanimal life, contains in his mind and nature the animal and rises out of all this substratum into his conscious manhood. Whatever soul there is in man is not a separate spiritual being which has no connection with all the rest of the terrestrial family, but seems to have grown out of it by a taking up of it all and an exceeding of its sense by a new power and meaning of the spirit ...
... or else a projection from his sense of the something divine, pure and perfect within him from which he has fallen, placed by symbolic legend not in the eternal but in time, not inwardly in his spiritual being, but outwardly in his obscure existence on this crude and transient crust of Earth. What concerns us more is that we find often associated with this memory or this backward-looking illusion, a ...
... helped to find them, to find himself, to grow into their maturity, into a fullness of physical and vital energy and the utmost breadth, depth and height of his emotional, his intellectual and his spiritual being. So too the subjection of woman, the property of the man over the woman, was once an axiom of social life and has only in recent times been effectively challenged. So strong was or had become the ...
... opening of the lotus is the opening of some part of the consciousness. The opening of the lotuses 2 means, I suppose, the opening of the true vital and physical consciousness in which the spiritual being (the Swan) can manifest with all the consequences of that opening. The lotus must represent owing to its numerous petals the "thousand petalled" lotus above the head which is the seat of ...
... a division and diminution Page 122 of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being. 6 October 1935 Passages from Lights on Yoga You write in a letter: "One must not enter on this path, far vaster and more arduous than most ways of Yoga, unless one is sure of the psychic ...
... effect of this working which you must be feeling in the head up to the shoulders. The Force that comes down from above is the one that works to transform the consciousness into that of a higher spiritual being. Before that the Mother's Force works in the psychic, mental, vital and the physical plane itself to support, purify and psychically change the consciousness. When you began to meditate ...
... literature, Mara represents the Spirit of Evil, all that is contrary or opposed to the spiritual life; in certain cases he represents death—not so much physical death as death to truth, to the spiritual being. Here, it means that so long as one does not control one's senses and desires, and concerns oneself with external material satisfactions as the most important thing, one has not the will necessary ...
... helped to find them, to find himself, to grow into their maturity, into a fullness of physical and vital energy and the utmost breadth, depth, and height of his emotional, his intellectual and his spiritual being. Sri Aurobindo (S.A.B.C.L. Vol.15, p. 605) Page 7 Education begins before Birth To speak of children to the women of Japan is, I think ...
... balance in accordance with the ordinary mode of living is indispensable to begin with, until the time one becomes a conscious being, when one must give up all these things in order to become a spiritual being. Now, has anybody a question to ask on the subject? Sweet Mother, when can one say that one is conscious? That is always a relative question. One is never altogether unconscious and ...
... still further deviation and mixture. A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong application, a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual physical ...
... reptile are natural existences, but the individual Self in them is not even for a moment characteristically man, bird, beast or reptile; in its evolution it is the same through all these changes, a spiritual being that consents to the play of Nature. What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc. by the Divine Power ...
... higher world or some supreme Absolute. The old Yogas (not quite all of them) tended the other way —but that was, I think, because they found the earth as it is a rather impossible place for any spiritual being and the resistance to change too obstinate to be borne.... But the fundamental proposition in this matter was proclaimed very definitely in the Upanishads which went so far as to say that Earth ...
... this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer,—first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the process and method of the evolution of the spiritual out of the mental man. It would at first sight seem evident that as each gradation emerges not only out of its ...
... through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge.... So must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe. (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 917-18) We have almost come to the end ...
... functions are solely determined by his earthly nature, so long he must needs be taken as a mere element in the mass, the cosmic mass. The true individual or person emerges only when something of man's spiritual being finds expression in these lower elements of his nature. And when man totally transcends his inferior sphere of existence and rises into his divine status where things are marshalled and organised ...
... experience: that is the impression left on the normal mind consciousness when the Purusha soars out of it, upwards from the life of the world to the life of the Spirit. But the soul, the true spiritual being in the individual, is not and cannot be an isolated entity; the nature of the spiritual consciousness is first transcendence, no doubt, transcendence of the merely temporal and ephemeral, but it ...
... resigned temporary endurance of the physical life the test of religious truth and of spirituality". 3 The traditional spiritual seeker has found the earth a rather impossible place for any spiritual being; earth-nature appears to him 1 2 Letters on Yoga, p. 24. 3 The Life Divine, p. 232. Page 9 in Vivekananda's simile as 'the dog's tail which, every time ...
... best a temporary field of development of a single scene of the drama of soul's existence and experiences, his general verdict has been that this earth-life is a rather difficult liability for a spiritual being, full of obstinate and obscure resistances to the growth of the Spirit. And thus a "war is declared between the spirit and its instruments and the victory of the spiritual Inhabitant ...
... present superconscient to it: we want instead an integral supramental transformation of the waking existence itself. In the luminous words of Sri Aurobindo: "If the control of [the] highest spiritual being is to be brought into our waking life, there must be a conscious heightening and widening into immense ranges of new being, new consciousness, new potentialities of action, a taking up — as ...
... Kathopanishad point out that in men the Self-Existent has cut the doors of consciousness outward, but a few men turn the eye inward and it is these who see and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being? 32.Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics. 33.Heisenberg, The Physicist's Conception of Nature, p. 24. 34.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 649. Page 74 ...
... which earth is the place of trial, from which man has to painfully disentangle himself so that he may gain immortal life elsewhere. The emphasis is on the development of the ethical and spiritual being as a means of ascending to heaven or supra terrestrial planes. (The Integral View) The Integral View is that there is the Divine Reality which manifests itself as the universe ...
... deviation and mixture. "A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong application, a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psyj| chic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual ...
... Page 58 hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of our spiritual being. These planes are in the ascending order: (i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, this last ...
... by the sense of harmony and heroic courage. Everyone needs to know how mind functions and how rationality, morality, and aesthetic refinement grow into higher and deeper reaches of psychic and spiritual being. Everyone needs to practise attitudes and powers of concentration and harmonisation of inner and outer life. Everyone needs to learn how to learn and how to continue to learn throughout life. Everyone ...
... its invariable action and character and process. Ordinarily supra-physical in fact must produce a direct effect on what is supra-physical in our consciousness, — on our mind, our life-being, our spiritual being, or other parts of us that are of the same order as itself, and can only indirectly and through them, if at all, influence the physical world and physical life. Even if the concerned supra-physical ...
... significance. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception 6 Page 101 IV The basic ontological foundation ...
... modern commercial barbarism, which values nothing as much as success in competition for money! Man does not live by bread alone, I had argued. Man is a rational animal; nay, man is a moral and spiritual being, -I had affirmed again and again. Page 67 This was my constant theme, and I used to cite freely from the Veda, from the Upanishad, from the Gita. How then could I say that I wanted to ...
... existence self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. Hence, there is the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original nature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, and the derived nature in which it is subject to the confusion of egoism and ignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual has to be inwardly recovered, fulfilled, made dynamic and ...
... The supramental or Gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man. The saint, the sage, the Page 77 divine lover and the divine soldier, — these four types of the spiritual being, would be integrated in their entirety and the Gnostic individual would live and act in the world in union with the divine law of action, sādharmya, — not only through he perfected mental and ...
... political creation on the Indian spirit and not on imitative European lines. This movement pursued a new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but as a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves ...
... not distinct thoughts then there must be a mental attitude or mental vibrations — e.g. the not Page 146 feeling interest. Could one have a great fullness of spiritual being and at the same time a deepening of emptiness? Without the emptiness there can be no fullness. How is it possible to have fullness and emptiness at the same time ...
... harmony of all the diversities that naturally rise Page 182 out of it as its self-expression becomes possible, not only possible but inevitable. That bed-rock is one's inmost spiritual being, the divine Consciousness which is at once an individual centre, a cosmic or universal field of existence and a transcendent truth and reality. With that as the nucleus and around it the whole ...
... higher or deeper source. Indeed, the will that never fails, that turns even the external circumstances, adverse and obstructive though they appear to be, to serve it, is the will of the soul, the spiritual being in us. And man is man, not a mere animal, because he has been called upon to seek and find his soul, to get at his inner and inmost being and from there command his external nature and outside ...
... harmony of all the diversities that naturally rise page – 379 out of it as its self-expression becomes possible, not only possible but inevitable. That bed-rock is one's inmost spiritual being, the divine consciousness which is at once an individual centre, a cosmic or universal field of existence and a transcendent truth and reality. With that as the nucleus and around it the whole ...
... existence. We want to introduce moral doctrines in the realm of art as well. Moral doctrines may serve a useful purpose in changing the physical part of our nature. But the subtle inner nature and the spiritual being of man will never be awakened by the canons of morality. Art is but revelation. This revelation enables us to hold a direct communion with the innermost truth of our heart. Many a time we become ...
... a transitional being; and the evolutionary Nature points man to a yet higher and more difficult level; Nature inspired him with an ideal of a spiritual living, begun the evolution in him of a spiritual being. As a result, the thinker, the idealist, the Prophet, the Sage, the self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonized mental being have been led to exceed themselves and to go higher and deeper within ...
... admit that every individual soul is immortal and that through a protracted series of births in the terrestrial plane, every soul is required in due course of its evolution to develop ethical and spiritual being as a means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of life in this world of Matter. Finally, in all these theories, the role of the individual and the way in which the individual can ...
... higher or deeper source. Indeed, the will that never fails, that turns even the external circumstances, adverse and obstructive though they appear to be, to serve it is the will of the soul, the spiritual being in us. And man is man, not a mere animal, because he has been called upon to seek and find his soul, to get at his inner and inmost being and from there command his external nature and outside ...
... endeavours of most of the leaders, 32. "The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation, not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in ...
... in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation or perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being.... He who sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own perfection, but ...
... of the earth-nature into the divine nature. Mr. K. D. Sethna in his book says, "only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Over and above opening up such movements, Sri Aurobindo discloses planes that have been sec- ret hitherto ...
... play. To seize this "secret of secrets" is to be able to batter one's way out of one's egoistic prison-house and function from a greater wideness, the ego being dissolved in the "impersonality of spiritual being". This in turn must facilitate a Divine orientation for all actions, all thoughts, all loves. In one sense, not the ego, but Prakriti or Nature is the doer of all works; but Prakriti is only a ...
... a perfect education for the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and harmonious. 49 Higher still is the service of Art in awakening or satisfying the spiritual being or in advancing the growth of spirituality in the race: Spirituality is a single word expressive of three lines of human aspiration towards divine knowledge, divine love and joy, divine ...
... the last overarching illimitable ether. Moving firmly between life and death it saw beyond both and cut out a hundred * Cf. Sri Aurobindo: "If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and ...
... indeterminate Being or Non-Being from which all thought and life fall away into cessation. The buddhi casts itself into a luminous sleep and the soul passes away into some ineffable height of spiritual being."¹ In the Integral Yoga this unilateral tendency of the buddhi is neutralised by a wide aspiration for an integral union with the Divine and for His manifestation in life, and a dynamic ...
... gunas stand for are three essential powers of the Divine which are not merely existent in a perfect equilibrium of quietude, but unified in a perfect consensus of divine action. Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, śakti, holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of ...
... Aswapathy felt that he was "a colonist from immortality", and as such he tended to grow towards, or into, the likeness of his spiritual Self. In this intense aspiration to grow into the likeness of spiritual being "his mind was like a fire assailing heaven". Aswapathy's spiritual growth began by his realising that the external being of man is not the whole of himself. There are hidden "celestial ...
... Nation-Soul which had become the demand of the Time-Spirit. "The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being...." The soul that was India told her children to dare. For true spirituality means courage, means strength. "Don't linger on the shore with fearful eyes. Dive into the roaring ocean. Dare ...
... their atmosphere that affects his vision of the earth. He regards the material as the first fact only in appearance and not in reality: matter is to him real only as a mould and opportunity of spiritual being and the psychical region is an intermediary through which he can go back from the physical to the spiritual truth. This it is that conditions his whole artistic method and makes him succeed best ...
... sixth sign is usually called the Virgin in Europe, but the word gives an idea of purity which is not the character of the sign and is therefore inappropriate. Each sign has a devata , a god or spiritual being in charge of it. He is not its master, but its protector and the protector of all who are born in the sign. Indra (Zeus, Odin) protects the Ram, Agni (Moloch, Thor) the Bull, the Aswins (Castor ...
... is fatum , the form of act and creation declared beforehand by a Will within him and the universe as the thing to be done, to be achieved, to be worked out and made the self-expression of his spiritual being. Fate is adṛṣṭa , the unseen thing which the Spirit holds hidden in the plan of its vision, the consequence concealed from the travailing mind absorbed in the work of the moment by the curtained ...
... so, from the law of the world action. And if all these energies are forms of energy of the nature of the Spirit, then it is likely that only when we rise into the consciousness of the supreme spiritual being can we hope wholly to understand all the integral secret and harmony of the world action and therefore the integral meaning and law of Karma. It may therefore serve a partial purpose but can ...
... highest ether (of the revealed superconscient, paramaṁ guhyam ) as the Enjoyer his two wives." The soul's enjoyment of its divinised mental and bodily existence upheld in the eternal joy of the spiritual being could not be more clearly and beautifully imaged. These ideas and many of the expressions are the same as those of the hymn of Gritsamada. Nodha says of the Night and Dawn, the dark physical ...
... prakṛtir me yayā dhāryate jagat , but it holds itself back, hidden in the heart of each natural existence, sarvabhūtānāṁ hṛddeśe , until the veil of Yogamaya is rent by the light of knowledge. The spiritual being of man, the Page 371 Jiva, possesses the divine Nature. He is a manifestation of God in that Nature, parā prakṛtir jīva-bhūtā , and he has latent in him all the divine energies and ...
... —the pantheist's identity of God and universe is a still more limited view,—he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which exceeds all ...
... self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation,—the original nature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, and the derived in which it is subject to the confusions of egoism and ignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual has to be inwardly recovered, fulfilled, made dynamic and active ...
... supporting with an infinite equality its natural being and action, but exceeding them by its freedom and infinity. We may live in what is now our natural being or we may live in our greater and spiritual being. This is the first great distinction on which the Karmayoga of the Gita is founded. The whole question and the whole method lie then in the liberation of the soul from the limitations of our ...
... the rest of Indian culture. A seeing in the self accordingly becomes the characteristic method of the Indian artist and it is directly enjoined on him by the canon. He has to see first in his spiritual being the truth of the thing he must express and to create its form in his intuitive mind; he is not bound to look out first on outward life and Nature for his model, his authority, his rule, his teacher ...
... for which we would now use more intellectual, less concrete and imaged terms, but which is still valid for those who practise Yoga and rediscover the secrets of our psycho-physical and psycho-spiritual being. Typical passages of this kind of peculiar expression of psychic truths are Ajatashatru's explanation of sleep and dream or the passages of the Prasna Upanishad on the vital principle and its motions ...
... in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and not ...
... form is one, it is bound to the One. And all the units are linked together and reproduce the One. The Mother Questions and Answers (1954): 17 February 1954 Sweet Mother, is there a spiritual being in everybody? That depends on what we call "being". If for "being" we substitute "presence", yes, there is a spiritual presence in everyone. If we call "being" an organised entity, fully conscious ...
... make you understand that there is an inner life, an invisible life, and it puts you in touch with things you don't see and proves to you that they exist". That is not true. Unless you have a spiritual being within you, capable of awakening and living its own life, all these things teach you nothing at all. I knew some people—one of them especially, who was a man of science, intelligent, a man of ...
... secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being. " Occultism is associated in popular idea with magic and magical formulas and a supposed mechanism of the supernatural. But this is only one side, nor is it altogether a superstition as is ...
... use him.... Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference. To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate ...
... aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is, then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our surface mental personality. But at first this consciousness may confine itself to a status of being separate from the action of our ignorant surface nature, observing ...
... three voices cast in one, indistinguishable in the eternal choir. And there is too and similarly a pure intuitive science which comes into the field when we enter the ranges of the psychical and spiritual being and can from there work for the discovery of greater secrets of the physical or at least of the psycho-physical world. Indian Yoga founds itself on that greater process, and there, though as in ...
... experience, is a large part of the process which comes by this aesthesis, but it is not quite the whole thing; it is rather only a common way by which we get at something that stands behind, the spiritual being in us which has the secret of the universal delight and the eternal beauty of existence. That which we call genius works or comes out from something deep within which calls down the word, the vision ...
... "As it climbs from height to height, there becomes clear to its view all the much that is yet to be done." But also it is beginning to be seen that only in some great awakening of the self and spiritual being of man is that yet unlived truth to be found and that infinite much to be achieved. It is only then that the fullness of a greater knowledge for man living on earth can unfold itself and get rid ...
... to powerful forces or must even bribe and cajole them or work through and behind them. It cannot be otherwise until the average and the aggregate man become more of an intellectual, moral and spiritual being and less predominantly the vital and emotional half-reasoning human animal. The unrealised international idea will have for some time at least to work by this secondary method and through such ...
... intellect is already predisposed to belief, and even if it convinces, it cannot give the true knowledge. Reason is safest when it is content to take the profound truths and experiences of the spiritual being and the spiritual life, just as they are given to it, and throw them into such form, order and language as will make them the most intelligible or the least unintelligible to the reasoning mind ...
... of the child as he grows into man and to found our systems of teaching and training upon that basis. The new aim is to help the child to develop his intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, moral, spiritual being and his communal life and impulses out of his own temperament and capacities,—a very different object from that of the old education which was simply to pack so much stereotyped knowledge into ...
... in oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation or perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being. If Page 259 the divinity sought were a separate godhead within oneself and not the one Divine, or if one sought God for oneself alone, then indeed the result might be a grandiose egoism ...
... its later development it became very consciously that. The movement of 1905 in Bengal pursued a quite new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves ...
... & material being in the state of life-force, but vájí, the horse of Being generally, Being manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the brihat of all this sevenfold substantial being that is the world we are, but white, the colour of illumined purity. He manifests therefore ...
... the gods". This is possible, if the rik be taken by itself without any connection with its context. अंगिरसो. The sense seems to be, "Let us, Angirasas in bodily birth, be truly Angirasas in our spiritual being." Sy. says भूतिमंतः स्याम for which I see no justification, nor for his rendering of the plain & straightforward दिवस्पुत्राः as meaning physical children of the Sun. The Sruti when it says दिवस्पुत्रा ...
... evolves it there, a similar evolutionary impulse towards mind in certain forms of life, an impulse in certain minds towards what is beyond Mind, towards the unveiling of Spirit, the evolution of a spiritual being. Each impulse justifies itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties. There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organisation ...
... ce and subsequent existence in Time; of the psychological by enlarging his self-knowing beyond the waking self into the subconscient and superconscient; of the constitutional by realising his spiritual being and its categories; of the cosmic by discovering his timeless self; of the egoistic by Page 499 realising the cosmic consciousness; of the original by opening to the Absolute of whom ...
... as divine. The joy of that reconciliation dwells in the Immortality to which the Vedanta is our guide and its starting point is the recognition by mind of the one Lord in all bodies, the one Spiritual Being in all becomings, átmánam sarvabhúteshu. Since it is the all-blissful Lord who dwells within and Nature is for His habitation and enjoyment, then a state of Nature which is a state of bondage, ...
... reptile are natural existences, but the individual self in them is not even for a moment characteristically man, bird, beast or reptile; in its evolution it is the same through all these changes, a spiritual being that consents to the play of Nature. What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power ...
... cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being. I know what is your difficulty about the Cosmic Divine. It was not present to my mind because I look at these things from the point of view of facts as they are both to our spiritual and ...
... physical enjoyment is not the only Page 119 enjoyment—the vital has its own way of enjoyment. The whole thing is to separate oneself from that and identify oneself with the psychic and spiritual being and through them receive the higher consciousness which will change the vital nature. The Intuition and the Vital The vital controlled and transformed by the Intuition has the spontaneous ...
... the Self That [ state of vast peace and calm ] is the basic experience of the higher consciousness—it is what is called the realisation of the Atman (the Self). It is the Atman, the spiritual being above the mind—the first experience of it is a silence and calm (which one perceives afterwards to be infinite and eternal) untouched by the movements of mind and life and body. The higher con ...
... can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda. While this transformation is being done it is more than ever necessary to keep yourself free from all taint of the perversions of the ego. Let no ...
... demand of man a choice between the right and the wrong way, between the will to an impermanent existence and the will to Nirvana, between a will to cosmic existence and the will to an absolute spiritual being. Nor do they demand this choice of the Absolute or of the universal Being or Power, who indeed cares nothing for their claim and goes on very tranquilly and securely with his mighty eternal action ...
... existence, its consequence for this race born into a world of ignorance and inconscience but capable of an upward evolution of its consciousness and an ascent into the light and power and bliss of a spiritual being and spiritual nature? The descent into the earth-life of so supreme a creative power as the Supermind and its truth-consciousness could not be merely a new feature or factor added to that life ...
... capacity of earth for a divine life: a divine existence could only be achieved by a departure from earth and the body. Even if cosmic existence is not an illusion or Maya, a divine or a completely spiritual being is likely to be possible only in another less material world or only in the pure spirit. At any rate, to the normal human reason the odds seem to be heavily against any early materialisation on ...
... civilisation and needed to read into their religion and their deities finer and subtler aspects which would support their more highly mentalised concepts and interests and find for them a true spiritual being or some celestial figure as their support and sanction. But the largest part in determining and deepening this inward turn must be attributed to the Mystics who had an enormous influence on these ...
... replaces the outer life-personality that the drive of the vital ego can be wholly overcome and the life-force become the servant of the soul and a powerful instrumentation for the action of our true spiritual being. This then is the origin and nature of error, falsehood, wrong and evil in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error ...
... Divine in our nature, the mystic sense of the symbol of sacrifice in the sealed speech of the seers of the Veda. But if this is to be the character of the rapid evolution from a mental to a spiritual being contemplated by the integral Yoga, a question arises full of many perplexities but of great dynamic importance. How are we to deal with life and works as they now are, with the activities proper ...
... sojourn on earth as a temporary passage or a departure from its highest eternal nature and of a heaven beyond as its proper habitation; thirdly, an emphasis on the development of the ethical and spiritual being as the means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of life in this world of Matter. These are the three fundamental ways of seeing, each with its mental attitude towards life, that ...
... even an extinction, a Nirvana both of our active being and of the sense of self into a Reality that is indefinable and inexpressible. But also we can realise that this self is not only our own spiritual being but the true self of all others; it presents itself then as the underlying truth of cosmic existence. It is possible to remain in a Nirvana of all individuality, to stop at a static realisation ...
... then as Mind, with the rest of it still unrevealed, then the emergence of consciousness out of the apparently Inconscient must have another and completer term; the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature ...
... centres, now closed, could be opened up, the higher psychical life proper to our subtle existence entered into by man, and even the physical and vital obstructions to the experience of the ideal and spiritual being could be destroyed. It is significant that one prominent result claimed by the Hathayogins for their practices and verified in many respects was a control of the physical life-force which liberated ...
... readiness for always more light and truth, an absence of limiting attachment and no such clinging to forms as would interfere with the forward movement of the Shakti towards the integrality of the spiritual being, consciousness, knowledge, power, action and the wholeness of the one and the multiple Ananda. The faith demanded of us both in its general principle and its constant particular application ...
... action from the spirit within and the action will not determine the spirit or subject it to a fixed standard or rigid mould of working. He will have no dominant mere habit of character, but only a spiritual being and will with at the most a free and flexible temperamental mould for the action. His life will be a direct stream from the eternal fountains, not a form cut to some temporary human pattern. His ...
... language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded ...
... principle. Another explanation that tallies with a certain part of our experience is that there is a dual being in us, the animal and material, or more widely the lower nature-bound, and the soul or spiritual being entangled by mind in the material existence or in world-nature, and freedom comes by escape from the entanglement, the soul returning to its native planes or the self or spirit to its pure existence ...
... three gunas stand for are three essential powers of the Divine which are not merely existent in a perfect equilibrium of quietude, but unified in a perfect consensus of divine action. Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, śakti , holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of ...
... them in a certain diverseness. This is that distinction for the joy of contact which in the mind becomes not only difference, but in its self-experience division from our other selves, in its spiritual being a sense of loss of self one with us in others and a reaching after the felicity it has forfeited, in life a compromise between egoistic self-absorption and a blind seeking out for the lost oneness ...
... to evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being. In Yoga we have to travel beyond the physical nature and the superficial man and to discover the workings of the whole nature of the real man. In other words we must arrive at and use a psych ...
... These cannot be acquired at all securely or integrally by personal effort, but can only come from above, or else can become natural to the man if and when he ascends beyond mind and lives in the spiritual being, power, consciousness and ideation. They then become, not abnormal and laboriously acquired siddhis, but simply the very nature and method of his action, if he still continues to be active in the ...
... They shift and change, but this remains constant. It is not the executive forms taken by Nature in us that are ourselves or the abidingly constant and expressive shape of ourselves; it is the spiritual being in us—and this includes the soul-becoming of it—that persists through time in the universe. We cannot, however, easily distinguish this true inner law of our being; it is kept screened from ...
... worked out in the cosmos. But the Spirit is in possession of knowledge and will, of which it is the source and cause and not a subject; therefore in proportion as the soul assumes its divine or spiritual being, it assumes also control of the movements of its nature. It becomes, in the ancient language, Swarat, free and a self-ruler over the kingdom of its own life and being. But also it increases in ...
... difficulties in the way of the integral knowledge, the integral realisation, the integral becoming we have to state succinctly before we can proceed farther. Realised mental being and realised spiritual being are really two different planes in the arrangement of our existence, the one superior and divine, the other inferior and human. To Page 392 the former belong infinite being, infinite ...
... consciousness, and the supermind when it takes possession of the waking consciousness, dematerialises it, delivers it from its limits, converts the material and the psychic into the nature of the spiritual being. The mental activity that can be most readily organised is, as has been already indicated, that of pure ideative knowledge. This is transformed on the higher level to the true jñāna , supramental ...
... as a resultant form of the spirit. All his thought will be of a kind that proceeds from knowledge. He perceives and enacts the things of the phenomenal life in the light of the reality of the spiritual being and the power of the dynamic spiritual essence. At first, at the beginning of the conversion into this greater status, the thought will continue to move for a shorter or a longer time to a greater ...
... might as well speak of the avatars and rishis and prophets in the same Page 160 breath as Steiner or the present occupant of the Vatican. Furthermore, the ranges of occult and spiritual being attained and explored by a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo are precisely those in which the mysterious founts of great art lie, so that if one has already an artistic turn one is very likely to ...
... the pantheist's identity of God and universe is a still more limited view, - he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which exceeds ...
... immobile,—there is an All-Consciousness disguised in the Inconscient. In Matter life Page 241 is embedded, in Life is an enveloped mind, in Mind is concealed a greater supramental and spiritual being not yet manifested. These are the significant and illumining terms of the riddle. Evolution is the labour of Nature, or let us say at once of the Energy of the secret Spirit, working in the ...
... Matter itself only a mask of it, a phenomenon of Energy, as it now more and more seems to be? Energy itself is a movement, a force of concealed Consciousness, Consciousness the sign of a hidden spiritual Being. But if so, what possible significance or purpose can there be in this involution, this material self-concealment and self-imprisonment, this slow tormented emergence of the Spirit? Two lines ...
... is that the Christian tradition with its theology of Father and Son was really never submerged in Blake's system at any stage. Nor was the title "father" debarred from applying to the highest spiritual being. What are we to make of "the Heav'nly Father" in the lines about the "Four Mighty Ones", the "Living Creatures" at the beginning of The Four Zoas (begun 1795)? 297 Surely there is no question ...
... motives and impulses, of the forces apparent Page 267 and hidden that move us. In this attempt to be conscious of all the parts of our being, we discover our spiritual being as well. This higher consciousness of the spirit is knowledge as well as power and holds the key to a total healing and integration of the being. He views the problem also from the ...
... out inward. "In men, says the Upanishad, the Self-Existent has cut the doors of consciousness outward, but a few turn the eye inward and it is these who see and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being." 1 Thus, in the course of his Sadhana, almost as an immediate necessity, when the aspirant seeks to reverse the gear, turn his gaze inward (antarāvṛtta-cak ṣ u ḥ ), enter into himself ...
... hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry." I do not feel ...
... only from sinner to saint but also from the right-moving Yogi to the easy-going stroller on the Left Bank of the Seine! The cry from the "Latin Quarter" and the call to the Indian Wholeness of spiritual being have been equally strong. Nothing except the vigilant and compassionate eyes of the Divine Mother could have led me to where I am at present. I recollect asking her whether the Supermind could ...
... Jesus who had been nailed on the cross? As Pagels 173 recounts, the writings of the later full-fledged Gnostics "tell countless stories about the risen Page 192 Christ - the spiritual being whom Jesus represented - a figure who fascinated them far more than the merely human Jesus, the obscure rabbi from Nazareth". Pagels 174 continues: "For this reason, gnostic writings often reverse ...
... material being in the state of life-force, but vāji, the horse of Being generally, Being manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the brhat of all this _____________ 1 The Secret of the Veda, pp. 376-77. Page 302 sevenfold substantial ...
... to evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being." 13 Psychoanalysis carried the reductionism to an extreme and earned notoriety by reducing even mystical experiences to the unconscious strivings of the id. In this regard, Sri Aurobindo ...
... others this Page 79 is often, and indeed usually, a specialised faculty limited though often precise and accurate in action, and implies no development of the inner soul or the spiritual being or the higher intelligence. 2 It is a door opened by chance or by an innate gift or by some kind of pressure between the waking and the subliminal mind and admitting only to the surface or ...
... Jivatman. The Jivatman feels his oneness with the universal but at the same time his central separateness as a portion of the Divine." 9 Page 79 The individual soul is the spiritual being which is sometimes described as an eternal porrion of the Divine, but can also be described as the Divine himself supporting his manifestation of the Many." 10 This persistent soul-existence ...
... to say at the end, I have heard about thee with the hearing of my ear but now I see thee with mine own eye. 64 To make the evolution of Job from a religious and moral man to a spiritual being possible the Lord enacts a drama, draws the attention of the cynical figure called the Satan—the definite article is used along with his name, hassatan in Hebrew; he is different from the ...
... self-forgetful of its source, its reality, its true character. The second idea is that of the double nature of the Soul in manifestation, — the original nature in which it is one with its own true spiritual being, and the derived in which it Page 74 is subject to the confusions of egoism and ignorance. The latter has to be cast away and the spiritual has to be inwardly recovered, fulfilled ...
... and develop it even in a greater measure. This is the knowledge of the psychic and the spiritual. Whatever else may be the vocation of the individual, to possess this knowledge of the inner spiritual being and to guide his mind, life and body in the light of this knowledge this has to be chief programme of the vocation of every student. A wide, special and flexible syllabus for the discovery of and ...
... manifests the Jiva. 38 As Sri Aurobindo points out, it is the individual being of ours by which ignorance is possible to self-conscious mind, but it is also that by which liberation into the spiritual being is possible and the enjoyment of divine immortality. 39 It is the individual being, represented by the psychic entity 40 that, impelled by the Supreme Will, plunges into the inconscient, and ...
... the Vedic Rshis. V In the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo a new dimension is added to conceptions of bondage, liberation and perfection. It founds itself on a conception of the spiritual being as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transference to other worlds or a cosmic self-extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into ...
... persistent and guided effort to unite our being with the divine reality and divine nature. Indeed, Yoga is a science, — an intuitive science, — which deals with the ranges of the psychical and spiritual being and discovers greater secrets of physical, psycho-physical and other higher worlds. As in all true science, the object is an assured method of personal discovery or living repetition and possession ...
... willed arrangements, so that we can generate electricity or steam at will and in the measure of requirements, even so Yoga observes and deals scientifically with the ranges of the psychical and spiritual being, and it arrives at the discovery and utilization of greater page - 41 secrets of physical, psycho-physical and other higher realities. 25 As in all true science, the object is an assured ...
... national soul into the powers of the life and the ascending mind and the soul of humanity. He added "at no time will it lose sight of man's highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being." 2 Page 139 II Sri Aurobindo speaks of three principles of teaching, and when implemented, they provide a sound basis of a system of natural organisation of the highest ...
... by the Vedic Rishis. V In the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo a new dimension is added to conceptions of bondage, liberation and perfection. It founds itself on a conception of the spiritual being, as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transcendence to other words or a cosmic self-extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into ...
... expression of inner capacities in a persistent and guided effort to unite our being with the Divine Reality and Divine Nature. Indeed, Yoga is a science, which deals with ranges of the psychical and spiritual being and even discovers greater secrets of physical, psycho-physical and other higher realities and worlds. As in all true sciences, the object is an assured method of personal discovery or living ...
... governed by vital desires and passions of the needs of the body; and these are the basic causes of pain and suffering, and they cannot be remedied except by spiritual methods. To discover the spiritual being in oneself and to help others towards the same evolution is the real service that the spiritual leader can render to the race; outward help can indeed succor and elevate, but that is not enough; ...
... the human spirit; secondly, the idea of its sojourn on earth as a temporary passage and of a heaven beyond as its proper habitation; thirdly, an emphasis on the development of the ethical and spiritual being as the means of ascension to heaven or supraterrestrial planes. IV The integral view According to the integral view, there is the Divine Reality ...
... his faith went out only to meet the void. But, it may be asked, does not the religious consciousness affirm something more about the God whom it postulates than that he is an ethical and spiritual Being? In what sense, for example, does the religious mind require its God to be personal? Observe that we are not asking what answer theological thought has given to this problem, and expressed in the ...
... gross matter in which there is life is seen as a material reproduction of the subtler parts of our being. It contains a secret. It is a sort of mysterious bridge between the physical and the spiritual being. The human body, according to Hatha Yoga, is a receptacle which, when purified, can hold an illimitable amount of universal life-energy. It is an instrument which, when taught concentration ...
... develop it even in a greater measure. This is the knowledge of the psychic and the spiritual. Whatever else may be the vocation of the individual, to possess this knowledge of the inner spiritual being and to guide his mind, life and body in the light of this knowledge this has to be chief programme of the vocation of every student. A wide, special and flexible syllabus for the discovery of ...
... by the sense of harmony and heroic courage. Everyone needs to know how mind functions and how rationality, morality, and aesthetic refinement grow into higher and deeper reaches of psychic and spiritual being. Everyone needs to practise attitudes and powers of concentration and harmonisation of inner and outer life. Page 85 Everyone needs to learn how to learn and how to continue to learn ...
... the phenomenon of a thinking life and body: so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body.... Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what ...
... earth-nature and impulses and appetites that tend to drag down man's soaring spirit and frustrate the winged visions of his soul — all these seriously detract from the glory of man the mental-spiritual being. But the question is: Are these limitations and impediments of the body to be considered as something permanent and insuperable? The Seer-Vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ...
... noble science and art of living. Everyone needs to be a good pupil and a good teacher, and every- Page 22 one needs to learn how to grow into higher and deeper reaches of psychic and spiritual being. These and allied subjects need to be woven together in a graded manner so that they are brought to students effectively but in a very flexible manner throughout the living process of the growth ...
... oneself, but to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one's own individual liberation and perfection, but to seek the liberation and perfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being. [And]... he who [thus] sees God in all, will serve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not only his own ...
... very deep. It is rather when one compares the spirit of Froebel with that of Montessori that one realizes their profound affinity. It is in their attitude of love and reverence for the child as a spiritual being that they are in complete unity — not in the details of their system nor in their philosophy of life. According to Montessori — the vital thing in a true educational method is the activity ...
... political creation on the Indian spirit and not upon imitative European lines. This movement pursued a new conception of the nation not merely as a country, but a soul, a psychological, almost a spiritual being and, even when acting from economical and political motives, it sought to dynamise them by this subjective conception and to make them instruments of self-expression rather than objects in themselves ...
... action. He wanted action founded on the Brahman, what he called practical Vedanta. Vivekananda sought to establish India's life on the Brahman. He has awakened and dynamised the eternal soul and spiritual being of India and stimulated her life. . The eternal power of the Brahman residing in the soul of India has been activised by this lion of a man. But how to give it a practical form in life in all ...
... the Page 141 group-houl does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack. The real truth is that a group has the soul—the spiritual being—that is put into it. How can that be done? It is done by the individual, in and through the individual. Not a single individual perhaps, but a few, a select body, a small minority who by their ...
... not from the ego. To arrive at that point, an enabling sadhana is indispensable. And that is why the Mother has created an environment where things are favourable for a natural evolution of the spiritual being in each one. Spiritual growth and freedom are interacting factors; each promotes the other. Where freedom is curtailed or suppressed in the supposed interests of an organisation, the soul cannot ...
... Sadhana has contributed to this madness in yoga. They brought down the whole Sadhana into the emotional plane and they could not distinguish between the true emotional movement of the psychic and spiritual being and the vital and other lower parts which imitate it. It is that which gives room for all sorts of lower forces to enter. This movement of restlessness and madness came to be accepted to such ...
... expression of the Spirit of universal Nature and nothing truly spiritual. As I have said, Far Eastern art expresses the Spirit as Nature, as Prakrid, while Indian art expresses the Spirit as Self, the spiritual being, Purusha. That is too subtle for the European mind to understand. × Wood-carvings which stood on a table in Sri ...
... attain a perfectly unified individuality that is the expression of the soul's truth-consciousness and escaping disruption and dissolution partake ultimately of the inherent immortality of the spiritual being. Page 294 ...
... y come to his consciousness first in importance – this is not a valid argument nor a statement of fact. For man has and is something else besides: and this something else, in other words, the spiritual being, is quite a free and independent entity and can act as it wills ignoring and ignorant of the body and its circumstances. Whether one is poor or rich, successful or frustrated, happy or unhappy ...
... as the Page 258 group-soul does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack. The real truth is that a group has the soul-the spiritual being-that is put into it. How can that be done? It is done by the individual, in and through the individual. Not a single individual perhaps, but a few, a select body, a small minority who by their ...
... supernormal possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater Page 17 effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being. " 14 In so far as occultism is a means of acquiring power to act upon men, affairs or things, it is but magic; real occultism, on the contrary, is "a direct and conscious perception of ...
... mental faculties. Sri Aurobindo warns against it: "They are not merely methods, way of knowing or faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal consciousness—Force constituting and organizing itself into a higher status."³ " In the descent of these higher grades upon us it ...
... realities. The consciousness of the mental creature is turning or has been already ¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo. Page 432 turned wholly into the consciousness of the spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations, uniting the manifested existence with what is above it, it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually evolving ...
... . Liberated, we live in the inalienable peace and purity, light and joy, power ¹ Collected Poems and Plays of Sri Aurobindo Vol - I. Page 394 and plenitude of our spiritual being. The world's din cannot raise a single ripple in that fathomless peace and silence, it remains impregnable, the world's pleasures. and sufferings cannot trouble that serene and limpid joy, it abides ...
... expression unequalled in world's literature. Of several such,—the one on page 74 can be taken as typical. As Aswapathy's soul was released from the bonds of Ignorance and rose to the heights of pure Spiritual Being he was suddenly surprised by a powerful Descent from above the mind. This is how it came: "To meet him bare and pure A strong Descent leaped down. A Might, a Flame, Page 102 ...
... she is "One who has all infinity to waste". She tackles the seemingly impossible task of transformation of the material being into the Divine. In Savitri's case it was the inner spiritual being that formed her body, it was like "the glowing arc of a charmed unseen whole". Very soon the link between her soul and physical form grew sure. She appeared like one who came to found a greater ...
... the result of participating in a monumental clash of mighty opposites. Evolutionary Man is symbolised in him and we are made to see "the first promptings of the deeper and higher psychic and spiritual being which it is * The reader is referred to the present writer's "Andromeda" (Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 194 for a historical study of the Perseus-Andromeda myth from Euripides to Sri Aurobindo ...
... there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will... receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into terrestrial being. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - II: The Gnostic Being Balcony Darshan If my understanding is limited, widen it; If my knowledge is obscure, enlighten it; If my heart is empty of ardour, set it aflame; If ...
... earth a mental consciousness and power which shapes a race of mental beings, so now there will be established here a gnostic consciousness and power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth nature that is ready for this new transformation." Since this was what he foresaw in his spiritual vision, he dedicated all his life to bring the supramental change in... this first realisation of the soul to the Psychic entity lying dormant in the deepest recesses of our being. This psychic transformation has been achieved by only a limited number of human beings up to the present. But this is only a first step in his yoga, the triple transformation of psychic, spiritual and supramental change will achieve a complete and radical change of human nature so as to usher in... The Mother Sri Krishna's Gita is well-known to the spiritual seekers all over the world from time immemorial and has been acclaimed by the elite as one of the best spiritual guide whose value remains unimpaired to this day because of the eternal verities it contains. Sri Aurobindo's Mother is not so well-known to the present-day spiritual seekers as his more renowned Magnum Opus, the Life Divine ...
... of all types and forms of its being which are the visible, indicative and efficient embodiments of its essential nature. There appear in the evolutionary process organised forms and activities of Matter, the types of life and the living beings, the types of mind and the thinking beings, the luminosities and greatnesses of the spiritual principle and the spiritual beings whose nature, character, personality... ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truth-conscious existence. In this inevitable ascent the mind of Light is a gradation, an inevitable stage. As an evolving principle it will mark a stage in the human ascent and evolve a new type of human being; this development must carry in it an ascending... mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution ...
... Force, he the Soul-—set in the world to refashion human nature and earth-nature. The promise is given: Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds, Mere men into spiritual beings grow And see awake the dumb divinity. 63 This is more than a personal or individual victory, more even than the recovery of a kingdom or the promise of increase and prosperity;... repugnance to the cosmic action of the Divine. This liberation gets its completeness when the spiritual gnosis can act with a supramental knowledge and reception of the action of Nature and a supramental luminous will in initiation. The gnosis discovers the spiritual sense in Nature, God in things, the soul of good in all things that have the contrary... thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire Grow large as all the regions of thy soul, Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being, And of created purpose reach the ends. 61 Prudence tells Savitri that Satyavan, being fated to die within a year, is no suitable husband for her; prudence tells her, again, that irresistible fate is not to be checkmated. Yet she sets ...
... of all types and forms of its being which are the visible, indicative and efficient embodiments of its essential nature. There appear in the evolutionary process organised forms and activities of Matter, the types of life and the living beings, the types of mind and the thinking beings, the luminosities and greatnesses of the spiritual principle and the spiritual beings whose nature, character, personality... ignorance, truth and error till it reached the spiritual perception and illumination and now can see as in a glass dimly the possibility of supermind and a truth-conscious existence. In this inevitable ascent the mind of Light is a gradation, an inevitable stage. As an evolving principle it will mark a stage in the human ascent and evolve a new type of human being; this development must carry in it .an ascending... capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind .and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution ...
... commune with the Spirit within And strive to obey the high spiritual law..." (Ibid., p. 709) "Even the many shall some answer make And bear the splendour of the Divine's rush And his impetuous knock at unseen doors." ( Ibid.) "Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds, Mere men into spiritual beings grow And see awake the dumb divinity." (Ibid., p. 710)... heterogeneous elements working together. This simple fact cannot but convince anyone with unblemished vision that this smooth functioning of our Ashram collectivity is a tangible proof that a higher spiritual Force and not any mere human control has been at work here despite the individual sadhaks foibles and deficiencies. Sri Aurobindo has not left us. The Mother has not left us. Page 87... recalcitrance and inveterate opposition. For, he declares: "Even should a hostile force cling to its reign And claim its right's perpetual sovereignty And man refuse his spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail. Page 88 For in the march of all-fulfilling Time The hour must come of the Transcendent's will: All turns ...
... Action belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical outcome of our being; but behind our surface is a freer life power, a freer mind power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate. Karma... when the subject turns away from the ordinary to the spiritual life. If the turn is very radical the cessation of predictability may be immediate; otherwise certain results may still last on for a time, but there is no longer the same inevitability. This would seem to show that there is or can be a higher-power or higher-plane or higher-source spiritual destiny which can, if its hour has come, override... that of the energy which returns as effect, that this is the universal law and nothing in the world can, being of and in our world, escape from its governing incidence. Sri Aurobindo Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Karma … if Karma be a universal truth or the universal truth of being, it must be equally true of the inly-born mental and moral worlds of our action as in our outward relations ...
... came along with them. Mother and Sri Aurobindo offered their physical forms and presence as a ladder for them to climb—no, to be carried up. They arranged so that human beings could grow into superhuman spiritual beings, shaking off their ignorant human consciousness, as the caterpillar grows into a butterfly shaking off its cocoon—but alas, man failed. Perhaps the new destiny was too new for... difficulty than before; it will need far greater Tapasya now. For as long as Mother was in her body, she made things easy for us. But it is no more so. For those who really want a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual mode of life, those who truly want to prepare themselves for greater ends, well, they have to take a serious look at things. For them it is a sadhana, a true endeavour, a conscious ... does: "Do not fight", "Do not utter bad words", "Do not steal", "Do not lie", etc. In the ancient methods of spiritual discipline those methods formed the elementary and basic part—in Rajayoga they are called Yama and Niyama (ahims ā , asteya, etc.). The Buddhists also started their spiritual training with the same lessons; they named them the Panchashilas: good conduct ( vinaya), etc. Withdrawal ...
... Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so Supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has not risen fully to Supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial existence. For the gulf between Mind and Supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent... first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force, Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must supervene the supramental transmutation... Supermind is organised into a new world, Page 429 the spirit will become the master and govern Nature in a clear and visible way. What is called "new birth" is the birth into the spiritual life, the spiritual consciousness; it is to carry in oneself something of the spirit which, individually, through the soul, can begin to rule the life and be the master of existence. But in the supramental ...
... frequent obstacles. "But these things are not universal in Westerners; they are super-structural formations, not the very grain of the being. They cannot permanently stand in the way of the soul, if the soul's aspiration is strong and firm, if the spiritual aim is the chief thing in the life."³ Yes, the lexicographer cannot help bringing out Sri Aurobindo in a trm ürti aspect - Brahma... spreading out in a super-rainbow spectrum of multiple tones the white light of the Mother's truth-consciousness. The word "tones" is apt, for here we get not only the diverse shades of a spiritual being's vision-moulded thought but also the varied modulations of a living voice - the soft or strong, intimate or commanding, piercing or wide-vibrationed utterance of one who stands amongst... problem of spiritual knowledge or practice. Yes, a light, to make us both know and do, comes to us in these pages. The Mother, no doubt, does not philosophise in any intellectual fashion, but she often transmits in a systematised intellect-stirring shape the discoveries she has made in the realms of psychology, occultism, the universal consciousness, the transcendental being. To every ...
... correct up to a certain stage and the character and events took a different course when the subject turned to the spiritual life. Spiritual realisation means union with the Spirit; union with the Spirit implies union with the Will of the Spirit,—and for the spiritually realised being it is the Will of the Spirit that prevails. The same truth stated in philosophical terms finds expression... complex; the destiny which binds our physical being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene... behind our surface is a freer Life-power, a freer Mind-power which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel... But greater spirits this balance can reverse And make the soul the artist of its fate. 61 This is one of the mystic truths revealed by Savitri. If the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual, it is our self, our soul that must determine our evolution. Our spirit must be greater than Fate or Destiny or Law. In fact the question of Fate and Free-Will has been one of the knottiest ...
... Chapter XXIII, "Man and the Evolution", and Arya chapter XXXVI, "Man and the Evolutionary Movement"; and between new Chapter XXVII, "The Gnostic Being", and Arya Chapters LI and LII, "The Necessity of the Gnostic Being" and "The Spiritual Gnostic Being". When setting aside Arya Chapter XL, "The Fundamental Character of the Ignorance", Sri Aurobindo wrote a note to his secretary indicating that... Divine Life -- L The Four Theories of Existence XVI Chapter comprising revised Arya material as well as new material. LI The Necessity of the Gnostic Being -- LII The Spiritual Gnostic Being -- LIII Conclusion -- Page 1116 TABLE II. Chapters in the 1940 edition of Book Two with corresponding Arya chapters ... Man and the Evolution XXIV Entirely new chapter. The Evolution of the Spiritual Man -- XXV Entirely new chapter. The Triple Transformation -- XXVI Entirely new chapter. The Ascent towards Supermind -- XXVII Entirely new chapter. The Gnostic Being -- XXVIII Entirely new chapter. The Divine Life -- Page 1117 ...
... gleam, Their hearts shall feel the ecstasy and the fire, Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul; Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds, Mere men into spiritual beings grow And see awake the dumb divinity... And, lastly: A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell And take the charge of breath and speech and act. A sudden bliss... ground that nothing unattested by one's mind and senses can be accepted as 'real' then one must land plop in rank materialism and repudiate any divine purpose in life. One must, because such a purpose being beyond the mental comprehension, one cannot help but dub the world an impossible creation which has, somehow, been fathered by blind chance. But no seer worth his salt can accept such a solution because ...
... Kindles the first spark of the word born of the churning - One great characteristic of these mystics, particularly the older ones, is the conception of the spiritual or divine being as Page 224 a human being-the soul, "the man there within this man here," is a human person and the human form has a significant charm which none other possesses. The Spirit, the Divine individualised... usually known as the father of Bengali poetry, being the creator of modern Bengali poetry. He flourished somewhere in the fourteenth century. That wave too subsided and retired into the background, leaving in interregnum again of a century or more till it showed itself once more in another volume of mystic poetry in the hands of a new type of spiritual practitioners. They were the Yogis and Fakirs,... struck the rock-bottom and are wheeling round. For in the present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us. In order to give you a taste of what this poetry is and how it evolved I shall cite samples of the various waves at their crest as they rose from epoch to epoch till today ...
... depths Kindles the first spark of the word born of the churning— One great characteristic of these mystics, particularly the older ones, is the conception of the spiritual or divine being as a human being—the soul, "the man there within this man here," is a human person and the human form has a significant charm which none other possesses The Spirit, the Divine individualised and... usually known as the father of Bengali poetry, being the creator of modem Bengali poetry. He flourished somewhere in the fourteenth century. That wave too subsided and retired into the background, leaving an interregnum again of a century or more till it showed itself once more in another volume of mystic poetry in the hands of a new type of spiritual practitioners. They Page 82 ... the rock-bottom and are wheeling round. For in the present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us. In order to give you a taste of what this poetry is and how it evolved I shall cite samples of the various waves at their crest as they rose from epoch to epoch till ...
... Vrindavan, the Dwaita liberation. Or it may, even being liberated, remain in the Lila or manifestation or descend into it as often as it likes. The Divine is not bound by human philosophies—it is free in its play and free in its essence. One has to get above the cosmic consciousness of the mind, life and matter by entering into the spiritual levels above the ordinary mind, into the higher c... consciousness and goes above. The personal being naturally feels itself as something very small and insignificant in that Infinite. But in that Infinite there are higher and higher levels and it is to these levels that the Mother was leading you when she took you by the hand. This often happens in meditation or trance when one has once gone upward into the spiritual infinity. The reason why you did not see... see the Mother's form was not that the Mother hid herself, or anything in you came between, but that you were both moving in the formless Infinite as spiritual beings and so it was easier to feel the presence than to see any physical form. Not that the form cannot be there, but it is less insistent and therefore not so soon seen as on the physical plane. The silence in the head and heart and the ...
... another destiny and bring it in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly remodel the graph of our physical fate." 199 The so-called finality of fate is thus not quite so final, after all. Fixed fate doesn't rule out free will. The perversity of the outer ego is not the source of this will; on the other... it is God's. 224 Hers is not the love merely of a beautiful face; it is rather a true marriage of minds at the first dawn of spiritual sight. She has found her true lord and lover; she has found true reality, Beyond my body in another's being. . . 225 No, no, Savitri will not bend; she has found her haven. A renewed fill of joy and strength has enriched her since... and Knowledge. 200 When fate seems to bar one's path, there is one recourse possible: appeal to spiritual force. All is possible then. The law itself may be exceeded, and predestination held at bay or even effectively turned back: ...as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new Page 150 ...
... medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one may be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto. "I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right , the Dark Well... this sense that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium... is still intellectual and not concrete in its approach to these things, although his imagination has learned to make itself their transcribing medium. That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience—and that has yet to be made. "Dilip wrote to me in recent times expressing great admiration for Arjava's poems and wanting to ...
... well-being can very well be the means of both coaxing the descent of the higher Force and facilitating the emergence of the veiled Superconscience. Page 697 And out of this double action will ensue the efflorescence of the Divine upon the earth: Earth's bodies shall be conscious of a soul; Mortality's bond-slaves shall unloose their bonds, Mere men into spiritual beings grow... to be a true man. 19 The emphasis throughout is on the substitution of egoistic criteria (rank, personal success, fame etc.) by spiritual criteria like right aspiration, the drive towards constant self-improvement, the straining after perfection. Physical well-being is commended, not as an end in itself, but as the base, the foundation, of "a higher and better life", as the indispensable ādhār... to the Mother's mind, one's vital in harmony with hers, one's very physical consciousness full of her. 12 A sense of nearness to the Mother - of being within the protecting and purifying orbit of her influence, of belonging to the Mother, and being committed to her far aims and immediate concerns - was to be attained. Sri Aurobindo's main point is that what really matters is an inner relation, not ...
... transforming change it induces: it induces the change by raising all things to their own hidden heights of Supernature, as it were - heights at which they are most authentically themselves by being spiritual, by being facets of the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal. Wonderfully synthetical and assimilative, it can also embrace and Indianise the quality of any race, the force of any culture; hence it can... ics a power of multifold assimilation arising from a many-sidedness, a globality, in the unique penchant that is the Indian genius. The Indian genius is, of course, best described as spiritual; but it is not spiritual in a narrow way: it is an urge of synthesis of a hundred approaches to the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. Not only does it spiritualise everything in the long run: it also spiritualises... the genius of a country which is not only synthetical and assimilative in the extreme but also spiritual to the n th degree; for, a speech with extraordinary potentialities of strangely suggestive effects suits most the magic, the mystery, the depth, the sudden and sublime revelatory reach of the spiritual consciousness. English promises, therefore, to be the expressive body par excellence of our ...
... autumns, may we see for hundred autumns, may we speak for hundred autumns, may we hear for hundred autumns, and may we even live more than hundred autumns." In another hymn. the seeker prays for spiritual well-being supported by the physical body and nourished by contentment of all the organs and limbs made capable of stability for the entire span of life. The secrets of longevity and perfect health were... the Science of Life, Ayur Veda, and the concept of physical, mental and spiritual equilibrium was its first principle. The Ayurvedic concept of health is organic and holistic, and it lays a special emphasis on the concept of health as a condition of happiness which transcends mere worldly happiness. It looks upon the human being as a whole consisting of body, mind and spirit. Even the gross physical... understand the concept of health, one needs to realize that health is a holistic concept, that physical health and mental health are interdependent, and there are even deeper moral, aesthetic and spiritual factors which combine together to influence the general state of health. The considerable influence and power of mind upon body is now recognized, and positive thinking is more and more used as an ...
... overmen, who in their turn will render the appearance of the divine species of supramental beings and a new world order possible. “All life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic consciousness must be the manifestation of the realised truth of Spirit; only what can transform itself and find its own spiritual self in that greater Truth and fuse itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance”... will continue existing in the same numbers. His destiny is for the most part collective, although he is the first terrestrial being with a sense of individuality. “It is not indeed necessary or possible that the whole race should transform itself from mental into spiritual beings, but a general admission of the ideal, a widespread endeavour, a conscious concentration are needed to carry the stream of... Aurobindo, “that if such an evolutionary culmination is intended and man is to be its medium, it will only be a few especially evolved human beings who will form the new type and move towards the new life; that once done, the rest of humanity will sink back from a spiritual aspiration no longer necessary for Nature’s purpose and remain quiescent in its normal status. It can equally be reasoned that the human ...
... identity of their beings, and a precondition for the accomplishment of their work. These two pioneer personalities, belonging to two opposite ends of the earth, met on the soil of resurgent India to sow the seeds of a new, a divine humanity and weave a luminous pattern of life for it. They did not meet to swell the traditional cry of world-renunciation and create a parked-up spiritual atmosphere for preparing... conclusive thoroughness since the short-lived heyday of the great but tragic Tantric experiment, let alone the conversion of the collective subconscient. The dominant trend of most of the spiritual disciplines being otherworldly and escapist, the impurities of human nature were not traced to their ultimate roots, but lashed or lulled, and left to seethe or slumber in their unlit depths. It was, indeed... the obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by his soul's union with the Infinite and Eternal. It was precisely to help this spiritual freedom and mastery of man by his union and communion with the Divine that the Mother ...
... identity of their beings, and a precondition for the accomplishment of their work. These two pioneer personalities, belonging to two opposite ends of the earth, met on the soil of resurgent India to sow the seeds of a new, a divine humanity and weave a luminous pattern of life for it. They did not meet to swell the traditional cry of world-renunciation and create a parked-up spiritual atmosphere for... conclusive thoroughness since the short-lived heyday of the great but tragic Tantric experiment, let alone the conversion of the collective subconscient. The dominant trend of most of the spiritual disciplines being otherworldly and escapist, the impurities of human nature were not traced Page 38 to their ultimate roots, but lashed or lulled, and left to seethe or slumber in their... obscure forces of the material life which emerge from the nether reaches of his being and express themselves in his character, temperament and action. This realisation will arouse in him an aspiration for freedom and mastery by his soul's union with the Infinite and Eternal. It was precisely to help this spiritual freedom and mastery of man by his union and communion with the Divine that the Mother ...
... are unique; both evidencing that philosophy and mystical experience could be rendered in poetry; both conferring in a wonderful way poetic concerteness and objectivity on their supernatural or spiritual beings and realms and visions, as only supreme poetry could do. Both are great, but if one wants to hear more frequently the word supernal, resounding with the secret heart-throb of the cosmos, one... divine transformation going on in the cosmic process itself. Although Blake too did see the vision of "Jerusalem" being established in "London", we wonder if this vision had acquired with him the full cosmic sense that was Sri Aurobindo's. And further, although Blake's "spiritual aim was a widening of consciousness," there is no evidence in his poetry that he had a vision of the supramental C... evolving into the spiritual. Blake stands out among the mystic poets of Europe. Kathleen Raine ranks him "as one of the half-dozen greatest men of genius of the modem world," and regards him as one of those spiritual presences that are felt in the world." 19 Sri Aurobindo writes about Blake's creative process that "he did not let his mind disfigure what came I from spiritual vision and audition ...
... Aryama protect the human being with the perfect knowledge of that through which he has to pass, his path, his dangers, his foes, that their protégé , however fiercely & by whatever powers assailed, cannot be crushed. At once, it begins to become clear that the protection in that case must, in all probability, be a spiritual protection against spiritual dangers & spiritual foes. The second verse... abundant fullness and protect him from any who may will to do him hurt, rishah; fed with that fullness he grows until he is sarvah, complete in every part of his being—(that is to say, if we admit the sense of a spiritual protection and a spiritual activity, in knowledge, in power, in joy, in mental, vital & bodily fullness)—and by the efficacy of that protection he enjoys all this fullness & completeness... Page 74 appropriateness in the scattering of human enemies by Varuna as a condition of the seeker after Truth & Right’s reaching a state of sinlessness. It is the spiritual, moral & mental obstacles, the spiritual beings & forces who are opposed to the soul’s perfection, Brahmadwishah, whom Varuna, Mitra & Aryama remove from the path of their worshippers. They smite them & scatter them utterly ...
... anybody accompanying him. A still more subtle aspect may be noted. The broad impression we have so far considered is of a vision that had objective reality in the sense of having been a spiritual being's Page 103 physical-looking "appearance" in front of the beholder as if outside him. But the very passage in Paul (Galatians 1:11-21), which speaks of Christ giving him directly... ent is preceded by a phrase (Galatians 1:15) about God specially choosing Paul while he was still in his mother's womb; 23 but there is not a word in the appearance-event about Paul's being spiritually allotted the wider task outside Jewry. Indeed the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 24 remembering Galatians' turn of speech (1:15) about God calling Paul through his grace, indicates the mandate in... in the Temple, whereas Paul's own direct assertion (Galatians 1:11-21) is that for his mission he was not responsible to anyone except Jesus and needed neither telling nor confirming of it by human beings? The Jerusalem Bible 10 translates Paul: "The fact is, brothers, and I want you to realise this, the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only ...
... logically impossible, yet it must be on this hypothesis the crucial fact of existence, a spiritual mystery, a suprarational paradox. But once we admit the origin of things as a suprarational mystery, we can equally or preferably accept this other crucial fact of the One becoming or being always many and the Many being or becoming the One; this too is at first view dialectically impossible, a suprarational... mental manipulation and discrimination to the point where the veil is broken and he can see; at the end spiritual knowledge comes in to help us to become what we see, to enter into the Light in which there is no Ignorance. It is true that the first origin of the Ignorance is beyond us as mental beings because our intelligence lives and moves within the Ignorance itself and does not reach up to the point... consciousness seems to be identical with Mind; in any case Mind is so dominant a factor of our being that to examine its fundamental movements is the first necessity. In fact, however, Mind is not the whole of us; there is also in us a life and a body, a subconscience and an inconscience; there is a spiritual entity whose origin and secret truth carry us into an occult inward consciousness and a supe ...
... and year after year Sri Aurobindo fought his occult and spiritual battles without anybody around him being aware of it; one only gets some glimpses of his “real Work” in his poems and in Savitri . The Mother has spoken about her battles in the subconscient, her physical sufferings and some of her victories. But who was aware that that Being sitting there in a simple armchair, on the first floor of... dead, feelings of peacefulness, the sense of leaving one’s body, the sense of moving through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, a life review, the crossing of a border, and meetings with other spiritual beings, often deceased friends and relatives. Near-death experiences are reported by about one-third of those who come close to death. Cultural and physiological explanations have been offered, but the... Mother’s writings which have in the meantime come within the compass of science, and there will no doubt be more to come. For there is a spiritual knowledge which is independent of and more true than scientific materialism, bound by the limitations of the human mind. Spiritual insight is based on direct knowledge; mental activity remains inexorably restricted by the human constitution, as has been recognized ...
... surrender. Aspiration is a call of the mind, the heart, and the physical being for Peace, Light, Force, and spiritual realization. Rejection is a refusal of the ignorant movements of one's mental, vital, and physical nature that stand in the way of spiritual realization, being contrary to or incompatible with the truth of one's being. It lies in ... rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences... writes: An immutable impersonal self-existence is his first obvious spiritual self-presentation to the experience of our liberated knowledge, the first sign of his Presence, the first touch and impression of his substance. A universal and transcendent infinite Person or Purusha is the mysterious hidden secret of his very being, unthinkable in form of mind, acintya-rūpa , but very near and present... becoming and surrender. 73 Surrendering to a greater Power so as to let It do the work of transformation, and relying on personal effort to transform one's being, are often described as two opposite methods of spiritual practice. However, from Sri Aurobindo's viewpoint, "The process of surrender is itself a Tapasya." 74 In other words, surrender involves and is part of personal effort. ...
... flawed. The World Health Organization has defined health as the total physical, psycho logical, and spiritual well-being of an individual — yet these concepts are too vague to be very useful. They are not clear about what this well-being actually is, or what is meant by the proper function of the spiritual, physical, and psychological parts of ourselves.... Health, we ordinarily presume, somehow emanates... body. 12. Transcendence of the concern about health may indeed lead to the view of health as irrelevant, but may also lead to an aware ness of the body as being materially alive at all levels. This awareness can generate a spiritual regard for the body, a self-identity with the matter comprising it, leading to an enhanced pattern of health care. 13 The ultimate goal of health care... nebulae, etc. But Bohm's contention is that we are squarely in the middle of these phenomena. He says: Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its "particles", including those constituting human beings, their laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be understood as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status." ...
... economic and even (though here the attempt broke down earlier than in other spheres) her political rule of life, system, turn of existence, with the adumbration of a spiritual significance behind,—the full attainment of the spiritual life being left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual—was as far as her ancient system could advance. This much endeavour, however, she did make with persistence... comprehensive experience, a more certain knowledge that shall reconcile life and the spirit, her ancient mission, to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth, the yet unrealised spiritual potentialities of our existence and so ensoul the life of her people as to make it the Lila of the greater Self in humanity, a conscious communal soul and... stifling the work of the vital and the spiritual intuition under the dead weight of its mechanical method which is the weakness of Europe and has deceived her aspiration and prevented her from arriving at the true realisation of her own higher ideals. It is only by reaching a third stage of the evolution of the collective social as of the individual human being that the ideals first seized and cherished ...
... pamphlet, known as “the Wedge document” we quote the following: “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. … Thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines. … The materialist conception of reality infected virtually... its own great souls and mystics it has suppressed or ridiculed; the great spiritual movements, especially those in the East, it has covered with disdain. “In the Western world theology is wedded to a particular concept of God.” (O’Leary) “We can take the term ‘purposeful designer’ in a very broad sense to refer to any being, principle or mechanism external to our universe.” (Nick Bostrom) For the... depends, must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.” 5 The observer is a living, conscious being. According to the weak principle this being may passively state the fact that the universe has created the (very improbable) circumstances of his being there; the strong principle asserts that all elements in the evolution of the universe must lead to the creation of the ...
... today with the powerful telescopes on and above earth. Another question altogether is whether all this has taken the human being out of the centre of the universe. If the humans were only material things on planet earth, one could say yes. But as they are mental and spiritual beings, they will always perceive “the world,” including its picture as developed by Science, from the centre that they are themselves... and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey of all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! In the spiritual view, now as well as in the past, the human being is an incarnated soul, in other words the Divine incarnated to fulfil His purposes on Earth. This has always been sensed and even concretely experienced by people in all climes... location in the universe. The spiritual view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother says exactly the opposite, as has been considered in another talk. 26 In the present context the following quotations must suffice. The Mother: “In the immensity of the astronomical skies, earth is a thing absolutely without interest and without importance, but from the occult and spiritual point of view, earth is the ...
... Akshara Purusha. The psychic being evolves, so it is not the immutable. The psychic being is especially the soul of the individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in evolution. ( Ibid ., p. 291) The integral Brahman holding the quiescent and the kinetic in its manifestive fold, and yet transcending them, is a spiritual experience which comes in a very... of his own spiritual realisation, of the blank featureless actionless Absolute. He saw only that and discounted what is around as fleeting and false and mundane. Effectively, he threw away God from this world. He saw everything in the scriptures only from this point of view and interpreted these accordingly. The haunting problem of the ultimate reality, “of the unreal there is no being and of the real... Sri Aurobindo, while commenting on the phrase “an eternal portion of Me,” writes: “This is an epithet, a statement of immense bearing and consequence. For it means that each soul, each being in its spiritual reality is the very Divine, however partial its actual manifestation of him in Nature. And it means too, if words have any sense, that each manifesting spirit, each of the many, is an eternal ...
... to surrender itself because of this sense of its own powers—but if it can do so, it becomes an admirable instrument for the Divine Work. No, a weak vital has not the strength to turn spiritually—and being weak more easily falls under a wrong influence and even when it wants, finds it difficult to accept anything beyond its own habitual nature. The strong vital when the will is there can do it... The Parts of the Being and the Planes of Consciousness The Parts of the Being and the Planes of Consciousness The Vertical System: Supermind to Subconscient Letters on Yoga - I Chapter VII The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness The Vital Mind and vital are two different processes of one consciousness. It [ vital ] means prāṇa —it is the ... life-force and desire-force in a man and the part of the being that responds to desire and is the instrument of the life-forces. The True Vital Being and Consciousness There is behind all the vital nature in man his true vital being concealed and immobile which is quite different from the surface vital nature. The surface vital is narrow, ignorant, limited, full of obscure desires, passions, ...
... poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one may be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto. Page 464 I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing... had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual experiences, spiritual knowledge, spiritual feelings, significant visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experiences and yet use the poetic... and error,—a poor mediocre thing, and we will trample and break it to pieces." Part of the work was an attempt to inspire a poetry which would express first the aspiration and labour towards the spiritual or divine and afterwards its realisation and manifestation. There are many who write poetry in the Ashram under this impulse but in the languages which I know best (English perfectly—at least I hope ...
... overcome the old. What then happens is that the old, though put down, weakened and no longer a real part of the nature, resist eviction from the adhar. They are supported by an army of forces or spiritual beings who surround you and live upon your experiences and enjoyments. This law of resistance marks the second period of the Yoga and, unless the Will has already become siddha and the adhar shuddha... Sukshma with reason or the inspired intellect, he knows the Karana with the Jnanam or spiritual realisation. Therefore complete knowledge consists of three operations, first, objective Upalabdhi or experience, secondly, intellectual statement of your understanding of the thing, thirdly, subjective Upalabdhi or spiritual experience. The scientist begins from the bottom and climbs if he can, to the top.... fretful with the rajas, not limited even by the sattwic ahankara—action made one in difference with the Purushottama, my being in His being, my shakti only a particular action of His infinite shakti, of Kali. I am not ignorant, I am not bound, I am not sorrowful: I only play at being ignorant, I only pretend to be bound; like an actor or like an audience I only take the rasa of sorrow. I can throw it ...
... experience that the larger being in us is perfectly aware of all that happens even in what is to our partial and superficial being a state of unconsciousness; it is limited neither by sleep nor by waking. So it is in our relations with Brahman who is our real and integral being. In the ignorance we identify ourselves with only a partial consciousness, mental or spiritual-mental in its nature, which... passivity the mind falls asleep or enters into trance or else is liberated into a spiritual silence; but though it is a liberation from the ignorance of the partial being in its flux of action, it is earned by putting on a luminous nescience of the dynamic Reality or a luminous separation from it: the spiritual-mental being remains self-absorbed in a silent essential status of existence and becomes either... separated from its spiritual and supramental basis, and culminates in this earth-life where the individual consciousness in the many identifies itself by dividing mind with the form, which is the only safe basis of division. But what is the form? It is, at least as we see it here, a formation of concentrated energy, a knot of the force of consciousness in its movement, a knot maintained in being by a constant ...
... all domains of the being—physical, vital, mental, ethical, aesthetic and spiritual. That there is something much vaster and much more important than the mind is underlined in an integral scheme of education. Our present system of education considers mind as the summit of our being, and leaves out of the scheme the. consideration of profounder and sublimer domains of being. In this sceptical age... Narendra' s innate spirituality and provided a protection for the freedom loving disciple against any deviations from the set goal. Sri Ramakrishna commissioned Narendra to look after the spiritual well-being Page 298 O f his brother-disciples, and after the Master's passing on August 16, 1886, these young men banded together as a brotherhood of monks. In spite of a flood of di... had a deep yearning for the truth, even if that meant treading a razor s edge. It is true that he questioned the validity of his spiritual yearning, but when his questioning was answered, he did not desist from pursuing it in full measure. He embraced the path of spiritual realization by accepting and following an exemplary teacher, Sri Ramakrishna. The mark of a good pupil is his self-sustaining ...
... g change it induces: it induces the change by raising all things to their own hidden heights of Supernature, as it were - heights at which they are most authentically themselves by being spiritual, by being facets of the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal. Wonderfully synthetical and assimilative, it can also embrace and Indianise the quality of any race, the force of any culture; hence... interrelated perfection keyed to the highest spiritual yet orchestrating Page 216 all the instruments of being. It is integration in this exalted sense that the Indian genius must ever toil for; it is integration of this kind that is most native to it; and to achieve it we must draw inspiration from our own spiritual depths and surcharge with their quality our... power of multifold assimilation arising from a many-sidedness, a globality, in the unique penchant that is the Indian genius. The Indian genius is, of course, best described as spiritual; but it is not spiritual in a narrow way: it is an urge of synthesis of a hundred approaches to the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. Not only does it spiritualise everything in the long run: it also s ...
... which drives each and every one who sincerely turns towards the spiritual life. However, it could not be the basis from which the transformation of the cells had to start, for they were much too ignorant and enslaved by millennia of dwarfish habits. The Mother often compared the spiritual aspiration to a flame burning in the core of the being, or to a need ‘which takes possession of you and which is so... 32 The gestation of the new species in her was a universal first. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often been asked whether there have been supramental beings on the Earth before. Their answer was unequivocal: some great spiritual beings may have had partial supramental realizations (siddhis) in their mental or vital bodies that showed in their physical body; some may even have had this kind of... could only be the result of a long labour of cleansing. In all its aspects, aspiration is a non-mental longing for something higher, the existence of which the aspiring being feels sure of, even if it has never seen it. The spiritual aspiration stems from the veiled knowledge of the Divine in us. The aspiration to be awakened in the cells of the body has to stem from the veiled knowledge of the Divine ...
... delight of spiritual realisation in our inner consciousness; what we aim at in our yoga is that our outer nature and being too should fully and integrally participate in the spiritual fulfilment. In the inimitable words of Sri Aurobindo: "...we have set out to conquer all ourselves and the world for God; Page 1 we are determined to give him our becoming as well as our being..." (The... make any tempting discrimination between big desires and small desires, noble desires and ignoble desires, spiritual desires and worldly desires. In that way he will surely fall into the dangerous trap laid by the Adversary. Desires are desires, equally detrimental to the spiritual well-being of the sadhaka. Aspiration he must have ardent and ceaseless; but desires which are the unholy progeny of the... (The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 67-68) Such being our goal, we are not allowed to turn our face away from nature and withdraw from it as far as feasible; nor are we permitted to step aside from the turmoils of life and seek the peaceful repose of a safe shelter in the quarantined outer and inner isolation. Our spiritual sadhana has to be undertaken in the very field of nature and in the arena of life ...
... the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one nay be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto. "I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right, the... point of view, the distribution of consonantal and vowel sounds being perfect. That, however, is possible on any level of inspiration. These are technical elements, the Overmind touch does not consist in that but in the undertones or overtones of the rhythmic cry and a language which carries in it a great depth or height or width of spiritual vision, feeling or experience. But all that has to be felt,... that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or Page 92 sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the ...
... mind; this enables the individual mental being in man to finally identify himself with the pure spiritual consciousness that Page 165 exists beyond Mind. This, according to the Indian concept, is the ultimate aim of life. It is on this basis that the whole of Indian life is built. Her religion is an aspiration to the spiritual consciousness and its fruits; her philosophy... whole dharma or law of being is founded upon it. This is her conception of progress. To the Indian mind, the true meaning of progress is this spiritual progress, not merely the externally self-unfolding process of an always more and more prosperous and efficient material civilization. It is her founding of life upon this exalted conception and her urge towards the spiritual and the eternal that constitute... her ancient system could advance. The full attainment of the spiritual life being was left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual. However, she did make that endeavour with persistence and patience. There was a constant reminder of the spiritual aim even in the political and social life; and this effort by itself Page 170 gave a peculiar type to her social ...
... speaking of consciousness as the human being knows it. The Brahman state is that of a supreme existence supremely aware of itself, Swayamprakasa;it is Sachchidananda, Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Even if it be spoken of as beyond That, parat param, it does not mean that it is a state of Non-existence or Non-consciousness, but beyond even the highest spiritual substratum (the " foundation above "... within; then our external being seems to us. something small and superficial, we are, or can become, aware of the large and rich and inexhaustible kingdom within. So also consciousness in us has drawn a lid or covering, or whatever one likes to call it, between the lower planes of mind, life, body supported by the psychic and the higher planes which contain the spiritual kingdom where the self is... composed. ___________________ 11 On Yoga II, Tome One, P. 257-258 Page 143 of parts, it is fundamental to being and itself formulates any parts it chooses to manifest developing them from above downward by a progressive coming down from spiritual levels towards involution in Matter or formulating them in an upward working in the front by what we call evolution. If it chooses ...
... life and physical part to grow into the full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to bring in the fiat of an arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless Maya. Page 434 But there is too a higher mental and spiritual basis for the philosophy of world-negation and here we... something not altogether real imposed for a time on the sole true Reality. But here all turns on the mind's conception or the mental being's experience of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative,—even if it is a spiritual experience, how far it is absolutely conclusive, solely imperative. The cosmic Illusion is sometimes envisaged—though that is not... come to us the records of happenings seen or experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal being into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic dreams, a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life or the life of others, reveal elements of our or their mental being and life-being or disclose influences on them of which our waking self is totally ignorant; but sometimes ...
... self-image of being spiritual. So you deny other desires in you that would not fit in with your self-image. And when you deny even to yourself the desires that you have, they become stronger. And suddenly they burst into your life and create havoc. And you don't know what's happening to you anymore. You [find that] you have done something dreadful! [chuckle] It often happens to spiritual people. Suddenly... kettle, [chuckle] So will power sometimes seems to yield results, but they are never lasting. Usually, will power is associated with a need to actualize the self-image of a more perfect, more spiritual human being who is not angry anymore, [laughter] So bring Presence to it. If Presence is obscured, especially in the case of anger that has lived in you for many years (some people's pain-bodies are pr... Purusha or the Conscious Being, and Prakriti or Nature. Three aspects of Nature are distinguished, namely, matter, life, and mind. Corresponding to these three aspects of Nature (Prakriti), three aspects of the Conscious Being (Purusha) are spoken of, namely, physical Conscious Being [Annamaya Purusha], the vital Conscious Being [Pranamaya Purusha], and the mental Conscious Being [Manomaya Purusha]. The ...
... the being. In the fullness of integrality, the highest spiritual consciousness manifests itself fully on all the planes of the being, including the mental, the vital and the physical. However, there are subordinate meanings of integral aims, and these aims, even while integrating all the parts of the being, may not find it possible to manifest the highest consciousness in all parts of the being. For... life of Socrates; Cyrenaic School by Aristippus, 33 Page 19 Epicureanism by Epicurus,34 a school which developed from the Cyrenaic school; Stoicism35 as improving the individual's spiritual well-being through self-control, fortitude and detachment; and finally Platonism,36 the founder of which was so influenced by his teacher that their lofty thoughts are united for eternity. There were others... learned that virtue is knowledge, and from Parmenides he learned that there is only one Reality The Being, while multiplicity, motion and sense perception (also called non-being) are illusory. Therefore, virtue is the knowledge of that Being (call it God, Intelligence, The Good, the One Absolute Being) and becoming (call it the many, evil), is its opposite. Other virtues, such as kindness, benevolence ...
... cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to... dynamic silence. The bright lustre of a steady fife glows in him everywhere, even while participating energetically in the dramatic action of the world; but he has the detachment of a true spiritual aesthete, "being steadfast and unshaken by even the heaviest of storms", as the Gita would say. That is why we see in Vyasa a constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements... itself, on participation in the endeavour, becomes their reward. Page 126 The gods and the sages help mankind grow in the dharma, which is in fact the law of the inner being in perfect accord with spiritual truths. That is the work of supreme sacrifice, of the offering of the will-to-be, of the bright Yajna dear to the creator and to the builders of society cherishing enduring values. ...
... Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is bom to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human farther, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to... dynamic silence. The bright lustre of a steady fire glows in him everywhere, even while participating energetically in the dramatic action of the world: but he has the detachment of a true spiritual aesthete, "being steadfast and unshaken by even the heaviest of storms," as the Gita would say. That is why we see in Vyasa a constant presence of great Idea-Forces and Ideals supporting life and its movements... in the process, that itself, on participation in the endeavour, becomes their reward. The gods and the sages help mankind grow in the dharma, which is in fact the law of the inner being in perfect accord with spiritual truths. That is the work of supreme sacrifice, of the offering of the will-to-be, of the bright Yajna dear to the creator and to the builder of society cherishing enduring values ...
... of some glorious spiritual substance within. What I mean is the understanding of what it means to be a human being. Education must impart this understanding and enable us to put specialized knowledge in its proper place in the total scheme of values. First we must realize that the human being exists at three different levels simultaneously—the biological, the mental and the spiritual. This is the peculiarity... e from continuous process of learning. This learning entails the progressive evolution of the leader's identity from a fragmented body-mind-senses self to the spiritual wholeness of being. The leader is, therefore, primarily a state of being (consciousness) and only then an agent of doing (executive functions). The Indian model of leadership is that of the rajarshi, a combination of the illumined... the unity of being. He moves with a sense of responsibility for the whole and not by the impelling forces of the conditioned mind of the collective or the forces of the market economy. He is free from the fear of the contingencies of life, and the pressures of conformism for security. He is sensitive to the spiritual dimensions of human existence and respects nature and life in all beings. We are faced ...
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