... discomfiture, face to face with the problem of an adequate verbal communication of their spiritual knowledge. Thus the Indian Page 138 mystic Dadu repeatedly avers that a veritable spiritual experience defies all formulation in the conceptual framework of our limited speech-mode, and since there is no commensurability between that and the normal experience of average humanity, spiritual knowledge... after supernal knowledge honestly feels the total inaptitude of all verbal communication and thus falls mute and speechless. Sri Ramakrishna himself expresses this indubitable fact of all true spiritual experience in the two following parables; "In the Kirtan the devotee first sings 'Net ā i ā m ā r m ā t ā h ã ti ('My Netai dances like a mad elephant'). As the devotional mood deepens, he simply... no noise. Afterwards all retire to sleep and absolute silence reigns." 6 Here at this point a question may be pertinently mooted: How to know whether the supposed inexpressibility of spiritual experience is not entirely due to the linguistic incompetence of the individual mystic? Is it not conceivable that with greater command over the language-appartus some other mystic will be in a position ...
... religion and spiritual experience. Occultism, if admitted, provides a vaster field of experience, but at the best, occultism points to a field of spiritual experience which lies beyond its proper domains of enquiry. Religion tends to claim the knowledge of spiritual realities; it pronounces its judgments based on intuitions and revelations that are proper to spirituality and spiritual experience. But religion... capacities of human experience. Philosophy and Spiritual Experience This is where philosophy tends to admit the relevance of the realm of direct spiritual experience, — the realm of intuitive experience, inspirational experience, and revelatory experience. There are, however, great difficulties in under-standing this realm of spiritual experience, mainly because it is a field traversed by rare... to be developed. Spiritual Experience and Yoga We stand today at a point of great transition where domains such as those which transcend the limitations, not only of science, but also of religion, occultism and philosophy, too, will need to be developed. It is in that context that yoga, which is practical psychology and science of direct spiritual experience, promises to be a quest of ...
... 143 [As for the other matter how can the écarts of the sadhaks here, none of whom have reached perfection or anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null or worthless.] You write as if the moment [one had] any kind of spiritual experience or realisation, one must at once be a perfect person without defects or weaknesses. That is to make a demand which it is impossible to satisfy and... siddha Yogis could not be advanced as a disproof of spiritual experience or of its value. My remark was not at all meant as justification of loss of self-control in an argument and getting angry and excited if crossed in one's views. It was merely a refusal to accept that as an argument against spirituality in general—spiritual experience, as I said, does not inevitably lead to perfection and... which do not exist in them. But apart from that the fall of a sadhak from Yoga proves nothing against the truth of spiritual experience. It is well known to all Yogis that a fall is possible and the Gita speaks of it more than once. But how does the fall prove that spiritual experience is not true and genuine ? The fall of a man from a great height does not prove that he Prithwi Singh ...
... governed by mental consciousness; it often revolves in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices of set prescriptions and forms. Religion does promise eventual arrival at spiritual experience, but often, it is claimed that spiritual experience is beyond the normal limitations of humanity, even though the founders of religions, it is acknowledged, were blessed with the rare ability of divine seeing and divine... and the issue of the conflict remains as yet an unresolved issue. It is the limitations of morality and religion iv that have compelled the quest of direct spiritual experience. But even in the realm of direct spiritual experience the issue of the justification of the claim in regard to knowledge, certainty and truth is not easy to resolve. Spirituality, Science and Criteria of Validity... greater detail, particularly with reference to the data of the claims of each major spiritual experience that it delivers the most comprehensive knowledge of the ultimate reality and the universe as also with reference to the data of plurality of religions and the claims of each religion that the spiritual experience which is the foundation and which is also the culminating point of its practices delivers ...
... every considerable line of spiritual experience and endeavour. It is true that a philosophic development of spiritual thought is not entirely indispensable; for the truths of spirit can be reached more directly and completely by intuition and by a concrete inner contact. It must also be said Page 912 that the critical control of the intellect over spiritual experience can be hampering and unreliable... spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a creed or theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former, ordinarily, is the occidental method, the latter the oriental: but spiritual experience is the final aim and achievement of religion, its sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes banned occultism or reduced its own occult element to a minimum; it has pushed away the philosophic... all aid—or all impediment—of religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and ...
... truth. The spiritual experience is more than the mental—it is in the very substance of the being that the experience takes place. But if you have that [ peace, calm, silence, wideness ] when you concentrate, it is a true spiritual realisation—that which Page 11 accompanies or prepares the experience of the Atman. It is not merely a mental realisation. Spiritual Experience as Substantial... Substantial Experience Your feeling [ of spiritual experience as a "substance" ] is quite correct. All spiritual experience is a substantial experience—consciousness, Ananda even are felt as something substantial. It is also true that it is felt so by something deeper than mind; it is the mind that turns concrete realities into abstractions. Yes, so long as the attitude is mental it is insecure... exclude all these feelings and kindred ones and say that they are feelings, not experiences, then there is very little room left for experiences at all. Feeling and vision are the main forms of spiritual experience. One sees and feels the Brahman everywhere; one feels a force enter or go out from one; one feels or sees the presence of the Divine within or around one; one feels or sees the descent of light; ...
... Truth and Spiritual Experience Intellectual truths? Do you think that the intellectual truth of the Divine is its real truth? In that case there is no need of Yoga. Philosophy is enough. Philosophy knows nothing about peace and silence or the inner and outer vital. These things are discovered only by Yoga. Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be... hasty and inept generalisation has no truth in it and therefore no value. Argument number two. A spiritual experience cannot be taken as a truth (it is a chimaera) unless it is proved just as the presence of a chair in the next room can be proved by showing it to the eye. Of course, a spiritual experience cannot be proved in that way, for it does not belong to the order of physical facts and is not ... incompatible conclusions. We cannot say that Reason is infallible, any more than feeling is infallible or the senses are infallible. Page 323 Russell has the doubts because he has no spiritual experience, Rolland because he takes his emotional intellectuality for spirituality, Tagore— If one is blind, it is quite natural—for the human intelligence which is rather an asinine thing at its best—to ...
... language may be used to express—at least up to a certain point and in a certain way—the supra-intellectual consciousness which is the essential power of spiritual experience? This however is by the way—when one tries to explain spiritual experience to the intellect itself, then it is a different matter. 14 January 1934 You ask me whether you have to give up your predilection for testing before... silence on the mind and heart, on the life stimuli, on the physical reflexes. A sudden descent of this kind or a series of descents accumulative in force and efficacy is a well-known phenomenon of spiritual experience. Or again one may start a mental process of one kind or another for the purpose which would normally mean a long labour and yet may pull down or be seized midway, or even at the outset, by an... higher consciousness to come and set right the disturbed balance. I am glad you are getting converted to silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses—in my case it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the rest of the sadhana; but as to the positive way to get these things, I don't know if your mind is quite ready to proceed with it. There are in fact several ways ...
... mental consciousness; it often revolves in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices of set prescriptions and forms. Religion does promise eventual arrival at spiritual experience, but often, it is claimed that spiritual experience is beyond the normal limitations of humanity, even though the founders of religions, it is acknowledged, were blessed with the rare ability of divine seeing and divine... and the issue of the conflict remains as yet an unresolved issue. It is the limitations of morality and religion 21 that have compelled the quest of direct spiritual experience. But even in the realm of direct spiritual experience the issue of the justification of the claim in regard to knowledge, certainty and truth is not easy to resolve. Spirituality, Science and Criteria of Validity... Pilgrims Quest for the Highest and the Best -04_Spirituality and Yoga.htm 3 Spirituality and Yoga In the history of human quest, the field of direct spiritual experience has come to be cultivated, both intensively and extensively. This cultivation has come to be explored and practiced systematically in various cultures of the world, and in India, this systematic ...
... way—the supra-intellectual consciousness which is the essential power of spiritual experience? This however is by the way—when one tries to explain spiritual experience to the intellect itself, then it is a different matter. The interpenetration of the planes is indeed for me a capital and fundamental part of spiritual experience without which Yoga as I practise it and its aim could not exist. For that... world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else. Intellectual Expression of Spiritual Experience In reference to what Prof.... —but it must be a Reason which in its turn is prepared to compromise and accept the data of spiritual experience as valid per se . That is to do what the Indian philosophers have always done; for they have tried to establish by the light of metaphysical reasoning generalisations drawn from spiritual experience; and it was always on the basis of that experience that they proceeded and with the evidence ...
... questions raised are interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind, capable enough in other directions should sink to so much puerility when it begins to deal with religion and spiritual experience. All the same I shall see if there is anything that can be said in the matter. You expect some sort of... inrush of spiritual experience. But if afterwards it begins questioning, doubting, theorising, surmising what this might be and whether it is true or not, what else can the spiritual Power do but retire and wait for the bubbles of the mind to cease? Page 223 I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the... mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting ln light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience. But of that, hereafter, when I get a chance of an hour or two to write ...
... a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. India recognised authority of spiritual experience and knowledge, but she recognised still more the need of variety of spiritual experience and knowledge. Even in the days of decline when the claim of authority became in too many directions rigorous and excessive, she still kept the saving... preparing in her, a mighty transformation and farther dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the Page 190 inexhaustible infinities of spiritual experience. The many-sided plasticity of Indian cult and spiritual experience is the native sign of its truth, its living reality, the unfettered sincerity of its search and finding; but this plasticity is a constant stumbling block... impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person: but whatever be our way of reaching him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more ...
... genuine faith has to be respected, there can be different degrees of respect and what I extend to you is a deep respect because you, like me, have a background or basis of a true "conversion", a spiritual experience bringing one in inner touch with the Divine. Your experience brought you into profounder relation with the religion in which you had been born. Mine took me out of the Zoroastrianism which is... s strike me as lacking in a proper understanding of people like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But how can you fall short of the truth in this context when you recognise them to be adepts of spiritual experience, of Yogic sadhana, of illuminating insights? Sri Aurobindo spent 14 years - from the age of 7 to that of 21 - in Christian England. Then and later he knew his Bible very well.* Do you think... the sum of its forms or its forces..... "Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these verses of the Gita: but they rest founded not upon any intellectual speculation, but on spiritual experience; they synthetise because they arise globally from certain truths of spiritual consciousness. When we attempt to put ourselves into conscious relations with whatever supreme or universal Being ...
... knowledge there may be and whatever corrections it may make in the knowledge by spiritual experience, it cannot abolish the facthood or truth of spiritual experience except by ignoring them; but then such ignoring knowledge would not be the highest knowledge. But unlike in sense-experience, in spiritual experience the subject finds its final rest and so of all search of knowledge. The experience... fulfilled in any single spiritual experience; where we find the identity of the subject and the object the differentiation between the two is absent, and vice versa. And this leads to variation in knowledge and claims which conflict with each other. There are three fundamental experiences in terms of which we can translate roughly all the multitudinous varieties of spiritual experience. The first is one... the inner consciousness into subtler planes of existence and even to the highest and supreme experience of the Infinite. Thus the movement of knowledge must rise higher into the field of spiritual experience to see if it gets there what it seeks. And indeed once again we find in the spiritual field the same kind of, though intenser and wider, certainty of the facthood and of the truth of the experience ...
... The lines: Revealed it wakens, when God's stillness Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature, express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and... been able to read the other poem; I have to reserve it. January 26, 1934 The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another... regret, even of sadness, that others don't realise how great you are and are so impatient— even though I happen to be more impatient than they.... Russell has his doubts because he has no spiritual experience. Rolland because he takes his emotional intellectuality for spirituality; as for Tagore—if one is blind, it is quite natural for the human intelligence which is rather an imbecile thing at its ...
... intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need not be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience. Spiritual intuition is always a more luminous guide than the discriminating reason, and spiritual intuition addresses... therefore in order to enter into relations with it we are impelled to set up these human fictions and these personal symbols so as to make it nearer to us. But we have to judge by spiritual experience, and in a total spiritual experience we shall find that these things are not fictions and symbols, but truths of divine being in their essence, however imperfect may have been our representations of them. Even... the intellect, its discriminations, and the aspirations of the heart and life, their approximations, have behind them realities at which they are the means of arriving. Both are justified by spiritual experience; both arrive at the divine absolute of that which they are seeking. But still each tends, if too exclusively indulged, to be hampered by the limitations of its innate quality and its characteristic ...
... based upon spiritual experience and channelised into a metaphysical system by means of intellectual processes of reasoning. Even when intellectual speculations have been free both in regard to the premises and conclusions, still the conclusions have never been accepted as authentic unless they have been found verifiable in spiritual experience or confirmed by the records of spiritual experience, shruti... the fundamental point of reference is not the outward form of a given belief and practice but the spirit behind and the justifying spiritual experience. Indian scriptures and records abound with the statements and descriptions of varieties of spiritual experience. But there are three central spiritual experiences in terms of which all these varieties can be readily understood. The first is that... vistas of experience and research. It transcends the boundaries of dogma and exclusive claims of Truth. It is not opposed to any religion, but points to a way to a synthesis and integrality of spiritual experience in the light of which the truth behind each religion is understood and permitted to grow to its fullness and to meet in harmony with all the others. The important thing is to turn the human ...
... judge, but they speak of a Reason which in its turn is prepared to compromise and accept the data of spiritual experience as valid per se. That, in a sense, is just what the Indian philosophers have always done; for they have tried to establish generalisations drawn from spiritual experience by the light of metaphysical reasoning, but on the basis of that experience and with the evidence of... A Greater Psychology 14 Validity of Supraphysical and Spiritual Experience It is a fact that mankind almost from the beginning of its existence or so far back as history or tradition can go, has believed in the existence of other worlds and in the possibility of communication between their powers and beings and the human race. In the last rationalistic... mental thinking the supreme rank as an instrument in the discovery of Truth, but only a secondary status. The first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience; an intellectual conclusion that contradicts this supreme authority is held invalid. Secondly, each philosophy has armed itself with a practical way of reaching to the supreme state of co ...
... literature of expositions, commentaries and treatises. Strong intellectuality of this period was inspired by the wide variety of spiritual experience and the synthetic turn so visible in the Vedas and the Upanishads. There was a conscious perception that spiritual experience is higher than religion and that what religion seeks can really be attained by the inner psychological discipline, which in due... the human form. The philosophic mind started from the data of the spiritual experience, and it went back always in one form or another Page 92 to the profound truth of the Veda and the Upanishad which kept their place as the highest authority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide... Page 94 forms and substitution of others. Symbol, ritual and ceremony were transformed; the lofty heights of the Vedic spiritual experience did not reappear as a predominant tendency, although there was a farther widening and fathoming of psychic and spiritual experience. The Vedic pantheon gradually faded out altogether under the weight of the increasing importance of the great Trinity, Brahma ...
... literature of expositions, commentaries and treatises. Strong intellectuality of this period was inspired by the wide variety of spiritual experience and the synthetic turn so visible in the Vedas and the Upanishads. There was a conscious perception that spiritual experience is higher than religion and that what religion seeks can really be attained by the inner psychological discipline, which in due... animal to the human form. The philosophical mind started from the data of the spiritual experience, and it went back always in one form or the other to the profound truth of the Veda and the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest authority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer, if more incalculable, guide than the... prominent Vedic forms and substitution of others. Symbol, ritual and ceremony were transformed; the lofty heights of the Vedic spiritual experience did not reappear as a predominant tendency, although there was farther widening and fathoming of psychic and spiritual experience. The Vedic pantheon gradually faded out altogether under the weight of the increasing importance of the great Trinity, Brahma- ...
... excessive importance has been given always to thought, intellect, the logical reason as the highest means and even as the highest end; "Thought is the be-all and the end-all" in philosophy; and even spiritual experience has been "summoned to pass the tests of the intellect" if such experience is to have any validity at all! 2 In India the position has been just the reverse. In the East generally, and in India... the intellect, they have assigned only a subordinate status to such mental constructions. On the other hand, "the first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience". 3 Without their corroboration - or, rather, unless they are made the base - mere intellectual constructions have been dismissed as no more than exercises. Further, the Indian metaphysical... 416 in the steady light of his own spiritual experiences at Baroda, Alipur, Chandernagore and Pondicherry. As he explained in one of the later issues of the Arya: The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present to us... but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had to be found. ...
... one usually has, then one can call this a spiritual experience; this means that there are thousands of different things which can be called spiritual experiences. Should we aspire to have a spiritual experience? I think it is wiser to aspire to make progress or to be more conscious or to be better or do better than aspire for a spiritual experience; because that might open the door to more or... The Sunlit Path The Spirit and the Psychic Being Spiritual Experience You speak of spiritual experience. What is an experience and how can one have it? It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than the one you usually have. You have a certain feeling about yourself, you are not even aware of it, it is for you your ordinary... ordinary condition, you understand. Well, if suddenly you become conscious within of something very different and much higher, then, whatever it may be, this will be a spiritual experience. You may formulate it with a mental idea, you may not formulate it; you may explain it to yourself, you may not; it may last, it may not, it may be instantaneous. But when there is this essential difference in the consciousness ...
... intellectual side, does not depart from this constant need of the Indian temperament. It works out from spiritual experience through the exact and laborious inspection and introspection of the intellect and works backward and in again from the intellectual perceptions to new gains of spiritual experience. There is indeed a tendency of fragmentation and exclusiveness; the great integral truth of the Upanishads... the contrary all the type of the mind reflected there is of the familiar Indian character constant through every change, religio-philosophic, religio-ethical, religio-social, with all the past spiritual experience behind it and supporting it though not prominently in the front; the imagination is of the same kind that we have found in the art of the time; the frames of significant image, symbol and myth... the vital aspects of existence, and it is these that in this age are being more fully Page 368 taken up, brought out and made in the religious field a support for an extension of spiritual experience. The sense of this evolution of the culture appears more clearly outside the range of pure literature in the philosophic writings of the time and in the religious poetry of the Puranas and ...
... formal logic. It expresses a fundamental spiritual experience, dynamic for the growth of the being, confirmed and enlarged and filled with detail by almost thirty years of continuous sadhana, and, as such, it cannot be seriously challenged or invalidated by mere intellectual question or reasoning, but, if at all, then only by a greater and wider spiritual experience. Moreover, it coincides (not in expression... has Whitham or Science to do with spiritual truth or spiritual experience? I can only suppose that he condemns all intrusion of anything like metaphysical thought into the spiritual field—a position excessive but not altogether untenable—and even perhaps proposes to bring the scientific method and the scientific mentality into spiritual experience as the sole true way of arriving at or judging the truth... it is a metaphor, but not a mere metaphor, for it is a symbol also, a symbol visually seen by the sūkṣma dṛṣṭi , the subtle vision, and not merely a symbol, but, as one might say, a fact of spiritual experience. The sun in the Yoga is the symbol of the supermind and the supermind is the first power of the Supreme which one meets across the border where the experience of spiritualised mind ceases and ...
... receive her beloved child? What gifts, what presents had she kept ready for him? She bestowed upon him, as an unsolicited grace, one of the brightest gems of her immemorial heritage - a high spiritual experience! In the midst of the confused hum and bustle of the strangers swarming up and down the gangways, "a vast calm descended upon him... this calm surrounded him and remained for long months a... to her bosom after a long sojourn in a foreign land. This greeting was at once a symbol and a prophecy. It was an index to the glory of his life's mission. This sudden and unexpected spiritual experience that invaded and encompassed Sri Aurobindo recalls the somewhat similar - only it was less unexpected - instance of Sri Chaitanya's conversion in the temple of Vishnu at Gaya. An arrogant... reveal Himself to my vision.” "A Hymn to the Supreme Lord of the Universe" by Sri Chaitanya In the second year of his stay at Baroda, i.e. in 1894, Sri Aurobindo had another spiritual experience, which came in the same unexpected way as the first one he had at Apollo Bunder. One day, while he was going in a horse carriage, he 21. Love and Death, a long poem, and the drama ...
... one usually has, then one can call this a spiritual experience; this means that there are thousands of different things which can be called spiritual experiences. Should we aspire to have a spiritual experience? I think it is wiser to aspire to make progress or to be more conscious or to be better or do better than aspire for a spiritual experience; because that might open the door to more... these movements, from the point of view of the inner spiritual growth, have Page 431 an infinitely greater value than when they are the result of an outer rule. You speak of spiritual experience. What is an experience and how can one have it? It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than the one you usually have. You have a certain feeling about yourself... it, it is for you your ordinary condition, you understand. Well, if suddenly you become conscious within of something very different and much higher, then, whatever it may be, this will be a spiritual experience. You may formulate it with a mental idea, you may not formulate it; you may explain it to yourself, you may not; it may last, it may not, it may be instantaneous. But when there is this essential ...
... The Riddle of This World The Riddle Of This World It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way the starting-point of the spiritual urge - except... which will be at the same time an opening for the entire descent of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude. All spiritual experience afirms that there is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle and that its characters... the logical issue of that progression? Everything seems to point to such a progression as a fact - to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. Here, too, there is a justifying line of spiritual experience in which we discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic ...
... The calm is the calm of the highest spiritual consciousness to which the soul has ascended, making those summits its own and looking down from their highest heights on all below: in spiritual Page 333 experience, in the occult vision or feeling that accompanies it, this calm is not felt as an abstract quality or a mental condition but as something concrete and massive, a self-existent reality... calm, and that would be an apt and live phrase and not an ugly artifice or twist of rhetoric. It should be remembered that the calm of Nirvana or the calm of the supreme Consciousness is to spiritual experience something self-existent, impersonal and eternal and not dependent on the person—or the face—which manifests it. In these two passages I take then the liberty to regard Mendonҫa's criticism as... one more to his taste; but it would not have been Savitri . It would not have fulfilled the intention or had anything of the character, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritual experience which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an "unconscionable length"—I ...
... something that warrants this hope to arrive at something better. For the spiritual experience there is—and this something behind is to it as undeniable a fact as the very apparent character of this world in its surface aspect as a world of Ignorance, tribulation, suffering, disharmony, disorder, obscure Inconscience. To spiritual experience it is not a speculation but a fact that there is a Godhead immanent... consciousness also. It is also a part of spiritual experience that there is something Beyond in which this Divinity—or whatever other name you may give to it—is above the contradiction offered to it by this world of disorder and ignorance; that is the meaning of the Transcendence. Whatever wide differences there may be between different ways of spiritual experience or whatever names may be put on these... is left as an influence only and not a thing fixed in the physical world—and it is through the Divine in the individual alone that this can be done. These are elements in the dynamics of spiritual experience and I am obliged to admit them if a divine work has to be done. The European type of monism is usually pantheistic and weaves the universe and the Divine so intimately together that they ...
... inrush of spiritual experience. But if afterwards it begins questioning, doubting, theorising, surmising what this might be and whether it is true or not, what else can the spiritual Power do but retire and wait for the bubbles of the mind to cease? I would ask one simple question of those who would make Page 340 the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the... the existence of air because a strong wind is not always blowing or of sunlight because night intervenes between dawn and dusk. The difficulty lies in the normal human consciousness to which spiritual experience comes as something abnormal and is in fact supernormal. This weak limited normality finds it difficult at first even to get any touch of that greater and intenser supernormal or it gets it diluted... Ignorance feeling and fumbling around after Knowledge; these greater things can only be brought by the progressive opening of a consciousness Page 339 quieted and turned steadily towards spiritual experience. If you ask why the Divine has so disposed it on this highly inconvenient basis, it is a futile question,—for this is nothing else than a psychological necessity imposed by the very nature of ...
... it ceases, we still regard it as something that was real. The principle of a supporting status for action is a permanent principle, and its action is constant in Time-eternity." 8 From spiritual experience too Sri Aurobindo gives us a hint. Apropos of the silent Self he says: "It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability, immobility that we can base on it a force and energy... be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness - ekātma-pratyaya-sāram , - with which this realisation seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them, - and not this alone, - are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of... silence is yet inherent. The truer way of putting the fact is that the two sides are never separate but coexistent, or rather one existence severable only in our thought or our partial spiritual experience. The ultimate essence not only carries all form and movement in potentiality in the depths of sheer Being: it is also never dissociated from a sovereign all-formative all-moving expansion ...
... —there is nothing to prevent us from proceeding firmly upon whatever certitudes of spiritual experience have become to us the soil of our inner growth or the pillars on our road to self-knowledge. These are soul realities. But the exact frame we shall give to that knowledge, will best be built by farther spiritual experience aided by new enlarged intuitions, confirmed in the suggestions of a wide philosophic... differences shows that in them too there is a selection of ideas, separate aspects of the Truth,—the sceptic would say, shows of imagination and falsehood,—and a construction from a limited spiritual experience. In them too there is an element of chosen and willed believing and some high pragmatic aim and utility, whether that be the soul's escape from the sorrow or unreality of existence or celestial... systems are very obviously only feasible selective constructions of great reflective ideas. More often these are possibilities of the reason much rather than assured certainties or, if founded on spiritual experience, they are still selective constructions, a sort of great architectural approach to some gate into unknowable Divine or ineffable Infinite. The modern scientific mind professed to rid us of all ...
... knowledge". The calm is the calm of the highest spiritual consciousness to which the soul has ascended, making those summits its own and looking down from their highest heights on all below: in spiritual experience, in the occult vision or feeling that accompanies it, this calm is not felt as an abstract quality or a mental condition but as something concrete and massive, a self-existent reality to... could, and that would be an apt and live phrase and not an ugly artifice or twist of rhetoric. It should be remembered that the calm of Nirvana or the calm of the supreme Consciousness is to spiritual experience something self-existent, impersonal and eternal and not dependent on the person — or the face — which manifests it. In these two passages I take then the liberty to regard Mendonca's criticism... one more to his taste; but it would not have been Savitri. It would not have fulfilled the intention or had anything of the character, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritual experience which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying outits purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an "unconscionable length" ...
... in some largest Truth which takes them into itself. Sri Aurobindo 1 The Nature and Methodology of Yoga Psychology The following account of Sri Aurobindo's first major spiritual experience provides a good starting-point for explicating the nature of yoga psychology: ...to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition... These things were known directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names. At the same time this fundamental character of spiritual experience is not absolutely limitative; it can do without thought, but it can do with thought also. 7 A second characteristic of yoga psychology is that its purview extends beyond the normal... daily tell us — so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific 19 or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid ...
... Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library,SABCL, 1970) Page 101 APPENDIX III SRI AUROBINDO on The Riddle of this World It. is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way the starting point of the spiritual... discovery of the spiritual Page 102 gate to perfection which will be at the same time an opening for the entire descent of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude. All spiritual experience affirms that there is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle and that its characters... principle, the logical issue of that progression? Everything seems to point to such a progression as a fact to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. Here too there is a justifying line of spiritual experience in which we discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic ...
... are not asking what answer theological thought has given to this problem, and expressed in the form of doctrinal propositions. We are trying to find out the conceptions to which the data of spiritual experience, in its developed form, point. When the question is put thus, the reply, it seems to us, can hardly be doubtful. The God of spiritual religion is conceived after the analogy of the human personality... idea is Page 27 therefore a problem which is set to the religious philosopher by the facts of religious experience. I do not think we are entitled to say more, than that man's spiritual experience shows us the idea of God which on the whole prevails, and in the long run works best. The notion that the evolution of religion is itself a logical movement, a movement which is a continuous... other hand, if we revise the proof and state it in the light of the idea of development, it assumes a sounder and more hopeful form. The reality of God then becomes a postulate of the developing spiritual experience of humanity. The long upward journey of the race, during which the idea of a spiritual God has gradually taken form and substance in human minds, becomes a meaningless movement if there be no ...
... st conceptions, he identifies two accounts, namely, spirituality as the sublime, and spirituality as the ineffable. The first one is related to the emphasis in contemporary thinking about spiritual experience, which focuses upon the moral, religious and aesthetic as concerned with the sublime. This he considers to be hardly more than a pious way of exalting or celebrating those aspects of human... processes, which are known in India as yogic methods. Hence, larger conceptions of spiritual education can be formulated. Again, spiritual education implies a vaster background of psychology of spiritual experience on a sound basis of which the pedagogy of spiritual education can be built. We seem to be as yet in a state of beginnings of spiritual pedagogy, and Carr has rendered valuable service in ... clarifying certain important concepts, and his analysis helps us to create strong bases for spiritual pedagogy, but we need to go farther. There are grounds in yoga to show that spiritual experience has many gates and that there are many preliminary stages through which human psychology can be developed before one can enter into the realm of the spiritual in its distinctiveness. Moreover ...
... ceremonies are, overtly, the details of! an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-Worship which was then the common religion, covertly the sacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand the ... use in its expression a common language. They differ in temperament and personality; some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use of Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion. Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the... symbol of sacrifice to a movement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others baffle us at first by their semblance of antique unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the fixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa ...
... and the descendants of all the tribes they have mixed with to something that until now remained outside their ken: the spiritual experience – the direct, personal, individual encounter with God. The Eastern Way – India To find what the West is lacking, the spiritual experience, we have to turn to the East, more especially to India, “the heart of Asia”, whose spiritual attainments have spread... the relations between East and West. It goes as follows: “The fundamental difference [between East and West] has been that Asia has served predominantly (not exclusively) as a field for man’s spiritual experience and progression, Europe has been rather a workshop for his mental and vital activities. As the cycle progressed, the Eastern continent has more and more converted itself into a storehouse of... The Catholic Roman Church dominated all forms of life and, passing itself off as the exclusive intermediary, demanded that everybody use its hierarchy to address God. Real spirituality and spiritual experience were mostly foreign to it – and have remained foreign to the West ever since, so much so that Western philosophy and psychology hardly have an inkling of them. But, by reason of the fact that ...
... Supramental Evolution Letters on Yoga - I Chapter I The Problem of Suffering and Evil The Riddle of This World It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil. Indeed this perception is in a way almost the starting-point of the... behind the world, in a discovery of the spiritual gate to perfection which will be at the same time an opening for the entire descent of the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power, Beatitude. All spiritual experience affirms that there is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in and this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle, and that its characters... principle, the logical issue of that progression? Everything seems to point to such a progression as a fact—to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. Here too there is a justifying line of spiritual experience in which we discover that the Inconscience from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic ...
... deepens into spiritual experience, it arrives readily at the etherial heights, pinnacles, skiey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine being and the divine Ananda. The way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily inferior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage of spiritual experience where there... other hand tends to look down on the sawdust dryness of mere knowledge. And it is true that philosophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction we seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much in an abstract delight and that what it... unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very principle is love and love means always two, the lover and the beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spiritual experience, and because it seeks after the personal God while the Impersonal is the highest and the eternal truth, if not even the sole Reality. But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion ...
... . As for the other matter how can the écarts of the sadhaks here, none of whom have reached perfection or anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null or worthless? You write as if the moment one had any kind of spiritual experience or realisation, one must at once become a perfect person without defects or weaknesses. That is to make a demand which it is impossible to satisfy... being siddha Yogis could not be advanced as a disproof of spiritual experience or of its value. My remark was not at all meant as justification of loss of self-control in an argument and getting angry and excited if crossed in one's views. It was merely a refusal to accept that as an argument against spirituality in general—spiritual experience, as I said, does not immediately lead to perfection and... today's letter so as to get that out of the way. I must say your arguments about X and Y made me smile. When on earth were politeness and good society manners considered as a part or a test of spiritual experience or true Yogic siddhi? It is no more a test than the capacity of dancing well or dressing nicely. Just as there are many very good and kind men who are boorish and rude in their manners, so there ...
... greater detail, particularly with reference to the data of the claims of each major spiritual experience, that it delivers the most comprehensive know- ledge of the ultimate reality and the universe as also with reference to the data of plurality of religions and the claims of each religion that the spiritual experience which is the foundation and which is also the culminating point of its practices delivers... experience is mystic, indiscernible and ineffable. This tradition is opposed to cataphatic tradition, according to which the object of spiritual experience is describable. On behalf of the apophatic tradition, it is argued that the ineffability of the spiritual experience which lies at the basis of religions prevents any philosophical argument or discussion, and that therefore philosophical disputations... points out, this argument may be answered by stating that the mystic gets caught by the mystery of the Object of mystical experience, while sceptics or atheists do not get so caught. Is Spiritual Experience Unavoidably Ineffable? The deeper question is whether mystical or spiritual experiences on which different religions are based are utterly ineffable or whether these experiences are capable ...
... ordinary men broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and fertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever increasing growth of spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet universal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes, Kshatriyas and Brahmins trained in the Vedic system of education, no longer content with an external truth and... Light; it went back always in one form or another to the profound truths of the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest authority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. The same governing force kept its hold on all the other activities of... this was after all less in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist ideal of Nirvana was no more than a sharply Page 207 negative and exclusive statement of the highest Vedantic spiritual experience. The ethical system of the eightfold path taken as the way to release was an austere sublimation of the Vedic notion of the Right, Truth and Law followed as the way to immortality, ṛtasya panthāḥ ...
... inner experience. "And then how can the écarts of the sadhakas here, none of whom has reached perfection or is anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null? You write as if the moment one had any kind of spiritual experience or realisation, one must at once become a perfect person without defects or weaknesses. That is to make a demand which it is impossible to satisfy and it... avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashaya (among Sri Ramkrishna's disciples) in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility; there are others, like Vivekananda, in whom it creates a great sense of strength and superiority — European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there... Pundit was speechless. That 'I' Vivekananda' stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-confident egoism. But there is nothing false or unsound Page 163 in Vivekananda's spiritual experience. For this was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the fighter who, as the representative of something very great could not allow himself to be put down or ...
... mental matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question, and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience. 1932 I have not yet found a moment's time to go through Russell's... questions raised are interesting enough if treated with true philosophic insight or from the standpoint of true spiritual experience. It is queer that the European mind, capable enough in other directions, should sink to so much puerility when it begins to deal with religion and spiritual experience. All the same I shall see if there is anything that can be said in the matter. 1932 Russell, Eddington... other atheist. Genius or fine qualities are always admirable in whomever they are found; all that has nothing to do with the turn of a man's opinions or the truth or untruth of atheism or of spiritual experience. Neither for that matter is the fact that there are people who believe out of fear or desire a valid argument against the existence of the Divine. I will read the book as soon as I can, but ...
... passage are the spiritual justification for the idea of a world created by Maya; but this consequence is not conclusive, since a larger and more complete conclusion superseding it is possible to spiritual experience. All these and other solutions of the nature of Maya fail to satisfy because they have no conclusiveness: they do not establish the inevitability of the illusionist hypothesis which, to... ness the division of these concepts must disappear in a reconciling self-vision; but we can arrive at their true unity only by passing beyond the intellectual Reason and finding out through spiritual experience where they meet and become one and what is the spiritual reality of their apparent divergence. In fact, in the Brahman-consciousness the divergences cannot exist, they must by our passage into... to the domain of the pure reason and the final test of truths of this order is not reason but spiritual illumination verified by abiding fact of spirit; a single decisive Page 485 spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the logical intelligence. Here the theory of Illusionism is in occupation of a very solid ground; for, although it is in itself ...
... that of a Yogi. It cannot be assumed or feigned. If it is a mystery and a paradox, or even a farrago of glaring inconsistencies to our rational mind, it is an undeniable truth and fact of spiritual experience. Vivekananda, if he had been alive at the time, would have easily appreciated it. The intuitive insight of Rabindranath Tagore, Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya, and Sister Nivedita clearly perceived... life of a new seed grown on the ancient soil of India, the logical and passionate development of all her Guru's teaching. 52 "Aurobindo's open and logical method of presenting his own spiritual experience, and revealing the divine message he had received in his solitary meditation, created the necessary unity between his past life of action and his future spiritual discipline. He said: "When... country. He was, according to Dr. R.C. Majumdar, a popular preacher of the spiritual nationalism of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. He was a disciple of Yogi Bijoykrishna Goswami, and the spiritual experience, which he had in jail, effected a great change in him, and gave a fiery accent of inspiration to his utterances. 72 But he was aware of an innate inconstancy in his nature, a lack of ...
... without denying either of them or taking anything from the reality of either. It harmonises the pantheistic, the theistic and the highest transcendental terms of our spiritual conception and spiritual experience. The Divine is the unborn Eternal who has no origin; there is and can be nothing before him from which he proceeds, because he is one and timeless and absolute. "Neither the gods nor the great... lifted by it beyond the ideative or sensible formulations of the universe. It rises into the ineffable power of an all-exceeding, yet all-fulfilling identity, the same beyond and here. This spiritual experience of the transcendental Infinite breaks down the limitations of the pantheistic conception of existence. The infinite of a cosmic monism which makes God and the universe one, tries to imprison... born of the ignorance." These results must arise inevitably from the very nature of the knowledge and from the very nature of the Yoga which converts that knowledge into spiritual growth and spiritual experience. For all the perplexity of man's mind and action, all the stumbling, insecurity and affliction of his mind, his will, his ethical turn, his emotional, sensational and vital urgings can be traced ...
... concentration of all his energies on it was necessary." But Sri Aurobindo's retirement from political activity "did not mean, as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. " The following excerpts are from letters, articles and essays; many of the latter appeared in the Arya, an English... fixed for us by Shastra and custom, every detail of our thought by Scripture and its commentators,—but much oftener by the commentators than by Scripture. Only in one field, that of individual spiritual experience, have we cherished the ancient freedom and originality out of which our past greatness sprang; it is from some new movement in this inexhaustible source that every fresh impulse and rejuvenated... surprising since they decide to force their reading of history, geography and ethnology into the Veda and a priori rule out any deeper, symbolic content to it (and consequently any significant spiritual experience the Vedic Rishis might have had); they are also compelled to date the Veda about 1000 BC, a ridiculously late date. The result is the fallacy of a rigid break between Aryan and Dravidian ...
... given mental thinking the supreme rank as an instrument in the discovery of Truth, but only a secondary status. The first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience; an intellectual conclusion that contradicts this Supreme authority is held invalid. Secondly, each philosophy has armed itself with a practical way of reaching to the supreme state of consciousness... Those who were only philosophic intellectuals were respected for their learning, but never took rank as truth-discoverers. And the philosophies that lacked a sufficiently powerful means of spiritual experience died out and became things of the past, because they were not Page 19 dynamic for spiritual discovery and realisation. ... more as the highest means and even the highest end; in philosophy, Thought is the be-all and the end-all. It is by intellectual thinking and speculation that the truth is to be discovered; even spiritual experience has been summoned to pass the tests of the intellect, if it is to be held valid - just the reverse of the Indian position. Even those who see that the mental Thought must be overpassed and admit ...
... intuition, a living contact, a close experience by identity in our self of knowledge. That is work not for a dialectical, but a bright revelatory thinking, a luminous body of intuitive thought and spiritual experience which carries us straight into sight, into vision of knowledge. The first effort of philosophy is to know for the sake of pure understanding, but her greater height is to take Truth alive in... ourselves and even our enemies, a thing impossible to our normal nature, a law honoured with the consent of the lips and universally ignored in the observance. A few only seeking perfection in spiritual experience discover in it the natural rule of our real and our highest being, quite possible if we can only get some abiding realisation of that secret oneness which is the foundation of the law of universal... the law, nation, State. It is a simple cry of the voice of nature and life, yet there breathes behind it a greater thought which is not so far from the truth underlying religious teaching and spiritual experience. The poet, his eyes fixed on life, shows us as if by accident the seed in our normal nature which can grow into the prodigious spiritual truth of universal love. He has to do it in his own way ...
... something that grows from within outward, not by the working out of a mental principle. You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real self. But there is another... the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and... what we mean when we speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything Page 12 else—so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to self-giving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of ...
... experience daily tell us—so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience following faithfully the methods laid down... or related with others that at first sight seem to contradict it, etc. etc. until you can move with a secure knowledge in the vast field of spiritual phenomena. That is the only way to test spiritual experience. I have myself tried the other method and found it absolutely incapable and inapplicable. On the other hand if you are not prepared to go through all that yourself—as few can do except those... knowledge or experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of others? I have often said that discrimination is not only perfectly admissible but indispensable in spiritual experience. But it must be a discrimination founded on knowledge, not a reasoning founded on ignorance. Otherwise you tie up your mind and hamper experience by preconceived ideas which are as much a priori ...
... mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always... its activities, learn what divine truth there may be behind them and reconcile that apparent opposition between the Divine Truth and the manifest creation which is the starting-point of most spiritual experience. Here, on each line of approach that he can take, he is confronted with a constant Duality, a separation between two terms of existence that seem to be opposites and their opposition to be the... two and, looking more closely, he discovers that in this half-light or darkness too is the Eternal—it is the Brahman who is here with this face of Maya. This is the beginning of a growing spiritual experience which reveals to him more and more that what seemed to him dark incomprehensible Maya was all the time no other than the Consciousness-Puissance of the Eternal, timeless and illimitable beyond ...
... of things are put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding law of spiritual experience—or else to liberate a light within that can lead us on the way until that greater direct Truth-consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us that is only outward, all... of physical things are sometimes half-lights, sometimes false lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for the rest either detain or confuse us. The guiding law of spiritual experience can only come by an opening of human consciousness to the Divine Consciousness; there must be the power to receive in us the working and command and dynamic presence of the Divine Shakti and... there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied ...
... final any kind of intellectual idea or opinion whatever in its intellectual form and to hold it in a questioning suspension until it is given its right place and luminous shape of truth in a spiritual experience enlightened by supramental knowledge. And much more must this be the case with the desires or impulsions of the life mind, which have often to be provisionally accepted as immediate indices... since it is opposed to the actual facts of life and will for long be contradicted by immediate experience, as happens with all far-off and difficult ends, and it is denied too by many who have spiritual experience but believe that our present nature is the sole possible nature of man in the body and that it is only by throwing off the earthly life or even all individual existence that we can arrive at... faith is essentially the secret śraddhā of the soul, and it is brought more and more to the surface and there satisfied, sustained and increased by an increasing assurance and certainty of spiritual experience. Here too the faith in us must be unattached, a faith that waits upon Truth and is prepared to change and enlarge its understanding of spiritual experiences, to correct mistaken or half-true ...
... because you cannot believe in the action of occult laws and forces or in siddhis. The object of Yoga is realisation of the Divine; these other things are side matters which need be no part of spiritual experience, nor is belief in them necessary for realisation. Everyone has the right of private judgment in these matters; so you need not worry. * February 4, 1943 (Dilipda’s... fundamental part he played in my own sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in your sadhana could be considered objectionable. Sectarianism is a matter of dogma, ritual, etc., not of spiritual experience; the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the ishta-deva. If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to him, you give yourself to me. Your inability to... necessity through Yoga of purifying the emotions as she is emotional though not of the nervous type. But I told her vital emotions were not helpful if one wanted to touch spiritual depths though spiritual experience needed vital power to find full poetic expression. I hope I didn’t err here. But I am not quite clear about the nervous as I have not lived on the nerves except in rare moments of sudden ...
... Divine purpose it has to be done, Sri Ramakrishna himself answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as he gave and such as I try to give answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to co-ordinate its ignorance; still less can there be a placing of the Divine Truth before... exclude all these feelings and kindred ones and say that they are feelings and not experiences, then you leave very little room for experiences. "Feeling and vision are the main forms of spiritual experience. One sees and feels the Brahman everywhere; one feels a force enter or go out from one; one feels or sees the presence of the divine within or around one; one feels the descent of peace or ... he put in placidly. "For Yoga has for its ultimate object the realisation of the Divine and achieving the divine life. These are side-issues and as such need not be looked upon as germane to spiritual experience. So belief in them is not necessary, far less indispensable for realisation. You have the right of private judgments in matters such as these." My heart-beat abated "I am relieved," I said ...
... of your nature: for that matter, it is the strongest motive force that sadhana can have and the best means for all else that has to come. It is why I said that it is through the heart that spiritual experience must come to you. The loyalty and the rest that you have for me and the Mother may not, as you say, be part of the bhakti itself, but they could not be there were not the bhakti deep inside... exclude all these feelings and kindred ones and say that they are feelings, not experiences, then there is very little room left for experiences at all. Feeling and vision are the main forms of spiritual experience. One sees and feels the Brahman everywhere—one feels a force enter or go out from one; one feels or sees the presence of the Divine within or around one; one feels or sees the descent of light;... softness, a plasticity, even a velvety softness, an ineffable plasticity. Any fellow who knows anything about Yoga would immediately say, "What a fine experience", a very clear psychic and spiritual experience. Page 103 June 3,1936 These sonnets are very fine, gracious and harmonious and beautiful. Shailen 35 wanted to send some stories he wishes to publish in ...
... from Hathayoga to Rajayoga can be made. Hathayoga, thus, combined with Rajayoga, leads to the spiritual experience which Rajayoga provides, but the advantage of the Hathayogin is the power of physical health and longevity, which have their own utilities for the growth and sustenance of spiritual experience. 32 Yoga of Devotion The yoga of devotion, as also the systems of yoga of works... into states of Samadhi, states of gradual cessation of modifications of consciousness. At last, the state page - 45 of Total Silence is achieved, and in that state of silence a true spiritual experience is obtained, the experience of a being, utterly unmoved, immobile and immovable, that stands un- affected even while it witnesses outer movements. This experience can be repeated, and one... and death are arrested. The page - 47 Hathayogin has a much greater power of longevity, and since the body is the instrument for increasing growth of consciousness and possession of spiritual experience, this power of longevity is a matter of great importance. There is an enormous variety of asanas in Hathayoga, running in their fullness beyond the number of eighty. This variety of asanas serves ...
... or weak points, of a particular philosophical formulation, the spiritual experience that it seeks to represent remains in itself eternally valid and can only be integrated in the compass of another experience much more wide and much more lofty. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully pointed out, "a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected... Ibid., p.375. Page 104 opposition of transcendent Reality and unreal cosmic Maya." 1 But the difficulty is that it is often trenchantly asserted as a fact of spiritual experience that the Reality is indeed featureless and immutable and the universe of manifestation is brought about by the illusionary Maya-Power of the Supreme. Although this assertion that the only... us listen to Sri Aurobindo describing his own personal spiritual realisation : "The solution of the matter must rest not upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience — an experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana and Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no decisive value. "Now to reach Nirvana ...
... seen in the Veda only rather obscure, ritualistic texts... of small value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience. 291 But in the original, he discovered a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience.... 292 I found that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light psychological experiences of my own for which... of proper concentration; there is nothing that will not finally yield to a well-applied concentration. When he went ashore on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he was overtaken by a spontaneous spiritual experience, a vast calm ; but he had more immediate concerns of food and survival. Sri Aurobindo was twenty. He found a position with the Maharaja of Baroda, as professor of French, then taught English... great founders of religions. This is where all the religions we know were born; they all derive from an overmental experience in one of its countless aspects. For a religion or revelation, a spiritual experience, belongs to a certain plane; it does not come from God's thunders or from nowhere; those who incarnate the particular Page 183 revelation have not conceived it from nothing: the overmind ...
... figures replace the old or intervene to add and modify and alter the whole ensemble, are in their essential build and character transmutations and extensions of the original vision and first spiritual experience and never an unconnected departure. There is a persistence, a continuity of the Indian mind in its literary creation in spite of great changes as consistent as that which we find in painting... its peculiar system of images and the complexity of its thought and symbolised experience, it is in fact the beginning of a form of symbolic or figurative imagery for the poetic expression of spiritual experience which reappears constantly in later Indian writing, the figures of the Tantras and Puranas, the figures of the Vaishnava poets,—one might add even a certain element in the modern poetry of Tagore... outward figure nearest to the inward experience, its material counterpart, is taken throughout and used with such realism and consistency that while it indicates to those who possess it the spiritual experience, it means only the external thing to others,—just as the Vaishnava poetry of Bengal makes to the devout mind a physical and emotional image or suggestion of the love of the human soul for God ...
... nature, anirvacanīya . But the difficulties are so great that it can be accepted only if it imposes itself irresistibly as the inevitable ultimate, the end and summit of metaphysical inquiry and spiritual experience. For even if all things are illusory creations, they must have at least a subjective existence and they can exist nowhere except in the consciousness of the Sole Existence; they are then subjective... creation would be the body of the Truth which they manifest in predetermined significant forms and powers of the All-Existence. Our fundamental cognition of the Absolute, our substantial spiritual experience of it is the intuition or the direct experience of an infinite and eternal Existence, an infinite and eternal Consciousness, an infinite and eternal Delight of Existence. In overmental and mental... existence, its report of the secret of creation and the significance of the universe. At the same time indeterminability is also a necessary element in our conception of the Absolute and in our spiritual experience: this is the other side of the supramental regard on Page 330 being and on things. The Absolute is not limitable or definable by any one determination or by any sum of determinations; ...
... expectations of a higher or a better life had always been projected into a hereafter or into an indefinite earthly future. Now, Sri Aurobindo and Mirra had acquired the conviction, based on their spiritual experience, that the time had come to realise the divine life here and now, and that it was they themselves who had to initiate the required transformation in matter, in the body, on earth. If this conception... idea and that hope, – and our aim has been [in the Arya ] to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based , were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual... concept of involution. Involution, it goes without saying, is the opposite of evolution. As Sri Aurobindo puts it: “Evolution is an inverse action of the involution.” 29 Logic as well as spiritual experience made it clear to him that nothing can evolve which has not previously been involved. The fact of universal evolution is naturally the consequence of the Divine “hiding himself from himself” ...
... word of wisdom in the matter, because it is not the only way and crown or not all the way and the last crown of self-realisation open to our endeavour. There is a mightier fuller more positive spiritual experience in which the circle of our egoistic personality and the round of the mind's limitations vanish in the unwalled infinity of a greatest self and spirit and yet life and its works not only remain... and its creatures which became as it were the flood and outpouring of the high Nirvanic state on life and action. Page 546 That reconciliation was equally the sense of yet another spiritual experience, more conscious of a world significance, more profound, kindling, richly comprehensive on the side of action, a step nearer to the thought of the Gita: this experience we find or can at least... then in "Me" the Ishwara, to renounce all action into the Self, Spirit, Brahman and thence into the supreme Person, the Purushottama. There is here a still greater and profounder complex of spiritual experience, a larger transmutation of the significance of human life, a more mystic and heart-felt sweep of the return of the stream to the ocean, the restoration of personal works and the cosmic action ...
... of the poetry which comes from the illumined mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines The longing of ecstatic tears From infinite to infinite Page 83 will do very well as an... an occult way with the occult may be called esoteric—e.g., the Bird of Fire, Trance , etc. The Two Moons 2 is, it is obvious, desperately esoteric. But I don't know whether an intimate spiritual experience simply and limpidly told without veil or recondite image can be called esoteric—for the word usually brings the sense of something kept back Page 86 from the ordinary eye, hidden... esoteric poem? There is no veil or symbol there—it tries to state the experience as precisely and overtly as possible. The experience of the psychic fire and psychic discrimination is an intimate spiritual experience, but it is direct and simple like all psychic things. The poem which expresses it may easily be something deeply inward, esoteric in that sense, but simple, unveiled and clear, not esoteric ...
... spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a creed or theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former, ordinarily, is the occidental method, the latter the oriental: but spiritual experience is the final aim and achievement of religion, its sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes banned occultism or reduced its own occult element to a minimum; it has pushed away the philosophic... all aid,—or all impediment,—of religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and ... very remarkable—I don't remember whether Sri Aurobindo speaks about it in what follows—but among the four activities or realisations he mentions—religion, occultism, spiritual philosophy and spiritual experience—which are necessary for the development and transformation of man, all are not equally accessible to humanity. The one which can be practised and, one might say, "understood"—although it ...
... Self-knowledge and unity with the Supreme. If the difficulty is presented in the context of spiritual experience, it can only be met by a wider resolving experience. The fact is that there is in the domain of spiritual experience a wide variety, and as Sri Aurobindo has explained, as long as spiritual experience takes place at the level of mental consciousness, whether in a state of silence of the mind... consciousness corresponding to the overmental and supramental consciousness. The principal ideas of the Gita which are woven into its complex harmony can be considered to be the enduring truths of spiritual experience, verifiable facts of our highest psychological possibilities, which no attempt to read deeply the mystery of existence can afford to neglect. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the wide, undulating... 1.2.6,10,11,12. "Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, SABCL, Pondicherry, 1971, Vol.12, pp. 231-2. 57 It would be useful to state that there have been in the history of thought and spiritual experience, several major descriptions of the supramental vision of the ultimate reality, and in regard to these descriptions, the same perplexity, bewilderment and some kind of unintelligibility can be ...
... itself into a congregation of religions providing, at the same time, to each human being with his or her own method of inner experience. It began with the Vedas and developed various facets of spiritual experience, philosophical thought and systems responding to emotional and vital needs as also demands of the physical nature. It maintained a continuous thread uninterruptedly right up to the present day... impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and know and feel him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person; but whatever be our way of reaching Him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that He is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in Him and to find Him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief are to the Hindu mind nothing more... Indian historical movements. But things become easier once it is grasped that the fundamental point of reference is not the outward form of any belief but the spirit behind and the justifying spiritual experience. Hinduism is the worship of one Godhead as the All, for all in the universe is That; godheads are made out of that being. The Indian religion is not therefore pantheism, for beyond universality ...
... perfectly chosen & perfectly placed. There is a consummate harmony in the rhythm of the thought as well as in the rhythm of the language & the verse. The result is a whole system of knowledge & spiritual experience stated with the utmost pregnant brevity, with an epic massiveness & dignity, but yet in itself full and free from omission. We have in this Upanishad no string of incoherent thoughts thrown... of logic and are misused when they are employed merely as mines & quarries for the building of metaphysical systems. I Page 363 hold them to have been arrived at by revelation & spiritual experience, to be records of things seen, heard & felt, drishta, sruta, upalabdha, in the soul and to stand for their truth not on logic which they transcend but on vision to which they aspire. Those ... the Sage; I cannot force upon him any ideas of my own to govern & override his apparent meaning—all that I am allowed to do, is to explain his evident textual meaning in the light of my inward spiritual experience but I must not use that experience which may be imperfect to contradict the text. Shankara has permitted himself all these departures from the attitude of subjection to the text. He has dealt ...
... 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 does not insist... absolute, eternal and infinite Self-existence, Self-awareness, Self-delight of being that secretly supports and pervades the universe even while it is also beyond it, is, then, the first truth of spiritual experience. But this truth of being has at once an impersonal and a personal aspect; it is not only Existence, it is the one Being absolute, eternal and infinite. As there are three fundamental aspects... itself; but we cannot generalise from it that the Infinite is that alone, nor would it be safe to view the rest of the Infinite in the terms of that aspect and exclude all other view-points of spiritual experience. The Infinite is at once an essentiality, a boundless totality and a multitude; all these have to be known in order to know truly the Infinite. To see the parts alone and the totality not at ...
... having discovered the Truth through spiritual experience, have given an intellectual expression of the Truth "as a means of expressing this greater discovery and as much of its contents as can at all be expressed in mental terms to those who still live in the mental intelligence." More on the subject of the role of philosophy in relation to spiritual experience will be said in a subsequent chapter... paricularly drawn. However, his philosophical writings, which I felt to be charged with the vibrations of a spiritual consciousness and which gave me an intuitive feeling that they were based on spiritual experience, made an impression that was deeper than that of Theosophy and gave me a greater understanding than what I had gained in Theosophy of the nature of the soul and its evolution, and of the laws... patient and persistent action on the lines laid down by the knowledge, the force of our personal effort— utsāha. There intervenes, third, uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher— guru. Last comes the instrumentality of Time— kāla; for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of the divine ...
... account of my life; but after starting to correct it I had to give up the attempt in despair. It is chock full of errors and inaccuracies: this cannot be published. As for the account of my spiritual experience, I mean of the Bombay affair, somebody must have inflicted on you a humorous caricature of it. This too cannot "go." The best will be to omit all account or narrative and say—at not too much... as well as the rest, it must be trained to receive, otherwise no transformation of it could take place. It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as is the ordinary unregenerated activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly Page 46 obstructive consciousness of the body. What the sadhaka has to be warned against... ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind, chanchalam manah which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches the human mental plane. Always, it is substituting its own representations and ...
... his insight into spiritual things, the brilliance and accuracy of his thought and vision and expression of them (I think I described it once as pashyanti vak) and on as much as I knew of his spiritual experience and constant acquisition and forward movement and many-sided largeness. A closer perception of the spiritual person behind that is something more than a mental impression. I think this is all... large and predominant part he played in my sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in yours could be considered objectionable. 'Sectarianism' is a matter of dogma, ritual etc., not of spiritual experience; Page 331 the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the Ishta Deva. If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to Him you can give yourself... it doesn't mean 'believe all that you are told.' I refer you to my previous letter to see what should be done with regard to words (written or spoken) which you have reason to think enshrine spiritual experience. I am sure you are not asked to aspire to an undiscerning faith. Few things are more stupid. What one is asked for is to have faith in one's Guru and in one's own Page 344 ...
... liberation has been attained by unity and self-knowledge. This is a difficulty of the logical reason and must be met by a larger and more catholic enlightening reason. Or if it is a difficulty of spiritual experience, it can only be met by a wider resolving experience. It can indeed be met also by a dialectical battle, a logomachy of the logical mind; but that by itself is an artificial method, often a futile... 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 undifferentiating itself in the cosmos. This means that cosmos and... we can make of all relatives that we know, can only be—in all that we know of them—a partial, inferior or practical expression. We see by reason that such an Absolute must exist; we become by spiritual experience aware of its existence: but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it because our language and thought can deal only with the relative. The Absolute is for us the Ineffable. ...
... towards one central thought, and to that it is arriving in all its balancing and reconciliation of the disagreements of various philosophic systems and its careful synthetising of the truths of spiritual experience, lights often conflicting or at least divergent when taken separately and exclusively pursued along their outer arc and curve of radiation, but here brought together into one focus of grouping... spirit, a vast identity of conscious being beyond all this endless variety of determination, behind all this apparent separativism of relative existence. The Gita takes its stand in that highest spiritual experience. It appears indeed to admit an eternal plurality of souls subject to and sustained by their eternal unity, for cosmos is for ever and manifestation goes on in unending cycles; nor does it affirm... highest seeing, has still to get rid of a very real and pressing difficulty, a practical as well as a logical contradiction which seems at first sight to persist up to the highest heights of spiritual experience. The Eternal is other than this mobile subjective and objective experience, there is a greater consciousness, na idaṁ yad upāsate : 1 and yet at the same time all this is the Eternal, all ...
... partial or, it may be, some complete spiritual experience. It is that spiritual experience, it is the method, it is the attainment of this realisation that we call Yoga. Page 361 But the Reality is an Absolute or an Infinite; our consciousness, even our spiritualised consciousness is that of a finite being. It is inevitable therefore that our spiritual experience should be not that of a concrete... of the Reality such as the Zero of the Nihilistic Buddhists which is yet a mysterious All, a negation that is a positive Permanence. It is an error to take these variations as a proof that spiritual experience is unreliable. All religions, all philosophies are equally desperate in their attempts to give an account of the Real and Ultimate; science itself for all its matter of fact physical positivism ...
... Spirit Letters on Poetry and Art The Poet and the Poem Power of Expression and Spiritual Experience All depends on the power of expression of the poet. A poet like Shakespeare or Shelley or Wordsworth though without spiritual experience may in an inspired moment become the medium of an expression of spiritual Truth which is beyond him and the expression,... as it is not that of his own mind, may be very powerful and living, not merely aesthetically agreeable. On the other hand a poet with spiritual experience may be hampered by his medium or by his transcribing brain or by an insufficient mastery of language and rhythm and give an expression which may mean much to him but not convey the power and breath of it to others. The English poets of the 17th... discovered, not in "his" outward mind or life or not solely or chiefly these. But a poem or work of art need not be (though it may be) an exact transcription of a Page 109 mental or spiritual experience; even, if the creating mind takes up an incident of the life, a vital impression, emotion or reaction that had actually taken place, it need not be anything more than a starting point for the ...
... consciousness and being, religion, too, has a similar discipline. Where then is the difference? The answer lies in the fact that although religion at its core and at its highest aspiration aims at spiritual experience and, although great religions have their origin in discipline and experience, they tend to develop systems of dogma and to prescribe belief in the dogma. Whatever spiritual discipline is proposed... heart-beats and breathing. Hatha Yoga is an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. Yoga is often identified exclusively with Raja Yoga, or the Yoga, the aphoristic formulation... Yogic āsana and prānāyāma in their bare minimum and simple forms. On the other hand, Hatha Yoga joins up with the psychological methods of Raja Yoga, where it begins to ascend the scales of spiritual experience. Raja Yoga insists on moral purification of the mentality, and five yamās and five niyamās are prescribed. Yamas are rules of moral control in conduct such as truth-speaking, abstinence ...
... Integral Realisation Preface If the Spirit is One, why do the reports of the experience of the Spirit differ so widely? The fact is that there is a variety of spiritual experience, and this phenomenon has to be understood and explained. Spiritual experiences can be sporadic, or they can be attained by pursuing a methodised effort leading to the union of the individual... is infinite, and there is a different Page i between the essential cognition of the Infinite and mental, overmental, and supramental cognitions of that Infinite. It is when the spiritual experience of the infinite is obtained in mental cognition that the aspect of the infinite which is experienced tends to be felt as though that aspect is the only truth of the infinite. As Sri Aurobindo... minor variations, but each of these philosophies has registered a quarrel with all the rest. Each one of them has developed a system of mental logic, and each one of them makes an appeal to a spiritual experience, which is declared to be final and ultimate. Is it possible to resolve this conflict? Sri Aurobindo has in his 'The Life Divine̕, in the chapter entitled, "The Triple Status of ...
... the fundamental point of reference is not the outward form of a given belief and practice but the spirit behind and the justifying spiritual experience. Indian scriptures and records abound with the statements and descriptions of varieties of spiritual experience. But there are three central spiritual experiences in terms of which all these varieties can be readily understood. The first is... ancient seers also made a distinction between Yoga and philosophy. Philosophy was restricted to mean intellectual reasoning about the ultimate source of things or intellectual transcription of spiritual experience. It was recognized that Yoga transcended intellectual methods of thought and attempted to revolutionize the ego-bound operations of thinking, feeling and action so as to arrive at a new and... vistas of experience and research. It transcends the boundaries of dogma and exclusive claims of Truth. It is not opposed to any religion, but points to a way to a synthesis and integrality of spiritual experience in the light of which the truth behind each religion is understood and permitted to grow to its fullness and to meet in harmony with all the others. The important thing is to turn the human ...
... put in placidly. "For Yoga has for its ultimate object the realisation of the Divine and achieving the Divine life. These are side-issues and as such need not be looked upon as germane to spiritual experience. So belief in them is not necessary, far less indispensable for realisation. You have the right of private judgment in matters such as these." My heart-beat abated, and I said: "I am... that its old Ruler, Reason, was fully capable of coping with the situation. For, boiled down, it comes to an insistence, really, that the mind was the ultimate judge of all experience. But spiritual experience has it that you can never hope to understand – get to the root of – anything by your mind alone. The mind by its very constitution is unable to apprehend more than a very small fraction of... He seemed to read my thoughts. For he said: "Such things do happen in the spiritual field – things which the mind finds difficult to conceive. I will give you an instance. It is a fact of spiritual experience that the Guru may even be less than the disciple and yet able to help; he may even be instrumental in imparting to his disciple what he never himself realised." . ... "Well," I apologised ...
... crucial experience of yoga that became the turning point of his life. In a certain sense, it was an epoch-making experience and he gave expression to it at a meeting in Uttarpara in 1909.S This spiritual experience in jail turned his mind to a problem; of far greater magnitude than winning the freedom of the I country. Subsequently invited several times to lead the¦ political movement, he politely declined... from India, who laid bare the Supramental level of Conscious- ______________ 3. August 15, 1960. 4 November, 1955. Page 5 ness opening thereby an immense realm of spiritual experience to man. In the words of Dr. Gokak his work " opens up new horizons that spell new cultures upon earth. " The Life Divine meets the challenge of the agnostic and materialistic outlook... of life may be seen from a statement of Sri Aurobindo himself: " This ( his retirement from outer activity ) did not mean as most, people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interests in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness ...
... arrive at our real relations with his being. Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these verses of the Gita: but they rest founded not upon any intellectual speculation, but on spiritual experience; they synthetise because they arise globally from certain truths of spiritual consciousness. When we attempt to put ourselves into conscious relations with whatever supreme or universal Being... or only an image or a symbol of existence by which we have to construct our significant relations with him and to grow gradually aware of him. But on the other hand, we get another revealing spiritual experience in which we are forced to see as the very Divine all things, not only that Spirit which dwells immutable in the universe and in its countless creatures, but all this inward and outward becoming... Even if in the mind we feel them to be comparatively unreal in face of the absolutely Real. Shankara's Mayavada apart from its logical scaffolding comes when reduced to terms of spiritual experience to no more than an exaggerated expression of this relative unreality. Beyond mind the difficulty disappears, for there it never existed. The separate experiences that lie behind the differences ...
... is wholly that of this lower nature full of the ignorance. We can only know this greater truth by living it, that is to say, by passing beyond the mental into the spiritual experience, by Yoga. For the living out of spiritual experience until we cease to be mind and become spirit, until, liberated from the imperfections of our present nature, we are able to live entirely in our true and divine being... sādhanā one has to advance from stage to stage, leaving many things, indeed the greatest things to arise subsequently and solve themselves fully by the light of the advance we have made in spiritual experience. The Gita follows to a certain extent this curve of experience and puts first a sort of large preliminary basis of works and knowledge which contains an element leading up to bhakti and to a ...
... well-known to all who know anything of the subject, that the conclusions of Buddha and other Indian philosophers (I am not now speaking of the inspired thought of the Upanishads which was pure spiritual experience enlightened by intuition and gnosis,) were preceded by a very acute scrutiny of relevant psychological phenomena and a process of reasoning which, though certainly not rationalistic, was as... extinction of ego, desire and Sanskara, and so far as he chose to go, his intuition of this extinction, Nirvana, and the Vedantic intuition of the supreme unity were the seeing of one truth of spiritual experience, seen no doubt from different angles of vision and couched in different intellectual forms, but with a common intuitive substance. The rest was foreign to Buddha's rigidly practical purpose... mentality comes to Indian art with a demand for something other than what its characteristic spirit and motive intend to give, and, demanding that, is not prepared to enter into another kind of spiritual experience and another range of creative sight, imaginative power and mode of self-expression. This once understood, we can turn to the difference in the spirit and method of artistic creation which ...
... lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come Page 103 out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of the being and nature. 123 * The first thing to be done is the psychic change and until that has progressed sufficiently, supermind is a far-off... amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities... sattwic limitations or poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance. This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and Page 105 with the occult ...
... merely an ingenious explanation; it expresses very soundly one of the clear certainties you meet when you step across the border and look at the outer world from the standing-ground of the inner spiritual experience. The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge Science organises takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external... ineptly superficial and external, explanations that explain nothing. If the defenders of religion take up an unsound position, easily capturable, when they affirm only the subjective validity of spiritual experience, the opponents also seem to me to be giving away, Without knowing it, the gates of thematerialistic stronghold by their consent at all to admit and examine spiritual and supraphysical experience... for spirituality and their inferior degrees for spiritual values. It is mere truth that the mental intuitions of the metaphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short of a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flashes, shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light. It is not less true that, looked at from the peaks, there is not much difference between the high mental eminences ...
... taking him on the psychospiritual plane into spiritual union with her. All that is very good and very beautiful, but it is not enough; the union has indeed to be realised in the inner psycho-spiritual experience first, because Page 477 without that nothing sound or lasting can be done; but also there must be a realisation of the Divine in the outer consciousness and life, in the vital and... he came out and received everyone—well, a few years of it wore out his body. To that, I suppose, he had no objection; he even pronounced a theory, when Keshav Chandra was dying, that spiritual experience ought to wear out the body! But at the same time, when asked why he got his illness in the throat, he answered that it was the sins of his disciples which they threw upon him and he had to... contrary the impersonal disappear into the absolute reality of the supreme and divine Person; the impersonal in that view is only an attribute or power of the personal Divine. But at the summit of spiritual experience passing beyond mind one begins to feel the fusion of all these things into one. Consciousness, Existence, Ananda return to their indivisible unity, Sachchidananda. The personal and the impersonal ...
... or meant. The lines: Revealed it wakens when God's stillness Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and... 259 A General Comment on the Poems of the 1930s Could you tell me what your object is in manifesting something through the form of poetry? I am expressing spiritual truth or spiritual experience through poetry. 12 September 1934 Page 260 × Intermediate stress. ...
... in with their own deformations. Remain always calm, collected, quiet within, vigilant—discriminate always. The progress so made may be more slow or seem so; but it is more sure. A true spiritual experience must be free from the claim of the ego. What the ego can do however is to get proud of having the experience and think, "What a great one am I." Or it may think, "I am the Self, the Divine,... of the ego. In such cases the ego may still remain strong although it feels itself instrumental and not the primary actor. Although there is no ego in the spiritual planes, yet by the spiritual experience the ego on the lower planes may get aggrandised through pride and wrong reception of the experience. Also by entering into the larger mental and vital planes one may aggrandise the ego. These... disposition to do the sadhana for that and not purely and simply for the sake of the Divine comes in and there must be disturbance or else an obstruction in the sadhana itself or if in spite of it spiritual experience comes, then there is the danger of his misusing the experience to magnify his ego like the man in the dream. All these dreams are coming to you to give you a vivid and concrete knowledge and ...
... according to his own notions end at the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation. The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly... lay down the law for the religious life, it cannot determine in its own right the system of divine knowledge; it cannot school and lesson the divine love and delight; it cannot set bounds to spiritual experience or lay its yoke upon the action of the spiritual man. Its sole legitimate sphere is to explain as best it can, in its own language and to the rational and intellectual parts of man, the truths... includes this satisfaction also in its scope, and in what is usually called religion it seems even to be the greater part, sometimes to an external view almost the whole; for the supreme purity of spiritual experience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Much impurity, ignorance, superstition, many doubtful elements must form as the result of this contact and union of ...
... the eternal and infinite good and right which he reaches perfectly when he is able to enter into the Truth Consciousness or Supermind. The belief in the guidance of God is also justified by spiritual experience and is very necessary for the sadhana; this also rises to its highest and completest truth when one enters into the Light. It [ the reason people remain calm and self-controlled in ordinary... that too is a little difficult to avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashoy in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a giant sense of strength and superiority—European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are... Pundit sank back amazed and speechless. That "I, Vivekananda" stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-confident egoism. But there was nothing false or unsound in Vivekananda's spiritual experience. This was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the fighter who, as the representative of something very great, could not allow himself to be put down or belittled ...
... y process would have been gauged. The realisation of the Supermind's significance and intention, by a wide-awake union with its Truth-Consciousness, is Sri Aurobindo's contribution to spiritual experience. The systematic detailed exposition of them is his contribution to philosophy. And the direct application of them to the problems of individual and collective living in his Ashram at Pondicherry... and manifestation of the Supermind. There he was joined after a few years by one who in far Europe had been fired by the same integral aspiration and had proceeded on similar lines of spiritual experience. She settled in Pondicherry and became, at his express wish, the head and guide of his Ashram and the chief radiating centre of the new Light which he sought to establish in earth-terms... in general and English poetry in particular, on the various grades and powers of consciousness finding poetic expression and on a new direction of poetic development under the stress of spiritual experience). Savitri (a blank-verse epic of nearly twenty-four thousand lines turning legend of the past into a symbol of the supramental transformation and variously exemplifying "the future ...
... me, I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means nothing (like all other experience) unless it can be precisely c... pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lal's designation of Savitri Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass ...
... either of their result or their process. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience, so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible.”... at Cambridge, he also acquired an encompassing command of the rich literature of India in her various languages, and penetrated ever deeper in her ancient scriptures as he advanced in his own spiritual experience. A radical in spirituality as he was in the liberation politics of his country, he concluded that the fundamental truth of Veda and Vedanta had to be accepted and put into practice unconditionally... the One out of itself.) The universal scheme behind the terrestrial evolution may be drafted as follows. There is the silent Brahman, the Ineffable, which can only be known by the highest spiritual experience. One and the same is the active Brahman which manifests its inexhaustible infinity in endless time and timelessness. Manifestation has been and will be always. At the top of the gradations of ...
... explained: ‘My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Vedas came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realize what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy... various forms that idea and that hope — and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present in us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual... soldiers transported by the trainload to the south of France. The frenetic dance of the dark powers on earth seemed unstoppable and Mirra received her share of the suffering. In the meantime the spiritual experience and the invisible work kept going on in her. She may not have known that the dark night and the suffering in Lunel were only a foretaste of what was to await her in the years to come. Paul ...
... certainly the essential thing; but to approach Him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve Him with one’s works and to know Him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga. If you accept Krishnaprem’s insistence that this and no other must be your path, it is this that you have to attain and realise; any exclusive... life or to come here for at least the necessary time; but these contradictions are always cropping up in the sadhak’s endeavour and they can be overcome. I will say nothing here about her spiritual experience, as that is not immediately urgent; I will answer your question about it later on in another letter. I wrote the above before I quite realised the violence of the attack or depression... service and self-dedication to service are sufficient evidence of fitness – not to speak of certain experiences in the past which were clear proof of the capacity for what can be called occult spiritual experience. These things of themselves would in time bring about the necessary growth of the inner consciousness behind the surface which makes for successful concentration and meditation and renders ...
... knowledge, will-force and delight consist of experience. To understand yoga, therefore, we need to enter into the realm of yogic experiences. Yoga is primarily and distinctly concerned with spiritual experience, and although in its integrality, it embraces all domains of knowledge, physical and supra-physical, its means are distinctively spiritual. Distinguishing features of what we call spirituality... (d) A turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being into a new becoming, or a new being, a new Self, a new nature. In the literature relating to the realm of spirituality and spiritual experience, one of the relevant works that stands out is William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience that was published in 1902. Another work which is even more relevant and supremely illuminating... writing, or the mediumistic trance. It may be remarked that in the strict path of yogic experience, a distinction is made between subliminal experience or experience proper to occultism, and spiritual experience, — a distinction, which William James does not offer in his book. Strictly speaking, experiences of automatic writing or mediumistic trance are experiences related to the subliminal consciousness ...
... dogma. Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thus constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritual experience of a developing humanity, continue to be of living importance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of the past, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future. In the Gita... woven into its complex harmony, are eternally valuable and valid; for they are not merely the luminous ideas or striking speculations of a philosophic intellect, but rather enduring truths of spiritual experience, verifiable facts of our highest psychological possibilities which no attempt to read deeply the mystery of existence can afford to neglect. Whatever the system may be, it is not, as the co... to all things and persons and happenings, not affected by any action, not altered by the figures of Nature. Be that, be the eternal self, be the Brahman. If you can become that by a permanent spiritual experience, you will have an assured basis on which you can stand delivered from the limitations of your mind-created personality, secure against any fall from peace and knowledge, free from ego. ...
... amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities... Psychic Transformation and Influx of Spiritual Experiences This is the level of higher degrees of psychicisation, and when this is accompanied and followed by a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience there comes about not only a psychic but, more widely speaking, a psycho-spiritual transformation in many directions. The psychic experiences relate to the discovery of psychic being and psychic... of Ishwara and the Divine Shakti of cosmic consciousness and of direct touch with cosmic forces and with occult movements of universal Nature. As a result of a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience, one receives illuminations of the mind by knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and spiritual joy and ecstasy, illuminations of dynamic action and the truth and largeness ...
... The essential tenets of Hinduism What are the essential tenets of Hinduism? Hinduism is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of the highest and widest spiritual experience. 1. First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda; this One Existence is given different names by the sages, the One without a second of the Upanishads, the Permanent... possible to discover and closely approach and enter into some kind of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, and this Eternal. It considers this unity as the highest and last effort of its spiritual experience. This is the first universal credo of the religious mind of India. Page 18 2. Admit in whatever formula this foundation; follow this great spiritual aim by one of the... come the concept of Rebirth and Karma and finally the worship of idols. The concept of Evolution The Indian concept of evolution is based on the following: Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own ...
... if one has no inner life or spiritual experience then the question does not arise since then everything, thought, feeling, speech is external. Page 101 I don't think I am without inner being or spiritual experience. Why then do I miss the inner contact and support for speech? If you had no inner being and no spiritual experience then you could have no descent ...
... fell mainly on him. The 'systematic' study had to be pushed in several directions at once, and much of the thinking and the writing had to be done by him. As he explained once, The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt should be based were already present to us... but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had... While writing Savitri —or rather while making the final draft of the poem—Sri Aurobindo was really trying to translate all this thought, the essence of it at any rate, into poetry. The spiritual experience and the intellectual organisation of that experience were now to be taken to a further stage; idea was to become image, argument was to become prophecy. "Thinking is no longer in my line"... call and 'feeling —that were more appropriate to poetic expression. Besides he had to wait for the self-opening and proper functioning of the 'overhead' powers, for not otherwise could the spiritual experience that was now the subject suffer translation as poetry. "One has to wait", said Sri Aurobindo, "till the absolutely right thing comes in a sort of receptive self-opening and calling-down condition ...
... than one page. Plato, of course, I read. But it was only when I went above the mind that I could understand philosophy and write philosophy. Ideas and thoughts began to flow in, visions and spiritual experience. Insight and spiritual perception, a sort of revelation built my philosophy. It was not by any process of mental reasoning or argument that I wrote the Arya . NIRODBARAN: Then you didn't... could read, as he was not merely metaphysical. Nietzsche also because of his powerful ideas. In Indian philosophy I read the Upanishads and the Gita, etc. They are, of course, mainly results of spiritual experience. People think I must be immensely learned and know all about Hegel, Kant and the others. The fact is that I haven't even read them; and people don't know I have written everything from experience... absurd. NIRODBARAN: In your case it was an opening then, like the one to painting? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes; but with painting, it was a moment's sudden opening while this one was a result of spiritual experience. NIRODBARAN: Then I can hope to understand philosophy some day. SATYENDRA: You want to understand Kant? NIRODBARAN: Oh, no, no! SRI AUROBINDO: It would be a sheer waste of time for ...
... to this pursuit. It is my knowledge of Sanskrit that has helped me write books like The Secret of the Veda and The Foundations of Indian Culture. I have already described to you my first spiritual experience which I had on disembarking at the Apollo Bunder in Bombay. Perhaps that was the first pointer I received that I ought to plunge myself into the study of our ancient Scriptures." "But Sanskrit... There, when I climbed the hill on top of which was Shankaracharya's temple to Shiva, I immediately experienced the Infinite. I saw an infinitely vast Emptiness covering the universe. "Another spiritual experience occurred in Chandod where I had gone to meet the Yogi Brahmananda. This place is on the bank of the river Narmada, which is dotted with innumerable temples, big and small. I entered a Kali temple... that. Of course, I had read his books, but I had never met him and yet his spirit came to me in prison for two whole weeks. He spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and ceased coming as soon as he had finished saying all that he had to say on that subject." "Incredible!" "It may sound incredible; but such things are not at all uncommon in spiritual ...
... What is exactly a spiritual experience? It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than that you have ordinarily. You live in a certain state and you do not even know what it is like. That is the ordinary consciousness. Suddenly you become conscious within you of something very different and much superior – that is a spiritual experience, whatever it may be.... essential quality of the consciousness, signifying something coming from above, from a greater height, something pure and true, purer and truer than anything you normally experience, that I call spiritual experience, although there are a thousand things that belong to that category. Page 58 ...
... due to failure of remittances from home as the result of father's large-hearted charities. 1893 February: Returned to India; on landing At Apollo Bunder, Bombay, had a spiritual experience of infinite calm descending upon him. This continued for weeks. 1893-1896 In Baroda State Service. First in administrative departments, then as lecturer in French, and... Aurobindo wrote a poern. 1901 April: Married Srimati Mrinalini, daughter of Sri Bhupalchandra Basu, in Calcutta, according to strict Hindu rites. Had a spiritual experience in which he saw a Being of Light appearing from out of him and saving him from an accident that was going to overtake him while driving in a carriage at Baroda. 1902 Visit... 1903 Initiated Barindra into the revolutionary cult and sent him to Calcutta to help Jatindra in revolutionary work. Visit to Kashmir with the Gaekwad. Had a spiritual experience of the vacant Infinite on Shankaracharya Hill. Drew up a scheme under the title 'Bhavani Mandir' on the lines of which was started Bharati Vidyalaya at the Ganganath Ashram, Sri Aurobindo helping ...
... by Nietzsche.. .The only two books that have influ- enced me are the Gita and the Upanishads. What I wrote was the work of intuition and inspiration working on the basis of my spiritual experience...Experience and formulation of experience I consider as the true aim of philosophy. The rest is merely intellectual work and may be interesting but nothing more. 58 Sri... and reach the highest state. But the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system is but a tour de force of the speculative intellect, and does not draw (as Sri Aurobindo's system does) from a fount of personal spiritual experience. There is, says D.S. Savage, a deadness, a lack of a living intuition at the root of Page 34 Gurdjieff's Gnosis, whereas Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Supermind is... possibility by Viscount Samuel in his modern Utopia, An Unknown Island, has a remote resemblance to the Aurobindonian supramental consciousness. But the British philosopher had no personal spiritual experience of anything like the Ambience, though he conceded, in the course of a letter, that while he had no doubt merely put it forward "as a speculation, and not even as a hypothesis, still less as ...
... found capable of survival, utility and vitality are retained, while those that have outlived their utility are rejected and dissolved. The basis of Indian culture goes back to the living spiritual experience embodied in the Vedas and Upanishads, the Gita, and Tantras and the Vedanta. Apart from the wide diffusion of spirituality in the consciousness of the masses, a traditional continuity of the... of secrecy used by them. In Savitri it is replaced by an open psychological and spiritual symbolism which interprets the legend using it as a transparent veil for conveying its world of spiritual experience. In fact the legend lends itself easily to such an interpretation. It is itself full of incidents and characters into which the poet's inspiration has woven the whole question of the supreme... Vedas and the Upanishads the same Overhead lightnings break forth revealing the universe in so different a light from that of the intellect that it has remained for mankind a new world of spiritual experience to which it has aspired from the dawn of its history. The lightning has revealed sometimes the higher regions of Solar Light, the regions of golden light or Truth, at times, the moonlit worlds ...
... for all eternity or as if it had been really there always. And then it slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self. 22 Whereas Sri Aurobindo's first major spiritual experience — that of Nirvana — confirmed the basic views of Nihilism and of Illusionism (unreality of the ego and illusoriness of the world), his subsequent realisations fusing with the original experience... intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. 30 Aspects of the Self Sri Aurobindo states that both for philosophical understanding and spiritual experience it is highly important to distinguish among different aspects of the Self, otherwise the nature of the Self is blurred and a confusion arises both in intellectual understanding and inner ... Integral View of Ego Ego and the Ignorance ...to the how of the fall into the Ignorance as opposed to the why, the effective cause, there is a substantial agreement in all spiritual experience. It is the division, the separation, the principle of isolation from the Permanent and One that brought it about; it is because the ego set up for itself in the world emphasising its own ...
... February 25, 1945 I don’t think I could approve of your departure to Brinda-van in this way – if you were going on a visit or temporary stay to see if you could get there some spiritual experience or for relief from pressure, it would be different; for however I would wish to have you here, your spiritual needs must take first place. The reasons you put forward in your letter seem... the one real Self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases – we may say a false light that is extinguished (nirvana) in the true Light. In spiritual experience it is sometimes the loss of all sense of individuality in a boundless cosmic consciousness; what was the individual remains only as a centre or a channel for the flow of a cosmic consciousness... becomes an armed cruiser and finally a great battleship unsinkable and indestructible. That is a parable, but its meaning should be quite intelligible, and it is a pragmatic fact of common spiritual experience. I may add that this inmost faith or fixed needle of spiritual aspiration may be there without one’s clearly knowing it; one may think that one has only beliefs, propensities, a yearning in ...
... other matters, I cannot be blamed for finding the ideas of Russell about spiritual experience, of which he knows nothing, very much wanting in light and substance. You have not named the Yogis in question and till you do, I am afraid I shall cherish a suspicion about either the height or the breadth of their spiritual experience. But off that hereafter, when I get a chance of an hour or two to write... During the first few years of my Ashram life I simply did not know what to do with my Russellian scepticism in face of Gurudev's deep disapproval of the fool's obstinate recalcitrance to spiritual experience. But this landed me in another dilemma: on the one hand, I could not discard Russell whose intellectual clarity, sincerity and probity I profoundly admired: on the other, even when I could not ...
... I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means nothing (like all Page 137 other experience)... pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lai's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and ...
... through the mere fact of its conscious omnipresence. It is, no doubt, a truth of spiritual experience that there is a status of peace and silence in the Infinite behind the Page 415 cosmic activity, a Consciousness that is the immobile Witness of the creation; but this is not the whole of spiritual experience, and we cannot hope to find in one side only of knowledge a fundamental and total... of all are different, contrary in the character of their being, separate in their will and purpose. Our reason tells us, our intuitive consciousness feels, and their witness is confirmed by spiritual experience, that the one pure and absolute Existence exists in all things and beings even as all things and beings exist in It and by It, and nothing can be or happen without this indwelling and all-supporting ...
... supreme experience in the spiritual consciousness; but by itself it is not the whole of spiritual thought complete and comprehensive and it does not exhaust the possibilities of the supreme spiritual experience. The absolutist view of reality, consciousness and knowledge is founded on one side of the earliest Vedantic thought, but it is not the whole of that thinking. In the Upanishads, in the inspired... either of their result or their process. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible.... subjective domains of our being which lie behind the obvious surface; these have to be fathomed and whatever is ascertained must be admitted within the scope of the total reality. An inner range of spiritual experience is one very great domain of human consciousness; it has to be entered into up to its deepest depths and its vastest reaches. The supraphysical is as real as the physical; to know it is part ...
... am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration, but in so Page 279 large a plan covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment. 1946 Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem... a critic in The Hindu condemned such poems as Nirvana and Transformation . He said that they were mere intellectual conceptions and images and there was nothing of religious feeling or spiritual experience. Yet Nirvana was as close a transcription of a major experience as could be given in language coined by the human mind of a realisation in which the mind was entirely silent and into which... new creation. That is described in the Book of the Divine Mother. As to the Nirvana poem, I have said that the poem announces no metaphysical philosophy but is only the description of a spiritual experience. So how can any metaphysics be derived from it true or false—if you mean truly or falsely derived? If you want to ask whether the metaphysics you derived is in itself true or false, well, I ...
... seeking into false paths, or to be left wandering about in an intermediate chaos of experiences and fail to find his way out into the true realisation. These perils were well-known to a past spiritual experience and have been met by imposing the necessity of initiation, of discipline, of methods of purification and testing by ordeal, of an entire submission to the directions of the path-finder or p... amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities... limitations or poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance. Page 941 This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature ...
... logic which deals in words and ideas, but by a spiritual experience which goes beyond Mind and enters into spiritual realities. Each mind is satisfied with its own reasoning, but for spiritual purposes that satisfaction has no validity, except as an indication of how far and on what line each one is prepared to go in the field of spiritual experience. If your reasoning leads you towards the Shankara... question of logic, it is a question of spiritual fact, of a supreme and complete experience. The solution of the matter must rest not upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening, widening spiritual experience—an experience which must of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana and Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no decisive value. Now to reach Nirvana was the ...
... that too is a little difficult to avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashoy in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a giant sense of strength and superiority—European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are... Pundit sank back amazed and speechless. That "I, Vivekananda" stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-confident egoism. But there was nothing false or unsound in Vivekananda's spiritual experience. This was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the fighter who, as the representative of something very great, could not allow himself to be put down or belittled... faith is so very superabundant in this Asram. There are some who have it, but for the most part I have met not only doubt, but sharp criticism, constant questioning, much mockery of faith and spiritual experience, violent attacks on myself and the Mother—and that has been going on for the last fourteen years and more. Things are not so bad as they were, but there is plenty of it left still, and I do ...
... Divine Truth and the manifest creation which is the starting-point of most spiritual experience. " Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 110 I don't understand the meaning. Why is this opposition the starting-point of spiritual experience? What is ordinarily called a spiritual experience is the intense need for something other than the life one lives, and most often ...
... done. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - III: Inner Experience and Outer Life You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is another... the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and... upwards and act also in the lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of the being and nature. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - II: Concentration and Meditation The realisation of the psychic being, its awakening and ...
... recommended Savitri to you. It belongs too much to what Sri Aurobindo has termed 'the Future Poetry' with unusual canons and uncommon modes of expression true to states of consciousness and spiritual experience much beyond the range of most people's actual life or even imaginative vision. This does not mean that Savitri has no contact anywhere with genuine past or present poetry. But even to judge... bring to them the narrow mind of a doctrinaire critic. When 1 turn to the page of which you fall foul, - namely, 54 - in Selections from Savitri I discover a most powerful evocation of a spiritual experience in an intensely inspired blank verse of the end-stopped kind, a difficult mould masterfully varied in internal structure and line-to-line linkage. One has to be in an unusually dense mood and... etc . are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot ...
... Once you feel this, you will not stress intellectually your differences with his teaching. He is not primarily arguing out a system. With his instinct towards harmony he has pressed on in spiritual experience. His is not an integral philosophy for the sake of philosophy, his is an integral Yoga, and all his philosophising is a statement in mental terms of what he has realised. The Life Divine... contention is not based only on argument: it has behind it a lack of realisation. The great prophets have all striven to their utmost and come short. It is the concrete coming short in actual spiritual experience that has created the tremendous obstacle to a keen and clear recognition of the élan towards harmony. Yet the élan is there. "Thou art That", "Brahmaloka is here and now", "The Kingdom... so that you may move with ease along thoughts put forth by one who plunged into the Unknown with that occult diamond for his guide. Then across those thoughts reach out for the concrete spiritual experience, the actual harmonious realisation which the Integral Yoga of that master-explorer is bringing to the world's view. Perhaps you will be disappointed by my letter, since I have not argued ...
... psychic being is in the fourth dimension as related to our physical being. You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has Page 25 an activity on the surface which veils the real... the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and... upwards and act also in the lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of the being and nature. Page 29 If the psychic is awake and in front, it becomes easy to remain conscious of the things that have to be changed ...
... NIRODBARAN: Dilip told me that once Tagore in an agony of pain tried hard to concentrate and ultimately he separated himself from his pain and got relief. Isn't that a spiritual experience? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that is a spiritual experience. NIRODBARAN: I remember also to have read in his autobiography, Jivan Smriti, that one day he felt a sudden outburst of joy and all Nature seemed to be full of... Ananda. The outcome of that feeling or experience of bliss is supposed to be the poem "Nirjharer Swapna Bhanga" ("Interruption of the Dream of the Fountain"). SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that too is a spiritual experience. What does he say in the poem? NIRODBARAN: He speaks of a fountain breaking all barriers and rushing towards the sea in Ananda. SRI AUROBINDO: But why does he take that symbol? Was it ...
... and the intuitions, experiences, phenomena are the same in all ages and countries far apart from each other and in systems practised quite independently from each other." 25 The substance of spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, is identical everywhere; only when it gets translated into the external consciousness of the seeker, difference of colour comes in because... their invalidity or their non-existence. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible."... other than the physical or sense mind, by a method of scrutiny and affirmation applicable to their own domain. And there is nothing unscientific or objectionable in it. TV. Argument: A spiritual experience cannot be scientifically demonstrated and hence lacks in concrete certitude. Critique: It has been asserted that although the scientific process is in the last analysis reduced to two ...
... Aurobindo Came to Me. Sri Aurobindo is writing to Dilip Kumar with 'stinging sarcasm': "I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or He is something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something... even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? "If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. "If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. "But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before its tribunal, summon it to appear as a candidate for admission... confusion rather than clarifying truth". "Especially is this mixed functioning dangerous when men with unchastened minds and unpurified sensibilities attempt to rise into the higher domains of spiritual experience. In what regions of unsubstantial cloud and semi-brilliant fog or a murk visited by flashes which blind more than they enlighten, do they not lose themselves by that rash and premature adventure ...
... passage upwards from the Mind to the Supermind, lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, and how ultimately the position of integrality removes the necessity of exclusiveness: "It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole eternal truth and states it in the terms of our all-dividing... . In the words of Sri Aurobindo: "It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, Page ...
... exactly a spiritual experience? It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than that you have ordinarily. You five Page 79 in a certain state and you do not even know what it is like. That is the ordinary consciousness. Suddenly you become conscious within you of something very different and much superior — that is a spiritual experience, whatever... essential quality of the consciousness, signifying something coming from above, from a greater height, something pure and true, purer and truer than anything you normally experience, that I call spiritual experience, although there are a thousand things that belong to that category. Page 80 ...
... are found capable of survival, utility and vitality are retained, while those that have outlived their utility are rejected and dissolved. The basis of Indian culture goes back to the living spiritual experience embodied in the Vedas and Upanishads, the Gita, the Tantras and the Vedanta. Apart from the wide diffusion of spirituality in the consciousness of the masses, a traditional continuity of the... veil of secrecy used by them. In Sāvitrī it is replaced by an open psychological and spiritual symbolism which interprets the legend using it as a transparent veil for conveying its world of spiritual experience. In fact .the legend lends itself easily to such an interpretation. It is itself full of incidents and characters into which the poet's inspiration has woven the whole question of the supreme... Vedas and the Upanishads the same Overhead lightnings break forth revealing the universe in so different a light from that of the intellect that it has remained for mankind a new world of spiritual experience to which it has aspired from the dawn of its history. The lightning has revealed sometimes the higher regions of Solar Light, the regions of golden light or Truth, at times, the moonlit worlds ...
... Disciple : D told me that Tagore in the agony of pain tried to concentrate hard and he could mentally separate himself from the pain and get relief. Sri Aurobindo : That is a spiritual experience. Disciple : In another of his early poems also he speaks of an experience; one day on the terrace of the Jorasanko House he felt a sudden outburst of joy and the whole of nature and... and life seemed to him bathed in Ananda. The poem Nirjharer Page 230 Swapna Bhanga" is the outcome of the experience Sri Aurobindo : That is also a spiritual experience, what does he say in that poem? Disciple : He speaks of a fountain that flows breaking all the barriers rushing towards the sea Sri Auroblndo : But why did he adopt the symbol? Did the experience... seers climb Indra like a ladder" Along with the ascent "much that remains to be done becomes clear" (Rig Veda I.10. (1.2) It is an extraordinary passage expressing perfectly a spiritual experience. Indra is the Divine Mind and as one ascends higher and higher in it or on it, all that has to be done becomes clearly visible. One who has that experience can at once see how perfectly true ...
... whether you have the energy, never mind in what way it is put forth. For instance, in that house just before I began the Arya there was a period of six months in which there was a continual spiritual experience and I could not do any writing at that time. But that does not mean I was less energetic. I could not have written the 64 pages of the Arya before without flagging. I give another instance... The test is that even if the work taken away or destroyed it must make no difference to the condition of consciousness. Page 160 Disciple : Nirvana is a fundamental spiritual experience, is it not? Sri Aurobindo : Nirvana, as I know it, is a necessary experience in order to get rid of the nature-personality which is subject to ignorance. You cease to be the small ... recounting mine! (Laughter) Disciple : It is very difficult for a man like me to accept what these people want one to accept. I can accept you as the guide and Guru. But I must have my spiritual experience to believe things. Sri Aurobindo : It is not always necessary to have the experience in order to believe. There are many people who believe on faith before they realise. But the ...
... history, but [which] seemed of small value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience. 6 Fifteen years later, in 1910 at Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo read the Vedas in the original and found in them a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience. 7 In the meantime, Sri Aurobindo had had a series of psychological experiences of my own for... kingdom ; it was to fulfil "our various lives," to "be born" to the totality of our being, for the worlds too were called "births" and we had to be born seven times in order to possess the full spiritual experience : "In the ignorance of my mind, I ask of these steps of the Gods that are set within. The all-knowing Gods have taken the Infant of a year and they have woven about him seven threads to make ...
... forms of highest Nature action corresponding to the gunas is not derived from the Gita, but introduced from spiritual experience. The Gita does not describe in any detail the action of the highest Nature, rahasyam uttamam ; it leaves that for the seeker to discover by his own spiritual experience. It only points out the nature of the high sattwic temperament and action through which this supreme mystery ...
... leads to Page 423 the highest perfection and spiritual status, parāṁ siddhim , and brings the soul to likeness with the Divine, sādharmya . It is the eternal wisdom, the great spiritual experience by which all the sages attained to that highest perfection, grew into one law of being with the Supreme and live for ever in his eternity, not born in the creation, not troubled by the anguish... and Page 433 of an utter bliss of happiness. There is a status then which is greater than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmoved the strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual experience and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there is an eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works, pravṛtti , there is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic ...
... apply old Vedic principles of life to modern conditions. The movement associated with the great names of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda has been a very wide synthesis of past religious motives and spiritual experience topped by a reaffirmation of the old asceticism and monasticism, but with new living strands in it and combined with a strong humanitarianism and zeal of missionary expansion. There has been... and there, their drift is much too externally pragmatic and vitalistic to be genuinely assimilable by the Indian spirit. But, principally, a real Indian philosophy can only be evolved out of spiritual experience and as the fruit of the spiritual seeking which all the religious movements of the past century have helped to generalise. It cannot spring, as in Europe, out of the critical intellect solely ...
... unusual in his excitement; and his vital nature takes great Page 613 pleasure in that" [ p. 11 ]. Does she mean that one should be usual instead of unusual in one's excitement during spiritual experience? The Mother did not mean that one must be usual in one's excitement at all—she meant that the man is not only excited but also wants to be unusual (extraordinary) in his excitement. The ... it back again. On the other hand, if the sleep is of the better kind, one may wake up in a good condition. Of course, it is better to be conscious in sleep, if one can. 25 June 1933 "Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain)" [ p. 17 ]. What is meant by the Divine "without"? Page 614 Does it mean ...
... correspondence, it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose—there are a large number of sadhaks whom it has helped to awake from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a flood of realisations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness... whom you quote for the futility of asking questions answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as Ramakrishna gave and such as I try to give, answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to coordinate its ignorance; still less can they be a placing of the Divine or the Divine Truth before ...
... scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of..." "... of their torch-lights". It is a joke; it's to say that it is a very tiny light of nothing at all and that they think they can judge spiritual experiences with this light which is no better than a small torch-light; it means something that has no strength. It is a joke. But what did you want to ask? Here, "spiritual experience by the ...
... date. He is too young and has not developed the necessary experience either of himself or of life or of Yoga. He should try to develop himself outside—develop in his inner spiritual urge and in spiritual experience and in strength and capacity. If he comes here in an unripe state, he is likely to meet not less but more serious difficulties than he has there. He must develop in himself the strength that... also be a power to deal with the ordinary outer life from a new inner attitude and one can then make the happenings of that life itself a means for the inner change of nature and the growth in spiritual experience. This was what was recommended to X when she first wanted to join the Ashram; she had already acquired the habit of inward concentration and it was suggested to her to proceed farther in this ...
... thought and experience; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a sure tread. Thus it Page 33 carried each tangent of philosophic thought, each line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at all existence, so as to see what truth or power such a view could give it. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and... through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and discovery at each step of the national life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never lose. But this spiritual tendency does not shoot upward only to the abstract ...
... being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy; this belongs to its ordinary labour, all the rest to... obscure and confused effort of self-finding is the inevitable result of its beginnings; for life has begun from an involution of the spiritual truth of things in what seems to be its opposite. Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own ...
... spiritual emotion of the seeing of truth and the abiding spiritual experience. The mental and vital interest, pleasure, pain of thought, life, action is not the source of poetic delight and beauty and can be turned into that deeper thing only when they have sunk into the soul and been transmuted in the soul's radiant memory into spiritual experience,—that perhaps was what the Greeks meant when they made ...
... what the Vedic Rishis did not do. Chaitanya and others developed an intensity of Bhakti which is absent in the Veda and many other instances can be given. Why should the past be the limit of spiritual experience? I can't say whether any of them [ the Vedic Rishis ] attained the supramental plane, but the ascent to it was their object. Swar is evidently the illumined regions of Mind, between the... the worshipper; by it they were called in to preside over and help all the action and life of the human being. Worship was for establishing a more inner relation and meditation the means of spiritual experience, Page 419 development and knowledge. The institutions which grew up in later Vedic times, such as the four Asramas and the four Varnas, the fourfold arrangement of society originally ...
... use in its expression a common language. They differ in temperament and personality; some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use of Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion. Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the... of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others baffle us at first by their semblance of antique obscurity. But these differences of manner take nothing from the unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the fixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa ...
... aware of his unborn non-evolving Self, a centre of the Divine Consciousness, long before that; the Self cosmic or individual is experienced long before rising to Supermind. If it were not so, spiritual experience of that high Page 66 kind would be impossible to mental man, liberation would be impossible; he would first have to become a supramental being. As for the Purusha it is there on... distinction is not made, then the nature of the Atman is blurred and a confusion arises. This is a necessary distinction for metaphysical knowledge and for something that is very important in spiritual experience. The word "Atman" like "spirit" in English is popularly used in all kinds of senses, but both for spiritual and philosophical knowledge it is necessary to be clear and precise in one's use of ...
... is no trace of any spiritual realisation or experience. All that he seems to think about is occult powers and feats of thaumaturgy. Those who take their stand on occult powers divorced from spiritual experience are not Yogis of a high plane of achievement. There are Yogis who behave as if they had no control over themselves—the theory is that they separate the spirit from the nature and live in the... because you cannot believe in the action of occult laws and forces or in siddhis. The object of Yoga is realisation of the Divine; these other things are side-matters which need be no part of spiritual experience, nor is belief in them necessary for realisation. Every one has the right of private judgment in these matters; so you need not worry. Occult Powers Not the Object of Our Yoga Yes, the ...
... true and false, genuine and deceptive. One has therefore to be very careful and be always vigilant and turned towards the true source of Light. The difficulty is that here one may have a true spiritual experience and afterwards all sorts of imitative deceptions come in and bring with them the danger of a false experience. One has to watch, observe one's experiences and try to discriminate and understand... experiences; they may happen on the vital plane so long as one has still to pass through the vital range of experiences, but the aim should be to get beyond them and live in a pure psychic and spiritual experience. To admit or call the invasion of others into one's own being is to remain always in Page 305 the confusions of the intermediate zone. Only the Divine should be called into one's ...
... which do not exist in theirs. But apart from that the fall of a sadhak from Yoga proves nothing against the truth of spiritual experience. It is well known to all Yogis that a fall is possible and the Gita speaks of it more than once. But how does the fall prove that spiritual experience is not true and genuine? The fall of a man from a great height does not prove that he never reached a great height ...
... you go into this indrawn condition, is not dreams but spiritual experiences or visions or experiences in other supraphysical planes of consciousness. Your burning aspiration was just such a spiritual experience. No, it was not sleep. You went inside into an inner consciousness; in this inner consciousness one is awake inside, but not outside, not conscious of external things but of inner things... discouraged, even though too much importance should not be attached to the Page 255 things seen in the earlier stages. (4) There are some however that are part of the growing spiritual experience, such as the sun you saw overhead and the piece of golden light—for these are signs of an opening within and symbolic. Both are symbols of the Divine Truth and Light and of one action of their ...
... the validity of all these experiences. We can only assert the priority of the oneness to the multiplicity, a priority not in time but in relation of consciousness, and no statement of supreme spiritual experience, no Vedantic philosophy denies this priority or the eternal dependence of the Many on the One. It is because in Time the Many seem not to be eternal but to manifest out of the One and return... divine unity; otherwise it could not have this characteristic of inevitable eternal recurrence in Time. It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole eternal truth and states it in the terms of our all-dividing mental logic that the necessity for mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises. Thus, emphasising ...
... can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence. A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it or dislike,—for it confuses the silence with mental... society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organised religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society; it could not do so because, in governing society, it had to compromise with the lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner change of the whole ...
... divine Consciousness in two forms. We may suggest that the biological division or a species into two sexes is some kind of representation of a twofold basic reality of being. Within each of us, spiritual experience reveals a twofoldness - Purusha and Prakriti, being and becoming, self and nature. In spiritual knowledge the creative world-principle is seen to be biune - Ishwara-Shakti - a two-in-one put... therefore, there is no lack of sense in speaking of the same consciousness divided into two for purposes of the play. Whether Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are such a consciousness must be left to spiritual experience or intuitivised intellectual insight. One thing is clear: their joint endeavour is to bring about a radical spiritual change of the world's consciousness, an evolution of Page 157 ...
... insight into spirituality, can pen such a criticism. Rajneesh seems to have dipped into Sri Aurobindo's "logical" and "philosophical" books but missed completely the great sweep of the spiritual experience that is behind the grand progression of his argument. The direct vision and the concrete realisation that have used a master-intellect to build the thought-system have not been felt at all.... the greatest system-maker before Sri Aurobindo, was subject to the same 'greatest limitation' as Sri Aurobindo and cannot have gone even a little beyond reason. In other words, Shankara had no spiritual experience at all of the suprarational." Will any Indian agree to this conclusion? Does even Rajneesh suggest Page 206 it? Not at all. He has no censure to pass on Shankara the outstanding ...
... put them in the forefront, making them take the place of spiritual experience. Do not follow that fashion or confuse yourself and waste time on the way by questionings which will be amply and luminously answered when the divine knowledge of the vijñāna awakes in you. Metaphysical knowledge has its place, but as a handmaid to spiritual experience, showing it the way sometimes but much more dependent ...
... various forms that idea and that hope,—and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual... the war this could not be fulfilled. The "Arya" except for one unfinished series has been an approach to the highest reconciling truth from the point of view of the Indian mentality and Indian spiritual experience, and Western knowledge has been viewed from that standpoint. Here the main idea which has governed our writing, was imposed on us by the very conditions of the problem. All philosophy is concerned ...
... corresponded with the days of Europe's mental vigour and vital activity. But the fundamental difference has been that Asia has served predominantly (not exclusively) as a field for man's spiritual experience and progression, Europe has been rather a workshop for his mental and vital activities. As the cycle progressed, the Eastern continent has more and more converted itself into a storehouse of... but the deeper practical psychology called in India Yoga; and the application of our ideas to the problems of man's social and collective life. Philosophy and religious thought based on spiritual experience must be the beginning and the foundation of any such attempt; for they alone go behind appearances and processes to the truth of things. The attempt to get rid of their supremacy must always ...
... "The lines: Revealed it wakens, when God's stillness Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and ...
... Sri Aurobindo and the Mother Visions of Champaklal Visions - Experience, Transformation, Realisation Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself.... Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according ...
... idealists, temporarily interested visitors and adventurous or curious hippies. Few, if any, had real knowledge of or insight into Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yogic efforts and realizations, or spiritual experience, or an idea of the scope of the work they were undertaking. No wonder that many, after some courageous idealistic gesturing, suddenly vanished never to be seen again. But they were soon replaced... heard in the courtyard below. They thought that she was ill, or whimsical, but attuning her consciousness to eat a bite or drink a sip was as important as it was to go through the most intense spiritual experience. The most painful transfer was that of the nervous system. She often suffered cruelly from the mere presence of certain people who approached her. Her body had become ‘very, very sensitive’ ...
... formulated mainly by Sri Aurobindo, with the Arya as his instrument, we call it Sri Aurobindo’s vision for the sake of simplicity. This vision has been developed progressively, always with spiritual experience as its foundation and touchstone. At no time has it been the intention of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to stop somewhere on the way, to review their gained knowledge at that point and to mould... with its attributes must be higher, or deeper, or more inclusive. The worlds of the gods are manifested worlds, while Being is the manifesting source beyond all names and manifestations. In spiritual experience there is a division between the worlds of the divine attributes and the worlds of the gods, a separation which the ancient Indian writings call ‘a golden lid’; it is this separation which is ...
... This is the same as saying that there is no gap, hiatus, discontinuity or lacuna anywhere, and that the supposed gap between mind and Supermind is nothing but the consequence of a lack of human spiritual experience. Let us recall, for clarity’s sake, the main rungs of the ladder of being, covering the whole of existence. In the “upper hemisphere” there is Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss, and ... greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight.” 47 Again, Sri Aurobindo is clearly relying on his personal spiritual experience. The philosophic masterpiece that is The Life Divine is in fact from beginning to end an account of his own experiences. Interpenetrability. We have enumerated the four spiritual levels ...
... thought, life and actions; we attempt to understand and approach it by our religion and philosophy, at last we touch it directly in some partial or, it may be, some complete spiritual experience. It is that spiritual experience, it is the method, it is the attainment of this realisation that we call Yoga.” 58 This being the general principle, what specifically is Integral Yoga? “What is Integral ...
... some extent, undiscovered.” (pp. 3 and 10) Let us return now to Sri Aurobindo: “The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly... reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy .” 11 This was written before the formulation of the theory of quantum mechanics. “Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own ...
... of mental logic. xxvi But these assumptions are simply not true. And what is more, the final test of truths... is not reason but spiritual illumination, and a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the normal logical intelligence. Also, a genuine spiritual knowledge - and we cannot but insist on this point again and... spiritual knowledge. But what about 'speech'? Has this, too, an ascending march analogous to that of 'thought'? And how far can it possibly go in its attempt at formulating the 'ineffable spiritual experience'? Is man justified in his expectation that he will be able to seize reality in its entirety through the mediation of linguistic symbols properly enriched? xxvii How far does the ...
... truth of the matter. The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's... a of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy. Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual experience as well as my awareness of the modern world's needs to bear upon the general pattern of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and on various particulars of the Mediaeval Italian poet's significant ...
... 48 Ibid., 35. 49 Ibid., pp. 36-37. 50 Savitri, p. 743. 51 The Secret of the Veda, SABCL, Vol. 10, p. 258. is an ancient Vedic knowledge based on spiritual experience. Indeed, the Sanskrit word Brahma also means the creative Word, the sacred and mystic syllable Om. In its manifestive-expressive sense it connotes the Gayatri Mantra. Thus it is in the dynamic... embrace "language of image and symbol" disposing of Yeats's "Asiatic vague immensities". It would also take care of Hegel's "concrete universals" that are otherwise too abstract or philosophic. Spiritual experience, as vast as the universe and as detailed as counting each star with its brightness in countless galaxies, always takes care of all such aesthetic stipulations which otherwise seem to be just ...
... Bearing the eternity of every spirit, Bearing the burden of universal love, A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls. 1 There is a sweep, a fulfilling vision, a height of spiritual experience. There is a spontaneous winging beyond the normal mode of existence. Or: A great Illusion then has built the stars. 2 Or Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God... metaphor; its direct transference can result in a spontaneous expression of the mystic truth, from which our language as a medium of expression debars us otherwise. In fact, the whole gamut of spiritual experience is opposed to the physical way of looking at things. Language, bom from mind's pragmatic need to express itself, and syntax, which has its iron-clad rules to aid this expression, are futile ...
... express the Inexpressible, to convey with the accuracy of a scientist, the clarity of a philosopher and the imaginative and emotional vividness of a poet, certain states of intuitive and spiritual experience which used to be expressed by the ancients in myths and parables. In other words, he is trying to carry the intellectual structure of the modem consciousness into mystical levels and planes... shows the yellow of the intellect, the infra-red of the instinctive life, the rosy glow of delicate emotion and the ultra-violet of intuitive perception. It does not give us the dense blue of spiritual experience, nor does it fuse all these colours into a white radiance. Sri Aurobindo's synthetic vision could not rest satisfied with anything less than a precise and colourful expression of the subtlest ...
... and woos the soul back into consciousness and together they return to their home and all the boons promised by Yama are fulfilled. Adapting this legend as a symbol for a great living spiritual experience, Sri Aurobindo changes King Aswapati's sacrificial asceticism into the Tapasya or conscious spiritualisation of an aspiring soul of humanity. Savitri is not only the incarnation of a goddess... Eleven). 18 Ibid„ pp. 715-24, (Book Twelve). Page 427 Thus have I heard the Revelation of Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's epic poem, truly an Apocalypse of the treasuries of spiritual experience and of the Perfect Divine Existence. JUDITH TYBSRG (Jyotipriya) Page 428 ...
... the one real Self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases, — we may say a false light that is extinguished ( nirvāṇa) in the true Light. In spiritual experience it is sometimes the loss of all sense of individuality in a boundless cosmic consciousness; what was the individual remains only as a centre or a channel for the flow of a cosmic consciousness... the exceeding and elimination of all other possible but lesser experiences is, as a step towards the Absolute, admissible. A supreme experience which affirms and includes the truth of all spiritual experience, gives to each its own absolute, integralises all knowledge and experience in a supreme reality, might be the one step farther that is at once a largest illuminating and transforming Truth ...
... lines a vision caught directly from the heights and depths and breadths of a more than human consciousness. The language too is austere and direct and tries to catch the very essence of the spiritual experience. But like Books I and II of the poem, Book III has the rare distinction of having been written in its entirety in his own hand by Sri Aurobindo himself. Therefore Books constituting Part I... mind of Ignorance. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego and see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Then there is the vast field of mystic and spiritual experience and the gates lie wide open to the possibility of extending our consciousness beyond its present limits. Access to the superior gradations of our conscious existence becomes possible when ...
... immediate discussion, however, we shall keep aside Page 47 the aspect of poetry and focus the attention only on a few issues of thought. It is necessary that the vastness of a spiritual experience, particularly as we experience in the Gita, does not get confined to a specific sectarian or logical-metaphysical formulation. The Scripture far exceeds the Adwaitic Doctrine of the Quiescent... individual Prakriti and taking part in evolution. ( Ibid ., p. 291) The integral Brahman holding the quiescent and the kinetic in its manifestive fold, and yet transcending them, is a spiritual experience which comes in a very definitive way from the assertion that Brahman itself enters, directly or indirectly, into this progressive material creation. If Matter is such a testing ground then its ...
... of Yogic Experience and Integral Realisation 8 Phenomena of Varieties of Spiritual Experience: Synthesis in Integral Realisation There is, however, an important problem from the phenomena of the varieties of spiritual experience. In the course of the history of yoga, there have been detailed investigations of the object of knowledge, status of ...
... store of traditional significances and explanations. In the Upanishads, he found various clues to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the Vedic Rishis, and he underlined their-method of spiritual experience and intuition. In European scholarship, he appreciated the critical method of comparative research, which when perfected, would be found capable of increasing immensely the materials available... Sri Aurobindo interpreted it and the Upanishads and suggests that the body of ideas and doctrines, which are found in the Upanishads, bore a more antique form of subsequent Indian thought and spiritual experience. This suggestion is further strengthened by what Sri Aurobindo Page 65 has written in his "Foundation of Indian Culture”, on Indian religion and spirituality as also on the Veda ...
... that the highest spiritual experience is that of the unqualified static and motionless Absolute. There has thus been a long history of conflict between Shankara s monism and other systems of philosophy such as qualified monism and dualism. In recent times, it has been held that the solution can come only through an integral experience in which the varieties of spiritual experience can be synthesised ...
... master impulse to reduce all its experience of life to the corresponding spiritual term and factor and the result was a transfiguring of even these most external things into a basis for new spiritual experience. The emotional, the sensuous, even the sensual motions of the being, Page 153 before they could draw the soul farther outward, were taken and transmuted into a psychical form... and so consistently that it is now supposed by many to mean nothing else, but this is quite negatived by the use of the same figures by the devout poets of the religion of Chaitanya. All the spiritual experience that lay behind the symbol was embodied in that inspired prophet and incarnation of the ecstasy of divine love and its spiritual philosophy put into clear form in his teaching. His followers ...
... Value and limitations of the philosophical proofs of the existence of God. Can God be experienced? Affirmation of spiritual experiences. Varieties of spiritual experience. Yoga as a systematic knowledge of spiritual experience. Page 58 Class XII Science and Values Yoga as an exploration of existence by an enlargement of consciousness. Yoga, like ...
... with Dilip Kumar. (1) Mental consciousness viz-d-vis Divine Consciousness: "I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. "Is the Divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and unplastic logic something... or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? "If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before the tribunal, summon it to appear as a candidate for admission ...
... 4. Value and limitations of the philosophical proofs of the existence of God. 5. Can God be experienced? Affirmation of spiritual experiences. Varieties of spiritual experience. Yoga as a systematic knowledge of spiritual experience. Class XII I. Science and Values 1. Yoga as an exploration of existence by an enlargement of consciousness. 2. Yoga, like science, is a systematic ...
... imagined, so that even the word dream seems too positive a thing to express its entire unreality." 1 But this universal Illusionism is not a necessary concomitant of the supreme spiritual experience. If instead of the mind's abrupt Samadhi-plunge into the mystic sleep state of su ṣ upti that is now superconscient and therefore inaccessible to it, one succeeds in acquiring spiritual... enter into the absolute mindless suṣupti. It is for this reason that so many seekers of the past have recommended manonāśa or the 'annulment of the Mind' as the via royal to the supreme spiritual experience. 1 2 The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 381. 3 The Life Divine, pp. 162-63. Page 116 Thus we find Sri Ramakrishna declaring: "The Knowledge of Brahman cannot ...
... want to ascend to the supreme Reality in full awareness and bring down its dynamic glories and splendours in the play of our waking state. But we cannot but take note of the fact of spiritual experience certified by most seekers of the Truth that an immense hiatus seems to exist between the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the Mind-Consciousness we normally know of. And unless this... illusion imposed on the silent Self, to pass into some supreme immobile and immutable status beyond the universe." 2 But fortunately this is not the only possible line of supernormal spiritual experience: the withdrawal from all participation in the world-existence and the immergence or extinction into the Unmanifest is not the only spiritual destiny decreed for the human soul. A supreme divine ...
... spiritual sadhana. For, it is not merely a philosophical hypothesis or the idle speculation of an imaginative heart but a very compelling and utterly convinc- Page 63 ing spiritual experience that, once the sadhaka, escaping from the prison of his ego-bound consciousness, enters the cosmic consciousness, and then proceeding further, transcends that cosmic consciousness too, he enters... bliss and peace... or else it is its unwillingness to return from the ecstasy of the divine embrace into the lower field of work and service. But there are other slighter causes incidental to spiritual experience, — strong feeling and practical proof of the great difficulty... of combining the life of works and action with spiritual peace and the life of realisation.... Lowest causes of all are the weakness ...
... the outer form, and insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognise that there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience. Instead of taking ...
... condition. I have not much knowledge of experience or descent; so I am unable to get the full value out of them. Could you kindly say something in general about the psychic and spiritual experience and the descent from above? You have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there... attained only when one is above pain and suffering, strife and quarrel, gloom and despair, at least for the time being. But then, too, there is no true peace or quietude. These are the fruition of spiritual experience and a yogic practice is necessary for their attainment. Worldly quietude or peace is very fragile, momentary, variable. Solid, lasting, self-existent, firm are the attributes of ...
... insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognize that there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual Page 119 experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience. Instead ...
... vital body. So in this yoga the going-out in the mental body precedes that in the vital body? Yes, but both these are yet subordinate to the spiritual experience which is much more important. I understand that the spiritual experience is fundamental and that the rest is necessary simply because the perfection must be reached on all the planes. Monday, May 31, 1926 My meditation ...
... not many nor important ones. I began to see things in the subtle. Then I had to give it up when I took to politics. I wanted to resume my yoga but did not know how to begin again. I wanted spiritual experience and political action together. I would not take up a method that required me to give up action and life. When I came to Baroda from the Surat Congress, Barin had written to me that he knew... must also pay attention to suddhi – purification, by introspection, by Karma yoga and by Bhakti, devotion. Then a step forward can be taken. The question was about the Guru giving spiritual experience to Disciple s. Sri Aurobindo : It only means that the readiness was already there and the Guru's help removes the obstacle and the natural development comes about. But no one can p ...
... other effect of reading it except this that I had a thought that I would dedicate my life to a similar World-change and take part in it. ( After a pause ) No, I had no extraordinary spiritual experience in my early life. I remember only three experiences. One was the Darjeeling experience. And the second came upon me at the age of twelve or thirteen. I was extremely selfish and then something... imperfectly – to put it into practice. But Page 166 that was a sort of turning-point in my inner life. The last came just before I left England. It was the mental rather than the spiritual experience of the Atman. I felt the One only as true ; it was an experience absolutely Shankarite in its sense. It lasted only for a short time. Disciple : Is it a fact that you came away straight ...
... into the very expression of what is beyond speech, which could sublimate the small and the finite into forms of the Vast and the Infinite. Mark how in these aphoristic lines embodying a deep spiritual experience, the inexpressible has been expressed with a luminous felicity: Delight that labours in its opposite, Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled.¹ or He made an eager death and... reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his authentic ¹ A Midsummer Night's ...
... to go to Chandernagore, 367; speculation about his disappearance, 367ff; Morley on the Karmayogin articles, 368; judgement in the Karmayogin case, 369, 376; at Chandernagore, 367, 370ff; spiritual experience at Chandernagore, 362, 371ff; decision to go to Pondicherry, 373; departure, 374ff; arrival, 375; letter to Hindu, 377; failure of force and fraud against, 378; with Tamil revolutionaries... Bharati, 41 1fn; keeping watch on events, 412; on Mont-Ford Reforms, 412; on the War, peace and the League, 412ff; "a God's labour", 414; Western metaphysics and Yoga of Indian Saints, 415-6; spiritual experience and intellectual formulation, 416-7; the Arya sequences, 417, 470; The Life Divine, 419-20; on śruti and smrti, 449; adventure in Vedic exegesis, 449-50; his intuitions backed by Veda ...
... becomes constant and complete. 46 XI In Conversation X, the issue is between Spirituality and Religion. Certainly, all religions had their beginnings in a seminal mystical or "The spiritual experience, some revelation from "what one could call a Divine Being ... bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and Truth for the earth". 47 Mahavira, the Buddha, the Christ... personalities, and were also divine-human persons who originated the several religions that still claim millions of followers today. But aside from the initial inspiration (which was basically a spiritual experience), what makes a particular religion distinctive are its dogmas, its theology, its body of ritual, its buttressing philosophy and ethics, its organised church and the rest of its institutional ...
... however, Sri Aurobindo felt that the writing of the letters and the answering guidance from the Guru had helped a large number of sadhaks "to awaken from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience"; others had been enabled to move "from a small round of experience to a flood of realisations"; and some who had been hopeless for years to experience a sudden conversion and make the passage... trance and Her eyes would suddenly open and with a wonderful smile on Her lips She would communicate much more than by explaining to me in mere words. Not things philosophical or some deep spiritual experience, but things we call practical, of day-to-day life, solutions to problems of the past day or of the next, what I should or should not do, all these and in the most minute detail, were received ...
... from political activity was complete, just as was his personal retirement into solitude in 1910. But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete... the Divine purpose, it has to be done. Sri Ramakrishna himself answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as he gave and such as I try to give answers from higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to co-ordinate its ignorance.³ What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little ...
... uplifting spiritual experiences which flood the being with light and bliss and raise its consciousness above mortality. "As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, turned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tāmasic inertia, the turbidities... has united herself in order to give an expression to its intense and resolute aspiration. This truth of the body's having a distinct individual consciousness of its own is a definite fact of spiritual experience and provides the rationale of the physical transformation. There is an involved yearning in Matter for a permanent union with the Divine; for essentially Matter is the death- less substance ...
... accounts of his experience in his own words are reproduced. "I am glad you are getting converted to silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses – in my case it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the rest of the Page 97 sadhana; but as to the positive way to get these things, I don't know if your mind is quite ready to proceed with it. There... Lele agreed. Sri Aurobindo gave a lecture at the Gaekwad Wada, Poona, on the thirteenth. Then he went to Bombay. At Girgaum (Bombay) he delivered a lecture on the fifteenth. In Bombay the spiritual experience that had begun at Baroda became more intense. The vacant condition of the mind turned into the experience of the silent Brahman Consciousness. The multifarious activities of the city of Bombay ...
... in other words, wouldn't that mean ? A : Yes, it is the realization of the original creative impulse, of the creative Truth. There are many sayings in the Bible that express profound spiritual experience. But it does not seem to have been understood in the right sense by the followers. First of all, the Bible is not the expression of Christ's personal experience. This is one difficulty... explaining ignorance in that way. It is a marvellous explanation. We will come to it in The Life Divine. Page 125 Q : But the intellect, or the intellectual, is not necessary for spiritual experience, is it ? A : Not necessarily. But one who hasn't developed the intellect and is seeking, for him there is an answer. And there is a place for the intellect in the spiritual life. But intellect ...
... erudition ... the original sense of the words, the lines, the allusions, the clue to the structure of the thought had been long lost or obscured; nor was there in the erudite that intuition or that spiritual experience which might have partly recovered the lost secret," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Secret of the Veda. A tongue unintelligible to us may be correctly understood once a clue has been found, he... "The seers climb Indra like a ladder, Along with the ascent all that remains to be done becomes clear." (Rig-Veda 1.10.1-2) "It is an extraordinary passage expressing perfectly a spiritual experience. Indra is the Divine Mind and as one ascends higher and higher in it or on it, all that has to be done becomes clearly visible. One who has that experience can at once see how perfectly true ...
... dogma. Only those Scriptures, religions, philosophies which can be thus constantly renewed, relived, their stuff of permanent truth constantly reshaped and developed in the inner thought and spiritual experience of a developing humanity, continue to be of living importance to mankind. The rest remain as monuments of the past, but have no actual force or vital impulse for the future. Page 5 ... complex harmony, are eternally valuable and valid; for they are not merely the luminous ideas or Page 7 striking speculations of a philosophic intellect, but rather enduring truths of spiritual experience, verifiable facts of our highest psychological possibilities which no attempt to read deeply the mystery of existence can afford to neglect. Whatever the system may be, it is not, as the co ...
... "not by logic is this realisation attainable." Logical reasoning and scholastic research can only be aids useful for confirming to the intellect what has already been acquired by revelation and spiritual experience. This limitation, this necessity are the inexorable results of the very nature of Veda. It is ordinarily assumed by the rationalistic modern mind, itself accustomed to arrive at its intellectual... experience is needed for our intellectual security. This method, by which, as I hold, the meaning of Veda can alone be entirely recovered, is, then, a process of psychological experiment and spiritual experience aided by the higher intuitive or revelatory faculties,—the vijnana of Hindu psychology,—of which mankind has not yet, indeed, anything but a fitful and disordered use, but which are capable ...
... hallucination, this is a thing which can be seen, can be grasped, can be sensed by the mind, can be entered into, can be lived. Fact of material existence or no, it is an indubitable fact of spiritual experience and seems for a time to be the only wholly blissful fact, the one thing of which we can say Anandam Brahma, Delight is the eternal Reality, Bliss is Brahman. It is as described in the Upanishad... the phenomenal universe. Is then the soul eternally coerced by its own phenomena, eternally bound to the revolving wheel of its own phenomenal manifestations? No, for freedom is the ultimate spiritual experience. Where then is the point of escape, the door, the egress? The point of escape is for Shankara, as for Buddha, in an ultimate act of knowledge which denies the real existence of the phenomenal ...
... impose a single dogmatic and inflexible rule on every man regardless of the possibilities of his nature, it tried rather to draw him gently upward and help him to grow steadily in religious and spiritual experience. Every part of human nature, every characteristic turn of its action was given a place in the system; each was suitably surrounded with the spiritual idea and a religious influence, each provided... outward, still Page 220 vitally and physically minded can be led only by devices suited to its ignorance. Another, more developed and capable of a much stronger and deeper psycho-spiritual experience, offers a riper make of manhood gifted with a more conscious intelligence, a larger vital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the nature. A third, the ripest and most developed ...
... terms of our own spiritual self-existence and cosmic being, and we have what these great builders saw in themselves and reared in stone. All objections, once we have got at this identity in spiritual experience, fall away and show themselves to be what Page 277 they really are, the utterance and cavil of an impotent misunderstanding, an insufficient apprehension or a complete failure to... there is another basic style; but here too the same spiritual, meditative, intuitive method has to be used and we get at the same result, an aesthetic interpretation or suggestion of the one spiritual experience, one in all its complexity and diversity, which founds the unity of the infinite variations of Indian spirituality and religious feeling and the realised union of the human self with the Divine ...
... things which are most native to its ideal, its temperament, its way of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the value of spirituality, of the sense of the eternal and infinite, the inner spiritual experience, the philosophic mind and spirit, the religious aim and feeling, the intuitive reason, the idea of universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this is the real attitude of our critic... necessary deduction from the great Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita, and was always combated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and from spiritual experience very different conclusions. At the present time, in spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara's philosophy, the most vital movements of Indian thought and religion are moving again towards ...
... knowledge and thought and experience; and it had in seeking this point a boundless courage and yet a sure tread. Thus it carried each tangent of philosophic thought, Page 10 each line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at all existence, so as to see what truth or power such a view could give it. It tried to know the whole of divine nature and... through an inner experience and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence. The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and discovery at each step of the national life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never lose. But this spiritual tendency does not shoot upward only to the abstract ...
... intellectual opinions may be anything and will not come in the way of his inner response to me." Not only will mere spiritual belief fail to bring a man into relation with the Mother, but even spiritual experience can keep him still apart from her. I have heard her comment on a person who had been meditating with her: "People sit before me and go into meditation and are quite pleased with the spiritual... no relation with my consciousness, with the work which I am here to do." Of course, the Mother in her non-personal aspect would be in Page 147 touch with every kind of spiritual experience anywhere. What is at issue is the Integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation whose radiating centre was the embodied Divine Mother gathering around her all those children of ...
... to his own notions end at the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation. The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly... of view between Sri Aurobindo and the other great Vedantin, Sri Sankara. For Sri Sankara the Law of Contradiction is the criterion of truth. In Sri Sankara, Reality is a concept based on a spiritual experience. While it is unreachable by thought we can say this much about it that it is free from contradictions. 10. System of Logic, Bk. II, Ch. 7. In the same vein Mill argues ...
... of the poetry which comes from the Illumined Mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines The longing of ecstatic tears From infinite to infinite 1 will do very well as an instance... etc., are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot ...
... language very different from Sanskrit. Spiritual poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes, has "the luminous and assured clarity of the fully expressed spiritual experience." 11 Sri Aurobindo and the Upanishadic seers write from the direct spiritual experience, but even poets who have not risen to the regions above the mind grasp sometimes the flashes of those illumined heights. These flashes are not usually ...
... related to the worship of the Supreme Mother, the Shakti in India. Just holding it I experienced waves of ananda or bliss emanating from it. I wondered how a geometrical figure could give such a spiritual experience. Exactly then an unpublished conversation was given to me in which the Mother speaks of the fifth aspect of the Mother, the Mother of Ananda which she wrote is also the Mother of Transformation... devotion through certain movements of the body; the vital corresponding to the level of occultism; the mental to that of spiritual philosophy and understanding; and the ultimate level of pure spiritual experience. From the time she withdrew from her body, it has been clear to me that for Auroville, and perhaps for the earth also, the Matrimandir is the receptacle holding the Mother’s Force. This Force ...
... action record a racial experience, Savitri records a 3 Ibid., p. 704. 4 The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 21, p. 759. 5 Ibid., p. 48. Page 182 spiritual experience which has an equally ancient history, though he also knew that the seeming illogical ratiocination of poetic recordation might not be appreciated easily by the general public: Savitri... reading and recitation of Savitri's journey is itself the discipline of Tantra and the discipline (the meditation, the sincerity, the surrender) pays dividends. For we would be re-enacting the spiritual experience of Savitri when the latent power that had lain coiled at her base (the Muladhara) begins to climb upwards, undoing the knots (also centres imaged as lotuses), of Vishnu-granthi, Brahma-granthi ...
... impossible dichotomy. Take, for example, the following lines: Turned are her tears to gems of diamond pain, Her sorrow into a magic crown of song. 68 Strength bom of an intense spiritual experience can save the soul from succumbing to his fate. Tears crystallise into a diamond just as the oyster forms a nacreous shell around the grain of sand. Pain is transformed into a gem and the crown... Mother , CWM, Vol. 15, p. 102. Page 512 connotations provides insights into the depth of Savitri. Jewels become a medium for depicting the abstract and subtle shades of spiritual experience. This medium conveys the power of the word, its concretising mantric effect. Apparently disparate and unconnected objects are matched together and metamorphosed through strikingly new images ...
... mistaking of mental ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic 30 and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane. 31 Eckhart attaches... after his experience that he came to understand ir in terms of such concepts as "cessation of thought," "Presence," and "thoughtless awareness." There is indeed an advantage in having a spiritual experience without prior mental knowledge about it. As the Mother remarks: Always the most interesting cases for me have been those of people who had read nothing but had a very ardent aspiration ...
... Page 99 were known directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names. At the same time this fundamental character of spiritual experience is not absolutely limitative; it can do without thought, but it can do with thought also. Of course, the first idea of the mind would be that the resort to thought brings one back at once to... SABCL,. Vol. 23, p. 647. × For a more derailed description of Sri Aurobindo's first major spiritual experience, sec Appendix Ill: × Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga. SABCL. Vol. 22, pp. 176 , 177 ...
... Non-Existence or Nothingness (Asat) is based on a different spiritual experience from the one that is founded on the Vedantic view of the ultimate reality as Being, Existence, or the All (Sat, the Brahman). Similarly, the Hindu view that both the world and the notion of an individual soul are illusions, Maya, is based on a spiritual experience that is fundamentally different from the equally valid experience ...
... twenty-ninth birthday, he had a sudden and profound spiritual experience that radically transformed him and entirely changed the course of his life. Following this transformative experience, he devoted a few years to the study of spiritual texts and spending time with spiritual teachers in order to understand and integrate his spiritual experience. Then, for about ten years, he engaged himself in spiritual ...
... certainly the essential thing; but to approach Him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve Him with one's works and to know Him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience is also essential in the path of Integral Yoga. If you accept Krishnaprem's insistence that this and no other must be your path, that it is this you have to attain and realise, then any... her; us she looks upon as your Gurus." I should perhaps have still refused to comply had I not been deeply impressed by her sincerity, truthfulness, intelligence, poetical gift, capacity for spiritual experience and, above all, her incredible purity of character. She was noble and generous to a fault, utterly indifferent to wealth, though born to wealth, and social without being attached to society ...
... compass of the4ntellect. His stinging sarcasm at the end of his letter hit the target: "I would ask one simple question of those who would make the intellectual mind the standard and judge of spiritual experience. Is the divine something less than Mind or is He something greater? Is mental consciousness with its groping Page 77 enquiry, endless argument, unquenchable doubt, stiff and... superior or even equal to the Divine Consciousness or is it something inferior in its action and status? If it is greater, then there is no reason to seek after the Divine. If it is equal, then spiritual experience is quite superfluous. But if it is inferior, how can it challenge, judge, make the Divine stand as an accused or a witness before its tribunal, summon it to appear as a candidate for admission ...
... : “the well-born”, or “the few”, “the predestined”, “the pioneers”, “the avant-garde”, “those who have in them a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the Divine”. “To follow the path of spiritual experience”, she said, “one must have within oneself a ‘spiritual being,’ 32 one must be ‘twice born’, as it is said. For if one does not have a spiritual being within which is at least at the point... French and 250,000 Dutch would be practising Buddhists. “That which is permanent in the Hindu religion, must form the basis on which the world will increasingly take its stand in dealing with spiritual experience and religious truth,” 79 wrote Sri Aurobindo. And “that which is permanent in the Hindu religion” may well prove to be the synthesis he and the Mother first realised and then formulated. ...
... Divine that “Supermind is Superman.” The Supermind is the intermediary Power between Sachchidananda, i.e. the ultimate attributes of the Godhead as conceivable by the human intellect and spiritual experience, and the mental ranges at the disposal of the human being. It is “the beginning and end of all creation and arrangement, the Alpha and the Omega, the starting point of all differentiation, the... countless generations of seers, saints, yogis and spiritual masters, and with their immense treasures of knowledge, they have no idea. The spirit of faith has, as its source and touchstone, the spiritual experience. “The ancient Indians through their yogic insight found the idea of similar evolution, which the modern scientists are finding out by observation and research. In the Tantras this kind of evolution ...
... Without knowledge and the unification with God, all else is nothing but ‘vanity of vanities’ while mankind keeps plodding around in its mental circles. ‘Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas does not bring with it any realization. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change... she did too, she pressed the whole world upon her bosom. At his first meeting with Lele, Sri Aurobindo, to his own and Lele’s surprise, had had the realization of the passive Brahman. (A spiritual experience is, generally speaking, an unexpected but relatively brief event; a realization causes a permanent change or acquisition in the personality.) After the following intensive practice of the yoga ...
... heavenly mystical states, he chuckled uneasily and replied: ‘I tend to try to stay away from that.’” 60 But mysticism is a matter of experience, and so is the evidence of God. The authentic spiritual experience is the same in East and West, and it is the same at the core of every religion, for the human being is the same everywhere. “The perennial philosophy holds that the world’s great spiritual ... differences, express the same fundamental truth about the nature of reality, a truth that can be directly apprehended during a mystical experience.” (John Horgan 61 ) “The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being, for these are the imperatives ...
... difficulties, progress and attacks and retardations, strong movements forward and a floundering in the bogs of the Ignorance. Even great realisations may come and high splendours of light and spiritual experience and yet the goal is not attained; for in the phrase of the Rig Veda, “As one climbs from peak to peak there is made clear the much that is still to be done. “ But there is always something... be a power to deal with the ordinary outer life from a new inner attitude and one can then make the happenings of that life itself a means for the inner change of nature and the growth in spiritual experience. This was what was recommended to Miss Wilson when she first wanted to join the Ashram; she had already acquired the habit of inward concentration and it was suggested to her to proceed further ...
... on a transformation of physical life no less than of the inner being. Again, all the world has recognised in him an intellect that has marshalled and organised the results of his integral spiritual experience in a most wide-sweeping yet systematic philosophy: Sir Francis Younghusband could not help hailing The Life Divine as the *This section, except for its last paragraph which replaces... palpitant with various motifs against a background of history and coloured with the dreams and deeds of diverse cultures pass before us to prove that Sri Aurobindo is not just mystical vision and spiritual experience. Though behind all that the plays set forth we feel the pressure of cosmic forces and supra-terrestrial influences, they do not intrude in any way to render the mind erratic or the flesh anaemic ...
... truth of the matter. The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work... Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy . Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual experience as well as my awareness of the modern world's needs to bear upon the general pattern of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and on various particulars of the Mediaeval Italian poet's significant ...
... same category— though, as I say, the mental s rain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative. "Its vision brings out a truth of spiritual experience with sufficient force and exactness, though not with the deeper intimacy that sometimes comes in from above. It has a perfection of its own which is considerable." * Page 148 ... Grows king of Nature with the mystic bird A flaming crown of godhead over life! SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT 'It is certainly very original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle ...
... futility of asking questions Page 475 answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as Ramakrishna gave and such as I try to give, answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to coordinate its ignorance; still less can they be a placing of the Divine or the Divine Truth before... answer to the question [ whether the Krishna of Brindavan and the stories of his lila are literally true or merely symbols of deep spiritual realities ] depends on what value one attaches to spiritual experience and to mystic and occult experience, that is to say, to the data of other planes of consciousness than the physical, as also on the nature of the relations between the cosmic consciousness and ...
... utterances of the great Scriptures—Veda, Upanishads, Gita,—it may well have a power to awaken a spiritual impulse, an uplifting, even certain kinds of realisation. To say that it cannot contradicts spiritual experience. The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as mantras , they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisation for others. Naturally, these mostly would be... September 1934 We remembered that Sahana had said you stopped her writing a novel, because her mind or consciousness was being externalised. That is when one is already in a steady stream of spiritual experience, living partly at least in an inner realisation, while the rest of the being is not yet in it. Writing a novel means then going out of the inner state of experience and stimulating the rest ...
... their vibration and texture. But yet in this passage there is a greater power that has rushed down from above and taken up the vital surge into its movement—so much so that if it had been a spiritual experience of which the poet was speaking, we could at once have detected an action of the illumined spiritual Mind taking up the vital love and soaring into spiritual greatness. Or take the quotation—... Skylark is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley looked, it is true, always towards a light, a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but he never got through the idealising mind to the spiritual experience. What he did get was something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest subtle mind touch Page 399 of an essence behind the appearance, an essence of ideal light, truth ...
... own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure. Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its thought-process of elimination and withdrawal, stands an overmastering spiritual experience. Deep, intense, convincing, common to all who have overstepped a certain limit of the active mind-belt into horizonless inner space, this is the great experience of liberation, the consciousness... which it is a refracted ray. There the abstract terms of the pure reason and the constructions of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soulvision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see this existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance ...
... himself to any rigid structure of metaphysical thought, but free to admit and combine all the soul's highest and greatest and fullest and most numerous experiences. If the highest height of spiritual experience, the sheer summit of all realisation is the absolute union of the soul with the Transcendent Page 361 who exceeds the individual and the universe, the widest scope of that union... oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience—a realisation in the very substance of our being. More and more frequent conditions come of something indefinable and illimitable, a peace, a silence, a joy, a bliss beyond expression, a sense ...
... shall this renunciation go? what shall be its nature? and in what way shall it be applied? There is an established tradition long favoured by great religious teachings and by men of profound spiritual experience that renunciation must not only be complete as a discipline but definite and final as an end and that it shall fall nothing short of the renunciation of life itself and of our mundane existence... and the struggle; or else it is its unwillingness to return from the ecstasy of the divine embrace into the lower field of work and service. But there are other slighter causes incidental to spiritual experience,—strong feeling and practical proof of the great difficulty, which we willingly exaggerate into an impossibility, of combining the life of works and action with spiritual peace and the life ...
... separate texts when they attempt an exact and verbal interpretation. The Rishis of the Upanishads followed another method. They sought to recover the lost or waning knowledge by meditation and spiritual experience and they used the text of the ancient mantras as a prop or an authority for their own intuitions and perceptions; or else the Vedic Word was a seed of thought and vision by which they recovered... dominant, the original sense of the words, the lines, the allusions, the clue to the structure of the thought had been long lost or obscured; nor was there in the erudite that intuition or that spiritual experience which might have partly recovered the lost secret. In such a field mere learning, especially when it is accompanied by an ingenious scholastic mind, is as often a snare as a guide. In Yaska's ...
... were all I knew of this profound Scripture, represented for me an important document of our national history, but seemed of small value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience. My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging... entire passages came at once into evidence which entirely altered the whole character of the Veda. For this Scripture then appeared to have a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience running all through it and appearing sometimes in small streaks, sometimes in larger bands, in the majority of its hymns. Moreover, besides the words that in their plain and ordinary sense give ...
... those who have ideas only on the intellectual plane and no idea of anything behind and there are those who have spiritual experience but no power to embody or materialise. These give us no sufficient hope, whatever they may do for the moment. It is where there is the spiritual experience or the ideas that give it a mental body and along with that a strong will to materialise from whom we can expect ...
... preserve the ancient balance: it Page 527 maintains the substance and foundation of the original synthesis, but the form has been changed and renovated in the light of a developing spiritual experience. This teaching does not evade the difficult problem of reconciling the full active life of man with the inner life in the highest self and spirit; it advances what it holds to be the real solution... then becomes evident how action continual and unceasing and of all kinds without diminution or abandonment of any part of the activities of life can be not only quite consistent with a supreme spiritual experience, but as forceful a means of reaching this highest spiritual condition as bhakti or knowledge. Nothing can be more positive than the Gita's statement in this matter. "And by doing also all actions ...
... questionings, the record of famous discussions that occupy so much space in the Upanishads—discussions which, we shall see, are not intellectual debates but comparisons of illuminated knowledge & spiritual experience. If this tradition—let us call it mystic or esoteric for want of a less abused word—was already formed at the time of the Brahmanas and Upanishads, when and how did it originally arise? Two... 181 as an explanation of life was not merely the ardour of a great metaphysician enamoured of a beautiful idea or a perfect theory of life, but the passion of a man with a deep & vast spiritual experience which he believed to be the sole means of human salvation. Therefore philosophy in India, instead of tending as in Europe to ignore or combat religion, has always been itself deeply religious ...
... thought of all being the Brahman, or one can draw back from the thought also and observe one's own thoughts as outside Page 306 things until one enters into the silence and the pure spiritual experience. One can concentrate in any of the three centres which is easiest to the sadhak or gives most result. The power of the concentration in the heart-centre is to open that centre and by... upwards and act also in the lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of the being and nature. Page 307 I was very glad to get your letter and especially to know that you are more at peace. That is what is first ...
... maintain that your views on the lack of all intensity in the psychic things or in the spiritual or their inferiority to vital pleasure are strange, because they contradict all psychic and spiritual experience except that of the mere vairagis and make the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. What have Ramakrishna's excesses... depression or Chaitanya's viraha to do with the question in issue? These are difficulties Page 377 of the body and the vital. The question was of the intensity of psychic and pure spiritual experience—psychic devotion and love, peace, Ananda. You cannot base a general denial on your own particular experience, because you have only the initial experiences of calm etc. and have not got to ...
... rest, it must be trained to receive, otherwise no transformation of it could take place. Page 13 It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as the ordinary unregenerated activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly obstructive consciousness of the body is an obstacle. What the sadhak has to be specially warned against in... ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind, cañcalaṁ manaḥ , which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane. There are also of course ...
... with regard to that particular prayer and that experience. It all depends on the person, the condition, the need of the moment or of that stage or phase of the consciousness. These things in spiritual experience are always plastic and variable. In some conditions or in one phase or at one moment expression may be needed to bring out the effectuating force of the prayer or the stability of the experience;... one has to fall back on the reason, but the human reason is an individual action quite unreliable. That is the sense. 18 June 1932 The Mother says in her prayer of 31 July 1914 that spiritual experience is willed ("elle est consciente, voulue" [p. 231]) by the Divine. Am I then to suppose that the dearth or abundance of experiences in any given case is willed by the Divine? To say so has ...
... difficult not to live in a double consciousness, one inward and turned towards the spiritual change and the other which is still chained to the ordinary movements and pulls them down from their spiritual experience into the persistent and unchanged course of the lower nature. If you have not the entire and undivided call, it is better not to take the plunge, unless you are prepared for very bitter inner... cannot appreciate that movement, knows nothing about spirituality or Yoga. Your husband's letters are like the reasonings of the scientists and men of the world who know nothing about Yoga or spiritual experience; they only pass mental opinions and judgments on it from outside. It is not even worth while replying to such things—they are so far from the realities of the spirit. Keep over there your ...
... first introduction to Indian spiritual experience and not as philosophy. They did not, however, carry me to the practice of Yoga: their influence was purely mental. My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was ...
... Grace. Strength has a value for spiritual realisation, but to say that it can be done by strength only and by no other means is a violent exaggeration. Grace is not an invention, it is a fact of spiritual experience. Many who would be considered as mere nothings by the wise and strong have attained by Grace; illiterate, without mental power or training, without "strength" of character or will, they have... suddenly or rapidly grown into spiritual realisation, because they had faith or because they were sincere. I do not see why these facts which are facts of spiritual history and of quite ordinary spiritual experience should be discussed and denied and argued as if they were mere matters of speculation. Strength, if it is spiritual, is a power for spiritual realisation; a greater power is sincerity; the greatest ...
... is an opening of the consciousness to spiritual experience without which few can open at all or go very far. If they advance by themselves, they can fall into all sorts of perils and errors of which they have no knowledge and no idea how to guide themselves among these things. All experience is direct—there is no such thing as an indirect spiritual experience. But after the consciousness is sufficiently ...
... give only to those whom I have accepted for my own path of Yoga. 15 November 1928 The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another... have them is quite a wrong idea. The only necessity in this sadhana is to open yourself to the Divine Force; if one is open the necessary understanding or knowledge will come of itself through spiritual experience. 23 May 1933 Sometimes I think it would be better not to ask you questions about my difficulties, but simply to state them. But I find that if I can't put things in the form of questions ...
... that he is somehow very unusual in his excitement; and his vital nature takes great pleasure in that." 10 Does she mean that one should be usual instead of unusual in one's excitement during spiritual experience? The Mother did not mean that one must be usual in one's excitement at all—she meant that the man is not only excited but also wants to be unusual (extraordinary) in his excitement. The... sometimes make a practice of lying quiet and tracing backwards, recovering the dreams one by one. When the dream-state is very light, one can remember more dreams than when it is heavy. "Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain)." 14 What is meant by the Divine "without"? Does it mean the cosmic Divine or ...
... is; but these are few, very few. You must be free from every mental construction, you must divest yourself of all that is merely local or temporal, before you can know what you have seen. Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and... If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your ...
... well as the rest, it must be trained to receive, otherwise no transformation of it could take place. It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as the ordinary unregenerated activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly obstructive consciousness of the body is an obstacle. What the Sadhak has to be specially warned against in... ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of Page 29 the mere mind which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane. There are also of course ...
... frequent thing. So I always advise people to keep their reason. But there's a point where it must cease having its superior rights—that's to judge spiritual experience, because it cannot judge this, it does not understand it; but it must truly be a spiritual experience, not something which tries to imitate it; here an absolute sincerity is necessary. One must not deceive oneself through ambition, or indeed ...
... outer world this is practically impossible. That is why those who wished to enjoy their spiritual experience without intervention from the mind used to remain in states of trance and to carefully avoid coming down to the level of action. But if one wants to transform life, if one wants the spiritual experience to have an effect on the mind, the vital and the body, on the daily activities, it is in ...
... adjunct to every considerable line of spiritual experience and endeavour. It is true that a philosophic development of spiritual thought is not entirely indispensable; for the truths of spirit can be reached more directly and completely by intuition and by a concrete inner contact. It must also be said that the critical control of the intellect over spiritual experience can be hampering and unreliable, ...
... [Indian] history, but seemed of scant value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience.' 2 Fifteen years later, however, Sri Aurobindo would reread the Vedas in the original Sanskrit and find there 'a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience.' 3 Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo had had certain 'psychological experiences of my own for which I ...
... had to try and make myself understood), I said that religions are based on spiritual experiences brought down to a level where mankind can grasp them, and that the new phase must be that of spiritual experience in its purity, not brought down to a lower level. 2 But this too is hard to understand. Anyway... it gives me colds! Yes, that's true, that's what gives colds, it's dogmatism, which... down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. The time of religions is over. We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity." ...
... The Poet of Integralism* The term "integralism", in our treatment of Sri Aurobindo the poet, the wielder of an intense art-form, must go beyond the discovery of a special spiritual experience and vision which we may designate by it. It must connote primarily an integral style, an integral word-power to match that experience and vision. But this style and this word-power cannot... also the very word and rhythm native to their greater inwardness and secrecy. Poetic integralism would lie in an expression springing straight from the highest, widest, deepest fount of spiritual experience and vision instead of getting shaped in the mere mind or even predominantly in the intermediate planes whose lights and shadows play in the usual universe of poetry. How the style ...
... has been a persistent questioning as to what is the aim of human life. Answers have been sought at various levels of reflection and critical thought. Answers derived from morality, religion or spiritual experience have also often been expressed in ways which are accessible to our rational understanding. The inquiring mind needs to reflect on these answers and arrive at its own conclusions. We speak... experience the reality which is the object of all knowledge. And it is this burning fire that breaks the limitations of the human mind and leads the seeker into higher domains of psychic and spiritual experience. A good pupil does not refuse to transgress the normal limitations of consciousness, but has the requisite courage to take the staff in his hands and set out on a newjourney. For a good pupil ...
... make them very difficult to understand. The texts are written in Sanskrit, a language which is far removed from the modern languages. The turn and style of exposition belong to a climate of spiritual experience, and therefore, not easily comparable to the modes of expression with which we are normally familiar. Since the tradition of communication at that time was primarily oral, the texts were highly... middle terms and intermediate argument and conclusion, and so on. But the Upanishads are not intellectual expositions; they may more fitly be called expressions of illumination, "of intuition and spiritual experience" (Joshi, 2001, pp. 99-100) and they are somewhat like giant steps in which the middle steps between one and the other are crossed over very rapidly. Despite these limitations, my discussions ...
... to the word 'Knowledge'. Here there is no reference to the knowledge of the whole reality or of the Highest Good; it is therefore not mystic or intuitive knowledge, which is an attribute of spiritual experience. Knowledge is, therefore, concluded to be intellectual apprehension of the right in a given particular situation. The Socratic doctrine thus interpreted is liable to obvious objection... true knowledge. In the Republic of Plato, when we read the myth of the den, 1 where Plato describes the way by which the Highest Good is realized, what we get is the symbolic description of spiritual experience. That realization is not intellectual apprehension, but that in which cognition, 2 affection 3 and conation 4 are fused together and transcended. It is, then, we may conclude, that knowledge ...
... based on spiritual experience. I have dealt with that in The Life Divine . SATYENDRA: The very fact that we have an Ashram means that we have to keep aloof from the world for a time. Else we could as well establish ourselves in the world. SRI AUROBINDO ( smiling ): "Ashram" is only a conventional term. As I said, we can't start a new creation except on the basis of spiritual experience. The starting ...
... find the difference because it is "you" who gets blotted out in Nirvana and not somebody else. (After a pause) In this letter of Vivekananda, there is at least one thing precise about his spiritual experience: he speaks of the calm and stillness of Nirvana and before it everything seems an illusion. PURANI: The division of consciousness into two parts—one being fundamentally free and the other... must go on acting. The test is that even if the work is taken away or destroyed, it must make no difference to the condition of your consciousness. SATYENDRA: Isn't Nirvana a fundamental spiritual experience? SRI AUROBINDO: Nirvana, as I know it, is an experience in which the separative personality is blotted out and one acts according to what is necessary to be done. It is only a passage for ...
... force mounting up and meeting those from above that the evolution can be complete. PURANI: Is spiritual experience possible without the awakening of the psychic? SRI AUROBINDO: What do you mean by the awakening? The psychic may be simply awake or it may take command of the being. But spiritual experience is not possible without the psychic awakening—occult experience can occur without it. NIRODBARAN: ...
... the three approaches to spirituality, the other two being occultism and spiritual philosophy. Each of these three may lead separately or together or in varying collaboration to direct spiritual experience and realisation which constitute real spirituality. "Spirituality", observes Sri Aurobindo in his Life Divine, "is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind... the soul or the true being, the spirit in us. The last part of his observation pertains to religion. The formalities of religion such as those mentioned above end when spirituality or rather spiritual experience begins. We can thus justly say that spirituality begins when religion ends as it has been rightly said earlier : Religion begins where philosophy ends. "Our souls can visit in great lonely ...
... Value and limitations of the philosophical proofs of the existence of God. 5. Can God be experienced? Affirmation of spiritual experiences. Varieties of spiritual experience. Yoga as a systematic knowledge of spiritual experience. Class XII I. Science and Values: 1. Yoga as an exploration of existence by an enlargement of consciousness. 2. Yoga, like science ...
... nature, anirvacanīya. But the difficulties are so great that it can be accepted only if it imposes itself irresistibly as the inevitable ultimate, the end and summit of metaphysical inquiry and spiritual experience. For even if all things are illusory creations, they must have at least a subjective existence and they can exist nowhere except in the consciousness of the Sole Existence; they are then subjective... creation would be the body of the Truth which they manifest in predetermined significant forms and powers of the All-Existence. Our fundamental cognition of the Absolute, our substantial spiritual experience of it is the intuition or the direct experience of an infinite and eternal Existence, an infinite and eternal Consciousness, an infinite and eternal Delight of Existence. In overmental and mental ...
... heartbeats and breathing. Hatha Yoga is an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. (b) Experiences in Raja Yoga Yoga is often identified exclusively with Raja Yoga... and Prāṇ ā y ā ma in their bare minimum and simple forms. On the other hand, Hatha Yoga joins up with the psychological methods of Raja Yoga, where it begins to ascend the scales of spiritual experience. Raja Yoga insists on moral purification of the mentality, and five yamās and five niyamās are prescribed. Yamās are rules of moral control in conduct such as truth-speaking, abstinence ...
... cosmic Beings or Gods of the higher planes. It may also be said that by means of ascension on the higher planes of consciousness between the mind and the supermind one can attain to varieties of spiritual experience, but when the spiritual power and light descend into the operations of the body, life and mind for their transformation, the endeavour would succeed better and more rapidly if it is preceded... light of Truth and what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realization is rejected. The result of this movement is that the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for the psychic and spiritual experience of every kind, and the whole conscious being is delivered from the hold of tamas, rajas and satwa; the whole conscious being becomes tuned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense ...
... was, I believe, a sort of distant distorted figure of a part of Sri Aurobindo’s mind, or what they believed to be Sri Aurobindo’s mind. Looking at that figure I said, ’It is a negation of all spiritual experience.’ Till then you were not taking any part in all this; you were sitting somewhere inside. But as soon as I uttered that sentence, you came forward like this (stretching out her arms) and exclaimed... lot; you have given Light, Force...’ And immediately everything vanished. Sri Aurobindo came out and descended into my body, full of love. "I uttered my sentence, ’It is a negation of all spiritual experience,’ with great power, but you see, it required some exterior support and when you came out with that support, that hostile force could not withstand any longer. "You remember Sri Aurobindo ...
... the outer form, and insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognize that there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience. Instead of taking ...
... .There can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness, — ekdtma-pratyaya-saram , — with which this realization seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them, — and not this alone, — are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of Its... regarded as penultimates of the one Ultimate; they are steps by which the soul crosses the limits of Mind into the Absolute. ... A supreme experience which affirms and includes the truth of all spiritual experience, gives to each its own absolute, integralises all knowledge and experience in a supreme reality, might be the one step farther that is at once a largest illuminating and transforming Truth ...
... actual moment of crisis. No, the really effective procedure we have to adopt is to leave the field of dry mental-rational arguments behind and enter instead into the domain of concrete spiritual experience which will render the clear distinction between the soul and the physical body self-evident. Only so can we defy the phenomenon of physical death and meet it with a calm smile of equanimity... Cent. Ed., pp. 461-62) Let us refer in this connection to the beautiful way the Mother once brought out the essential difference between a mere intellectual presentation and a genuine spiritual experience: "As for me, I consider this the best remedy. The other is an intellectual, common-sense, rational remedy.... The other is like the prisoner finding good reasons for accepting his prison ...
... that grows from within outwards, not by the working out of a mental principle. You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is... concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and ...
... has either fallen from the status of a mystic or has deviated from the path of inner discipline. He is of the opinion that the fount of a poet's inspiration, insight and feeling is either a spiritual experience or an experience inclined towards spirituality. But the poet has not marched forward in a straight line to the original Goal; nor has he even attempted to give it a shape. After covering half... and Abbe Bremond. The difference that does exist is not about the source of poetry but about its culmination. According to Bremond, the inner inspiration of the poet or the source of it is a spiritual experience. He also adds to it that the poet descends into a lower level of nature the moment he endeavours to mould his experience into words and tries to give it a metrical shape without following the ...
... crucial experience of Yoga which became the turning point of his life. In a certain sense it was an epoch-making experience and he gave expression to it at a meeting in Uttarpara, in 1909. This spiritual experience in jail turned his mind to a problem of far greater magnitude than the winning of the freedom of the country. Subsequently, though invited several times to lead the political movement, he... here, in this King's College, there was another distinguished discoverer, Sri Aurobindo, from India who laid bare the supramental level of consciousness, opening thereby an immense realm of spiritual experience Page 25 to man'. In the words of Dr. Gokak, "his work opens up new horizons that spell new cultures upon earth". The Life Divine meets the challenge of the agnostic ...
... time we could solve ultimately and finally the problem which has baffled great philosophers. I will try to make out some points along the lines not merely of metaphysics, but along the line of spiritual experience which gave Sri Aurobindo solutions for all the problems of life which beset humanity today. It is not that there is no metaphysical justificaion for his solution. What I mean to stress is that... contemporary philosophy after that of Henry Bergson. His master-piece, The Life Divine, was highly prized by Romain Rolland. In what consists the speciality of the contribution ? Apart from his spiritual experience what has he given to the world of philosophy ? There are more than three fundamental problems on which he has thrown light, among them the explanation of the baffling problem of the origin of ...
... harmony from the vital plane. The audience helps the artists by its semi-religious attitude towards music. The average Page 87 European, who is generally not open to direct spiritual experience, is able to rise to a plane of harmony and peace, of beauty and self-forgetfulness, for the time being, in some of these concerts. In the midst of the general materialistic outlook, music to... convincing demonstration of the profound effect of the imponderable on man and things. I am convinced that music is one of the secular channels through which the mass in Europe can get a glimpse of spiritual experience. If music can convey a high spiritual or some deep psychic state the audience would surely be able to receive something of it. Indian music, compared with the European, is poor in symphony ...
... knowledge, while your surface consciousness is ignorant about it. Disciple : But to return to N's question. If one takes the standpoint of reason and wants to decide about the validity of spiritual experience he will find the experiences also differ. So how can experience be a criterion. Sri Aurobindo : Experience is not a criterion; it is a means of arriving at the Truth. Experience is... something of that infinite. All of them express some particular view, but they are all wrong when they say that their view is the whole and the entire Truth. When you want to describe a spiritual experience you are obliged to use mental terms and you can somehow manage it, so long as you deal with levels up to the Overmind. But when you enter the Supermind then it is impossible. And if you proceed ...
... alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject."² Regarding this Alipore period he wrote: "I was carrying on my Yoga during these days, learning to... silence in order to be able to hear him, for there were no loudspeakers in those days.¹ He was heard in the pin-drop silence. The Uttarpara speech is openly a description of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual experience while in jail: "I remembered then that a month or more before my arrest, a call had come to me to put aside all activity, to go into seclusion and to look into myself, so that I might enter ...
... conscious Yogas: Hatha, Raja, Jnana, Karma, Bhakti, the Yoga of the Gita, his own integral Yoga and the revolutionary world-transforming Supramental Yoga. With this unique wealth of variegated spiritual experience, it was not unnatural that Sri Aurobindo should weave into the fabric of his Yoga - described with ascending connotation as Integral Yoga, Puma Yoga or Supramental Yoga - the more essential... experience daily tell us - so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down ...
... his life, and to accept as final the limitations of human nature. He awoke in himself latent powers, faculties that lay dormant in him—powers of pure perception, intimate vision, and also of spiritual experience. He could know the motives, ideas and wishes in other men and he felt also world thought-streams running into his own mind. He could hear secret voices and the "Word that knows". He came in... brought the word of the Supreme. Its action made Aswapathy comprehend the world-design and behind the apparent working of chance he saw the unfolding of a world-idea. In the light of his spiritual experience he saw the tree of cosmos supported by the Spirit. He knew the original divine Desire that gave rise to this creation. He could then understand the wisdom that permits this long game of evolution ...
... His first answer was, 'It would be easy for you as you are a poet.'" Sri Aurobindo wanted neither Sannyasa nor Nirvana, nothing which required him to give up action and life. "I wanted spiritual experience and political action together," he said. "I had to liberate my country. I took it [yoga] up seriously when I learnt that the same Tapasya which one does to get away from the world can be turned... liberation. As a result "the whole being became Page 439 quiet and in seven days I got the Nirvanic experience...." Nirvana, said Sri Aurobindo, "in my case was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the rest of the sadhana." Lele was astonished with his student. He "said to others that he had never met anyone before who could surrender himself so absolutely ...
... It behoves us therefore to test our faith by a careful examination into the meaning of Purana & Veda and into the foundation of that truth which our intellect seeks to deny [but] our living spiritual experience continues to find in their conceptions. We must discover why it is that while our intellects accept only the truth of Vedanta, our spiritual experiences confirm equally or even more powerfully ...
... are meant to give the preliminary conditions for the great achievement of the Immortality. They are the symbols of the grand Mythus, the mythus of the Mystics in which they hid their supreme spiritual experience from the profane and, alas! effectively enough from their posterity. That they were secret symbols, images meant to reveal the truth which they protected but only to the initiated, to the knower ...
... adepts who still remained in possession of it, partly by the traditions of the great seekers of the past Yuga, Janaka, Yajnavalkya, Krishna and others, partly by their own illuminations and spiritual experience. The Chhandogya Upanishad is thus the summary history of one of the greatest & most interesting ages of human thought. Page 262 Satyakama Jabala The story of Satyakama Jabala ...
... printed in italics If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and essentially, we might answer in one word, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent ...
... came to be the sole rule of status. The son of a Brahmin is always a Brahmin in status, though he may have nothing of the typical Brahmin qualities or character, no intellectual training or spiritual experience or religious worth or knowledge, no connection whatever with the right function of his class, no Brahminhood in his work and no Brahminhood in his nature. This was an inevitable evolution ...
... at this affirmation of an all-cognitive principle superior to Mind and exceeding it in nature, scope and capacity. For the Upanishad affirms a Mind beyond mind as the result of intuition and spiritual experience and its existence is equally a necessary conclusion from the facts of the cosmic evolution. What then is this Mind beyond mind? how does it function? or by what means shall we arrive at the ...
... insisted upon with a strong emphasis, because it is ignored by foreign translators who seek to bring out the intellectual sense without feeling the life of thought vision and the ecstasy of spiritual experience which made the ancient verses appear then and still make them to those who can enter into the element in which these utterances move, a revelation not to the intellect alone, but to the soul ...
... of Manu. The work of the philosophers was to systematise and justify to the reasoning intelligence the truths of the self and man and the world already discovered by intuition, revelation and spiritual experience and embodied in the Veda and the Upanishads, and at the same time to indicate and systematise methods of discipline founded upon this knowledge by which man might effectuate the highest aim ...
... three gunas that it has to be so severely censured and put roughly aside; but its central idea is not destroyed; transfigured and uplifted, it is turned into a most important part of the true spiritual experience and of the method of liberation. The Vedantic idea of knowledge does not present the same difficulties. The Gita takes it over at once and completely and throughout the six chapters quietly ...
... whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was done to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ ...
... confusion rather than clarifying truth. Especially is this mixed functioning dangerous when men with unchastened minds and unpurified sensibilities attempt to rise into the higher domains of spiritual experience. In what regions of unsubstantial cloud and semi-brilliant fog or a murk visited by flashes which blind more than they enlighten, do they not lose themselves by that rash and premature adventure ...
... of our parts of knowledge is prepared. We see this succession in the Upanishads and the subsequent Indian philosophies. The sages of the Veda and Vedanta relied entirely upon intuition and spiritual experience. It is by an error that scholars sometimes speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishad. Wherever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or ...
... impossible. What I have written to you about these things and the attitude to be taken is the knowledge that we have and the truth of the human nature and of sadhana confirmed by our and by all spiritual experience. It is your outer being that has these reactions and not your inner nature. You have only to trust in the Mother and follow what I say and these difficulties will be worked out of the outer ...
... little to change and a new consciousness opens in the sadhak which begins to be aware more and more of the Mother's presence within, of her working in the nature and in the life or of some other spiritual experience which opens the gate towards realisation. 22 February 1937 ...
... when you emphasise minor facts and set aside or belittle the meaning of the main ones. In this case the main facts are (1) that the Mother has loved music all her life and found it a key to spiritual experience, (2) that she has given all encouragement to your music in special and to the music of others also. She has also made clear the relation of Art and Beauty with Yoga. It is therefore rather ...
... a prohibition on publication of her name and what she has written. The Conversations are for private circulation, the Prayers only for disciples and those who are actively interested in spiritual experience. This rule has been hammered into Y and others; you also must fix it in your cerebellum for the future. The tail will have to be docked for a reason regarding myself. Your reason for including ...
... You ought not to attach too much importance to impulses like the one you had about going downstairs to the puja, or think that because you do not obey the impulse you have prevented the spiritual experience of fulfilment. The spiritual fulfilment will come in its time by a steady development of the being and the nature. It does not depend on seizing upon this or that opportunity. There is another ...
... Sri Aurobindo Ashram which has less been created than grown around him as its centre. Sri Aurobindo began his practice of Yoga in 1905. At first gathering into it the essential elements of spiritual experience Page 9 that are gained by the paths of divine communion and spiritual realisation followed till now in India, he passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and harmonising ...
... many difficulties can come up, but if one perseveres a time comes when all is ready, the Mother's Force opens the consciousness fully to the Divine, then all that must develop develops within, spiritual experience comes and with it the knowledge and union with the Divine. 9 April 1937 You say after several years you have not changed your nature. I only wish the external nature were so easy to transform ...
... retirement from political activity was complete, just as was his personal retirement into solitude in 1910. But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual ...
... essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, Page 234 to serve him with one's works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga. 28 April 1949 An Experience in Kashmir Kashmir is a magnificent place, its rivers unforgettable and on one of its mountains with ...
... society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organized religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society; it could not do so because, in governing society, it had to compromise with the lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner change of the whole ...
... caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us ...
... the conditions on earth have changed, though not exactly in the way that had been hoped and expected. For example, one who has attained to a certain plane of knowledge and consciousness and spiritual experience, has come and said, "I am bringing to you liberation" or "I am bringing to you peace." Those who were around him believed, perhaps, that he was bringing it in a material way; when they found ...
... discover a symbol, deep, elaborated, willed, that most of the people know and understand; but it is an exterior and learnt knowledge—a tradition, it is not living truth coming from the depth of spiritual experience, enlightening heart and mind. Japan is essentially the country of sensations; she lives through her eyes. Beauty rules over her as an uncontested master; and all her atmosphere incites to mental ...
... Introduction Our Many Selves The Psychic Being and Transformation In spiritual experience there exists one sole Being, one sole Existence which embraces all beings and existing things in the universe, and which in spiritual realisation is experienced as the One Self of all things and creatures. But in our ordinary experience we perceive the world as i ...
... things and big things, the sacred and the profane.... "What!" say the people who profess to follow a spiritual life, "how can you make such little things, such insignificant things the object of spiritual experience?" And yet this is an experience that becomes more and more concrete and real, even materially; it's not that there are "some things" where the Lord is and "some things" where He is not. The ...
... they are completely out of their senses the whole time. And the pity of it is that people call these "spiritual experiences", and there is nobody to tell them that this has nothing to do with spiritual experience. Some time ago I received a letter from someone who told me he had taken these drugs, and he said he had had terrible visions, that the walls of his room were alive with thousands of evil ...
... be cultivated—must be acquired—not least when things go against—for when they are favourable, trust and patience are easy. Spiritual capacity means simply a natural capacity for true spiritual experience and development. It can be had on any plane, but the natural result is that one gets easily into touch with the Self and the higher planes. Fitness for Yoga Nobody is fit for the sadhana—i ...
... get organised in the Truth. Aspire for your will to be one with the Divine will, concentrate in the heart and be plastic to whatever experience comes, neither forcing nor resisting any spiritual experience. The aspiration for the supramental would be premature. What you have to aspire for is for the psychic change and the spiritual change of the whole being—which is the necessary condition ...
... with something in it at once superconscient, immanent and comprehensive of which that is only a blind index will be the moving power of a greater utterance. And until we have found, whether by spiritual experience or poetic insight, this identity and its revelations in ourselves and in things, we shall not have laid a sound and durable basis for the future creation. The essential and decisive step ...
... highest point of mental seership where the imagination tries to figure and embody in words its intuition of things, though that stands far below the vision of things that can be grasped only by spiritual experience. It is for that the poet is exalted as the real seer and prophet. There is too, helping the idea, the error of the modern or European mentality which so easily confuses the mentalised vital ...
... and to stress the distance at which the English temperament stands from the Indian temperament. But Tagore's Gitanjali is most un-English, yet it overcame this obstacle. For the poetry of spiritual experience, even if it has true poetic value, the difficulty might lie in the remoteness of the subject. But nowadays this difficulty is lessening with the increasing interest in the spiritual and the ...
... done or not done. The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sādhanā —unless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the substance of the Gita's teaching. The cessation of desire of the fruit, of the attachment to the work itself, the growth of equality to all beings, to all happenings, to good repute ...
... into the one real self or Brahman; it is the idea and experience of individuality that so disappears and ceases,—we may say a false light that is extinguished ( nirvāṇa ) in the true Light. In spiritual experience it is sometimes the loss of all sense of individuality in a boundless cosmic consciousness; what was the individual remains only as a centre or a channel for the flow of a cosmic consciousness ...
... sometimes been created by the ardour of a moment. That the combination must happen some day is a certainty, but none can tell how many attempts will have to be made and how many sediments of spiritual experience will have to be accumulated in the subconscient mentality of the communal human being before the soil is ready. For the chances of success are always less powerful in a difficult upward effort ...
... islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds. Page 18 × Ananda, in the language of Indian spiritual experience, is the essential delight which the Infinite feels in itself and in its creation. By the infinite Self's Ananda all exists, for the Self's Ananda all was made. ...
... large store of traditional significances and explanations. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to us their method of spiritual experience and intuition. European scholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research, yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing the materials available and sure eventually to ...
... let him go to the devil where he belongs, his limitations are no reason for spoiling a perfect thing. With "ecstatic" these two lines are authentic, inspired, inevitable—suggestive of a deep spiritual experience,—with "mysterious" they become falsely romantic and commonplace, with nothing true or genuine behind the pretentiousness of the words. 21 August 1931 O Grace that flowest from the Master's ...
... instances of the difference, I may give you two from the opposite poles of experience, one from the most external phenomena showing how the inward opens to the awareness of universal forces, one of spiritual experience indicating how the inward opens to the Divine. Take illness. If we live only in the outward physical consciousness, we do not usually know that we are going to be ill until the symptoms of the ...
... plasticity is the danger of a systematic intellectual formulation; one must look into the thing itself and not get tied up in the idea. Nothing of all this can be really grasped except by the actual spiritual experience. Page 73 × In Bengal when one is about to kill a small animal, people often protest saying, "Don't ...
... of the Powers of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we have to take it as it is and find out—if we reject the way out of the old sages—the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all a wide terrain of equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting into it that we can have the eye that sees and Page 464 hope to gain ...
... things does not belong to the surface, it is in the depths—or on the heights, at any rate, in the inner being behind the veil of the frontal consciousness. The actual occasional cause of the spiritual experience,—the match that sets the fire, so to say,—may be something very slight and looking accidental on the surface, a chance word or happening or something else quite fortuitous in its appearance ...
... anything, without any good or bad movement, and, finally, tamasic or inert emptiness. The first two conditions can be brought about by an action of the Force, and the first is a very good basis for spiritual experience and progress; the second also is not unfavourable and is often a needed stage, the consciousness becoming empty in order that it may be filled from within or from above with the true things ...
... is too, usually or very often, a massive immobility of the body which corresponds to the silence that comes on the mind when it is released from itself—the Silence that is the foundation of spiritual experience. What you have felt (the former experiences were probably preparatory touches) is indeed the beginning of this foundation—a consciousness free, wide, empty at will, able to rise into the su ...
... means too much to give to it. I say nothing else since you say that words of encouragement from me can have no value for you. But this at least is a thing that is true and that others whose spiritual experience and greatness cannot be disputed would tell you. If you have the love for me you speak of—I will say nothing of mine for you, since you do not seem to believe much in it—you will listen to ...
... movements from outside. It is the light from within that you have to make room for; the light of the outer mind is quite insufficient for the discovery of the inner values or to judge the truth of spiritual experience. Detaching Oneself from Difficulties Not to be touched or disturbed by the difficulties, to feel separate from them is the first step towards freedom. If you cannot do anything ...
... They come very commonly when the inner or subtle consciousness is awake. The hearing of the bells has always been considered a sign or a premonition of the opening of the inner being to spiritual experience. It [ the sound of the conch ] is one of the many symbol sounds one hears in Yoga. The conch shell is the sound of victory. Page 112 Both of these [ the sound of OM and ...
... suggestion of outer forces on the vital plane to see what kind of response, if any, your consciousness would make. These are dreams of the vital plane in which the vital plane takes up the spiritual experience and tries to turn it into forms of ego with a suggestion afterwards of loss of power and of consciousness and a fall. You should attach no importance to these dreams except as an indication ...
... than one of the three at work. First, some sexual aberration—I am not speaking of mere sexuality which can be very strong in the nature without leading to collapse—or an attempt to sexualise spiritual experience on an animal or gross material basis; second, an exaggerated ambition, pride or vanity trying to seize on spiritual force or experience and turn it to one's own glorification—ending in megalomania; ...
... neither good sense nor good poetry. The European is not at fault; he translates according to his knowledge. But the Hindu who knows the depth & sublimity of the Upanishads, who has in his spiritual experience tested, realised & established Vedantic truth by a sure & unfailing experience as surely as the scientist has tested & established his laws of gravitation & the indestructibility of matter,—the ...
... reason that witnesses and seeks to understand but considers it futile to judge Page 630 the activities of the cosmic Energy. There is too a suprarational truth formulating itself in spiritual experience which can observe the play of universal possibility, accept all impartially as the true and natural features and consequences of a world of ignorance and inconscience or admit all with calm ...
... texts: My philosophy was formed first by study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy. . . . The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge ...
... and perceive the origin and difference of the two distinct orders, knowledge by identity and separative knowledge. In the supreme timeless Existence, as far as we know it by reflection in spiritual experience, existence and consciousness are one. We are accustomed to identify consciousness with certain operations of mentality and sense and, where these are absent or quiescent, we speak of that state ...
... intuitive discernment, surpassing our less illumined or less powerful normal mind-action, are there and their origin is unmistakable. Finally, there is the vast and multitudinous field of mystic and spiritual experience, and here the gates already lie wide open to the possibility of extending our consciousness beyond its present limits,—unless, indeed, by an obscurantism that refuses to inquire or an attachment ...
... is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence—and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal—of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth—a ...
... activity. It may be above it in detachment and aloofness, udāsīna , seated above and indifferent, or attracted by and lost in the absorbing peace or bliss of its undifferentiated, its concentrated spiritual experience of itself; we must then transcend by a complete renunciation of Nature and cosmic existence, not conquer by a divine and sovereign possession. But the Spirit, the Divine is not only above Nature; ...
... connected with Sri Aurobindo's work has to be properly understood - in the very sense in which you speak of "man" "since in our nature we are already what we should become". Yes, in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual experience not only man in his inner being but also apparently brute matter holds the supramental light and love and bliss secret within. That is why evolution follows as a natural consequence of involution ...
... etc., are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which ...
... supreme experience with which it deals. He says: "I meant to contrast the veiled utterance of what is usually called mystic poetry with the luminous and assured clarity of the fully expressed spiritual experience. I did not mean to contrast it with the mental clarity which is aimed at usually by poetry in which the intelligence or thinking mind is consulted at every step. The concreteness of intellectually ...
... it provides a hint that the cry of shock or protest is irrational. The irrationality resides in that the fact of Brahman being all and all being Brahman is considered not only without spiritual experience but also without another side of the divine reality. Brahman has projected in His infinity a negation of the essentially divine and an emergence of divine values from the Inconscient. According ...
... has also lower ones that accommodate things like untouchability is to be victimised by a hysteria of humanism. Humanism is a very worthy sentiment and creed, yet it cannot be balanced against spiritual experience, against God-realisation, against concrete communion with the Eternal. Hinduism stands or Page 79 falls primarily and essentially by its ability to produce embodiments of ...
... years before their own time. And, if we wish to realise the truth about the Purānic "fantasy", we may listen to Sri Aurobindo 1 who tells us that an immense and complex body of psycho-spiritual experience, supported by visual images, is embedded in the Purānas, though more loosely than in the Tantras and cast out in a less strenuous sequence. Sri Aurobindo goes On to say: "This method is after ...
... impersonal but personal, not only Purusha but Prakriti, not only Being but Shakti; He is all. For the proof of its position Religion appeals to something higher than logic or the senses, to spiritual experience and the direct knowledge drawn from the secret discipline it has developed in most parts of the world. Force Universal or Individual It is not clear whether our contemporary recognises ...
... complete knowledge consists of three operations, first, objective Upalabdhi or experience, secondly, intellectual statement of your understanding of the thing, thirdly, subjective Upalabdhi or spiritual experience. The scientist begins from the bottom and climbs if he can, to the top. The Yogin begins from the top and descends for perfect proof to the bottom. You are not scientists, you are sadhaks. Therefore ...
... fixed for us by Shastra and custom, every detail of our thought by Scripture and its commentators,—but much oftener by the commentators than by Scripture. Only in one field, that of individual spiritual experience, have we cherished the ancient freedom and originality out of which our past greatness sprang; it is from some new movement in this inexhaustible source that every fresh impulse and rejuvenated ...
... reflective experience and calls vaguely spirit or spiritual being. Spirit is found to have three tones of its being. Triune, it makes each successively a power of its energy, a status of spiritual experience and form of its action. Triune, they are inseparable, but one or other can be so stressed as to appear a leading principle. But we have to note three essential facts about spirit:— Spirit ...
... glimpse of the Inconscient; it knows the universe as an organised freak that has emerged from the material Inconscience and will go back to its source. Religion and Philosophy rise on the wings of spiritual experience or in a balloon of metaphysical logic into some stratosphere of superconscient Reality, they seem to discover a God or Self or Spirit or Absolute and try to map it with the intellect or to turn ...
... to last in identity and not lose ourselves in identity with the supreme Existence. 135 It is possible for the reason, the thinker in us to rest and cease satisfied in this sole spiritual experience and to discard all others on the ground that they are in the end illusory or of a minor phenomenal significance. The logical mind drives naturally towards a pursuit of the abstract, towards ...
... Demiurgus, a great Artificer of things struggling amongst forces over which He has not entire Page 60 control. Such a conception is unphilosophical and contrary to the universal spiritual experience of mankind. The problem remains why, if He is God, All-Love, sarvamaṅgalam , He creates evil or, if He does not create it, permits it. To our mind there is no escaping from the belief that ...
... union with Superconscience or bliss in heavens beyond or any personal or impersonal relation with the Divine, since these may well be heights of the spiritual unfolding. Its truth will depend on spiritual experience and effectuation; but chiefly on this momentous issue, whether there is anything in the soul-powers of man which promises a greater term of being than his present mentality and whether that ...
... reach the highest and widest are the third and fourth of the middle stanza. Lines i, 7, 8, 9, come from very high and express a vision the full significance of which can only be realised by spiritual experience. Line 1— Illumined Mind taken upwards by a wide intuitive inspiration. Lines 7,8—I am inclined to ascribe them at their source of vision to an intermediate plane which is not Overmind itself ...
... same category—though, as I say, the mental strain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative. "Its vision brings out a truth of spiritual experience with sufficient force and exactness, though not with the deeper intimacy that sometimes comes in from above. It has a perfection of its own which is considerable." * Page 85 ...
... to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. The time of religions is over. We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity. ( About an article entitled "Religion in the New Age" ) I have read the article—it is all right. I have made only one change—in the last page, where you write ...
... pure or complete. Cleopatra's Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven fuses the intensity of a spiritual experience with a tremendous thrill of the life-force, but, instead of raising the latter to a significance beyond itself, the infinitude of the Spirit has become a symbol and suggestion of the sheer acme ...
... in it belongs mainly to the world of the spirit and the Page 365 elements of the language-field are those that are most congenial to the expression of the spiritual experience, such as symbol and rhythm. The spiritual poet also uses, like other poets, the linguistic devices of alliteration, metaphor, repetition, metrical measure, etc. In the fusion with ...
... 175) While to the devout, the merit of this approach that relies on feeling cannot be denied, even the votaries will admit that for those without an equal access to heightened spiritual experience and realisation, such terms and standards, even with the help of the Arnoldian "touchstone" method, will remain finally abstract and imprecise notions. They will eventually make a plea ...
... conveyed through Nirodbaran after the latter read Tehmi’s poems to him: “The poems are remarkable, especially the later ones. They have power of revelatory image and phrase and of expressing spiritual experience. Also, her later poems are very remarkably built, the thought is worked out in a perfect beginning, middle and end in a way in which is not very common. Many poems contain a beautiful lyrical ...
... are conscious of, by which we are affected, that which we express." That would make the two birds of Amal Kiran a product of his humanness which is certainly in contradiction with the spiritual experience, of their being independent of the observer or perceiver. They are pre-existent and are an aspect of the Infinite and with them we can come in contact in several ways. This living truth ...
... the great contributions made to spirituality by Buddha and Shankara. Similarly, although he does not favour asceticism, he pays high tribute to asceticism and recognise the value of the spiritual experience supporting it. 4 Page 258 Among numerous such instances in his writings, I would like to refer here particularly to one which occurs in his brief essay on ...
... do hint a difference which can in general be felt to justify their being contraposed and there is no bad taste in speaking of the Inconscient being teased or Ignorance being wakened, since to spiritual experience they are concrete realities. Absolutely dry and abstract the line is not; and yet in its suggestive pregnancy I miss the full poetic turn that everywhere else carries Sri Aurobindo triumphantly ...
... the language most subtly, intensely, profoundly developed and since India is still the 10. Translated by Prema Nandakumar. Page 177 country with the greatest spiritual experience, the spiritual fulfilment of English speech along the inward lines indicated or initiated by many English poets themselves will first come - if it already hasn't - through Indians and not Englishmen ...
... have been deployed effectively to provide poetic and spiritual connotations for plumbing the depths of this epic. Gems and precious metals become almost a medium for portraying the areas of spiritual experience beyond our ken. They are used as poetic embellishments, as strikingly new images where sound, sight and sense mingle and as parameters of truth, light and beauty. The word, the inspiration and ...
... 14. Sri Aurobindo’s Vision Hitler and his God The Human Cycle Sri Aurobindo’s writings are not only based on a severely tested spiritual experience but also on a vast erudition. He was thoroughly familiar with the tradition and cultures of the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their ...
... medieval Western thought, that the real soul, the ‘psyche’ has been confused with the mind. The reason of this confusion seems to have been that the Greeks, despite their Mysteries, lacked the spiritual experience of the East. Descartes’ basic and very influential worldview was essentially that of his Catholic educators, the Jesuits. Their official teaching was a dualism of body and soul, the burdensome ...
... feature of this yoga was the underlying principle of everything: UNITY. All is one, all is one single Being, ‘don’t forget it.’ ‘Being’, to us, is one of the most abstract words, but in the spiritual experience there are no abstractions. For abstraction is a fictitious projection of the impotently grasping mental consciousness. Unity is the basis; Unity is the stuff of experience; Unity is the aim ...
... was very human, but human in divine proportions, you see, human without weaknesses and without shadows. … Yes, perhaps the overman.” 15 The Mother has always warned that, if one has a spiritual experience, one should let it work itself out, without limiting and thereby fixing it through a mental formulation or interpretation. This is one of many examples how she proceeded herself, evoking the ...
... "This is the truth. Such and such is its nature". Clear-cut statements like these cannot be made by anyone. The supreme Truth cannot be known by the sense-organs. It can only be known as a high spiritual experience. VII. Like an artist who gives shape to his piece of work, from deep layers of thought, we give a form to Truth, with what we have seen, heard, experienced, read and talked about as the ...
... No wonder it find it so hard to see things clearly in all this self created blur. Or perhaps, as I some-times infer from my recalcitrance to the higher Light, I have no native capacity for spiritual experience, no congenital power of vision which can glimpse Grace even in this world of awful wars and petty preoccupations." She shook her head. "But you have the vision," she said. "And you ...
... may appear to be purely academic, but I would be glad if you can help to clarify my mind? “) Page 187 The answer to the question depends on what value one attaches to spiritual experience and to mystic and occult experience, that is to say, to the data of other planes of consciousness than the physical, as also on the nature of the relations between the cosmic consciousness ...
... wanting. And yet where and how else could one translate in daily life one's ideal of one-pointed sadhana (self-discipline), so indispensable to one who is. athirst for the all-transfiguring spiritual experience? The world, as I saw it, if not actually hostile, was certainly indifferent to all spiritual endeavour which could only attain fruition after an arduous effort at self-purification under the ...
... the Yogic way of observing ourselves and change its modus operandi. "I find it difficult", he wrote to me, "to take Jung and the psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinize spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch lights—though perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. No doubt, they ...
... is the Self." (Life Divine—Reality omnipresent). It is the mind in ignorance that makes division in the indivisible and sets up rigid dogmas like if it is One, it cannot be Many. But spiritual experience shows that both are true. There is nothing incompatible in the One becoming Many. At the core of everything is the One-the multiplicity, diversity are on the surface of Page 462 ...
... are aware of the Universe of Matter, Life and Mind which is cognisable by our senses and reason. The immaterial or the Spiritual is known to us only indirectly by faith or authority. All our spiritual experience has owed the reality of the Spirit or Atman as the One, Infinite, Eternal and Unchanging. We have to accept this discovery of the Rishis, Sages, Saints, Seers, Mystics, Yogis, Prophets and Avatars ...
... whether a virus can be described as living and, indeed, as to what we mean by living." (Prof. Charles Singer) In fact, as the faint glimmerings of recent scientific research suggest and spiritual experience and vision certify, "Life reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement of being which are released into ...
... etc. are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought, but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot ...
... destroyed in an instant – and she was immensely grateful for it. She took great care not to spoil the new poise, which never left her again. As usually happens at the time of a decisive new spiritual experience, Mirra felt as if all the preceding work meant nothing. ‘It seems to me that I am being born into a new life,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘and that all the methods, all the habits of the past can ...
... political workers. But he was soon called back by the Maharaja who wished that he should accompany him on his tour to Kashmir as his personal secretary. In Kashmir, Sri Aurobindo had his third spiritual experience of decisive character, as unexpected and unbidden as the first two, but of a capital importance from a certain standpoint. He says about it: "There was a realisation of the vacant Infinite ...
... She was highly introspective, clear-minded and firm in will and conscious of a mission in life. 3) At 13 years of age She had, for almost a whole year, repeated every day, a most wonderful spiritual experience—an experience of a high spiritual status rendering help to men, women and children, bringing to them through spiritual contact hope, joy, health and general well-being. 4) During the early ...
... down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth. The time of religions is over. We have entered the age of Universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity. The Mother, Words of the Mother - III: Religion The quarrels of religious sects are like the disputing of pots, which shall be alone allowed to hold the ...
... small group of Sadhaks soon after the first one-volume edition of Savitri had been published in 1954 by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education: Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally—but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope to explain ...
... endless Peace, shadowless Light, perfect Harmony, Certitude, Rest and Supreme Blessedness." (5 February 1913) What does "Certitude" mean, in the spiritual sense? Faith confirmed by the spiritual experience of what one has faith in. 31 July 1934 "All who seek Thee with ardour should understand that Thou art there whenever there is need of Thee; and if they could have the supreme faith ...
... I looked at it, the more it gave that impression and when I was asked its significance, I said, 'Unostentatious Certitude.' It's what one might call a superlative good-taste in the realm of spiritual experience: something with greater content than it expresses. ( Following the letter Satprem had written to Mother the previous day regarding the book on Sri Aurobindo: ) I had a clear vision ...
... Nevertheless, a reply which is formulated mentally, however complete it may be, can never be the reply , the one which silences every doubt and quietens the mind. Certitude can only come with spiritual experience, and the most beautiful philosophical works can never equal or replace a few minutes of Knowledge that is lived. You say: "Should a man of average development, who is no longer tormented ...
... the passage marked in the magazine. One thing is sure—these experiences are not spiritual and to give them Page 256 that name is a proof of complete ignorance of what is really a spiritual experience. The effect of the drug must be either an erratic wandering in the vital or the waking up of some subconscient notation gone asleep in the subconscient part of the being. No time to say ...
... 1. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, 1972 Ed., pp. 35-36. 2. Ibid., pp. 39-40. Page 153 of Brahman". Without abrogating the ultimacy of the unity it is possible in spiritual experience to find this unity endlessly creative without losing its unitary essence. If you will excuse the pun, I may say that in the One "without a second" not only many a second but also many a minute ...
... in the original poem..." It is this "new form" that has become for us a guide-book in times of indecision. What is even more important is that it is a magnet to draw for us further spiritual experience. What could be more vivifying to an urge to see a subtle mystical presence in Nature at the break of dawn than the lines? - All grew a consecration and a rite. Air was a vibrant link ...
... clung to the religion prevalent among the Arabs in that period? We have to be plastic to new messages. Then there is another point. Sri Aurobindo is not only one more teacher with direct spiritual experience: he is also quite evidently a master of the widest spirituality compassed so far on earth. I am a Zoroastrian by birth, a member of the Parsi community. Compared to what Sri Aurobindo discloses ...
... time. Then I only have to get up, go find the card, write, and it's all over. People will tell me (precisely those who lead a "spiritual life"), "What! You make such a trifle the object of a spiritual experience!" And it's the same with ALL small things: what object to be used, what perfume to put on, what bath salts, all manner of "futile," "frivolous," "unimportant" things—"How shocking!" I don't ...
... Savitri is complete... I am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration, but in so large a plan covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment." Yes, the new Savitri is not only a Legend and a Symbol ...
... uniform law of action: each one's svadharma, every sadhak's true mould of being and line of nature, were sought to be evoked. A set of rituals was never prescribed: a wide scope of individual spiritual experience was accepted and allowed. The Mother granted the utmost freedom possible for spontaneous development. All the more she offered it to the youngsters whom she took into her fostering ...
... attuned to a force belonging to the human rather than the Superhuman: the sight and the movement are of the inspired imagination, they have not the profound ease and colossal freedom of a direct spiritual experience. More inward, more authentically swept with the true spiritual suggestion and resonance is the poetic soul of those two lines about mystical inspiration, by the Indian poet Harindranath Cha ...
... Mother was drawing down the beings of the Gods into people, and the sadhaks felt great exaltation and had remarkable experiences. With what Purushottam did, that sadhak had an unforgettable spiritual experience. The Mother confirmed its genuineness and indicated the extraordinary meaning of what had happened to him. Hers had been the general guiding force, even if the particular form given to it may ...
... Supramental Truth; this Truth is to be found somewhere high up. (laughter) They had to haul him up. You see, these voices are dangerous and one has to be vigilant. Also I might say that even spiritual experience can be quite dangerous. One instance comes to my mind, of a friend who began to have extraordinary experiences. He wrote to Sri Aurobindo about them: he felt Light Page 27 ...
... hope of being more and more Aurobindonian. * Soon after the one-volume edition was out, the Mother said to our small group upstairs: "Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally - but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope to ...
... can in general Page 44 be felt to justify their being contraposed and there is no bad taste in speaking of the Inconscient being teased or Ignorance being wakened, since to spiritual experience they are concrete realities. Absolutely dry and abstract the line is not; and yet in its suggestive pregnancy I miss the full poetic turn that everywhere else carries Sri Aurobindo triumphantly ...
... change of its life which will even lead to a new life of the race". While enunciating this aim in an editorial in his periodical's fourth year he takes us into his confidence as follows: "The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an at tempt could be based, were already present to us, otherwise we ¹. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, ...
... unconscious strivings of the id. In this regard, Sri Aurobindo made the following remarks: "I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights. ... They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below. ... The s ...
... experience as it does in the Gita." 56 He conceived Savitri as "a sort of poetic philosophy of Spirit and Life...covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience." 57 It is not that Vyasa is constantly busy with ideas. His poetry is philosophical because, even when he is narrating or describing, his attitude is philosophical. He sees everything ...
... the other answering to impressions inherited from an antiquity which by its far-awayness has grown one with the projections of a mythic imagination and with the mysterious splendours of inner spiritual experience. What Sri Aurobindo has called "memories of the Arctic home" belong to the second shade crossed here and there by superimposed tinges from the first, as when the Vedic Dawn with its backdrop ...
... small group of sadhaks, soon after the first one-volume edition of Savitri was published in 1954 by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education: Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally—but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope to explain ...
... falls into the state of Ignorance and Night. Gethsemane is the Garden across the Olive Hills in which Jesus undergoes intense agony not long before the great sacrifice. The agony is a spiritual experience with no resemblance whatsoever to human agony which is essentially egoistic. It is there that his disciples deny him and Judas betrays. Gethsemane stands for inexplicable agony, denial and ...
... mathematics exists as such somewhere in an ideal, Platonic space or world, or whether it is a product of the human mind. In the following lines Sri Aurobindo provides the answer from his spiritual experience: The Unseen grew visible to student eyes, Explained was the immense Inconscient's scheme, Audacious lines were traced upon the Void; The Infinite was reduced to square ...
... necessary deduction from the great Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita, and was always combated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and from spiritual experience very different conclusions. At the present time, in spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara's philosophy, the most vital movements of Indian thought and religion are moving again towards ...
... the only appropriate words to express correctly what Sri Aurobindo is and the experience he has given us, we would become dogmatic and be on the point of founding a religion. He who has a spiritual experience and a faith formulates it in the most appropriate words for himself. But if he is convinced that this expression is the only correct and true one for this experience and faith, he becomes ...
... which will further strengthen his resolve and bring to him more of tranquil happiness. In such a lonely place the practice of Yoga will become spontaneous and in its beautiful surroundings the spiritual experience will flow unimpeded. Even an agnostic or a heretic or a nonbeliever, should he chance to go by this place, would get attracted towards it and engage himself in askesis. While there, in that ...
... to the Shankarite Theory of Maya as an illusory power and not as a conceptively creative force in world-manifestation. Not that this interpretation is altogether indefensible. Nor is such a spiritual experience entirely invalid. The first few shlokas of this chapter of the Gita can very easily lend themselves to such a possible point of view or explanation of this cosmic tree of existence. The ...
... correspondence, it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose—there are a large number of sadhaks whom it has helped to awake from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a flood of realisations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness ...
... society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organized religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society. What is needed is not religion so conceived, but a total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature. The conclusion that has therefore ...
... conservation of forms; this method was quite different from the method followed by the Rishis of the Upanishads, who sought to recover the knowledge contained in the Veda by means of mediation and spiritual experience. Between the Brahamanas and the Upanishads there is a vast literature of Aryanakas. The main subject dealt with in the Aryanakas is the esoteric meaning of sacrifices, their rituals as also ...
... system of communication, and they swept through the highest minds of the nation and fertilised the soil of Indian 'culture for a constant and ever-increasing growth of spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. And even when this turn was still evident, chiefly among the Kshatriyas and Brahmins, we find too among those who attained to the knowledge men like Janashruti, the wealthy shudra or Satyakama ...
... . He may hear the categorical imperative, practise the austerities of morals, and knock at the doors of churches, temples and mosques. He may endeavour to set his feet on the paths of spiritual experience. He may imitate or live with Agni, Indra, Shiva, Krishna and Christ, sit at the feet of Agastya, Yajnavalkya, Aruni and Buddha, laugh with the sanyasin at the snaring net of Maya and meditate ...
... large store of traditional significances and explanations. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to us their methods of spiritual experience and intuition. European scholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research, yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing the materials available and sure eventually to ...
... even a development of novel Page 82 idea forms, which sprouted from the seed of the original thinking. In the Puranas we find a farther widening and fathoming of psychic and spiritual experience although ,it was less lofty than the Vedic experience. The Vedic gods rapidly lost their deep original significance; they even came to be overshadowed by the great Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva; ...
... or ceremonies and of any acts specifically prescribed by any particular religion. Furthermore, both of them are independent of any authority except that of one's own free judgement and direct spiritual experience. f.It is also useful to distinguish religion from what in India is called "dharma". Dharma is not any religious creed or dogma nor system of Page 625 rituals, but a deeper ...
... life and works in the world. The idea that the world and its activities must be renounced was a later development, when India made an Page 443 experiment of sounding each line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at existence, so as to see what Truth or power it could give. That was the part of the heroic adventure of the Indian spirituality ...
... of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence. . . . The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it finished saying all that it had to say on the subject.'15 It was again in the Alipore jail that Sri Aurobindo received the messages from Sri Krishna which ...
... may be admitted that all reality, all experience must, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience. In fact, yoga affirms that all human beings can have a spiritual experience and follow it out and verify it in themselves. But just as not every untrained mind can follow the mathematics of relativity or other difficult truths or the physical world such as those of ...
... ancient seers also made a distinction between Yoga and philosophy. Philosophy was restricted to mean intellectual reasoning about the ultimate source of things or intellectual transcription of spiritual experience. It was recognized that Yoga transcended intellectual methods of thought and attempted to revolutionize the ego-bound operations of thinking, feeling and action so as to arrive at a new and ...
... experience the reality which is the object of all knowledge. And it is this burning fire that breaks the limitations of the human mind and leads the seeker into higher domains of psychic and spiritual experience. A good pupil does not refuse to transgress the normal limitations of consciousness, but has the requisite courage to take the staff in his hands and set out on a new journey. For a good pupil ...
... rituals and ceremonies and of any acts specifically prescribed by any particular religion. And both of them are independent of any authority except that of one's own free judgement and direct spiritual experience. It is also useful to distinguish religion from what in India is called "dharma". Dharma is not any religious creed or dogma and system of rituals but a deeper law of the harmonious and ...
... "Strength has a value for spiritual realisation, but to say that it can be done by strength only and by no other means is a violent exaggeration. Grace is not an invention, it is a fact of spiritual experience.... Strength, if it is spiritual, is a power for spiritul realisation; a greater power is sincerity; the greatest power of all is Grace." (Letters on Yoga, p. 611) We have at last arrived ...
... voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence.... The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it finished saying all that it had to say on the subject.³ It was again in the Alipore jail that Sri Aurobindo received the messages from Sri Krishna which opened ...
... " (SABCL, Vol. 17, pp. 192, 193) The basic assumptions guiding the new education of the future,—and those are not mere intellectually cogitated assumptions but wise insights bom of spiritual experience, — are, in an adaptation of the language of Sri Aurobindo: (1)All life, even the vital and material life, is indeed a manifestation of the universal Power in the individual but veiled ...
... point is that it is untrue to say that one must have a decisive or concrete experience before one can have love for the Divine. It is contrary to the facts and the quite ordinary facts of the spiritual experience. It is only the lion-hearts that can go on without any experience. The ordinary Bhakta is not a lion-heart. The lion-hearts get experiences comparatively soon, but the ordinary Bhakta ...
... things and have nothing much to do with the practice of Yoga. Why should you expect the theory of logic to have anything to do with Yoga - it is concerned with mental reasoning, not with spiritual experience. Cooking also has nothing to do with Yoga; you can't cut up Brahman and the Purusha and surrender and put them into the dishes either as a vegetable or a sauce. All the same, cooking is a part ...
... to the supra-mental level of the Vijnana, to give it a complete perfection. The defect of the old yoga was that, knowing the mind and reason and knowing the Spirit, it remained satisfied with spiritual experience in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the fragmentary; it cannot completely seize the infinite, the undivided. The mind's way to seize it is through the trance of samadhi, the liberation ...
... which gives him life, energy, power dynamism, desires, emotions or feelings, ambitions, etc. Page 23 quarrels are necessary. I was saying, "You're not giving me any touch of spiritual experience; you're sitting tight over all the treasures you have gained and you're holding them back like a miser. How can a man walk on the path without any encouragement ? I admit you have given me some ...
... It seems as if spiritual poems can't do without them. Excuse me, they can. ন তত্র ভাতি চন্দ্রতারকাং । 200 May 14, 1938 You say "ন তত্র ভাতি চন্দ্রতারকাং", that may be a spiritual experience, but to express it in poetry is rather difficult. Harin has sun and moon in plenty. Amal has "stars" coming in almost every one of his poems, said his friend Saranagata. That was Amal's ...
... forward to rejoining the work as soon as possible. I learnt that any work done with the right attitude creates interest and brings joy. Apart from this, I cannot claim to have had any positive spiritual experience as a timber-supervisor, except one. It happened as far as I can remember after an interview with the Mother. She asked me how my aspiration was formulated. I could not understand what she meant ...
... other souls around me. It seems to me that Pondicherry is the place appointed by those who are Beyond.' But this did not mean, as it was then supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual ...
... letters we receive from you are full of power? Yes, power is put into them. What do you express through your poetry? I am expressing spiritual truth or spiritual experience. It ought to be possible to read with the inner consciousness looking on and, as it were, seeing the act of reading. In the condition of absolute inner silence I was making speeches ...
... g the holy hush and secrecy and inviolable loneliness of the ultimate home of Savitri's secret soul, and only such imagery can communicate so ineffable a Page 350 spiritual experience. 'Mystic cavern, 'occult depth', 'God's refuge': either they are wholly opaque, or they are 'open sesames', 'charmed magic casements' opening on the threshold of Eternity. Three more similes ...
... aware of inequalities of level in the still widening expanse of the poem. "In so large a plan", he wrote in 1946, "covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment." 120 Anyhow, by October or November 1950, the poem in its present ...
... Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. 2 Blake had this wonderful gift of transmuting the baser metal of mundane experience into the gold of a deep mystic and spiritual experience: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! 0 clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire ! 3 An allegorical structure has been ...
... all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and constructed by the conscious intelligence. They form part of a dramatization (to use a term of the Freudian psychology of dreams), a p ...
... logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness. This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. Page 13 But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came in the end to be looked upon ...
... seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness. This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. 1 The Dhammapada, I. 1 Page 17 But in this view, the world or creation or Nature ...
... level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law—dharma—of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual ...
... dedicated outwardly to a public cause. About his own retirement he writes: "But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he (Sri Aurobindo) had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain I'" a complete spiritual ...
... straight into the tenuous spaces of spiritual metaphysics. We have one more example of how a modern physicist is metamorphosed into a mystic. What Dirac says is tantamount to the very well-known spiritual experience that the world as it appears to us is a vesture or symbol of an inner order of reality out of which it has been broadcast-sah paryag ā t-and the true causes of things are not on the surface ...
... logic, so long as it is dominated by the senses, by the external impressions from things and by its analytic or exclusively separative method of procedure, is a denial of Intuition and a bar to spiritual experience. But Reason can be purified, relieved of its dross, illumined (sam-buddha) – sublimated and uplifted – then it comes to its own, becomes what it really is and should be – a frame to give body ...
... again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law – dharma – of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual ...
... seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness. This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. ¹ The Dhammapada , I. 1 Page 9 But in this view, the world or creation or Nature ...
... again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned' according to the central character, the law - dharma – of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of grow and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. 1 It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual ...
... Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.² Blake had this wonderful gift of transmuting the baser metal of mundane experience into the gold of a deep mystic and spiritual experience: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! 0 clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!³ An allegorical structure has ...
... PURANI: It seems Mahadev Desai has asked for a copy of The life Divine . NIRODBARAN: For Gandhi? PURANI: No, for himself. He doesn't think that in the strict sense Gandhi has any spiritual experience or knowledge. Desai has his own Guru. SRI AUROBINDO: One won't get anything spiritual unless one recognises that one's ideas are only ideas. EVENING PURANI: Nolini had a strange experience ...
... hence it will take a long. time. SRI AUROBINDO: Not necessarily. Obviously if one has to wait for spiritual realisation, especially the highest or supramental realisation, it will take time. Spiritual experience is enough for the purpose and that is not difficult to have. I told Motilal, "Spirituality must be the basis; otherwise your success will be your failure." There were religious communes of ...
... PURANI: He is a moralist. SRI AUROBINDO: He has said, as I have done, that there is no solution to the problem of the world except by spirituality and the spiritual way. SATYENDRA: Can spiritual experience solve the problem? SRI AUROBINDO: It is the basis. What people try to make out of Huxley and Gerald Heard is that theirs is a confession of defeat and that they on their part want to escape ...
... example than that fiction is becoming yogic from Huxley's. NIRODBARAN: The point about Huxley seems as follows: Y told Z that Huxley had undergone a great change, becoming a Yogi and having spiritual experience. Z denied it, saying, "What is there of Yoga here? It is all mental."; Then Y spoke of Huxley's experience of peace as described in Eyeless in Gaza. This again was contradicted by Z. Y asked ...
... experience, as long as it lasts, do not try to understand what it means; if you do that, it vanishes, or you deform and disfigure it, taking away all its purity. In the same way also if you want a spiritual experience to enter into you, you must have a brain absolutely quiet and immobile, like a mirror which not only reflects but absorbs, allows the ray to enter and penetrate deep within so that out of the ...
... that would be a real gain neither to the world nor to us. There is a question whether she may prosper more harmlessly in the outward life yet lose altogether her richly massed and firmly held spiritual experience and knowledge. It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards ...
... in one of his letters he admirably twits the psycho-analyst's complacent pretentions: I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysis at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights, - yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology ...
... images of vividly perceived facets of the truth. Sri Aurobindo himself has remarked that "the mental intuitions of the metaphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short of a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flashes, shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light". 1 But even these - the flashes and the reflections - the formulations and the recollections - are of considerable ...
... but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. 34 The Mother too had the spiritual experience on which "The Symbol Dawn" is structured. As she speaks drawing upon the vast reserves of her spiritual knowledge, passage after passage sheds its obscurity and ambiguity, and the native meaning ...
... and interpretation both of the psychic and the physical existence." The age of the Rishis. "The stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost, but rather always enriched it with fresh spiritual experience and discovery at each step of the national life. Even in her hour of decline it was the one thing she could never lose. "The second long epoch of India's greatness was an age of the intellect ...
... truly, with the feeling that ALL one has lived, all one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion—that's what I was living yesterday evening.... It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual ...
... was the further difficulty that, although Sri Aurobindo was apparently answering his correspondents at the mental level, the replies really came from the infinite reserves of the "higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge", 8 The comments, the admonitions, the instructions were offered by a Guru to a disciple, and were meant to be treasured as such and implicitly acted ...
... disciple received on the 29th April written to co-disciple here spoke of his experience at Tiruannamalai. He mentioned in his letter that the resistance in his physical being was broken by the spiritual experience he had there. In the evening a disciple asked Sri Aurobindo: "What Page 226 do you think of his saying that the resistance in the physical is gone?" Sri Aurobindo ...
... seen from a statement of Sri Aurobindo himself about his outer retirement. : "His retirement from outer activity did not mean as most people supposed that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realize the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual con ...
... conscious or subconscious physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring psychic light".¹.. .And there begins also "a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine śakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature ...
... the gods are from her. It is she who gives out the gods – Shiva and others. It is said that even Shiva cannot act unless she gives him power to act. Disciple : Harnath had his decisive spiritual experience in Kashmir where, it is related, Gauranga came to him and gave him the "mission". But his later disciples regard him equal to Gauranga. Disciple : But where is the difficulty? If the ...
... It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign: A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown". Sāvitrī, Book II , Canto I. Page 108 When we have a description of a. spiritual experience—and there are several dozens of them—we find the language adequate and appropriate to the experience. There are intensities of delight, of power, of ecstasy, of calm-wideness of self, each carrying ...
... National Congress and went into a complete retirement. Page 8 Sri Aurobindo began his practice of Yoga in 1905. At first gathering into it the essential elements of spiritual experience that are gained by the paths of divine communion and spiritual realisation till now in India, he passed on in search of a more complete experience uniting and harmonising the two ends of existence ...
... and easiest of access to our physical being, whose transformation and conversion is the most important condition Page 99 of supramental manifestation. In the Integral Yoga no spiritual experience counts for much unless it is translated into the terms of the physical being, and rivetted and revealed in the outer nature and action. The Mother's physical Presence and contact, surcharged ...
... Gitâ. This integrality of its conception of the infinite and eternal Brahman makes the philosophy of the Integral Yoga the most rational, perfect and comprehensive monism ever formulated by spiritual experience. Here there is no Maya or Karma or Satan to cut across or cast a shadow on the all-constituting and all-exceeding; unity of Brahman. All is Brahman, the mutable as well as the Immutable, ...
... millennium upon earth, but the dream, except being a remote inspiration to the higher endeavours of a very small section of humanity, has never been able to base itself on any definite truth of spiritual experience or any comprehensive vision of the purpose and possibilities of evolution. Sri Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as ...
... surprisingly ample element of conscious intuitive insight and expression. Some of his poems, notably, "The Poet", "Word Over-all", "The Revenant" are all remarkable in the faithful rendering of the spiritual experience or insight. The poet in him has caught the movement at its white heat of experience and has succeeded in casting it into an inspired utterance, the language and the rhythm,—the words and the ...
... It is a name which simply covers up the inequalities. All human ideals move round in a vicious circle. First, a hierarchy starts the culture – the start, generally, is with knowledge and spiritual experience. Then the culture spreads down to the people and in so doing it depreciates. Then a general levelling down takes place and there comes democracy. Then a hierarchy comes in and the circle ...
... Page 2 outwardly to a public cause. About his own retirement he writes: "But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he (Sri Aurobindo) had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise the Divine and attain I'" a complete spiritual con ...
... supposed by many that Sri Aurobindo's Ashram is a place where people live in an ivory tower, practise some kind of Yoga in splendid isolation, enjoying a lotus-eater's idle existence. If there was spiritual experience or enlightenment it was perhaps imaginary and had very little use for the ordinary mortal. How far these notions were from the truth may be seen from this output exhibited here which is only ...
... time to start. Sri Aurobindo : Not necessarily. Ordinarily if one is to wait for spiritual realization it will take time. But all may not have the highest or supramental realization. Spiritual experience is enough for the people and that is not difficult to have. I told M that spirituality must be the basis of the Sangha. Otherwise, your success will be your failure. But he does not seem to ...
... necessarily. It can be an experience along the line of pure Monism. In the intense experience of the Brahmic Consciousness the world loses its reality. But as I said, that is only one side of spiritual experience. On the other hand there are many seers who have spoken of the Divine Beauty. To them the Absolute is not merely Being but also Beauty. They have said रसो वै स:—" It is the Divine Himself who ...
... physical goodwill is more important than intelligence and ability to speak clearly and big words. * * * 12.11.72 In reply to a letter:- Page 244 About a spiritual experience Mother said that if one has it one should try to remain there. About premonitions, she said that she does not understand how it is dangerous. These come to warn beforehand. If one is quiet ...
... revolutionary movement and his admiration for Parnell were a reflection of his increasing inner preoccupation with India's own predicament, which was indeed worse than Ireland's. His first spiritual experience of immense peace and calm and joy on touching Indian soil at Apollo Bunder in Bombay instantaneously quickened his political sensibility by giving it a mystical dimension. It did not take ...
... in the life of man and society. In one of the later chapters of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo refers to the four main lines followed by Nature - religion, occultism, spiritual thought and spiritual experience and realisation - in her attempt to open up the inner being. 21 These are really interlinked lines and answer the needs of man's self-expansion and bring about his slow unfolding. Religion ...
... Aurobindo had eschewed political action, he continued to follow the course of events in India and the world. It was not as though, "as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in the fate of India"; and as he has explained later: It could not mean that, for the very principle of his Yoga was not only to realise ...
... of duties, "a rule of their action and an ideal way and temperament, character, spirit in the action, a dharma with a spiritual significance." It was the work of the Rishi—the man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of the classes—"to put this stamp enduringly on the national mind, to prolong and perpetuate it, to discover and interpret the ideal law and its practical meaning ...
... experience daily tell us —so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience, following faithfully the methods laid down ...
... voice of Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject." In a talk Sri Aurobindo disclosed the field on which Vivekananda had come to teach him. "It was ...
... to the lowest Shudras and even the despised and oppressed outcastes." From the outcastes themselves came saints revered by the whole community. It was this freedom to pursue an individual's spiritual experience which saved India from going the way of other ancient civilizations like Greek, Egyptian, Roman. Time as we know is a great corrupter. With time the downward pull becomes so great that ...
... entirely different method. India began with a Page 605 synthetic and intuitive manner of thinking based not upon logical distinctions and verbal oppositions, but upon the facts of spiritual experience and vision. In such synthetic and intuitive philosophies truths are arranged according to the place of each in the actual fact of things, as different laws and generalisations are arranged in ...
... great work known as the Tiru-vay-moli (the Sacred Utterance) which contains more than a thousand stanzas, he has touched all the phases of the life divine and given expression to all forms of spiritual experience. The pure and passionless Reason, the direct perception in the high solar realm of Truth itself, the ecstatic and sometimes poignant love that leaps into being at the vision of the "Beauty of ...
... and Night suckling alternately an infant fire? But the Vedic poet is not thinking of the physical night, the physical dawn or the physical fire. He is thinking of the alternations in his own spiritual experience, its constant rhythm of periods of a sublime and golden illumination and other periods of obscuration or relapse into normal unillumined consciousness and he confesses the growth of the infant ...
... existing creator and ruler of Mind; it is a secret principle already conscient and not merely contained inconsciently in the very stuff of things. But this is the natural conclusion—even apart from spiritual experience—from the nature of the supramental principle. For it is at its highest an eternal knowledge, will, bliss and conscious being and it is more reasonable to conclude that it is eternally conscious ...
... transcendental Unity, Oneness & Stability behind all the flux and variety of phenomenal life is the basal idea of the Upanishads: this is the pivot of all Indian metaphysics, the sum and goal of our spiritual experience. To the phenomenal world around us stability and singleness seem at first to be utterly alien; nothing but passes and changes, nothing but has its counterparts, contrasts, harmonised and dissident ...
... its explanation of all the problems that perplex the human mind; it brings the contradictions of the world into harmony by a single luminous law of being; it has developed in Yoga a process of spiritual experience by which its assertions can be tested and confirmed; the law of being it has discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ...
... surroundings was effected. What the Vedanta is, intrinsically, I have already hinted. It is the reaffirmation of Veda or Brahmavidya, not by metaphysical speculation or inferential reasoning, but by spiritual experience and supra-intellectual inspiration. If this idea be true, then by interpreting correctly the Vedanta, we shall come to some knowledge of what God is, what man, of the nature and action of the ...
... assailant. To have put a high value on philosophy, sought by it the highest secrets of our being, turned an effective philosophic thought on life and called in the thinkers, the men of profoundest spiritual experience, highest ideas, largest available knowledge, to govern and shape society, to have subjected creed and dogma to the test of the philosophic mind and founded religious belief upon spiritual intuition ...
... to all things and persons and happenings, not affected by any action, not altered by the figures of Nature. Be that, be the eternal self, be the Brahman. If you can become that by a permanent spiritual experience, you will have an assured basis on which you can stand delivered from the limitations of your mind-created personality, secure against any fall from peace and knowledge, free from ego. "Thus ...
... le influence, but the real or active political power remained with the king, the Kshatriya aristocracy and the commons. A peculiar figure for some time was the Rishi, the man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of the classes, but exercising an authority by his spiritual personality over all, revered and consulted by the king of whom he was sometimes the religious preceptor ...
... truths are the same, experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason, intuition. Only, since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must necessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and psychophysical experimentation, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition which looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason which admits something ...
... the spirit is infinite and cannot be circumscribed in that manner. Still it Page 562 may be said that most of the main clues are there and that after all the later developments of spiritual experience and discovery we can still return to it for a large inspiration and guidance. Outside India too it is universally acknowledged as one of the world's great scriptures, although in Europe its ...
... Aurobindo by breaking completely the "lustrous lid" which divides the overhead from the ranges whence poetry usually springs. The breaking of the "lustrous lid" is a very real spiritual experience. The Upanishads speak of the face of Truth having a golden cover which has to be removed. This cover is composed of the concepts and percepts through which we ordinarily turn our sight towards ...
... glitter of 'advanced' countries - that irresistible temptation! (c) Let us return again to Amal Kiran. 'Humanism is a very worthy sentiment and creed, yet it cannot be balanced against spiritual experience, against God-realisation, against Page 412 concrete communion with the Eternal. Hinduism stands or falls primarily and essentially by its ability to produce embodiments of ...
... Vedic religion, that is a question which cannot be solved at present for lack of data. It does not follow that it had no origins or in other words that humanity was not prepared by a progressive spiritual experience for the Revelation." Surely, what this implies is: (1) an essentially spiritual expression everywhere in the Rigveda in symbolic terms mostly connected with the conditions of the time; ...
... effective use of jewels and gold with poetic and spiritual connotations provides insights into the depths of Savitri. Jewels become a medium for depicting abstruse and subtle shades of the spiritual experience. This medium not only conveys the power of the word, its concretising mantric effect; it also gives to it a gleaming solidity. Objects are matched together and metamorphosed through strikingly ...
... data before you you must decide for yourself. (FURTHER POINTS ELICITED IN 2ND CONVERSATION) K.D: How can one know when he meets his psychic mate? Sri Aurobindo: How do you know a spiritual experience? How do you know when you have the right leader? It is all a matter of feeling and inner perception. It is an art and not a science. When she walks into your life you will know her right enough ...
... training, and there I was, having been practicing yoga for nearly two decades, including about seven years of concentrated practice in an Ashram, without having had what is generally regarded as a spiritual experience. I tried several times to take up the practice of zazen, 3 , which I learned at the abbey, but was never able to persist with it for lack of zest. I could not understand the significance ...
... for yourself. 25 November 1924 (A disciple later asked a further question about the subject discussed above.) How can one know when he meets his psychic mate? How do you know a spiritual experience? How do you know when you have the right leader? It is all a matter of feeling and inner perception. It is an art and not a science. When she walks into your life you will know her right enough ...
... the Transcendent — the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a divine reflection. See also the Divine. triguṇātī ta — above or beyond the three Gunas. Truth-Consciousness — see Supermind. Turiya — the fourth plane ...
... safety and some chance of a rapid and successful change. Letters on Yoga, pp. 1605-07 I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights, — yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology ...
... is in it — not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself. 10 In the supreme timeless Existence, as far as we know it by reflection in spiritual experience, existence and consciousness are one. We are accustomed to identify consciousness with certain operations of mentality and sense and, where these are absent or quiescent, we speak of that ...
... mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. 2 — Sri Aurobindo "Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence." 3 In these words, William James states ...
... pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience. 1 If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature ...
... secret śraddhā of the soul, and it is brought more and more .to the surface and there satisfied, sustained and increased by an increasing assurance and certainty Page 201 of spiritual experience.... too the faith in us must be unattached, a faith that waits upon Truth and is prepared to change and enlarge its understanding of spiritual experiences, to correct mistaken or half true ...
... scattered throughout his various and numerous writings on yoga and philosophy. The essays aim at bringing out explicitly the system underlying his thought. Sri Aurobindo's writings, based on spiritual experience rather than on intellectual theory, can convey not only their thought content but also something of the higher state of consciousness underlying the thought when read in a meditatively receptive ...
... the levels of higher intuition. This should then really mean our seeing it with a suppler and freer luminous intellect with the possibility of perceiving the subtler shades and nuances of the spiritual experience and expression. Jnaneshwar’s work has that scope and it is only the little ingenuous mind of ours that has prevented us so long from the exploration of these worlds of the magnum opus. Our ...
... the union with the Divine, bhakti, change of nature, etc. Page 122 I have been working hard. Last night till nearly 2 a.m. I am working at a spiritual novel (voicing my spiritual experience, etc.). I want to do sadhana more consciously through service and as my books are selling progressively better and better I want to offer it all as a concrete sacrifice to you and Mother. ...
... 11. The German Aspiration Hitler and his God A Higher and a Lower Choice The German aspiration for a new and total spiritual experience was spontaneous and sincere. The existing religions had always promised a fulfilment of all expectations in another world, but human intuition knew that, if God was something more than a simulacrum residing above the clouds ...
... c autocrat floating somewhere above the clouds or sitting on a throne in heaven. The “integral Vedantic affirmation” agrees with the mystics, because its perception of God is a matter of spiritual experience confirmed by many great experiencers: rishis, seers, yogis, mystics. According to this affirmation all is God, all is the Brahman, all is That, all is the Self, and there cannot be anything ...
... of the world, was an “agnostic,” to use his own term. 1908 was an axis year in his life. In the beginning of this year he met the yogi Vishnu Bhaskar Lele and had with him his first great spiritual experience, the realization of the silent Brahman. Later he was imprisoned in Alipore Jail under accusation of revolt against the Crown, which could cost him his life. But the jail, where his cell is now ...
... direct experience of a supra-mental reality; as such, it is felt to be irrational by the mental consciousness of the human being. Religion is always suspicious of true mysticism and of the true spiritual experience, for it knows itself to move on a much less elevated plane. Once religion has the worldly powers behind it, it will hush up the (irrational) mystics, expel them (even physically from life) or ...
... (Correspondence with Gautam Chawalla) Gautam Chawalla's Correspondence with The Mother 10 October 1966 It happens that after every spiritual experience, I experience a drop in consciousness or rather a sort of negation of that experience. Why? This is one more proof of the division in you. One part wants the light, another part clings to its obscurity ...
... are not the object of Yoga and a bargain or demand for a replacement of this kind can be no legitimate or healthy element in the sadhana. If it is there, it will surely impede the flow of spiritual experience. Ananda, yes; but Ananda and the spiritual happiness which precedes it (adhyātma-sukham) are something quite different from joys and pleasures. And even Ananda one cannot demand or make it ...
... and Uttararamacarita. He was a great devotee of Shiva. 112. Raihana Tyabji was born and brought up in an aristocratic highly educated muslim family. At the age of 16 she had a profound spiritual experience which she narrated in a booklet: Heart of a Gopi. She was a powerful singer and used to Page 400 sing Meera bhajans in love of Krishna. She passed away in 1976. 113 . Mrinalini ...
... into spiritual things, the brilliance and accuracy of his thought and vision and his expression of them – I think I described it once as pasyanti vak – and on as much as I knew of his spiritual experience and constant acquisition and forward movement and many-sided largeness. A closer perception of the spiritual person behind all that is perhaps the one thing that I could add to it, but that ...
... he explained, ‘it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose – there are a number of Sadhaks whom it has helped to awaken from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a flood of realizations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness ...
... language. Although in the course of their ‘academic’ curriculum the students studied all branches of modern science, the teachings of the Mother in her evening classes, based on her occult and spiritual experience, did not always match with what the textbooks said. One example is something she has repeated on many occasions: that this universe is the seventh manifested by the Godhead. ‘The traditions ...
... discover most of it by herself and for the very first time. In some cases she moved forward step by step, all the time groping for a formulation which might be comprehensible to others. True, all spiritual experience is incomprehensible as such because it belongs outside the domain of the mind. ‘I am using words for what is not expressible in words,’ 9 she said, and: ‘It [i.e. her experience] is difficult ...
... by Sri Aurobindo by breaking completely the "lustrous lid" which divides the overhead from the ranges whence poetry usually springs. The breaking of the "lustrous lid" is a very real spiritual experience. The Upanishads speak of the face of Truth having a golden cover which has to be removed. This cover is composed of the concepts and percepts through which we ordinarily turn our sight towards ...
... "Undermined by Overmind." Yes, Indians too are liable to fall or go astray on the Yogic path. Yet, by and large, they have a more pervasive sense of the genuine and the spurious in spiritual experience: a long historic background charged with realisation on realisation by numerous followers of various Yogas — Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Tantra — is responsible for this sense, so that, as the ...
... not merely redness is here but a tangible object saving the depth from striking us as an abstraction arti-ficially daubed over with a colour-epithet. Justice is done to the substantiality of spiritual experience. Thirdly, the ruby is a pre-cious stone found not on earth's surface but far underground: in addition to an inward-pointing sound harmonising with the rest of the phrase and in addition to a ...
... highly obliged if you will send your illumined comments to clarify the whole thing." In my opinion, the passage refers only to the individual's rise and relapse in the course of his spiritual experience. The "descent" here is the opposite of the individual being's ascent, spoken of earlier, to the "heights" of "heavenlier states". And the "twin duality for ever one" does not refer to Purusha ...
... immobile." What you label as "a matter of dispute between East and West" stems only from the Western belief that Shankara - or in another shape Buddha - is the sum and substance of the entire spiritual experience and thought compassed in India's three or four millennia. The point you make about a Primordial Unity expressing itself in the many and then a Consequent Unity which brings in something ...
... in various forms that idea and hope, - and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truths which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make this endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual ...
... golden epiphany and the silver secrecy could be living realities anywhere and they could be such even when their outer double embodiment had ceased. No doubt, there were special possibilities of spiritual experience for those whom the Divine had willed to be bodily with them, but no essential realisation is debarred to those whom the Divine has willed to be not so. The central point is the inward touch ...
... waiting for sun and rain to call forth their colour and fragrance. Yes, Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga lays out a superb programme. Even to traverse in mind the wonder after wonder of spiritual experience it discloses to the aspirant is to attain a permanent opening - an empty space, no doubt, but one which constantly invites the multi-splen-doured Plenitude. The Synthesis is most helpful if ...
... their inspiration glowed upon us: they were small like the stars — immense worlds that were pin-points because of the farness of their flame. AE's work is remarkable for the unique spiritual experience by which it is kindled: an experience of many colourful changes resolved by a certain underlying movement of mystical aspiration into a single-shining mood. The colour and change were not valuable ...
... an anti-life movement. But to tell the whole world that at some time or other, before all life-powers fail, a person should turn away from his practice so far of procreation and go in for the spiritual experience, the transcendence of desire in a vast Brahmic Consciousness or in a rapturous Bhakti-surrender to the Personal Deity — to tell this is surely nothing anti-life. Rather it is a call to Super-life ...
... persona ingrata with P.M. P.M. does not like him as a literary figure and he does not like him as a Yogi: he considers his English imitative and stone-stiff -lifelessly ersatz - and his spiritual experience a kind of many-sided muddle scarcely deserving the hagiographical approach that seems to be Prof. Iyengar's. If P.M. did not suffer from an inferiority complex "which when it is sought to be ...
... keenest moments. It is only when the treasure that lies deep within or high above is brought to us that the trouble begins. The 'overhead' rhythms, as Sri Aurobindo calls the poetry that in spiritual experience seems to descend from some vastness above the brain-centred mind, need expert sensibility on our part for their nuances and stages to be distinguished and I dare say a good bit of Yoga. What ...
... hope of being more and more Aurobindonian. * Soon after the one-volume edition was out, the Mother said to our small group upstairs: "Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally — but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope ...
... against a background of ultimate immensity. To Milton the ultimate immensity is itself the principal fact of both personal and poetic imagination though not of mystical intuition, much less of spiritual experience. Milton the man, Milton the poet, the whole individuality of him, his entire soul is charged with the boundless, the unfeatured, the supra-mundane which is ever losing itself into an infinity ...
... the Divine, that is our gate of deliverance and in it we can remain ourselves even in the midst of this world's disharmonies, luminous, blissful and free. That much is the age-old testimony of spiritual experience." On the general position as regards ultimate reality Sri Aurobindo 7 makes the summary; "In the Upanishads, in the inspired scripture of the most ancient Vedanta, we find the affirmation ...
... consider Teilhardism from all possible sides and converge upon a number of primary insights into its authentic heart of vision. This heart is sought to be illumined in the context of past spiritual experience and tradition, the present world-view of the aspiring Western mind, and the trend today towards a future in which the human soul shall labour to build an earth rich and dynamic with life-values ...
... Mother. Qualities of the soul reach their acmes only through the soul's awakening to its cosmic and transcendent source. But Russell's failure to assess rightly the validity and worth of spiritual experience must not blind us to the noble, Page 103 acute, healthy sagacity he is shown by Roy to be commanding in many respects on the outer tangible plane. Before ...
... beautiful poetry in all languages which is our precious heritage from the richest vital, mental and intuitive expressions of mankind in the past, and, on the other, the poetry of direct spiritual experience — at once a veridical descent from several levels of the heights - and a bone-chilling upsurge from Page 168 the depths. We recall Sri Aurobindo's Pilgrim ...
... are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought, but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which ...
... level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth . The time of religions is over . We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity . The Mother, Words of the Mother - III: Religion Sri Aurobindo has explained about the religions: The Ashram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or ...
... often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns, if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even ...
... purpose; but the Scriptural legend treated was poetically sufficient if only it had received throughout a deeper interpretation. Dante's theology had the advantage of the richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval Catholicism, but intellectually for so deep and vast a purpose it was not any more satisfying or durable. Still through his primitive symbols Dante has seen and has revealed things ...
... its poetical success to its starting from a great and critical situation in life, its constant keeping of that in view and always returning upon it, and to its method which is to seize on a spiritual experience or moment or stage of the inner life and throw it into the form of thought; and this, though a delicate operation, can well abide within the limits of the poetic manner of speech. Only where ...
... a push towards it that will not cease till it is done. That is why a spirit of denial and scepticism stands in the way, because they stand against the creation of the conditions under which spiritual experience can unroll itself. In the absence of faith and firm will to achieve, the Divine has to manifest in conditions which are the most adverse to that manifestation. It can be done, but you cannot ...
... rising towards the heights. And so on. That is "a deeper power", not a greater actual glory or perfection. All that may be true or not to the mind, but it is the traditional attitude of Indian spiritual experience. Ask any Yogin, he will tell you that the Life Heavens are childish things; even the gods, says the Purana, must come down to earth and be embodied there if they want mukti , giving up the ...
... adverse things present themselves you must meet them with courage and they will disappear and the help come. Faith and courage are the true attitude to keep in life and work always and in the spiritual experience also. In moments of trial faith in the Divine protection and the call for that protection; at all times the faith that what the Divine wills is the best. It is what turns you towards ...
... life and sense and their data and relating to them through the idea the truth of higher things, but it starts on the contrary from truth of self and spirit and relates to that through a direct spiritual experience assuming all other experience as its forms and instruments the things of mind and soul and life and sense and matter. It commands a far vaster Page 821 range than the ordinary embodied ...
... Reality. But here all turns on the mind's conception or the mental being's experience of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative,—even if it is a spiritual experience, how far it is absolutely conclusive, solely imperative. The cosmic Illusion is sometimes envisaged—though that is not the accepted position—as something that has the character of an unreal ...
... succeeds by a subtle inner discernment Page 76 in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions, deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life,—the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and leave him free ...
... patient and persistent action on the lines laid down by this knowledge, the force of our personal effort— utsāha . There intervenes, third, uplifting our knowledge and effort into the domain of spiritual experience, the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher— guru . Last comes the instrumentality of Time— kāla ; for in all things there is a cycle of their action and a period of the divine ...
... × That perhaps is why it was the Kshatriya bringing his courage, audacity, spirit of conquest into the fields of intuitive knowledge and spiritual experience who first discovered the great truths of Vedanta. ...
... account of in all living existences. In our ordinary consciousness we see these three as ourselves, the Jiva in the form of the ego, God—whatever conception we may have of God, and Nature. In the spiritual experience we see God as the supreme Self or Spirit, or as the Being from whom we come and in whom we live and move. We see Nature as his Power or God as Power, Spirit in Power acting in ourselves and ...
... process of Life in Matter as they are developed here. Science and metaphysics (whether founded on pure intellectual speculation or, as in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and spiritual experience) have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science cannot dictate its conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions on Science. Still if we accept the ...
... It is affirmed that there is: the dual status of Brahman, quiescent and creative, is indeed one of the most important and fruitful distinctions in Indian philosophy; it is besides a fact of spiritual experience. Here let us observe, first, that by this passivity in ourselves we arrive from particular and broken knowledge at a greater, a one and a unifying knowledge; secondly, that if, in the state ...
... pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience. 2 If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature ...
... each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally, without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until we arrive at that eternal calm from which may proceed some Page 317 partial ...
... immutable Self and refusal of the imposition. 2 The two views really differ only in their language and their viewpoint; substantially, they are the same intellectual generalisation from the same spiritual experience. If we rest here, there are only two possible attitudes towards the world. Either we must remain as mere inactive witnesses of the world-play or act in it mechanically without any participation ...
... conscient Power or Being in the universe greater and higher than ourselves or in any way influencing or controlling our existence, is one which Yoga cannot accept, as that would contradict all spiritual experience and make Yoga itself impossible. Yoga is not a matter of theory or dogma, like philosophy or popular religion, but a matter of experience. Its experience is that of a conscient universal and ...
... be otherwise acquired, it offers a ready means, a facility which becomes more helpful, if not indispensable, the higher and more difficult of access become the planes on which the heightened spiritual experience is sought. Once attained there, it has to be brought as much as possible into the waking consciousness. For in a Yoga which embraces Page 526 all life completely and without reserve ...
... not himself put it in that language, as an attempt by fixed scientific processes to give to the soul in the physical body the power, the light, the purity, the freedom, the ascending scales of spiritual experience which would naturally be open to it, if it dwelt here in the subtle and the developed causal vehicle. To speak of the processes of Hathayoga as scientific may seem strange to those who associate ...
... knowledge or sensation of the emotions, desires, vital impulses of others; these are some of the signs of this new consciousness gained by Yoga. But all this belongs to the inferior grades of spiritual experience and indeed is hardly more spiritual than the physical existence. We have in the same way to go yet higher and raise ourselves into the mental self. By doing so we can become the mental self ...
... ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature Worship which was then the common religion, covertly the sacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand; ...
... Vedic religion, that is a question which cannot be solved at present for lack of data. It does not follow that it had no origins or in other words that humanity was not prepared by a progressive spiritual experience for the Revelation. Page 593 Again, I certainly did not intend to express my own idea in the description of the Upanishads as a revolt of philosophic minds against the ritualistic ...
... Hinduism and the Mission of India [.....] [That] which is permanent in the Hindu religion, must form the basis on which the world will increasingly take its stand in dealing with spiritual experience and religious truth. Hinduism, in my sense of the word, is not modern Brahmanism. Modern Brahmanism developed into existence at a definite period in history. It is now developing out of existence; ...
... formula. IV. The Denial of Salvation by Works What is it, after all, to which the denial of salvation by works amounts, when looked at not from the standpoint of logic only but of actual spiritual experience? Some people when they talk of Karma or works, think only of rites and ceremonies, Vedic, Page 202 Puranic or Tantric. That kind of works, certainly, do not bring us to salvation ...
... Lord; this objective he, she, it to whom the action is done, exists only in the Lord. It is the omnipresent universality of the Supreme, that has first to be realized. When the Yogin has had spiritual experience of this universality, then only is he fit for Karmayoga; for not till then can he sink the constant feeling of I and thou and he in a single higher and wider Existence; not till then can he ...
... have to be careful always Page 263 of our steps in order to avoid error and a missing of the real sense. For we are here no longer steadily on the safe ground of psychological and spiritual experience, but have to deal with intellectual statements of spiritual and often of supracosmic truth. Metaphysical statement has always this peril and uncertainty about it that it is an attempt to define ...
... have been cut entirely asunder. This is the wisdom of all wisdoms, the secret of all secrets, the king-knowledge, the king-secret. It is a pure and supreme light which one can verify by direct spiritual experience and see in oneself as the truth: it is the right and just knowledge, the very law of being. It is easy to practise when one gets hold of it, sees it, tries faithfully to live in it. But ...
... human soul calls down this descent into himself and is either possessed by the divine consciousness or becomes an effective reflection or channel of it. This view rests upon certain truths of spiritual experience. The divine birth in man, his ascent, is itself a growing of the human Page 161 into the divine consciousness, and in its intensest culmination is a losing of the separate self in ...
... best ignorantly reverse responses: the positive terms, liking, pleasure, joy, attraction, are ill-guided responses or at the best insufficient and in character inferior to those of the true spiritual experience. All these things taken together constitute the fundamental character of our first transactions with the world of Nature, but it is evidently not the whole description of our being; it is ...
... hiding, because on the contrary it has built and placed before it the terrible as well as the sweet and beautiful symbols of the Godhead. But it is the depth and largeness of its long thought and spiritual experience that prevent it from feeling or from giving countenance to these feeble shrinkings. Indian spirituality knows that God is Love and Peace and calm Eternity,—the Gita which presents us with ...
... is due the perpetual reflooding of the Indian mind with Vedic truth and its immortal permanence and unfailing reappearance in philosophy, in religious teaching and observance and in personal spiritual experience and discipline. Page 93 None of these puissant exterior aids to the permanence of the Veda would have been entirely effective without another, yet more characteristic of our Indian ...
... stock in your friend's theories—at that rate half the world's poetry would have to disappear. And what is meant by philosophy—there is none in your poem, there is only vision and emotion of spiritual experience, which is a different thing altogether. Truth and thought and sight cast into forms of beauty cannot be banished in that cavalier way. Music and art and poetry have striven from the beginning ...
... of your nature: for that matter, it is the strongest motive force that sadhana can have and the best means for all else that has to come. It is why I said that it is through the heart that spiritual experience must come to you. The loyalty and the rest that you have for me and the Mother Page 352 may not, as you say, be part of the bhakti itself, but they could not be there were not the ...
... do I impose retirement on anyone as a method or approve of it unless the person himself seeks it, feels its necessity, has the joy of it and the personal proof that it helps to the spiritual Page 343 experience. It is not to be imposed on anyone as a principle, for that is the mental way of doing things, the way of the ordinary mind—it is as a need that it has to be accepted, when it is felt ...
... defeats the object—for the object is not to allow either the greed for food or the heavy tamas of the physical which is the result of excessive eating to interfere with the concentration on the spiritual experience and progress. If the body is left insufficiently nourished, it will think of food more than otherwise. Too much eating makes the body material and heavy, eating Page 427 too ...
... excitement that there are these things. It is probably because the nerves are strung in the daytime and you do not relax into ease that it is difficult to sleep. One can assimilate [ spiritual experience ] in sleep also. Remaining awake like that is not good, as in the end it strains the nerves and the system receives wrongly in an excited way or else gets too tired to receive. You should ...
... then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance. I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,—yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a very powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology ...
... difficulties, progress and attacks and retardations, strong movements forward and a floundering in the bogs of the Ignorance. Even great realisations may come and high splendours of light and spiritual experience and yet the goal is not attained; for in the phrase of the Rig Veda, "As one climbs from peak to peak there is made clear the much that is still to be done." But there is always something that ...
... concentration in the heart. (3) An aspiration for the Mother's presence in the heart and the control by her of mind, life and action. Page 225 But to quiet the mind and get the spiritual experience it is necessary first to purify and prepare the nature. This sometimes takes many years. Work done with the right attitude is the easiest means for that—i.e. work done without desire or ego ...
... the condition you want. The inner spiritual progress does not depend on outer conditions so much as on the way we react to them from within—that has always been the ultimate verdict of spiritual experience. It is why we insist on taking the right attitude and persisting in it, on an inner state not dependent on outer circumstances, a state of equality and calm, if it cannot be at once of inner ...
... activity or even by any attempt at attack or disturbance. The condition you describe shows precisely the growth of this inner silence. It has to fix itself eventually as the basis of all spiritual experience and activity. It does not matter if one does not know what is going on within behind the silence. For there are two conditions in the Yoga, one in which all is silent and there is no thought ...
... permissible but right, when it can be made part of the Yoga; one can give not only one's soul, but all one's powers to the Divine. It is very evident that X has had a sudden opening to spiritual experience—a surprisingly sudden opening, one would think, but it happens often in that way, especially if there is a sceptical mind outside and a soul ready for experience within. In such cases also it ...
... pleasures are not the object of Yoga and a bargain or demand for a replacement of this kind can be no legitimate or healthy element in the sadhana. If it is there, it will surely impede the flow of spiritual experience. Ananda, yes; but Ananda and the spiritual happiness which precedes it ( adhyātma-sukham ) are something quite different from joys and pleasures. And even Ananda one cannot demand or make it ...
... the results—either of these things is sufficient to show that one is open. To feel the grace descending and yet doubt whether it is not a vital imagination is a folly of the physical mind; a spiritual experience must be accepted as it is; if one questions at every moment whether an experience is an experience or Grace is grace or peace is peace or light is light, one will spend all the time in these ...
... thinks he must stand for one or other of these things, he is making a mistake and is likely to create unnecessary narrowness, clash and opposition. There is no opposition or clash between them in spiritual experience; it is only the external human mind that mistakenly puts them against each other. What we are here to make is a new creation in which there is a larger reconciling Truth than anything that went ...
... that Prabartak is getting on well enough as it is, though, if Nalini could write, it would produce an element of greater variety. You should be able to develop more writers with the necessary spiritual experience, grasp of the thought and literary ability,—these things the inner Shakti can bring to the surface if it is called upon for them,—so that Prabartak will not have to depend on three or four people ...
... predominant part he played in my own sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in your sadhana could be considered objectionable. Sectarianism is a matter of dogma, ritual etc., not of spiritual experience; the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the iṣṭa-deva . If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to him, you give yourself to me. Your inability to identify ...
... alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject. Then about my relations with Sister Nivedita—they were purely in the field of politics. Spirituality ...
... this a formation of the mind or the vital? Was there a mistake in it? If seeing the Mother's Light is a mistake or a mental or vital formation, then the realisation of the Divine and all spiritual experience can be questioned as a mental or vital formation or mistake and all Yoga becomes impossible. 6 September 1933 While watching the Mother walk on the terrace, I saw a light like moonlight ...
... separate history. Chapter 1. Sri Aurobindo wrote this essay as a message for distribution on 21 February 1927, the birthday of the Mother. Three months earlier, after an important spiritual experience of 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from outward contacts and placed the Mother in charge of the disciples who had gathered around him. He told them at that time to turn entirely ...
... done or not done. The overcoming of all attachments must necessarily be difficult and cannot come except as the fruit of a long sadhana , unless there is a rapid general growth in the inner spiritual experience which is the substance of the Gita's teaching. The cessation of desire of the fruit or attachment to the work itself, the growth of equality to all beings, to all happenings, to good repute ...
... remembered the constant indulgence and patience the Mother has always shown to you. The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another ...
... account of my life; but after starting to correct it I had to give up the attempt in despair. It is chock-full of errors and inaccuracies: this cannot be published. As for the account of my spiritual experience, I mean of the Bombay affair, somebody must have inflicted on you a humorous caricature of it. This too cannot go. The best will be to omit all account or narrative and say—at not too much length ...
... the outward physical mind and intellect which can take only physical things as real and important and vivid and to it inward phenomena are something unreal, vague and truthless. The spiritual experience does not even despise dreams and visions; it is known to it that many of these things are not dreams at all but experiences on an inner plane and if the experiences of the inner planes which ...
... is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve him with one's works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga. Page 375 The Importance of Descent in the Yoga I meant by it [ the phrase "a far greater Truth" ] the descent of the supramental ...
... utterances of the great Scriptures—Veda, Upanishads, Gita,—it may well have a power to awaken a spiritual impulse, an uplifting, even certain kinds of realisation. To say that it cannot contradicts spiritual experience. The Vedic poets regarded their poetry as mantras , they were the vehicles of their own realisations and could become vehicles of realisation for others. Naturally, these mostly would be ...
... what the Vedic Rishis did not do. Chaitanya and others developed an intensity of Bhakti which is absent in the Veda and many other instances can be given. Why should the past be the limit of spiritual experience? 19 December 1934 Is it a fact that some ancient sages and Rishis have taken birth here in order to help your work? If so, it is not a fact of much importance. 27 October 1935 ...
... Divine, to become conscious in Him and live Him, will arrive, no matter what path, what way they follow. That is to say, even in religion there are people who have had Page 146 the spiritual experience and found the Divine―not because of the religion, usually in spite of it, notwithstanding it―because they had the inner urge and this urge led them there despite all obstacles and through them ...
... of things are put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding law of spiritual experience―or else to liberate a light within that can lead us on the way until that greater direct Truth-Consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us that is only outward, all ...
... normal. Suddenly an opening in the mind, a Page 352 light that comes, one understands something which he did not before. You take that for a very natural phenomenon. But it is a spiritual experience—or the clear seeing of a situation, the understanding of what is happening in oneself, of the state one is in, the indication of the exact progress one ought to make, of the thing that's to ...
... in the physical world, and it is through the Divine in the individual alone that this can be done. Page 51 These are elements in the dynamics of spiritual experience and I am obliged to admit them if a divine work has to be done. June 12, 1932 Page 52 ...
... pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience.* If the secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and from behind the veil this outer nature of ...
... the world indicated my path to me completely, its full theory... The defect of the old yoga was that, knowing the mind and reason and knowing the Spirit, it remained satisfied with spiritual experience in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the fragmentary; it cannot completely seize the infinite, the undivided. The mind's way to seize it is through the trance of samadhi, the liberation ...
... mind to the truly occult regions beyond, the real meaning of each colour is the same for all those who can read it directly. This is true not only in this particular case but for all occult and spiritual experience. There is a remarkable similarity in the experiences of mystics of all times and places. Consequently, if the colours of the rings in the Olympic Symbol are viewed from this standpoint, we ...
... appropriate words to express correctly what Sri Aurobindo is and the experience he has given us, we would become dogmatic and be on the point of founding a religion. Page 21 He who has a spiritual experience and a faith, formulates it in the most appropriate words for himself. But if he is convinced that this expression is the only correct and true one for this experience and faith, he becomes ...
... Words of the Mother - II Experiences and Visions Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. 18 February 1935 One must always be greater than one's experience ...
... even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude. 101 * I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,—yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new Page ...
... mountain air and the lightness of the mountains—it was all there. The splendor of sunlight on the Himalayan peaks. After that half hour I hadn't the slightest wish to go! I'd had the FULL spiritual experience of the Himalayas. It was a grace given to me—a gift. If I could give you such a gift.... I am trying, but so far I can't do it—I don't know why. I have done many things for many people ...
... then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance. I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,—yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology ...
... no train of logic, no continuity; these are always, always mental. An inspiration, an intuition, a revelation always comes, 'poff!', leaving a score of things unsaid—gaps to be filled in with spiritual experience. Page 387 If you start to explain, it falls flat—there's no help for it. So I wonder, after all, if there aren't many revelations in your book which MUST NOT be explained; then ...
... feeling that ALL one has lived, all one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion—that's what I was living yesterday evening. And then.... It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully Page 147 beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but ...
... X is a poor man who comes here practically every week, meditates near the Samadhi and offers money very regularly. He feels the Mother's Presence and guidance. But every time he gets a good spiritual experience, something bad happens in the domestic or professional sphere. Yesterday, for instance, he came across a quotation saying that if one goes deep into the heart one can find Mother there; immediately ...
... is the experience and the sincerity of the experience that count. 23 June 1965 Sweet Mother, You speak (in "Conversations") of the plunge we must take in order to have the true spiritual experience. Is it possible to achieve it by aspiration alone, or is there a method or discipline to be followed? Everything is possible. All paths lead to the goal provided they are followed with ...
... his being, and for that reason I won't name him. And along with this, in answer to what that fake Sri Aurobindo was saying, I said forcefully (also in English): "This means the negation of all spiritual experience!" And immediately the whole scene, the whole construction, everything—poof! Vanished, dissolved. The Force swept it all away. Later, when I had that second vision April 3, 1962 , I saw that ...
... in spiritual life. But on one side women are more interested by action than by mentalisation and intellectual expression, that is why very Page 289 few women have recorded their spiritual experience and thus they have remained unknown. To be truly a good wife is almost as difficult as to be a true disciple. The idea that women should cook for males is against my principles ...
... free in its heart and imagination from superstitious no less than political chains, but he was bound later to arrive at some more clear and controlled thought-process and some more definite spiritual experience side by side with the lyric impulse and the symbolic vision. Shelley could never have stopped growing and in the right direction for his peculiar Page 62 genius: not since ...
... cultured, sweet with words, deeply committed to the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, always rightly proud of his family tradition and contribution, it was always a sort of an unforgettable spiritual experience to talk to him. It is extremely difficult for me to believe and yet there is no option but to accept Page 129 that the inevitable has after all happened. I am deprived of a towering ...
... the poetry which comes from the Illumined Mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines The longing of ecstatic tears From infinite to infinite 1 will do very well as an instance ...
... king of Nature with the mystic bird A flaming crown of godhead over life! Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is certainly very original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle ...
... qualitiless Atman or Brahman, a-cosmic and free from name and form, to be the one and only Existent. In the world which for all practical purposes he took as real, even though from the final spiritual experience it might be mere Maya, he granted the traditional Indian view of the individual soul reincarnating or transmigrating. Aquinas can escape just as little as Shankara the destiny, whatever it may ...
... .. it's not easy That's all. So I can listen to this. ( Satprem reads out ) Page 199 Pavitra's experience Night of February 5, 1966 "It is a night of fully conscious spiritual experience, a night of torture and glory. "I walked through large rooms in which beings without communication with outside were living. And other rooms where wretched beings were dragging out a wretched ...
... that Art can never really find what it seeks or succeed in liberating its soul in the highest perfection of speech unless it transfuses the rhythms of its exquisite moods into a sustained spiritual experience. English literature has not been utterly barren in Page 28 this kind of direct revelatory speech; here and there the veil has been lustrously rent, but there has been no secure ...
... spiritual integrality insisted on by Sri Aurobindo. Without our openly feeling that imperative, there will never be a common "insight" for all persons. How can we reach in the sphere of spiritual experience a common insight unless we envisage with unblurred eyes our total constitution's bedrock need? The bedrock need shows itself in our thirst for perfection - and the common origin, in God ...
... qualitiless Atman or Brahman, a-cosmic and free from name and form, to be the one and only Existent. In the world which for all practical purposes he took as real, even though for the final spiritual experience it might be mere Maya, he granted the traditional Indian view of the individual soul reincarnating or transmigrating. Aquinas can escape just as little as Shankara the destiny, whatever it may ...
... be reckoned as misguided since, though he too was the apostle of a Supreme Silence and Impersonality, he did not call it the Self but named it Non-Being or Nirvana. The large variety of spiritual experience creates the presumption not, as sceptics suppose, that here is a field of hopeless contradiction and therefore purely subjective individual illusion but that here is some Reality which ...
... here but a Page 285 tangible object saving the depth from striking us as an abstraction artificially daubed over with a colour-epithet. Justice is done to the substantiality of spiritual experience. Thirdly, the ruby is a precious stone found not on earth's surface but far underground: in addition to an inward-pointing sound harmonising with the rest of the phrase and in addition to a ...
... Divine Mother. Qualities of the soul reach their acmes only through the soul's awakening to its cosmic and transcendent source. But Russell's failure to assess rightly the validity and worth of spiritual experience must not blind us to the noble, acute, healthy sagacity he is shown by Roy to be commanding in many respects on the outer tangible plane. Before I pass to the author's fruitful contact ...
... pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lal's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty- first year in Eng land), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and ...
... thought, by abstraction", as Mr. Alvares opines. 72 It is a world of spirituality with philosophical systematization coming in its wake. Immediate spiritual experience and mystical realization are here concerned. Mr. Alvares appears to be congenitally incapable even of asking whether any value can be attached to what ...
... comment you have asked for. The trouble with Nair is that he is amazingly ill-versed in Sri Aurobindo — amazingly because he is expected to be a good student of both spiritual thought and spiritual experience. At the very outset he should know that Sri Aurobindo is not spouting mere philosophy: he is putting in intellectual terms the insights brought him by Yogic realisations. The question of pl ...
... the whole of our existence, is what we have placed before us as our goal. But a further point remains to be elucidated here. A well-established Page 142 line of spiritual experience shows that whenever our soul gets involved in action, it loses hold and becomes nescient of its immobile, passive and so-called true status, whereas a withdrawal from dynamism and an involution ...
... tending to obliterate the borderline between the states of sleep and wakefulness can be explained on the assumption — and this is not merely a conjectural assumption, it is a fact of occult-spiritual experience — that there is not just one unique level of awareness, that of the ordinarily understood waking hours of a man, but that there are many levels. And unless and until all these are mastered ...
... 83. (Italics ours) Page 386 "Science and metaphysics (whether founded on pure intellectual speculation or, as in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and spiritual experience) have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science cannot dictate its conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can impose its conclusions on Science. Still if we accept ...
... great work known as the Tiru-vaymoli (The Sacred Utterance) which contains more than a thousand stanzas, he has touched all the phases of the life divine and given expression to all forms of spiritual experience. The pure and passionless Reason, the direct perception in the high solar realm of Truth itself, the ecstatic and sometimes poignant love that leaps into being at the vision of the "Beauty of ...
... has been a persistent questioning as to what is the aim of human life. Answers have been sought at various levels of reflection and critical thought. Answers derived from morality, religion or spiritual experience have also often been expressed in ways which are accessible to our rational understanding The inquiring mind needs to reflect on these answers and arrive at its own conclusions. We speak ...
... because by self-deprivation he would land himself in the seas of despair—not as a method of reaching the Brahman. He was trying to do what his nature would not allow. It was only if he got intense spiritual experience that he could give up tea and talk without wallowing in misery—Is it so difficult to understand a simple thing like that? I should have thought it would be self-evident even to the dullest ...
... Guru. PURANI: It's very strange he didn't feel anything else here, while Ganapati who is also not a disciple felt a higher consciousness here. SRI AUROBINDO: Ganapati had considerable spiritual experience. S didn't appear to have gone very deep. Does he know the source of his voices? PURANI: He says that they come from Overmind. SATYENDRA: That is your term, Sir. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. ...
... the voice Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence.... The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on the subject." (p. 115) "[Before coming to Pondicherry] Sri Aurobindo had already realised in full two of the four ...
... that experiences differ, you have to go on adding experience after experience till you come to the reconciling experience in which all others find their place. When you want to describe a spiritual experience, you are obliged to use mental terms which are quite inadequate. That is why the Vedantins say that mind and speech can never express the Truth. Still you can somehow manage to express something ...
... Dilip sent you some extracts from Huxley's book After Many a Summer . He wants to know how you found them. Anilkumar says that he doesn't find anything there to indicate that Huxley has had any spiritual experience or has written from such experience. Dilip maintains that he must have done some sadhana in order to be able to write like that. SRI AUROBINDO (after some silence) : All I can say is that ...
... ceremonies and of any acts specifically prescribed by any particular religion. Furthermore, both of them are independent of any authority except that of one's own free judgment and direct spiritual experience. It is also useful to distinguish religion from what in India is called dharma. Dharma is not any religious creed or dogma nor a system of rituals, but a deeper law of the harmonious ...
... difficulties can come up, but if one perseveres, a time comes when all is ready. The Mother's Force opens the consciousness fully to the Divine, then all that must develop, develops within, spiritual experience comes and with it the knowledge and union with the Divine. 9.4.37 Sri Aurobindo Mother, For the last few days, sometimes I feel good and sometimes bad. ...
... 160 But in the beginning he can receive just a vague intimation only and not the direct and full awareness of it; for, he has not yet reached the advanced state of a concrete spiritual experience of the Presence of either the Divine or the psychic being. That experience will surely come with the further advancement of his sadhana. But at this early stage of his spiritual life, the ...
... prospect did not daunt Amal-da. It is not without reason that we have entitled our essay, “The Wonder that is K.D.S.”. For, to everybody’s surprise, he turned his body’s ‘doom’ into a profound spiritual experience. Let us listen to K.D.S. describing his inner state during this period of forced immobilisation: “I am now as if lodged in some depth of my body most of the time. There is a great stillness ...
... Spirit of tolerance, assimilation and synthesis (d) True understanding of religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism. (e) Synthesis of spiritual experience. 2. Indian Literature: (a) Sanskrit and Tamil (b) Birth of modem Indian languages (c) Great literary masters: a detailed study of one of them. 3. Indian ...
... ceremonies and of any acts specifically prescribed by any particular religion. Furthermore, both of them are independent of any authority expect that of one's own free judgement and direct spiritual experience. It is also useful to distinguish religion from what in India is called dharma. Dharma is not any religious creed or dogma nor a system of rituals, but a deeper law of the ...
... positions of Vedantic philosophy finds a resolution in the experience of the three poises of the Supermind. The conflict arises when human mentality lays an exclusive emphasis on one side of spiritual experience. As Sri Aurobindo explains: "Thus, emphasising the sole truth of the unitarian consciousness, we observe the play of the divine unity, erroneously rendered by our mentality into the terms ...
... with mastery the life and works in the world. The idea that the world and its activities must be renounced was a later development, when India made an experiment of sounding each Line of spiritual experience to its farthest point, and chose to look from that farthest point at existence, so as to see what Truth or power it could give. That was the part of the heroic adventure of the Indian sp ...
... experiences. Therefore, except for the materialistic school of Charvaka, all systems of Indian philosophy provide for a special room where philosophical conclusions are shown to be supported by spiritual experience either as they are obtained directly or as they are obtained through the records of Shruti. On account of this reason, as also on account of the fact that philosophy did not attempt to prescribe ...
... This yoga, therefore, does not reject life but transforms life so as to bring out fully the hidden Spirit behind all manifestations of material life. This yoga rejects exclusiveness of any spiritual experience, which has so far been claimed to be ultimate, and it also establishes that science of yoga is not a closed book, but continues to expand in the light of larger integral experiences. ...
... crucial episode. As a result, the Gita is largely intellectual, ratiocinate, and philosophical in its method. It is, indeed, founded on the Truth discovered by Page 37 intuition and spiritual experience, and it is so highly esteemed as to be ranked almost as a thirteenth Upanishad. 59 The Gita is a continuation of the basic teaching of the Upanishads, although its Vedantic ideas are ...
... brings me to the subject which will assume increasing importance as we go on, viz. , Sri Aurobindo's turning to yoga. Actually, Sri Aurobindo was a born yogi. I have already told you of the rare spiritual experience which came to him when he first stepped on the shores of India. Let me give you another instance of an experience he had in the first year of his stay in Baroda, again in a most unexpected manner ...
... was also permitted to obtain clothes and books from home and accordingly asked his uncle, Krishna Kumar Mitra, to send him the Gita and the Upanishads. We come now to the overwhelming spiritual experience Sri Aurobindo had in jail. He spoke of it in his Uttarpara Speech, to which I have referred earlier, and I shall be quoting from it extensively. But this experience did not come to him without ...
... stayed at Baroda for a fortnight and this stay took on a special significance and importance not so much for political activities, although he was involved in these, but because of a tremendous spiritual experience which, in his own words, was the first of the four great realisations on which his Yoga and spiritual philosophy are founded. I shall now try and give you an account of this, relying largely ...
... will see that my 3 lines are put against the two last lines taken together and not this one only by itself. So taken they express with perfect felicity something that can be seen or felt in spiritual experience. The same reason for the other three line encomiums. E.g. A line like "Life that is deep and wonder-vast" has what I have called the inevitable quality, with a perfect simplicity and straig ...
... Police search of my house. Perhaps the Police thought that it was one of those "sweet letters" the Government much-adoed about in Sri Aurobindo’s trial! 2 It was curious that I had no spiritual experience to speak of during my long stay, while my previous short visit had been so strikingly different. Still a month’s quiet sojourn in the spiritual atmosphere, with the daily touch of the Mother ...
... Indian soil, he had a strange experience. A vast cairn and quiet descended on him and remained with him for months thereafter. This young man was Aurobindo Ghose and he had this profound spiritual experience the moment he reached India. He told us later that it was the experience of the calm and silent Self, a realisation attained by yogis after years of sadhana. Yet it came to Sri Aurobindo, unbidden ...
... think there is a country as beautiful as that. There you are. All this is authentically true. This is the Japanese life on one side, now compare it with ours. *** Spiritual experience develops one's subtle sights and sounds. One Page 51 sees visions and hears voices that may seem authentic, but they may often be quite false and misleading. The Mother ...
... you have not expected, in the least, suddenly occurs. But in spite of these experiences, in my spiritual history there was a lot of trouble, a lot of heartache, a lot of doubts. So, you see, spiritual experience, on one hand, and frailty of human nature, on the other. Now I will finish this talk by reading Nolini-da's text, very apt, appropriate for all of you and particularly for the young people here ...
... in cutting off the mind from the body, and there was an instantaneous relief and joy. I don't know if it has been recorded in Jibon Smriti. Then Sri Aurobindo commented: "Yes, that is a spiritual experience." Another famous instance is that of Ramana Maharishi, the great Maharishi about whom Sri Aurobindo had a very high opinion. Ramana Maharshi had cancer in the upper part of one hand ...
... the higher flights. For it is impossible to have a complete annihilation of ego at such an early stage of sadhana. Although there is no ego in the spiritual planes, yet by the spiritual experience the ego on the lower planes may get aggrandised through pride and wrong reception of the experience. Also one may by entering into the larger mental and vital planes aggrandise the ego. These ...
... towards the Light", (2) "The peace in the cells". It is evidently from what you have written the thing that is happening — the physical consciousness is opening to the spiritual experience. In action I feel detached and the Mother's Force working in my place; I find myself above with her at the same time. All is very good — to live on a higher ...
... Light; it went back always in one form or another to the profound truths of the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest authority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. Page 167 Inevitably there was a close link between ...
... straight into the tenuous spaces of spiritual metaphysics. We have one more example of how a modern physicist is metamorphosed into a mystic. What Dirac says is tantamount to the very well-known spiritual experience that the world as it appears to us is a vesture or symbol of an inner order of reality out of which it has been broadcast— sah paryagat —and the true causes of things are not on the surface ...
... do not try to understand what it means; if you do that, it vanishes, of you deform and disfigure it, taking away all its purity. Page 99 In the same way also if you want a spiritual experience to enter into you, you must have a brain absolutely quiet and immobile, like a mirror which not only reflects but absorbs, allows the ray to enter and penetrate deep within so that out of the ...
... The one below is active and tastes of things both bitter and sweet, in other Page 379 words, it takes part and is involved in the varied life-experiences. Certain lines of spiritual experience find that the being above is the reality, that the other is only an image, a reflection or illusion; and the image looks like a troubled image because it is, as it were, a reflection in the ...
... and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe." 38 All spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them like the Page 46 experience of the Silence or of the Being or of the experience of Silence beyond ...
... the more shall we come across man's original, primitive and immature nature. As the Vedas owe their origin to a hoary past, it is a axiomatic that there can be no solid philosophical truth and spiritual experience in them. It is vain to seek for something in the Vedas that can satisfy the modern scientific mind. Hence any such attempt will end in utter failure. In modern times those very scientists ...
... level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the law— dharma—of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual ...
... rather than the other, howsoever may the artist aspire for the shore beyond. No doubt, I speak of the creations of artists in general. There are rare artists whose creation embodies genuine spiritual experience and realisation. But that is a different matter – it concerns the purely spiritual art. Ordinary works of art do not belong to that category and derive their inspiration from a different source ...
... this but the beginning of all truth is like that. It begins with the minority of one to all and then it gradually spreads and ultimately it succeeds and the truth becomes part of life. Spiritual experience of this widening out into infinity would bring about this result of elimination of the consequence of ego and the limitations of duality. Then one finds, says Sri Aurobindo, that not only ...
... millennium upon earth, but the dream, except being a remote inspiration to the higher endeavours of a very small section of humanity, has never been able to base itself on any definite truth of spiritual experience or any comprehensive vision of the purpose and possibilities of evolution. Sri Aurobindo's ideal of the divine Manifestation and the Divine Life on earth claims originality, in as much as it ...
... him " relatedness to an ego is an essential condition of consciousness. " This is a limited view of consciousness, as it takes for granted the mental as the only possible consciousness. All spiritual experience, including that of Sri Aurobindo, always speaks of the ultimate Reality not as _________________ ¹ Sri Aurobindo in his two books - The idea! of human unity and Human Cycle - points ...
... rightly interpreted and enlightened, and itself united with spirituality in a happy wedlock. It is a synthesis, not achieved by an intellectual or emotional eclecticism, but by an integral spiritual experience — a synthesis which reflects the manifold unity of all existence. It is an epitome of all the conceptions of the Divine, past and present, and bids fare to be the sovereign, dynamic spiritual ...
... effects a living contact between the limited human consciousness and the infinite consciousness of the Spirit, and this contact cannot but be overwhelming and stunning to the mind. A genuine spiritual experience is not like a mental thought, idea or imagination, it comes from the unexplored depths or heights of the being and leaves an indelible impress upon the consciousness, if it does not at once ...
... Especially, in this age of exaggerated intellectuality, we are apt to confuse spirituality with mental accomplishments and let the power of our pen or the eloquence of our tongue to duty for spiritual experience. It is not unoften that the initial fervour of our heart for spiritual progress is overlaid with a plethora of intellectual activity which revels in the analysis, synthesis, criticism and ...
... action. Another difficulty arises because most of the yogis are very bad philosophers. And so they cannot put their experiences in mental terms. But that does not mean that they have no real spiritual experience. They do not want to acquire intellectual development; for, they wanted only to reach a Higher consciousness and they are satisfied with that. When you look for things the yogi has never tried ...
... the stuff that dreamers are made of..." 54 In 1908 Sri Aurobindo was, if anything, graver and serener, unattached to the ebb and flow of the political flood. The second great spiritual experience which came to him in the Alipore Jail completed the transformation; from the 'still centre' of detachment he passed on to the circle of purposeful commitment. So far his surface mind had attended ...
... was not dedicated outwardly to a public cause. About his own retirement he writes, "But this did not mean, as most people supposed, that he ( Sri Aurobindo ) had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realize the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness ...
... "supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane", 109 and later he made the "interpenetration of the planes...a capital and fundamental part of spiritual experience." 110 Now this was by no means peculiar to Sri Aurobindo. Planes, ascents, descents, explorations, although they evoke physical realities, have also corresponding non- Page 326 ...
... spiritual insights woven into the texture of The Life Divine. V Sri Aurobindo saw the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita as a grand succession of syntheses of all current and previous spiritual experience and speculative thought on the issue of right action here and now. The crown of the Vedic synthesis was the visioned possibility and experienced actuality of man's self-transcendence towards ...
... , agnostic, sceptic, advaitin, bhakta, shakta - and he had to gather into one vast synthesis the variegated, and sometimes conflicting and contradictory, elements of his own and the world's spiritual experience and of the several Yoga disciplines of the past. But once he had discovered the key to the synthesis in the Supermind, the rest was not very difficult. The new synthesis of knowledge called ...
... long afterwards sees in the pamphlet "the idea which was to form the core of the philosophy which he [Sri Aurobindo] was to formulate later on... [stressing] the need for a reinterpretation of spiritual experience to relate it to the changing conditions evolved in the outward progress of mankind". 39 As a matter of fact, neither the Mandir nor the Math actually came into existence. "The idea of ...
... also sat at the feet of Nayana's own Guru, Sri Ramana Maharishi of Tiruvannamalai. After Sastriar's contacts with Page 257 Sri Aurobindo had thrown open to him new vistas of spiritual experience, it was natural enough that Ganapati Muni also should visit the Ashram sooner or later. When Sri Aurobindo received a copy of Uma Sahasram from Duraiswami Aiyar, the splendour of its diction ...
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