... firm metaphysical building, it may be concluded, can be erected upon these shifting quick- sands. But the theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with the scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution. According to the theory of spiritual evolution, there are three stages in the process of becoming. An involution of the spirit in the inconscience is the beginning. An evolution... ng by self-exceeding? A spiritual evolution, it is affirmed, an evolution of consciousness in Matter, in a constant developing self- formulation till the form, even the physical body, can reveal the highest supramental knowledge and power and harmony is the key-note, the central significant motive of terrestrial existence. The theory of spiritual evolution may accept the scientific account... account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. What is common "between the theory of spiritual evolution and scientific theory is the account of certain outward aspects of evolution, namely, that there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent organization of Matter, of Life in Matter ...
... The Supramental Evolution Letters on Yoga - I Chapter II Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental Human History and Spiritual Evolution There have been times when the seeking for spiritual attainment was, at least in certain civilisations, more intense and widespread than now or rather than it has been in the world in general during the past few centuries... to greater Page 271 Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible. My view is that this conversion is not only possible, but inevitable in the spiritual evolution of the being here. The embodiment of life has nothing to do with it. This embodiment is not of life, but of consciousness and its energy, of which life is only one phase or force. As life has... t. I do not see what answer you can give to your uncle that would satisfy him, as he is evidently living in the mentality of the past and would not readily understand anything about spiritual evolution, the supermind and the Divine Manifestation in life and matter. You can perhaps tell him casually that it is not our hope to transform suddenly the whole human race. Your object is precisely ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVI The Ascent towards Supermind Masters of the Truth-Light who make the Truth grow by the Truth. Rig Veda. (I. 23. 5.) Three powers of Speech that carry the Light in their front,... a triple house of peace, a triple way of the Light. Rig Veda. (VII. 101. 1, 2... intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive. The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed... concert of knowledge, a more manifold delight of being. But there are certain reasons arising from its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action taking its stand on the ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXII Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality He passes in his departure from this world to the physical Self; he passes to the Self of life; he passes to the Self of mind; he passes to the Self of knowledge; he passes to the Self of bliss; he moves through these worlds... raises the question of the principle and process of the passage to other worlds, which must be the scene of these intervals, and the return to earth-life. A third question is the process of the spiritual evolution itself and the mutations which the soul undergoes in its passage from birth to birth through the stages of its adventure. If the physical universe were the sole manifested world, or if it... in its manifestation in Nature; all would then turn on the degree of its capacity for entering a higher status than the earthly life. But in the ordinary notion of reincarnation the idea of a spiritual evolution is not explicit, it is only implied in the fact that the soul has to reach the point at which it becomes capable of transcending the necessity of rebirth and returning to its eternal source; ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXIV The Evolution of the Spiritual Man Even as men come to Me, so I accept them. It is my path that men follow from all sides.... Whatever form the worshipper chooses to worship with faith, I set in him firm faith in it, and with that faith he puts his yearning into his adoration and... natural form or action, extending itself upward into a transcendence of which the limits are not visible. It is these liberations of the spiritual part in us which are the decisive steps of the spiritual evolution in Nature. It is only through these decisive movements that the true character of the evolution becomes evident; for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of the psychic... perception and an instinctive urge or seeking without any acquired experience or clear knowledge. Even the formations which are the first effects of the perception or urge or the first indices of a spiritual evolution, must inevitably be of this incomplete and tentative nature. But the error so created comes very much in the way of a true understanding, and it must therefore be emphasised that spirituality ...
... vision is pointed to a truth that exceeds the human mind and, if at all realised in his members, would turn human life into a divine superlife. And not until this third largest sweep of the spiritual evolution has come into its own, can Indian civilisation be said to have discharged its mission, to have spoken its last word and be functus officio , crowned and complete in its office of mediation between... the luminous grandeurs of spiritual truth and its practice was kept ready and its means of attainment provided for the third and greatest type of human being, the third loftiest stage of the spiritual evolution. The complete light of spiritual knowledge when it emerges from veil and compromise and goes beyond all symbols and middle significances, the absolute and universal Page 222 divine... things were the heritage of the human being ready for divinity and their way and call were the supreme significances of Indian religion and Yoga. He reached by them the fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the Self and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being, a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence. But distinctions are lines that can always ...
... knowledge declare, there has been a spiritual evolution from down upwards,—though the modern speaks only of an evolution of the body with the consciousness Page 262 depending on it and the ancient, as in the Tantras, only of a spiritual evolution of the soul from vegetable life-form to the human mind-life,—then there is no reason why this spiritual evolution should not arrive beyond its present... power and the effective process. It must so also be done in the achievement of harmony in a still discordant earth-nature. Is there any conclusive reason for declaring such an achievement or spiritual evolution impossible? The only argument you advance amounts to this only that it has not been done yet and that shows that it cannot be done. That reasoning has not much value. It is the usual logic of ...
... insignificant spiral amid the vast circlings of the Eternal's becoming in the universe 57 Spiritual Evolution of the Soul and Terrestrial Existence; Key to the new Integral Aim of Life The central point of importance in the solution lies in the discovery of Sri Aurobindo that spiritual evolution is the sense of our birth and terrestrial existence. In the light of this discovery, he found... of the manifestation of the Supermind and of the transformation of Matter leading to true integration of the Spirit and Matter. That is the reason why he lays a great stress on the theme of spiritual evolution and regards a complete involution of all that Spirit is and its evolutionary self-unfolding as the secret meaning and significance of our material existence. As Sri Aurobindo points out:... instrumentation of human thought and action in this world of earth-nature. According to Sri Aurobindo, this is the first truth and the essence of the matter; but still, from the point of view of spiritual evolution, this would be only an individual liberation and perfection in an unchanged environmental existence. He points out that for a greater dynamic earth-nature itself, a spiritual change of the whole ...
... chapters: Volume One: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe' Volume Two: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance -The Spiritual Evolution' Part One: 'The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance' Part Two: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution' From an inquiry into the place of "man-as-he-is" in the universe, the argument proceeds to a discussion of the 'how':... makes it create these intricate patterns of desire and pain and pleasure and incapacity. IV The second Part of the second Volume of The Life Divine - "The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution" - begins with a brilliant summing-up of the conclusions of the first Part and an indication of the ground yet to be covered in the second: This then is the origin, this the nature,... aspiration for change. After the immersion of the Spirit as a result of the material devolution, and after the phase of evolution in the Ignorance in transitional Man, now the stress naturally is on spiritual evolution, but in such a way that the triad matter-life-mind may also receive the transforming touch of the Spirit. In his arduous and anxious climb towards the heights, Man seeks support and light from ...
... the Cosmic Self and the Divine Reality. The history of spiritual evolution has witnessed even the higher ranges of Himalayan eminences and peaks of highest nature. And beyond these heights, the paths have been built towards the supramental ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence. The recent developments of the spiritual evolution have opened up the paths of the supramental descent and supramental... t spiral amid the vast circlings of the Eternal's becoming in the universe." viii Spiritual Evolution of the Soul and Terrestrial Existence: Key to the new Integral Aim of Life The central point of importance in the solution lies in the discovery of Sri Aurobindo that spiritual evolution is the sense of our birth and terrestrial existence. In the light of this discovery, he found... of yoga and specialized processes of yoga, and there have also been various systems of the synthesis of yoga. If there is today a need for a new synthesis of yoga, it is because the object of spiritual evolution of the growing individual and of the graded development of terrestrial existence has come to be conceived in terms of the largest and ever progressive totality of integration, and this integration ...
... realize Parabrahman Itself, that is the cessation of Yoga; for we depart utterly from Oneness & difference and no longer envisage the world of phenomena at all; that is Nirvana. Chapter II. Spiritual Evolution in Brahman It is in this infinitely motionless, yet infinitely moving Brahman that Matariswan or Prana, the great Breath of things, the mighty principle of Life, disposes forms and solidities... animal forms until in the course of differentiation by selection the body of man was developed as a perfect temple for the gods and a satisfactory instrument for sensational, intellectual and spiritual evolution. When the Swetaswatara sums up the process of creation in the pregnant formula "One seed developed into many forms", it is simply crystallizing the one general idea on which the whole of Indian... self-existence. In examining and analysing these spiritual conditions in their respective bodies the Rishis arrived at a theory of psychical evolution contained within and dependent on the spiritual evolution already described. The basis of psychical as of spiritual existence is the pure Self called the Paramatman or Supreme Self when it manifests in the Cosmos and the Jivatman or individual Self ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXIII Man and the Evolution The one Godhead secret in all beings, all-pervading, the inner Self of all, presiding over all action, witness, conscious knower and absolute... the One in control over the many who are passive to Nature, fashions one seed in many ways. Swetaswatara Upanishad... Rig Veda. (I. 95. 4, 5.) From the non-being to true being, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. (I. 3. 28.) A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key note, the central significant motive of the t... of Consciousness and that the material Inconscience has been laid down as a basis for the reascent of the Spirit, admit ting that rebirth is a fact, a part of the terrestrial order, still a spiritual evolution of the individual being is not an inevitable consequence of any of these admissions or even of all of them together. It is possible to take another view of the spiritual significance and the ...
... Aurobindo points out that the theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with the scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life. The theory of spiritual evolution may accept the scientific account of the physical evolution as a support or an element, but that support is not indispensable. What is common between the theory of spiritual evolution and scientific theory is the account of... dispute, once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshalled. The dispute arises in regard to those aspects which are not indispensable for the theory of spiritual evolution, namely, the precise machinery by which the evolutionary process is effected or the exact genealogy or chronological succession of types of beings, the development of one form of life out... Aurobindo points out, this may or may not be accepted; what is of primary consequence is the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan in it. The essential point in the theory of spiritual evolution is the fact of evolution of consciousness, a progression of a spiritual manifestation in material existence, and that essential point follows naturally from the refutation of the materialism ...
... building can, it may be concluded, be erected upon these shifting quick- sands. In reply, it may be urged that the theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with the scientific theory of form- evolution and physical life-evolution. According to the theory of spiritual evolution, there are three stages in the process of becoming. An involution of the spirit in the inconscience is the beginning. An... have for its secret of significance the revelation of Being in a perfect Becoming. The theory of spiritual evolution may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. What is common between the theory of spiritual evolution and scientific theory is the account of certain outward aspects of evolution, namely, that there is in... dispute, once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshalled. The dispute arises in regard to those aspects which are not indispensable for the theory of spiritual evolution, namely, the precise machinery by which the evolutionary process is effected or the exact genealogy or chronological succession of types of being, the development of one form of life out of a ...
... higher levels of consciousness. The scientific theory of physical evolution, states Sri Aurobindo, deals only with the outward and visible machinery of a process which is fundamentally a spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness. The first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter. Matter is not inert substance as it appears to be, but a form of consciousness which is closest to Inconscience... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being of a greater and higher kind and of a larger sweep and completeness than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world. 10 ... more complex forms of Matter which can embody and express increasingly greater powers of consciousness; this is the physical aspect of evolution; secondly, after the emergence of Mind, a spiritual evolution consisting in an ascent towards progressively higher gradations of consciousness above the ordinary mind; thirdly, Page 396 an integration of what has already evolved into each ...
... fascinate anybody who has the patience and the perceptivity to study and understand them. And knowledge of them puts the importance of the Aurobindian revolution in perspective. Positivist and Spiritual Evolution The central theme of this talk is that the macrocosm, and in it the human being as the microcosm, are brought about by a divine creative Force above and behind them, which Sri Aurobindo calls... the other end, from below, will not admit it. But, all the same, it is not for ignorance to dictate knowledge to wisdom! … Conception precedes manifestation and expression.” “A theory of spiritual evolution,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution [e.g. the Darwinian theory]; it must stand on its own inherent justification:... Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, and evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence. ” 12 We can only now begin to appreciate how clear and detailed Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XX The Philosophy of Rebirth An end have these bodies of an embodied soul that is eternal; it is not born nor dies nor is it that having been it will not be again. It is unborn, ancient, everlasting; it is not slain with the slaying of the body. As a man casts from him his worn-out garments... rebirth of the soul in the body becomes a natural and unavoidable consequence of the truth of the Becoming and its inherent law. Rebirth is an indispensable machinery for the working out of a spiritual evolution; it is the only possible effective condition, the obvious dynamic process of such a manifestation in the material universe. Our explanation of the evolution in Matter is that the universe... and not one alone? For the same reason that has made the human birth itself a culminating point of the past succession, the previous upward series,—it must be so by the very necessity of the spiritual evolution. For the soul has not finished what it has to do by merely developing into humanity; it has still to develop that humanity into its higher possibilities. Obviously, the soul that lodges in a ...
... with difficulties and dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice, however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of the Consci... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXV The Triple Transformation A conscious being is in the centre of the self, who rules past and future; he is like a fire without smoke.... That, one must disengage with patience from one's own body. Katha Upanishad. (II. 1. 12, 13; II. 3. 17.) An intuition in the heart ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVI The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence When all the desires that cling to the heart are loosed away from it, then the mortal becomes immortal, even here he possesses the Eternal. [Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. (IV. 4. 7.)](https://upanishads.org.... other views tend to isolate. In this last category would fall our view of our existence here as a Becoming with the Divine Being for its origin and its object, a progressive manifestation, a spiritual evolution with the supracosmic for its source and support, the other-worldly for a condition and connecting link and the cosmic and terrestrial for its field, and with human mind and life for its nodus... intolerantly condemns them, is therefore by that very fact, whatever its other truth or merit or utility, or whatever its suitability to individuals of a certain temperament or in a certain stage of spiritual evolution, unfit to be the general and complete rule of human living. Nature takes good care that the race shall not neglect these aims which are a necessary part of her evolution; for they fall within ...
... if we can once find it to be a truth and recognise its antecedents and consequences, we have a very sufficient clue for an answer to all these connected sides of the one perpetual question. A spiritual evolution of which our universe is the scene and earth its ground and stage, though its plan is still kept back above from our yet limited knowledge,—this way of seeing existence is a luminous key which... difficult, plastic material and its besieging battery of multiform stimulus and suggestions, is hardly at all clearer than before. But the perception of rebirth as an occasion and means for a spiritual evolution fills in every hiatus. It makes life a significant ascension and not a mechanical recurrence; it opens to us the divine vistas of a growing soul; it makes the worlds a nexus of spiritual sel... only a pedestal of form corresponding in its evolution to the ascending degrees of the spirit, but the spiritual growth is the real sense and motive. What is behind us is the past terms of the spiritual evolution, the upward gradations of Page 303 spirit already climbed, by which through constant rebirth we have developed what we are, and are still developing this present and middle human term ...
... 354 eternity and shaping the work of a future eternity. Our every thought, will, action carries with it its power of future self-determination and is too a help or a hindrance for the spiritual evolution of those around us and a force in the universal working. For the soul in us takes in the influences it receives from others for its own self-determination and gives out influences which the soul... eternal full stop, an endless repose, an infinite cessation? Much rather should infinity be eternally capable of an infinite self-expression. The births of the soul are the series of a constant spiritual evolution, and it might well seem that when the evolution is finished, and that must be, it might at first appear, when the soul involved in ignorance returns to self-knowledge, the series of our births... phase and partial appearance. To find self is the cure of suffering, because self is infinite possession and perfect satisfaction. But to find self in quiescence is not the whole meaning of the spiritual evolution, but to find it too in its power of being; for being is not only eternal status, but also eternal movement, not only rest, but also action. There is a delight of rest and a delight of action ...
... significance or its divine possibility? That is the clear conclusion we must arrive at in the end, if we once admit as the key of the whole movement, the reality of this 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... involution or concealment in the forms of its workings could not be known in the greatness of its reality. Spirit and Nature discovering the secret of her energies become one at the top of the spiritual evolution by a soul in Nature which awakens to the significance of its own being in the liberation of the highest truth: it comes to know that its births were the births, the assumptions of form of an... and rises to the possession of the revealed, full and highest power of its own real and spiritual nature. That liberation, because liberation is self-possession, comes to us as the crown of a spiritual evolution. We must consider all the packed significance of this involution. The spirit involved in material energy is there with all its powers; life, mind and a greater supramental power are involved ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XIX Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge Seven steps has the ground of the Ignorance, seven steps has the ground of the Knowledge. Mahopanishad. (V. 1.) He found the vast Thought with seven heads that is born of the Truth; he created some... half-light. A surface mental knowledge of the physical universe is a still more imperfect guide; for the thinking animal it might be enough, but not for a race of mental beings in labour of a spiritual evolution. Even the truth of physical things cannot be entirely known, nor can the right use of our material existence be discovered by physical Science and an outward knowledge alone or made possible... much a law as the truth acting in its own consciousness and in a free luminous plastic automatic process of its knowledge. This would seem to be the method and the result of the conscious spiritual evolution; a transformation of the life of the Ignorance into the divine life of the truth-conscious spirit, a change from the mental into a spiritual and supramental way of being, a self-expansion out ...
... You, like Teilhard, stop short of the inherent implication of such a spirituality. You as well as he speak of a final breakaway from the terrestrial scene. That would be the frustration of a spiritual evolution starting with the Divine's involution in material substance. I am afraid you shirk the logic of the spiritual consummation called for, simply because of the Christian preconception of a Parousia... mistranslated form an Aurobindonian motif more vividly and more suggestively than any Page 78 other faint presage of the final consequence visualised by Sri Aurobindo of earth's spiritual evolution. Then there is the ultimate question: "What lies behind this doctrine?" Is there a historical fact of whatever kind? You refer to the resurrection as "solidly based historically". Surely... anticipate your manner, though he has much of it. Your manner is Aurobindonian, except that you do not yet see how logical and necessary it is to postulate rebirth if you are to postulate spiritual evolution and if it is in souls that this evolution is carried on. Life being involved in matter, and mind in life, and spirit and supermind in mind, and the evolution proceeding from such involution ...
... past history of the earth of which the living record remains in the embryo; but the physical evolution is only an outward sign, means and material condition of a still more secret evolution. A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness is the inner fact which alone illumines the problem of earth existence and opens to it its true solution; apart from it our life here has no intelligible significance... the instruments of the spirit in a medium of matter is the whole fundamental significance of the values of the earth-existence. All its other laws are its values of operation and process; the spiritual evolution is its one pervading secret sense. The history of the earth is first an evolution of organised forms by the working of material forces. There follows on this initial stage an evolution... now below his tops and belongs to an inferior creation. This reversal is the sign of a decisive victory and the seal of a radical progress in Nature. The new consciousness attained in the spiritual evolution is always higher in grade and power, always larger, more comprehensive, wider in sight and feeling, richer and finer in faculties, more complex, organic, dominating than the consciousness that ...
... fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul's manifestation in material existence.'' 19 It is through his theory of evolution that Sri Aurobindo so triumphantly brings together the fundamental truths of materialism and spirituality. According to him what is evolving is consciousness, and evolution is basically spiritual. Evolution is preceded... also opens up new vistas. He has explained the difference between the scientific theory of form-evolution and his theory of the evolution of consciousness in these words: "A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form evolution and physical-life evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: It may accept the scientific account of physical ...
... of evolution took place in water), Tortoise (amphibian), Boar (mammal), Dwarf (hominid), Rama with the ax ( Homo habilis or ergaster ), Rama with the bow ( Homo sapiens ), followed by the spiritual evolution of humanity in Krishna, the Buddha, and Kalki, the future avatar. This “procession of the avatars” is unmistakable. It should be clear that “avatar” in this context has no relation to the present... only the abstraction of the Truth and to seize it completely or express it completely there is needed a concrete experience and a more living and full-bodied language.” (LD 357) “A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification; it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution... Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery; but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, as progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” (LD 836) “Earth-life is not a lapse into the mire of something undivine, vain and miserable ...
... scientifically unreal. Science too, the standard bearer of matter and of the concrete, has declared the human experience and consequently the experienced world to be an illusion! Material and Spiritual Evolution It may seem amazing how near E.F. Schumacher brings the higher animal to the human being. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother go still further in this. ‘Man and the animal are both mentally conscious... the goal of evolution on Earth are spiritual; the mechanisms of evolution are procedures of the spirit in matter, and its results are ever higher gradations of material forms. ‘A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution... Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.’ (The Life Divine, p. 835) Seen from the standpoint of the Spirit, ‘the material universe ...
... mutations by itself. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, this is the end of sexuality. We have reached the stage at which we can switch from natural evolution through sexual power to spiritual evolution through the power of consciousness. Nature generally does not let organs linger that no longer serve her evolutionary design, so we can foresee that the sexual function will atrophy in those... is to say, to lead the rather brute man we still are to a more conscious man, more capable of grasping the true sense of his evolution, and finally wholly capable of switching from natural to spiritual evolution. The inequality of development in individuals is the obvious reason why we cannot make general rules or hand out infallible prescriptions. To each stage its law. But after however long a time... discipline of accelerated evolution on a principle that runs counter to evolution. Moreover, anyone who has even barely crossed the difficult line, the point X of the transition from natural to spiritual evolution, cannot but realize that all the pseudo-mystic attempts to prettify the sexual relations between man and woman are shams. I have nothing against sexual relations (God knows!), but trying to ...
... practical and vital issues life puts before us.10 Sri Aurobindo has examined this entire chain of argument in detail. But, in brief, he points to the examination of the significance of the spiritual evolution of man, not from a judgment that proceeds from a view of things which in itself is bound to pass into discredit. For that judgment depends ultimately on the circular argument that the material... more than it has done so far. On the other hand, spirituality itself has to develop a higher instrumental dynamic power than what the mind can provide. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the spiritual evolution of Nature is still in process and incomplete; its main preoccupation has been to affirm and develop a basis of spiritual consciousness and knowledge and to create more and more a foundation or... him to the supreme Reality and release him from Nature or Prakriti of the three gunas, or from the Ignorance in which Nature as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, then the task of spiritual evolution has in essence been already accomplished. The ways have been built, the capacity to follow them has been developed, and all that is left is for each soul to reach individually the right stage ...
... confined merely to philosophical and spiritual knowledge, but which extended also to fields of literature, psychology, and social and political thought. The all-embracing idea was, however, that of spiritual evolution, which subsumed within itself the latest knowledge of physics and biology. Warrior and hero of Indian independence, Sri Aurobindo had now scaled vast heights of knowledge and power and had launched... instead, of a sort of inner transformation.² *** In his magnum opus, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo has explained at length the philosophy of ascent and descent in the context of spiritual evolution and provided a detailed exposition of the entire process of integral transformation, consisting of a triple transformation, the psychic, the spiritual and the supramental. Sri Aurobindo uses... passages on the subject are given in Appendix III. ² Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, Centenary library, Vol. 24, p. 1154. Page 79 from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. As Sri Aurobindo explains it: In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform ...
... twenty-eight chapters: Vol I: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe' Vol II: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution' Part I: "The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance' Part II: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. The argument, reduced to fundamentals, is simplicity itself. In the first volume, Sri Aurobindo describes the nature... 61 Faced by so formidable a revelation, people have been obliged to Page 32 seek suitable comparisons. D.S. Sarma calls it "a vast philosophical prose epic...on the spiritual evolution of the universe" and describes Sri Aurobindo as "a self-exiled and self-imprisoned Dante" and The Life Divine as, "a philosophical Divina Commedia having its Inferno in the Spirit's descent ...
... have not been carefully registered and brought together. Page 173 7. Evolution In my explanation of the universe I have put forward this cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here. It is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital, the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised... supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and whole Self-Knowledge and world-Knowledge; it is through that only that we can get to our true being and the fulfilment of our spiritual evolution. October 8, 1945 All true Gurus are the same, the one Guru, because all are the one Divine. That is a fundamental and universal truth which justifies Krishnaprem’s statement ...
... into the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from life into mind, from mind into the spirit.” 27 Sri Aurobindo wrote even more explicitly: “A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution... to be considerably changed [as in the meantime it has on several occasions] or may be dropped altogether in the light of a new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” 28 There is, finally, an important concept to be found in the scheme of things as proposed ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXI The Order of the Worlds Seven are these worlds in which move the life-forces that are hidden within the secret heart as their dwelling-place seven by seven. Mundaka Upanishad. (II. 1. 8.) May the Peoples of the five Births accept my sacrifice, those who are born... its branches downward; this is Brahman, this is the Immortal; in it are lodged all the worlds and none goes beyond it. This and That are one. Katha Upanishad. (II. 3. 1.) If a spiritual evolution of consciousness in the material world and a constant or repeated rebirth of the individual into an earthly body are admitted, the next question that arises is whether this evolutionary movement ...
... incarnations of the Buddha, often with a teaching implied in them, and are not a part of the Hindu system. To the Buddhists Buddha was not an Avatar at all, he was the soul climbing up the ladder of spiritual evolution till it reached the final stage of emancipation—although Hindu influence did make Buddhism develop the idea of an eternal Buddha above, that was not a universal or fundamental Buddhistic idea... the evolutionary idea, such a thing may have its place. If Buddha taught something different from Krishna, that Page 488 does not prevent his advent from being necessary in the spiritual evolution. The only question is whether the attempt to scale the heights of an absolute Nirvana through negation of cosmic existence was a necessary step or not, having a view to the fact that one can ...
... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being, an advance of a greater and higher kind and of a larger sweep and completeness than that smaller though decisive achievement of the emerging Consciousness when a mentalised being... have disappeared. The object of supramentalisation is a body fitted to embody and express the physical consciousness on earth so long as one remains in the physical life. It is a step in the spiritual evolution on the earth, not a step in the passage towards a supraphysical world. The supramentalisation is the most difficult part of the change arrived at by the supramental Yoga, and all depends on whether ...
... to evade the concept of a soul going through many lives, getting diverse experiences, gradually rising higher and higher. If evolution is a fact and if it is to have a spiritual meaning, the spiritual evolution can proceed only through the progress of an individual soul through a series of lives across the ages. Reincarnation in a literal sense is unavoidable in a spiritually evolutionary world-vision... Life Divine and put it in the right framework. If Griffiths is drawing strength, as he does, from modern science for his spiritual outlook he can ill afford to get round the individual soul's spiritual evolution. He has accepted many truths of the Spirit from India, which his too conservative co-religionists would be inclined to look askance at. It is best not to jibe at literal reincarnation. Perhaps ...
... to evade the concept of a soul going through many lives, getting diverse experiences, gradually rising higher and higher. If evolution is a fact and if it is to have a spiritual meaning, the spiritual evolution can proceed only through the progress of an individual soul through a series of lives across the ages. Reincarnation in a literal sense is unavoidable in a spiritually evolutionary world-vision... Life Divine and put it in the right framework. If Griffiths is drawing strength, as he does, from modern science for his spiritual outlook he can ill afford to get round the individual soul's spiritual evolution. He has accepted many truths of the Spirit from India, which his too conservative co-religionists would be inclined to look askance at. It is best not to jib at literal reincarnation. Perhaps ...
... concert of knowledge, amore manifold delight of being. But there are certain reasons arising from its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action taking its stand on the... l body. The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. The physical body is a basis of action, which can not be neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution. A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine being living on earth will be necessarily a part of the supramental transformation. 'Pushed to its highest conclusion', ...
... of yoga and specialized processes of yoga, and there have also been various systems of the synthesis of yoga. If there is today a need for a new synthesis of yoga, it is because the object of spiritual evolution of the growing individual and of the graded development of terrestrial existence has come to be conceived in terms of the largest and ever progressive totality of integration, and this integration... the forms and outsides of the various yogic disciplines and various processes of successive practise. This synthesis is thus neither a combination in mass nor by successive practice. The spiritual evolution which is the key of the new synthesis of yoga considers the individual soul and the universal principles of Matter, Life and Mind to be intertwined in an evolutionary process which has so far ...
... PART ONE. Book One: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe; Book Two: The Knowledge and the Ignorance — The Spiritual Evolution; Part I: The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance. Volume 19 The Life Divine, BOOK Two, PART Two: The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. Volume 20 The Synthesis of Yoga , PARTS ONE AND Two: Introduction: The Conditions ...
... chapters, appeared in November 1939, when Hitler had already overrun Poland and partitioned it with Russia. The second volume of The Life Divine, "The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution", appeared in two Parts in April 1940, synchronising with Hitler's swoop upon Denmark and Norway, followed by the massive invasion of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. We have seen... Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind: it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing ...
... a standard of legal justice, to dole out deterrents and sanctions, rewards and penalties, ferocious pains of hell, indulgent joys of paradise. He is the Divine in the world, the Master of a spiritual evolution and the growing godhead in humanity. That godhead grows however slowly beyond the dependence on the sanctions of pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure govern our primary being and in that primary... above the first formulation of the world energy here, may be influences from superior planes of the universal existence, but they are still a part of the economy of Karma here, a process of the spiritual evolution in the body. And they bring in a higher soul nature and will and action and consequence, a higher rule of Karma. The law of Karma is therefore not simply an extension of the human idea of ...
... a general law and all these considerations have been the enunciation of quite general principles and refer indiscriminately to all actions and to all men alike. All can eventually arrive by spiritual evolution to this strong discipline, this large perfection, this highest spiritual state. But while the general rule of mind and action is the same for all men, we see too that there is a constant law... a man's inborn nature and course of life are essentially determined by his own past lives, are the self-development already effected by his past Page 513 actions and mental and spiritual evolution and cannot depend solely on the material factor of his ancestry, parentage, physical birth, which can only be of subordinate moment, one effective sign perhaps, but not the dominant principle ...
... with difficulties and dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice, however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of the Consci ...
... perception and an instinctive urge or seeking without any acquired experience or clear knowledge. Even the formations which are the first effects of the perception or urge or the first indices of a spiritual evolution, must inevitably be of this incomplete and tentative nature. But the error so created comes very much in the way of a true understanding, and it must therefore be emphasised that spirituality... regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience ...
... are not lacking, but as yet they have not been carefully registered and brought together. 7) Evolution. In my explanation of the universe I have put forward this cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here. It is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital, the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised... the Supramental Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and whole SelfKnowledge and world-Knowledge; it is through that only that we can get to our true being and the fulfilment of our spiritual evolution. Page 397 ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVIII The Divine Life O seeing Flame, thou carriest man of the crooked ways into the abiding truth and the knowledge. Rig Veda. (I. 31. 6.) I purify earth and heaven by the Truth. Rig Veda. (I. 133. 1.) His ecstasy, in one who holds it, sets into... pass—beyond the ordinary instrumentation of human thought and action in this world of earth-nature. This is the first truth and the essence of the matter; but still, from the point of view of a spiritual evolution, this would be only an individual liberation and perfection in an unchanged environmental existence: for a greater dynamic change in earth-nature itself, a spiritual change of the whole principle ...
... which made the limitations of positivist science – a science of process, not of essentials or Reality – crystal clear. About the theory of evolution, for instance, he wrote: “A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution... Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” 4 What was to Sri Aurobindo self-evident fact of spiritual knowledge, here brought to ...
... sed and is given shape, as it were, by a psychic being. Thirdly: “The psychic being is a spiritual personality put forward by the soul in its evolution; its growth marks the stage which the spiritual evolution of the individual has reached and its immediate possibilities for the future. It stands behind the mental, the vital, the physical nature, grows by their experiences, carries the consciousness... superhumanity that are likely to exist simultaneously in the future. “Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or ...
... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived to bring about a strong and assured step for- ward in the spiritual evolution of the consciousness such as and greater than what took place when a mentalised being Page 322 first appeared in a vital and material animal world. If any- thing short of that... one can understand it truly, enter in its past or its future or put in their place the spiritual men of the past and the present or relate the different ideals, stages, etc. thrown up in the spiritual evolution of the human being. December 5, 1935 I send you the penultimate couplet-poem with the translation I made last night. When I look at my translation's spontaneity and distinctive ...
... of the Cosmic Self and the Divine Reality. The history of spiritual evolution has witnessed even the higher ranges of Himalayan eminences and peaks of highest nature. And beyond these heights, the paths have been built towards the supramental ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence. The recent developments of the spiritual evolution have opened up the paths of the supramental descent and supramental ...
... Now, this integral vision of world-existence and self-existence views "our existence here as a Becoming with the Divine Being for its origin and its object, a progressive manifestation, a spiritual evolution with the supracosmic for its source and support, the other-worldly for a condition and connecting link and the 1 The Life Divine, p. 675. Page 44 cosmic and... field, and with human mind and life for its nodus and turning-point of release towards a higher and a highest perfection." 1 As a matter of fact, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, "a spiritual evolution, an unfolding here of the Being within from birth to birth, of which man becomes the central instrument and human life at its highest offers the critical turning point, is the link needed ...
... to a growth of consciousness that culminates in a fulfillment upon the earth . In other words, there is evolution, an evolution of consciousness behind the evolution of the species, and this spiritual evolution is destined to result in an individual and collective realization upon the earth. One may ask why the traditional spiritualists, enlightened as they are, have not foreseen this earthly realization... however, provides a third possibility, allowing us to get out without flying into ecstasy or dying – that is, to get out without actually getting out – thereby reversing the course of man's spiritual evolution, since the goal is no longer only above or outside, but inside; and, in addition, opening the door of waking life to all the dreams, all the ecstasies, and especially to all the powers that can ...
... Book Two, PART ONE. Book One: Omnipresent Reality and the Universe; Book Two: The Knowledge and the Ignorance —The Spiritual Evolution; Part I: The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance. Volume 19 — The Life Divine, Book Two, PART TWO: The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution. Volume 20 — The Synthesis of Yoga, PARTS ONE AND Two. Introduction: The Conditions of the Synthesis; Part ...
... reason takes the lead, for discriminative reason is the shadow of the vijnanam, the link between the animal and the god and it is not till a fit body is formed for the works of reason that the spiritual evolution begins and the development of the higher states of consciousness is possible. Man is that fit body, sukritam eva, well indeed and beautifully made as a habitation for the gods. His business is ...
... possible contribution to human culture Page 384 and progress. And although this modern tendency is exaggerated and ugly and degrading in its exaggeration, inimical to humanity's spiritual evolution, it has this much of truth behind it that while the first value of a culture is its power to raise and enlarge the internal man, the mind, the soul, the spirit, its soundness is not complete ...
... Durga, Togo her lion and the asura was who — but Kameshwar (I think he had on two horns). On one of the 1st December Programmes (School’s Anniversary) there was a 6-hour programme titled “The Spiritual Evolution of India”. One of the scenes depicted the Muslim invasion of India. There was Kameshwar, a turban on his head and a sword at his waist, a glittering waistcoat, and of course his beard — he strode ...
... ever live in the West!... Here what dominates is the impression of light. At last I see the light of day." Every day in the Ashram he wrote his commentary on Sri Aurobindo's theory of spiritual evolution. Sometimes when, after two hours of writing, he used to visit his close Russian friend, Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, he would tell him that he himself could not immediately understand what he had ...
... more daring, more perilous and yet more satisfying and joyous than the his symbolic quest into the unknown for a new mind and body in the city of God? Symbol of the World-Stair: The spiritual evolution and transformation of consciousness in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga implies a double vertical movement. There is first an ascension of consciousness to its higher plane and then descent of Peace ...
... among the various religions. Theosophy also served to introduce me to certain fundamental doctrines of Eastern spiritual philosophy, Page 4 such as karma, rebirth, and spiritual evolution—tenets that were quite alien to my early beliefs about the afterlife. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother seemed to have entered my life at a timely point when Theosophy was beginning to pall ...
... of knowledge, a more manifold delight of being. But there are certain reasons arising from its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action taking its stand on ...
... intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living ...
... A Greater Psychology 4 The Inconscient A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is ... the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the ...
... the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and Ananda, these are the spirit's five levels. The higher we rise the nearer we get to the condition of the highest perfection of Man's spiritual evolution. By rising to the supermind it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. There is a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and Infinite Ananda. Not only in the timeless Akshara Brahman ...
... can understand it truly, enter in its past or in its future or put in their place the spiritual men of the past and the present or relate the different ideals, stages, etc. thrown up in the spiritual evolution of the human being." This was not just a mere theory or philosophy: through detailed instructions this was concretized. To illustrate, the master teaches the disciple to become a master ...
... regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution, – the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience ...
... Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind …” 1124 A few days after what has come to be named “the miracle of Dunkirk” he said: “If England can win against the Germans, it would mean that she is specially protected”; and in ...
... can understand it truly, either in its past or in its future or put in their place the spiritual men of the past and the present or relate the different ideals, stages, etc. thrown up in the spiritual evolution of the human being," But as he knew to his cost what human nature was and how liable to be heading for disaster in its cussed moods, he always tried to efface promptly the aftermath of a ...
... to change without the Incarnate Divine's pioneering Page 87 sadhana concretely proceeding amidst us and gathering us up into its own movement with its constant Grace. Spiritual evolution and spiritual revolution were a single prospect when the Mother was still present in her body. In my view, it can be the same only when she takes birth once more or in any other way reappears ...
... (or for that matter Christian Church-rites or Muslim mosque-rituals) would be to lay ourselves open to atmospheres and influences which grossly or subtly tend to lure us away from the path of spiritual evolution along which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have sought to lead us. But I may put a footnote to my exposition. The Mother has said that most places of public worship dedicated to traditional ...
... 1, 1931 I do not know what answer you can give to your uncle that would satisfy him, as he is evidently living in mentality of the past and would not readily understand anything about spiritual evolution, the Supermind and the Divine manifestation in life and matter. You can perhaps tell him casually that it is not our hope to transform suddenly the whole human race. Your object is precisely ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVIII The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration As he mounts from peak to peak,... Indra makes him conscious of that goal of his movement. Rig Veda. (I. 10. 2.) A son of the two Mothers, he attains to kingship in his discoveries of knowledge, he moves on the ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XV Reality and the Integral Knowledge This Self is to be won by the Truth and by an integral knowledge. Mundaka Upanishad. (III. 1. 5.) Hear how thou shalt know Me in My totality ... for even of the seekers who have achieved, hardly one knows Me in all the truth of ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XVII The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature Thou art That, O Swetaketu. Chhandogya Upanishad. (VI. 8. 7.) The living being is none else than the Brahman, the whole world is the Brahman. Vivekachudamani. (Verse 479.) My supreme Nature has become ...
... ns. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can ...
... necessary for the true transformation. Theoretically the Force can transform you in one hundredth of a second from an animal to a god, but that would not be transformation or the working out of a spiritual evolution, it would be mere thaumaturgy, i.e. miracle Page 297 working without a significance or purpose. The whole of humanity cannot be changed at once. What has to be done is to bring ...
... with its manifesting power of Supermind, always aware of the Divine and free from Ignorance and its consequences. Man so long as he is in the ignorance is subject to the lower Prakriti, but by spiritual evolution he becomes aware of the higher Nature and seeks to come into contact with it. He can ascend into it and it can descend into him—such an ascent and descent can transform the lower nature of mind ...
... Surrender The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading—how else can any real spiritual evolution be done? All the play in this world is based on a certain relative free will in the individual being. Even in the sadhana it remains and his consent is necessary at each step—even though ...
... Page 747 Dharma of work and service that there are found some of the most necessary and beautiful elements of our greatest perfection and the key to much of the secret of the highest spiritual evolution. For the soul powers that belong to the full development of this force in us are of the greatest importance,—the power of service to others, the will to make our life a thing of work and use ...
... description of the work of the Avatar, take the idea of the Dharma in its fullest, deepest and largest conception, as the inner and the outer law by which the divine Will and Wisdom work out the spiritual evolution of mankind and its circumstances and results in the life of the race. Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole government ...
... sake and it is this, however imperfect at first in self-consciousness and intelligence, that represents the characteristic intention of Nature in him and makes his mental and eventually his spiritual evolution inevitable. The insistence of the external world around him and the need of utilising its opportunities and of meeting its siege and dangers causes his mind to be much obsessed by life and external ...
... succession of suppressed powers, and there too the evolution not at an end, but this large and packed intelligence the means of liberating a greater and now suppressed self-power of the Spirit. A spiritual evolution thus meets our eye in the world which an inner force raises up a certain scale of gradations of its births in form by the unfolding of its own hidden powers to Page 313 the greatness ...
... expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas . Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in ...
... waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course. Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or ...
... can understand it truly, either in its past or in its future or put in their place the spiritual men of the past and the present or relate the different ideals, stages etc. thrown up in the spiritual evolution of the human being. I reply to your letter as Mother is still too much occupied to write. What was in her view at the time was what is called in the psychology of Indian Yoga a "sattwic" ...
... in Nature which is limited and disguised at first by the Ignorance. It has still to climb out of the Ignorance—therefore to get beyond the human person into the divine person. It is in this spiritual evolution that the Plan Divine ( dessein de Dieu ) manifests its central and significant line and calls all creation to the crowning Grace. You will see therefore that the resemblance of the transformation ...
... elements of it,—first, the acceptance of the world as a manifestation of the Divine Power, not its rejection as a mistake or an illusion, and, secondly, the character of this manifestation as a spiritual evolution with Yoga as a means for Page 373 the transformation of mind, life and body into the instruments of a spiritual and supramental perfection. The universe is not only a material but ...
... both, but is bound by neither. 4 September 1933 My wife wishes to have explicit instructions from the Mother as to which of the following two procedures would be most conducive to her spiritual evolution: (1) Should she meditate on the Lotus of the Heart and think of Mother as the Light of Lights situated therein, which is the real Bliss, Omnipresent and Omniscient, which supports everything ...
... and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the Divine. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental If one of you (I have my doubts, but still) went down into the Inconscient, what is called the pure Inconscient, you would realise what it is. A stone will seem to you ...
... with its manifesting power of Supermind, always aware of the Divine and free from Ignorance and its consequences. Man so long as he is in the ignorance is subject to the lower Prakriti, but by spiritual evolution he becomes aware of the higher Nature and seeks to come into contact with it. He can ascend into it and it can descend into him - such an ascent and descent can transform the lower nature of ...
... (1957-1958) 23 October 1957 Mother begins the reading of the last six chapters of The Life Divine . " A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the t ...
... Transformation "The upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature" as a result of the action of the psychic and the higher consciousness is what is meant by transformation. In the spiritual evolution of mankind, the goal hitherto has been the attainment of liberation from the bondage and suffering imposed by mind, life and body. Such a liberation has been sought either by discovering one's ...
... as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course. Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or ...
... psychic being, its emergence from the mass of inertia under which it lies buried, and its ultimate role as the direct link with the Divine. This flows from Sri Aurobindo's remarkable theory of spiritual evolution, according to which, although every individual has a spark of the Divine, it is only when the spark becomes individualised that it emerges as the Psychic Being which then, if recognized and accepted ...
... is true also that the spiritual change has been individual and not collective; its result has been successful in the man, but unsuccessful or only indirectly operative in the human mass. The spiritual evolution of Nature is still in process and incomplete,—one might almost say, still only beginning,—and its main preoccupation has been to affirm and develop a basis of spiritual conciousness and knowledge ...
... intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality ...
... and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda—these are the spirit's five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman ...
... earth justifies the withdrawal he has accomplished: her radiant presence fulfils the miraculous power of his absence. By the co-operation between that absence and this presence a leap in spiritual evolution has been made. A hint of it is in a new expression that comes again and again over the Mother's face. The Supermind, whose realisation and subsequent descent are the Aurobindonian Yoga, seems ...
... Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible. My view is that this conversion is not only possible, but inevitable in the spiritual evolution of the being here. The embodiment of life has nothing to do with it. This embodiment is not of life, but of consciousness and its energy of which life is only one phase or force. As life has ...
... political issue among the big nations. The Nazi aggression meant "the peril of black servitude and a revived barbarism threatening India and the world". It was a life-and-death question for the spiritual evolution of the new man, for the emergence of a new race which the Mother and Sri Aurobindo had come to initiate and establish on the earth. And the victory of Hitler's Germany would mean not only the ...
... reactions of Nature are not in essence meant as reward or punishment; that is not their fundamental value, which is rather an inherent value of natural relations and, in so far as it affects the spiritual evolution, a value of the lessons of experience in the soul's cosmic training.... in all Nature's dealings with us there is a relation of things and there is a corresponding lesson of experience." (The ...
... the same reason that has made the human birth itself a culminating point of the past succession, the previous upward series. It is because of the inexorable necessity of the always ascending spiritual evolution: All life is fixed in an ascending scale And adamantine is the evolving Law; In the beginning is prepared the close. (Savitri, Cent. Ed., pp. 342-43) Thus the soul ...
... satisfactions, on the one hand, and the neglect of the ethical and spiritual dimensions of human life, on the other. One, therefore, hears of the crisis of character, crisis of values and crisis of spiritual evolution. Gripped as we are in this crisis, we are bound to look for the knowledge of ethics and spirituality, of values and of the knowledge that can bridge the gulf between the life of matter and the ...
... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being of a greater and higher kind and Page 35 of a larger sweep and completeness than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material ...
... spirit 15,29,30,36,37,65,66,81, 95, 96, 97, 98; liberation of 22 spirit-born conceptual knowledge 67; see also knowledge spiritual change 15 spiritual consciousness 29, 96 spiritual evolution 34; see also evolution spiritual liberation 22, 30; see also mukti, nirv ā na spiritual transformation 34; the process of 33 spiritualisation 86, 95 ś raddhā 75 ...
... contribution to human culture and progress. And while it must be admitted that this modern tendency is somewhat exaggerated, ugly and degrading in its exaggeration, inimical to humanity's spiritual evolution, it has this much truth behind it that while the first value of a culture is its power to raise and enlarge the internal man, the mind and the soul, its soundness is not complete unless it has ...
... none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution. This effort at spiritual evolution is provided by the systems of Yoga. Here is what Sri Aurobindo has to say: WHAT IS YOGA The contact of the human and individual consciousness with the Divine is the ...
... same phenomenon. The god that you call upon to come into you is your presiding deity and it is there always over your head guiding you, helping you, befriending you throughout your cycles of spiritual evolution. This archetype of divinity that you are to become or that is to engulf you and be identified with you has been with you from the very beginning, coming closer and closer to you as you go on ...
... Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and ...
... With this sacrifice nourish the Gods, that the Gods may nourish you; thus mutually nourishing ye shall obtain the highest felicity¹ is the very secret of the cosmic play, the basis of the spiritual evolution in the universal existence. The Gods are the formations or particularisations of the Truth-consciousness, the multiple individualisations of the One spirit. The Pitris are the Divine Fathers ...
... powerful trends have emerged to challenge it through theories such as those of Vitalism of Bergson , Emergent Evolution of Alexander, Holism of Smutts, Ingressive Idealism of Whitehead, and Spiritual Evolution of Teillard De Chardin. In India, Sri Aurobindo's theory of Supramental Evolution is a formidable answer to Darwinism and to materialism in general. Page 202 A major difficulty lies ...
... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being of a greater and higher kind and of a larger sweep and completeness than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world. If anything ...
... systems, the subtle illuminating debates and inquiries of the thinkers, the more passionate reaches of devotion, and austerer ideals of dharma. The third stage, the loftiest stage of spiritual evolution, goes beyond all symbols and middle significances in order to arrive at the absolute and universal divine love, the beauty of All-beautiful, noblest dharma of unity with all beings, universal ...
... ought not to be a cause of any sorrow or anxiety." After all, what is a single life? It is, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Page 18 "only [a] brief episode in a long history of spiritual evolution..." (Letters on Yoga, Cent. Ed., p. 461) If so, does it behove a sane person to be so much excited and agitated at the thought of death, the inevitable ending of this present life which ...
... The next element of perfection is that of the gnostic perfection in the physical body. The physical body is a basis of action, which cannot be neglected or excluded from the spiritual Page 75 evolution. A perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine being living on earth will be necessarily a part of the supramental transformation. 'Pushed to its highest c ...
... what Sri Aurobindo has called the dynamic spiritual transformation. And yet, there are certain reasons arising from its status and power that prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. As Sri Aurobindo explains it: 'In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform ...
... the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seers—divine men—of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened ...
... regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life, they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to, the mental evolution,-the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience ...
... Unless this question is torn out of the Page 120 ethico-religious nimbus with which it has been surrounded for over four decades, the confusion, which has crippled India's spiritual evolution and hindered her advance on the lines of her self-nature to her true destiny, cannot be dissipated. It is the key question of the hour, and it should be faced squarely, and with forthright candour ...
... can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance. If earth is the only field of the spiritual evolution in Matter, (assuming that) then it must be a part of the total design. The idea that all the rest must be a waste is a human idea which would not trouble the vast Cosmic Spirit whose consciousness ...
... of Nature. But a naked, irrevocable retreat to the relationless Absolute cannot be the aim of the soul's incarnation in the world of relativities, it can only be an important episode in its spiritual evolution. If the soul has descended into Matter, it is only to transfigure it and manifest the Divine in its transmuted substance. If it has descended into the relativities, it is to realise and fulfil ...
... vital pleasure, which obscures ¹ Words of the Mother. Page 255 his consciousness, inflates his pride and egotism, and retards, if it does not, indeed, impede, his spiritual evolution. "It is not that those rich men who are more or less toys and instruments in the hands of the vital forces are averse to spend; their avarice is awake only when the vital desires and impulses ...
... intellect is leading its life from problems to predicaments and from predicaments to perils. It is a blind chase—after what ? What should we do with the mind in order to make it help our spiritual evolution and become a supple and docile instrument of the Divine, which it is meant to be ? The Mother says, "The mind has got to be made silent and attentive in order to receive knowledge from above ...
... And this I believe is God's will. 129 Beast to man, man to God; or average ordinary man to the evolved spiritually awakened saint: how is this progression started, how achieved? "Spiritual evolution as distinct from revolution", says Hugh I' Anson Fausset, "consists of this gradual dying to the old life of the divided senses and gradual growing of the new life of wholeness within the decaying ...
... tones", the discipline of ethics and philosophy, the climb of the mind to eagle heights, the leaps of thought "crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond", all play their part in Savitri's mental and spiritual evolution. Sculpture and painting, music and architecture, dance and poetry, the many arts and crafts, these are pressed into service too, and Savitri masters them, and is moulded by them. Nor are the ...
... and a supreme Grace from above that answers. 10 Ascent, descent, integration; aspiration, response, realisation: such are the classic terms of the Aurobindonian dialectic of spiritual evolution. Once spiritually awakened, mental man strives to exceed himself, and as he explores the ascending possibilities, he reaches stage after stage of the overhead—or above mind—consciousness: Higher ...
... man, in society, in States, the like of which we have not seen before. This condition prevailed for a long time. Such involution and revolution continued. Now begins an Evolution - a silent spiritual Evolution. This Revolution and Evolution sometimes go separately sometimes go together side by side. Sri Aurobindo has said that mankind in the past history has experienced many kinds of revolutions ...
... and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda – these are the spirit's five levels. The higher we rise on this ascent the nearer to man comes the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman ...
... must be nothing left anywhere in the nature which can respond even in the slightest degree to the forces of ignorance and falsehood and suffering, which sway the life of humanity and impede its spiritual evolution. From the cells of the physical body to the summits of our mental being, all, without exception, must be divinely converted and rendered perfectly plastic to the supramental Force of the divine ...
... Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind; it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing ...
... understanding, the super- mind and the Ananda - these are the Spirit's five levels. The higher we rise on this ascent the nearer to man comes the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman but ...
... Aurobindo once said ironically. That ours is a plane of evolution was freely accepted by the pro-Evolutionist. "In my explanation of the universe I have put forward this cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here." Of course, by 'evolution' Sri Aurobindo meant an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and "only outwardly an evolution of ...
... × The distinction between the two creations has its full truth in supraphysical planes where the law of spiritual evolution does not govern the movement. There are worlds of the Devas, worlds of the Asuras, and there are in these worlds behind us constant types of beings which support the complex divine play of creation ...
... according to the law of the lower nature; it must Page 422 put on the law of the Divine's supreme way of existence which is in fact the real law of its own eternal essence. In the spiritual evolution of its becoming, no less than in its secret original being, it must grow into the likeness of the Divine. And this great thing, to rise from the human into the divine nature, we can only ...
... significance by lifting our eyes to the trail of the great Pioneers who lead or point him by whatever step of attainment towards supermanhood. Arjuna himself is a Vibhuti; he is a man high in the spiritual evolution, a figure marked out in the crowd of his contemporaries, a chosen instrument of the divine Narayana, the Godhead in humanity. In one place the Teacher speaking as the supreme and equal Self of ...
... is quite possible that there have been periods of harmony on different levels, not supramental, which were afterwards disturbed—but those could only be a stage or resting place in a world of spiritual evolution out of the Ignorance. (9) That a perfect manifestation is quite possible without need of evolution. But you have not said anything about whether an unfolding of the Inconscience (involved ...
... been achieved till now? By the victory is meant the final emergence of the embodied consciousness on earth from the bondage of the Ignorance. That had to be prepared through the ages by a spiritual evolution. Naturally the work up till now has been a preparation of which the long spiritual effort and experience of the past has been the outcome. It has reached a point at which the decisive effort ...
... involved the presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a mistake or a vanity and illusion to be cast aside by the soul returning to heaven or Nirvana, but the scene of a spiritual evolution by which out of this material Inconscience is to be manifested progressively the Divine Consciousness in things. Mind is the highest term yet reached in the evolution, but it is not the highest ...
... Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible. My view is that this conversion is not only possible, but inevitable in the spiritual evolution of the being here. The embodiment of life has nothing to do with it. This embodiment is not of life, but of consciousness and its energy, of which life is only one phase or force. As life has ...
... transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the consciousness such as and greater than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world. If anything short of that takes place or at least if ...
... Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind: it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing of ...
... waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course. Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that this change can be effected by machinery and outward institutions; they ...
... t as in the animal, but intuitive and fully, integrally conscient. Therefore, the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age, will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being, an evolution or conversion of the present type of humanity into a spiritualised humanity, even as the animal man has been largely ...
... grades of Consciousness and that the material Inconscience has been laid down as a basis for the reascent of the Spirit, admitting that rebirth is a fact, a part of the terrestrial order, still a spiritual evolution of the individual being is not an inevitable consequence of any of these admissions or even of all of them together. It is possible to take another view of the spiritual significance and the ...
... Answers (1957-1958) 13 November 1957 I have a question about the first page where Sri Aurobindo says, "A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the t ...
... (1957-1958) 22 October 1958 " But this is not the standpoint from which the true significance of the spiritual evolution in man or the value of spirituality can be judged or assessed; for its real work is not to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a new foundation of our being ...
... natural form or action, extending itself upward into a transcendence of which the limits are not visible. It is these liberations of the spiritual part in us which are the decisive steps of the spiritual evolution in Nature. It is only through these decisive movements that the true character of the evolution becomes evident; for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of the psychic ...
... bondage to suffering caused by the illusory sense of a separate self, the ego, and thereby escape from the perpetual cycle of birth and death. According to Sri Aurobindo, the farther goal of spiritual evolution beyond liberation consists in the transformation of the instruments of the spirit—mind, life and body—so as to establish the kingdom of the spirit on earth. It is when the outer being is unified ...
... have to know the persons and be familiar with their soul history to tell what was behind their meeting and separation. In a general way, a life is only one brief episode in a long history of spiritual evolution in which the soul follows the curve of the line set for the earth, passing through many lives to complete it. It is an evolution out of material inconscience to consciousness and on towards the ...
... Sri Aurobindo's message; for the Gita seems to admit the cessation of birth in the world as the ultimate aim or at least the ultimate culmination of Yoga; it does not bring forward the idea of spiritual evolution or the idea of the higher planes and the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the bringing down of that consciousness as the means of the complete transformation of earthly life. The idea of ...
... higher consciousness on earth and a higher state. If it were to act otherwise, then all would be done by a miracle or magic, no sadhana would be needed, no way beaten out for the process of spiritual evolution to follow; there would be no real transformation of consciousness, but only a temporary feat of force which having no basis in the substance of creation here would vanish as it came. Therefore ...
... Absolute; in its extension, living Page 127 in the luminous infinite, its special power is to realise the infinite in the finite, the eternal unity in all divisions and differences. Our spiritual evolution ascends therefore through the relative to the absolute, through the finite to the infinite, through all divisions to oneness. Man in his spiritual realisation begins to find and seize hold on ...
... × There is another side of the truth in which this interdependence is not so imperative, but that is a phenomenon of spiritual evolution which has nothing to do with the present subject. × The emphasis has somewhat shifted now and ...
... individual and group freedom within the human unity, and the insufficiency of formal unity without a growth of the religion of humanity which can alone make it a great psychological advance in the spiritual evolution of the race. 1919 Page 274 Publisher’s Note to the Second Edition The Ideal of Human Unity first appeared in the "Arya" Vol. II, No. 2 - Vol. IV, No. 12) complete in 35 ...
... Life-Energy pouring itself through nature & through man's nervous activities, the strong impetuous swift galloper of the worlds that bears gods & men on the journey of life, up the ascent of spiritual evolution, through the battles of the great war which is the Cosmos. Without a strong & joyous vital energy to support it, human mind cannot bear the tremendous shocks of the divine activity, the divine ...
... living beings from the earth's highest to its lowest creatures. The psychic being is a spiritual personality put forward by the soul in its evolution; its growth marks the stage which the spiritual evolution of the individual has reached and its immediate possibilities for the future. It stands behind the mental, the vital, the physical nature, grows by their experiences, carries the consciousness ...
... have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance. If the earth is the only field of the spiritual evolution in Matter—(assuming that)—then it must be as part of the total design. The idea that all the rest must be a waste is a human idea which Page 394 would not trouble the vast Cosmic ...
... can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Page 144 Divine leading—how else can any real spiritual evolution be done? If there is so serious an obstacle to your going forward, it consists only of two things, your vital depressions and your mental doubts which make you challenge even the experiences ...
... nature in all its operations works through three inherent gunas or qualities which repeat themselves in all stages and forms of her multifold activity; they are present as much in psychic and spiritual evolution as in the physical; and so all-important are they that all activity of any kind whatsoever, all life mental, vital, physical are said to be merely the natural operation of the three gunas ...
... higher law of Karma, of the output and returns of energy, and see it immediately and directly to be, what all law of Karma, really and ultimately, if at first covertly, is for man, a law of his spiritual evolution. The true return to the act of virtue, to the ethically right output of his energy—his reward, if you will, and the sole recompense on which he has a right to insist,—is its return upon him in ...
... 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 altogether in basic consciousness, scope, significance, so this change from the materialised ...
... human exceeding itself and opening itself to a supreme plenitude that the Divine must manifest itself here, since Page 129 that comes inevitably in the course and process of the spiritual evolution, and therefore he will not despise or blind himself to the Godhead because it is lodged in a human body, mānuṣīṁ tanum āśritam . Beyond the limited human conception of God, he will pass to the ...
... world inextricably entangled together, like pain and pleasure,—a proposition which, however true at the moment and plausible as a generalisation, need not be true of the human being's greater spiritual evolution,—the liberated man will live in the spirit and stand back from the mechanical continued workings of a necessarily imperfect nature. This, however possible as a stage towards a final cessation ...
... men, much trouble of self-approbation and disapprobation or of self-righteousness and disgust, remorse, shame and moral depression. These things are no doubt very necessary at present for our spiritual evolution. But the seeker of a greater perfection will draw back from all these dualities, regard them with an equal eye and arrive through equality at an impartial and universal action of the dynamic ...
... opens to us possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratiṣṭhā , which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion. The change will be effected by bringing in the law ...
... The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution The Life Divine Chapter XXVII The Gnostic Being A perfect path of the Truth has come into being for our journey to the other shore beyond the darkness. Rig Veda. ( I. 46. 11.) O Truth-Conscious, be conscious of the Truth, cleave out many streams of the Truth. Rig Veda. (V. 12. 2.) ...
... towards its destined self-realisation in God". Sri Aurobindo comments: "That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of Yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution, and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward Page 233 forms ...
... Aurobindo's magnificence· of phrase reveals the pure yet passionate Yoga that is the secret of the irresistible divine potentiality asserted by his felicity of phrase and the ground of the spiritual evolution that his piquancy of phrase prophesies. Page 123 We may close with two points about the technique of the line. First, the three parts of the verse — "I cherish/God the Fire,/not ...
... "The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called 'man' to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading: how else can any real spiritual evolution be done?" If it is asked what becomes of Sri Aurobindo's assertion that only in a divine state there can be genuine freedom of will, the answer is: he evidently means by genuine freedom ...
... which corresponded to our Purusha. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that man is full of divine possibilities—he is not merely a term in physical evolution, but himself the field of a spiritual evolution which with him began and in him will end. It was only when man was made, that the gods were satisfied—they who had rejected the animal forms,—and cried सुकृतमेव, "Man indeed is well and wonderfully ...
... Sri Aurobindo's magnificence of phrase reveals the pure yet passionate Yoga that is the secret of the irresistible divine potentiality asserted by his felicity of phrase and the ground of the spiritual evolution that his piquancy of phrase prophesies. We may conclude with two points about the technique of the line. First, the three parts of the verse—"I cherish/God the Fire,/not God the Dream"—are ...
... they declare, unrightly, to be an Avatar. The task of the Avatar is always out of the ordinary, relevant for the whole of humanity, and revolutionary, initiating a radical new element in the spiritual evolution of life on Earth. In 1957 the Mother said: “The spaces which separate these various incarnations [of the Avatars] seem to have become shorter and shorter, as if, for as much as Matter became ...
... all that is to be converted is here. This means that if one concentrates on this work and does it here, all the rest will follow automatically.” By the “work” she meant the effort of conscious spiritual evolution. On another occasion, in 1951, she had said: “It is only upon earth that the Presence is found, this direct contact with the supreme Origin, this presence of the divine Consciousness hidden ...
... receiving it. There are not many who are really capable of receiving the light of spiritual knowledge. A certain mental and moral development in the right direction is necessary for a conscious spiritual evolution. Only when there is an unquenchable fire of aspiration for the Divine and a real thirst for spiritual knowledge, does the seeker inevitably meet the right Guru and undergoes the baptism of fire ...
... a consummation and a supreme fulfilment of the Divine Existence-Consciousness-Bliss in manifestation is the culmination. To summarise in Sri Aurobindo's own illuminating words: "A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant 27.Sri ...
... material body – though she kept always alive the remembrance of the true nature of her soul. Now had come the time of the identification of her self with her Self. This crucial event in Mirra’s spiritual evolution must have happened in the last days or on the last day of August 1914, for we read in her diary entry of 31 August the invocation: ‘O Mother, sweet Mother who I am …’ which is the direct formulation ...
... she said several times that she had chosen her parents before her conception. To understand this one must accept reincarnation. ‘Rebirth is an indispensable machinery for the working out of a spiritual evolution; it is the only possible effective condition, the obvious dynamic process of such a manifestation in the material universe … Rebirth is not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the ...
... at 2 a.m, on the 25th. In either case the child would be within the glow of the 64th anniversay of the Mother's final settlement by the side of Sri Aurobindo to bring into birth a New Age of spiritual evolution. It is also significant that, on the glimmering edge of an anniversary of a day with such a sign of the fabulous future, exquisite aspiring Yasmin brought into the world a boy like Jeraz joyously ...
... have termed in my letters to friends a concentrated and accelerated process - a spiritual revolution, as it were in the present Page 320 lifetime - but only by a process of spiritual evolution through life after life. It is postponed and not cancelled, because the Supramental Light, Consciousness and Force manifested in the subtle-physical layer of the earth on February 29, 1956 and ...
... Satprem subsequently asked Mother: You almost seem to be saying that during the Vedic era there was no divine presence in man! No, there wasn't! They discovered it. Humanity has undergone a spiritual evolution. Vedism is in contact with the gods and, THROUGH THE GODS, with the Supreme; but it is not in direct contact with the Supreme—there is no inner, psychic contact. That's what Sri Aurobindo says ...
... more profoundly. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo considered the Second World War as their own war because of Hitler's typal tyranny which, if successful, would have blocked their work of spiritual evolution. Sri Aurobindo kept in close touch with every development by means of a radio fixed in his room by Pavitra. Many of us understand that he intervened at various turning-points. But not many ...
... are factors in the Integral Yoga, even if not exactly in the old way. You say that the psychic being was not a part of the past Yogas. But the psychic being is the true fountainhead of spiritual evolution. Even the urge towards a supracosmic realisation comes ultimately from it. In fact the psychic being hails from the Transcendent, the negative aspect of which is the Supracosmic in the sense ...
... 3, 77 Buddhist views, 77 Jivatman, 79, 80 personal, 80 true, 79 Universal, 79, 80 self-realization, 1, 20, 21 silence, 17, 24, 25, 98, 99 space, 17 spiritual evolution, 5 spiritual path, 42-44 spiritual practice, 65, 66 Page 171 aim of, 144-147 methods, 112-121 zeal in, 107 spiritual teachings, paradoxes ...
... thus already set in the story narrated as a simple human tale belonging to the early times. This entire paraphernalia has been pressed into the story to convey the revelatory truth of the spiritual evolution in the terrestrial scheme. Sri Aurobindo has renewed it, fixing his own yogic power into it: he has kindled the fire of his own soul in its body and in its spirit. We Page 74 ...
... its manifesting power of supermind, always aware of the Divine and free from Ignorance and its consequences. Man so long as he is in the ignorance is subject to the lower Prakriti, but by spiritual evolution he becomes aware of the higher Nature and seeks to come into contact with it. He can ascend into it and it can descend into him — such an ascent and descent can transform the lower nature of ...
... into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. 7 Page 338 In my explanation of the universe I have put forward this cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here. It is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital, the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised ...
... be familiar with their soul history to tell what was behind their meeting and separation. In a general way, a life is only Page 137 one brief episode in a long history of spiritual evolution in which the soul follows the curve of the line set for the earth, passing through many lives to complete it. It is an evolution out of material inconscience to consciousness and towards the ...
... forces. The Divine can lead, he does not drive. There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading: how else can any real spiritual evolution be done? If there is so serious an obstacle to your going forward, it consists only of two things, your vital depressions and your mental doubts which make you challenge even the experiences ...
... of this kind of supermanhood in her past, and a larger emergence of that type would be a retrograde evolution. What is, however, conceived as the supermanhood that results from the decisive spiritual evolution is at once much more difficult and much more simple. What is conceived in the divine superman is a self-realized being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and ...
... satisfactions, on the one hand, and the neglect of the ethical and spiritual dimensions of human life, on the other. One, there ore, hears of the crisis of character, crisis of values and crisis of spiritual evolution. Gripped as we are in this crisis, we are bound to look for the knowledge of ethics and spirituality, of values and of the knowledge that can bridge the gulf between the life of matter Page ...
... have been pursued from time to time independently of each other or with predominance of one line of development in comparison with others. Of these four, the first three are approaches to the spiritual evolution of the human consciousness and being, but the last is the central avenue of entry. Religion It is difficult to define religion, considering that it is seen to have been manifested ...
... transformation, Sri Aurobindo means, "a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived as to bring about a strong and assured step forward in the spiritual evolution of the being of a greater and higher kind and of a larger sweep and completeness than what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world." 72 According ...
... and Upanishads and in the rest of Yogic traditions, which can contribute to the attainment of the new aim that has been envisaged, the central idea in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga is to lead spiritual evolution to the next stage of the mutation of human species by bringing down the Supermind as the means of complete transformation of Nature. The idea of the Supermind, the Truth-consciousness, is there ...
... ss in the earth-existence rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme supramental level. In the context of this development, mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees above it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental being, Page 71 as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into an embodied ...
... p. 803) (Q. 23): What is the necessity of rebirth? (A. 23): Not of any significance in the Adwaita Vedantism "but is an indispensable machinery for the working out of the spiritual evolution..." (The Life Divine,Cent. Ed., pp. 754-55) (i)"...rebirth is an indispensable condition for any long duration and evolution of the individual being in the earth-existence." (The Life ...
... The individuals who will most help the future of humanity "Therefore, the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being." "They will be comparatively indifferent to particular belief and form and leave men to resort to the beliefs and forms to ...
... necessary for the true transformation. Theoretically the Force can transform you in one hundredth of a second from an animal to a god, but that would not be transformation or the working out of a spiritual evolution, it would be mere thaumaturgy, i.e. miracle-working without a significance or purpose. Is it true that the dynamic descent has resulted badly in some sadhaks? It ...
... Hitler and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind: it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the undoing ...
... gentle manner of a good man, sometimes 41The psychic being is the Divine spark in every living creature, which develops into a fully conscious and individualized Divine presence through spiritual evolution. It is the Antaryamin, a delegate of the Divine self in the lower planes of body, life and mind. 42The human being has many elements in himself, quite distinct from each other. He has ...
... this sacrifice nourish the Gods, that the Gods may nourish you; thus mutually nourishing ye shall obtain the highest felicity 1 is the very secret of the cosmic play, the basis of the spiritual evolution in the universal existence. The Gods are the formations or particularisations of the Truth-consciousness, the multiple individualisations of the One spirit. The Pitris are the Divine Fathers ...
... spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seers—divine men— —of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened ...
... that the psychic being is not able to throw away this personality in him, then he may go on repeating the double movement and one can't say to what it may lead. It is better for his spiritual evolution that this crash has come to him ; for, if he had remained sane and allowed this force to work through him and himself taken enjoyment of it like Y, or become a big Swami and had Disciple ...
... spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seers – divine men – of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened ...
... spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seers – divine men – of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened ...
... a deal of 'lost' Indian history is woven into the fabric of these books that cover such a vast period of time. The Puranas give mythical accounts of creation. They expound the theory of spiritual evolution. Stating that the material world is not an integral totality, but only a grade in a gradation, they describe through parables and fables how the powers belonging to the whole and involved within ...
... more emphasis on the truth of the Spirit, the latter on the world of phenomena. This divergence should be healed, and both the East and the West march together towards the new horizons of a spiritual evolution of human and earth nature so that a "divine life" on the earth may emerge ultimately out of the present. The Mother, in a succinct message, exhorted men and women all over the world to stop thinking ...
... and Nazism were dark Asuric forces and that their success would mean the enslavement of mankind to the tyranny of evil, and a set-back to the course of evolution and especially to the spiritual evolution of mankind : it would lead also to the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in it of India, an enslavement far more terrible than any this country had ever endured, and the ...
... to his Masters's force working in him ; for his Master never subscribed to Sankar's Advaita, because it is not Advaita. 14.11.67 * * * I fully share your views on equality and spiritual evolution as enunciated by Sri Aurobindo. In fact, evolution is the pivot of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. What the Western philosophers and scientists, including Teilhard de Chardin, have missed is the ...
... from birth to birth, from suffering to suffering.” With an unerring intuition, Buddha thus laid his finger on the prime cause of terrestrial suffering and the greatest enemy of man's spiritual evolution. Renunciation of desire, he taught, was the elimination of all evil and suffering and the surest means to the extinction of the egoistic human personality, which is a not-self, a mere ephemeral ...
... leading and the soul's experiences, it strives to force its consciousness and nature into a preconceived mould and pattern. This stress and domination of the mental ego spells an arrest of the spiritual evolution, though it may rig out an ethical Joseph and make him masquerade as a spiritual Paul. What is most needed in spiritual life is an infinite plasticity and an ungrudging capacity for renouncing ...
... involved the presence and possibilities of the Divine. The created world is not a mistake or a vanity and illusion to be cast aside by the soul returning to heaven or Nirvana, but the scene of a spiritual evolution by which out of this material Incbnscience is to be manifested progressively the Divine Consciousness in things. Mind is the highest term yet reached in the evolution, but it is not the highest ...
... Titan and demoniac agencies" in which case man's thoughts are guided by these forces and his faith is destroyed by them. Man becomes completely their subject and all the chances of his spiritual evolution are lost. Such beings have no soul "and only a mind and body live to die" in their case. Ignorance shields many terrible, enormous powers which are 'Haters of light, intolerent of peace" ...
... throughout the period of the first world war, and discontinued publication only in 1921. The comprehensive Supramental Manifesto for the future - comprising the plea for change, the programme of spiritual evolution (or revolution) and the promise of individual, social and terrestrial transformation, involving man and collective man and global humanity - the grand Manifesto had been broadcast in all its ...
... book form in 1949, and was given a new title. The Human Cycle. In the third and final sweep of its tremendous argument. The Life Divine is the projection of Sri Aurobindo's theory of the 'spiritual evolution', from the Ignorance to the Knowledge; The Human Cycle is likewise the projection of his theory of 'social evolution', from the 'symbolic' to the 'psychological' stage. Although reprinted over ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter VIII Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance Some speak of the self-nature of things, others say that it is Time. Swetaswatara Upanishad. (VI. 1.) ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XI The Boundaries of the Ignorance One who thinks there is this world and no other. Katha Upanishad. (I. 2. 6) Extended within the Infinite,... headless... 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 ... ultimately our own highest deepest vastest Self, it is apparent on its summits or by reflection in ourselves as Sachchidananda creating us and the world by the power of His divine Knowledge-Will, spiritual, supramental, truth-conscious, infinite. That is the real Being, Lord and Creator, who, as the Cosmic Self veiled in Mind and Life and Matter, has descended into that which we call the Inconscient ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter IX Memory, Ego and Self-Experience Here this God, the Mind, in its dream experiences again and again what once was experienced; what has been seen and what has not been... knowledge is the aim of the conscious evolution; a clean cut of the consciousness shearing apart one side and leaving the other cannot be the whole truth of self and things. For if some immobile Self were all, there could be no possibility of world-existence; if mobile Nature were all, there might be a cycle of universal becoming, but no spiritual foundation for the evolution of the Conscient out of the I... becomings. This development continues until the coordinating mind of knowledge and mind of will are fully able to possess and use all the material of self-experience. Such at least is the process of evolution as we see it governing the development of Mind out of the self-absorbed and apparently mindless energy in the material world. The ego-sense is another device of mental Ignorance by which the mental ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XII The Origin of the Ignorance By energism of consciousness(Tapas.) Brahman is massed; from that Matter is born and from Matter Life and Mind and the worlds. Mundaka... only a partial consciousness, mental or spiritual-mental in its nature, which becomes nescient of its self of status by movement; in this part of us, when we lose the movement, we lose at the same time our hold on our self of action by entering into passivity. By an entire passivity the mind falls asleep or enters into trance or else is liberated into a spiritual silence; but though it is a liberation... unthinking Force or inconscient Matter; dominant order, which we suppose to be existence according to the truth of things, may be really the mechanical law of an eternal self-ignorance and not the self-evolution of a supreme self-ruling conscious Page 589 Will; perpetual existence may be the constant phenomenon of an eternal Nihil. All opinions about the origins of things become of an equal force ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XIII Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance From the kindled fire of Energy of Consciousness Truth was born and the Law of Truth; from that... still included, but as a part of the higher dynamism and its higher values, in a new and greater self-creation. This is what can happen when the Consciousness-Force in our being decides to raise its evolution from the mental to the supramental level. In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the predetermined process ...
... been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution. " The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be... should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation. " The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings... correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. " Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and ...
... should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation. The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings. ... correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height... profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way. All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter VII The Knowledge and the Ignorance Let the Knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Rig Veda. (IV. 2. 11.) Two are there, hidden in the... accepted among them as reverse aspects, as powers of an involved consciousness and a self-limited knowledge brought forward because necessary to a certain movement in Time, a movement of involution and evolution of the Reality. If suprarational in its basis, this total conception is not altogether a paradox; it only demands a change, an enlargement in our conceptions of the Infinite. But the real world... Knowledge into a material Inconscience but that Knowledge too emerges along with an emerging Consciousness out of the Inconscience, then we can be sure that this fullness of Ignorance is by its own evolution changing back into a limited Knowledge and can feel the assurance that the limitation itself will be removed and the full truth of things become apparent, the cosmic Truth free itself from the cosmic ...
... material existence, so are they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually supermind and the higher degrees of the spiritual existence. Evolution comes by the unceasing pressure of the sup... Matter; its last effect has been to assist the emergence of a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual will and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so that he is no longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with that and mental pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover his inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass earth and her limitations. As... themselves in the order of the physical world; the rest await their time and proper circumstance for revelation in physical term and form, for their part in the terrestrial 11 evolution which is at the same time an evolution of all the powers of the spirit. This character of the other worlds defeats all our attempts to give the premier importance to our own plane of being and to our own part in ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter III The Eternal and the Individual He am I. Isha Upanishad. (Verse 16.) It is an eternal portion of Me that has become the living being in a world... s-Force. There is as a phase or movement of the self-manifestation a descent into an apparent material inconscience, an awakening of the individual out of the Inconscience and an evolution of his being into the spiritual and supramental consciousness and power of the Reality, into his own universal and transcendent Self and source of existence. It is on this foundation that we have to base our conception... the harmonically manifest being of God in certain great rhythms of His conscious force and self-delight. Therefore this mutual inclusion is spiritual and psychological; it is a translation of the two forms of the Many, all and individual, into a unifying spiritual experience,—a translation of the eternal unity of the One and the Many; for the One is the eternal unity of the Many differentiating and ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter IV The Divine and the Undivine The Seer, the Thinker, the Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal. Isha Upanishad... has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine,—a divine dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold itself in the evolution of Nature. In this light... content with that belief, to search for and find the spiritual key of things is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic intellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter I Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable The Unseen with whom there can be no pragmatic relations, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, undesignable... neither is the separate cognition of them entirely an illusion or a complete error of the Ignorance; this too has its validity for spiritual experience. For these primary aspects of the Absolute are fundamental spiritual determinates or indeterminates answering at this spiritual end or beginning to the general determinates or generic indeterminates of the material end or inconscient beginning of the descending... object and self-awareness holding together Self as subject-object. These and other primal powers and aspects assume their status among the fundamental spiritual self-determinations of the In finite; all others are determinates of the fundamental spiritual determinates, significant relations, significant powers, significant forms of being, consciousness, force, delight,—energies, conditions, ways, lines ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter V The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, turn to Me. Gita. (IX. 33.) This Self... that seem to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experience needed for the soul, mind, 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 man... formulated with much acumen of thought by men of genius and spiritual insight, which disputed with more or less force and success the conclusions of these two great metaphysical systems, but none has been put forward with an equal force of presentation or drive of personality or had a similar massive effect. The spirit of these two remarkable spiritual philosophies—for Shankara in the historical process of ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter X Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge They see the Self in the Self by the Self. Gita. (VI. 20.) Where there is duality, there other sees... certain tertiary powers of spiritual knowledge, of knowledge by identity, take their first origin, which are the sources of our own normal modes of knowledge. There is a spiritual intimate vision, a spiritual pervasive entry and penetration, a spiritual feeling in which one sees all as oneself, feels all as oneself, contacts all as oneself. There is a power of spiritual perception of the object and... the perception. There is a spiritual conception that is the original substance of thought, not the thought that discovers the unknown, but that which brings out the intrinsically known from oneself and places it in self-space, in an extended being of self-awareness, as an object of conceptual self-knowledge. There Page 566 is a spiritual emotion, a spiritual sense, there is an intermingling ...
... sort of evolution from the objective to the inward and from the inward to the inmost, the spiritual,—an evolution which has many curves and turns and cycles, many returns upon past motives and imperfect anticipations of future motives, but is on the whole and up to a certain point a growth and progress, a constant labour of self-enlargement and self-finding. It is a clear idea of this evolution which... or three peoples that have powerfully developed the spiritual force within, the highest with the exception of the spiritual summit. In these few we can best see the inner character and aim of any one line of the movement,—whether it be the line of poetry, the line of art or the line of religious and spiritual endeavour. This general evolution has its own natural periods or ages; but as with the... limited by what has been left behind from the evolution of a past self which, being dead, yet lives. Thus, the Indian spirit could seize powerfully the spiritual motive in an age in which the mass of the people lived a strenuous external life and was strongly outward-going and objective in its normal mentality. It succeeded in expressing the supreme spiritual experiences, so difficult to put at all into ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter XIV The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil The Lord accepts the sin and the virtue of none; because knowledge is veiled by Ignorance, mortal men are... narrow and rigid or complex and confused, uncertain, subject to alteration by a mental or a vital change or evolution; yet it is felt that there is a deeper abiding truth and something within us that can have the intuition of that truth,—in other words, that the real sanction is inward, spiritual and psychic. The traditional account of this inner witness is conscience, a power of perception in us half... necessity of the evolution itself, a step towards the growth of the being out of the Ignorance into the truth of the divine unity and the evolution of a divine consciousness and a divine being. For much more than the mind or life which can turn either to good or to evil, it is the soul-personality, the psychic being, which insists on the distinction, though in a larger sense than the mere moral difference ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter II Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti It is there in beings indivisible and as if divided. Gita. (XIII. 17.) Brahman, the Truth, the... 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; 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... conceptual cognition as the fundamental aspects in which we see and experience the omnipresent Reality. In themselves they are seized directly, not by intellectual understanding but by a spiritual intuition, a spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness; but they can also be caught at in conception by a large and plastic idea and can be expressed in some sort by a plastic speech which ...
... The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance The Life Divine Chapter VI Reality and the Cosmic Illusion The Eternal is true; the world is a lie. Vivekachudamani. (Verse 20.) The Master of Maya creates this world by his... Existence in a world of Matter. This original Reality might be a cosmic spiritual Existence, a Pantheos, or it might have some other status; but in any case there would be, not a universal illusion or mere phenomenon, but a true universe. In the classical theory of Illusionism a sole and supreme Page 457 spiritual Existence is accepted as the one Reality: it is by its essentiality the... outcome or product of the eternal Being. Brahman is 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 ...
... instrument of material energy, the spiritual self-evolution of Yoga can be only a delusion, hallucination, abnormal state of mind or self-hypnosis. In any case it cannot be what it represents itself to be, a discovery of the eternal truth Page 752 of our being and a passing above the limited truth of the mental, vital and physical to the full truth of our spiritual nature. But when we look... getting control of the pranic energy. They heighten too and set free the psychic, mental and spiritual energies which ordinarily depend for their opportunity of action on the pranic force. But the same thing can be done by mental will and practice or by an increasing opening of ourselves to a higher spiritual power of the Shakti. The pranic Shakti can be directed not only upon ourselves, but effectively... The relation between the Purusha and Prakriti which emerges as one advances in the Yoga of self-perfection is the next thing that we have to understand carefully in this part of the Yoga. In the spiritual truth of our being the power which we call Nature is the power of being, consciousness and will and therefore the power of self-expression and self-creation of the self, soul or Purusha. But to our ...
... material existence, so are they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually supermind and the higher degrees of the spiritual existence. Evolution comes by the unceasing pressure of the sup... imposed on this sensible form and instrument of our being, then there may be even here a physical working of divine mind and sense, a physical working of divine life in the human frame and even the evolution upon earth of something that we may call a divinely human body. The Page 268 body of man also may some day come by its transfiguration; the Earth-Mother too may reveal in us her godhead... principle, limit themselves by its possibilities and, if they would develop others, have even in that development to take account of the original formula, its purpose and its demand upon the divine evolution. The sense works through physical instruments, the life through a physical nerve-system and vital organs, the mind has to build its operations upon a corporeal basis and use a material instrumentation ...
... "what is known through rational reflection on the ultimate significance of evolution". Rideau also quotes Teilhard directly. Teilhard writes: "...Christ (provided he is seen in the full realism of his Incarnation) is a perfect parallel to the Omega Point our theory led us to anticipate and tends to produce exactly the spiritual totalization we are awaiting" (L'energie humaine, 1937, in L'energie humaine... upon which the mathematical physics of matter is founded. A universe whose primal stuff is matter is irremediably fixed and sterile; whereas a universe of 'spiritual' stuff has all the elasticity it would need to lend itself both to evolution (life) and to involution (entropy)..., "No, the cosmos...is fundamentally and primarily living, and its complete history is ultimately nothing but... form with their spiritually glorified physical beings a Plenitude, a Pleroma, with himself and carry this Cosmic Fullness into the bosom of the Transcendent God. Lastly, he had the conviction that he could bring home to his Church his evolutionary vision of that wonderful doctrine and lift Roman Catholicism out of an old-fashioned interpretation taking no stock of modern evolutionism which, with its ...
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