... the "vital proper." Disciple : What is the "vital proper" ? Sri Aurobindo : The vital being is that which is concerned directly with life. You can call it "life-force" and all the movements connected with the life-force belong to the vital being. The fundamental working of the vital being is that it takes the form of Desire – the desire for objects, for possession, lust, ambition and... weakness was not more than what other people have got. His chief defects were in the mental and the vital being. He has a very narrow mental being – practically no mind at all, only conventional ideas about religion and spirituality. But he had a remarkable aspiration and intensity in the vital being. He progressed more than any one. But he had also a great vanity in him and believed that he was someone... form is very useful for life in Nature. It is the vital being in man which wants to do this or to do that. It is busy trying to throw itself out. That is the essential vital nature. And behind it is the vital mind. It takes a thought-form but that form is different from mental thought-form. It is something going out straight from the vital being and not from the mind. It accompanies the vital movements ...
... difficulty in the way with almost everybody is the difficulty of controlling the desires and impulses of the vital being. In many cases as in yours, certain strong impulses run persistently counter to the ideal and demand of the reason and the will. The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind... attachments, desires or habits of the mind, heart, vital being or body should be clung to which come in the way of this aspiration and one object of the life. One must be ready to renounce all these completely as soon as the demand comes from above and from the divine Shakti. (2) A fundamental calm, peace and purity in the mind, vital being and all the nature. The hours of meditation should... psychic and vital worlds. But his mind was unprepared and unable to understand his experiences and judged them by the light of fancy and imagination, and erroneous mental and vital suggestions. His vital being full of rajasic and egoistic energy rushed up violently to enjoy these new fields and use the force that was working for its own lower ends. This gave an opportunity for the hostile power from the ...
... also, mind cannot be transformed unless the Vital Being is transformed. And if the Vital Being is not transformed nothing can be realized ; because it is (he Vital Being that realizes. So if the mind is only partially changed and if the Vital Being is open and also partially changed it is not sufficient for our purpose. Because the whole range of the Vital Being cannot be done unless the Physical Being... other justifications and thus they try to deceive the sadhaka under various guises. Generally, the vital being is very impatient and wants to get things done quickly on the physico-vital and physical planes. But this has very violent reactions and therefore the mental and the vital being, instead of seizing upon the Higher Light and Power, should surrender themselves to the higher Power. We... into the vital being and into the physical being, so that the supreme calm and universality will be there in all its fullness from top to bottom. If this cannot be done then the first condition of transformation is not fulfilled. Second thing we have to know and remember is that nothing is perfectly done unless all is perfectly done. It is not sufficient to open the Mind and the Vital Being and leave ...
... psychic and vital worlds. But his mind was unprepared and unable to understand his experiences and judged them by the light of fancy and imagination and erroneous mental and vital suggestions. His vital being full of rajasic Page 335 and egoistic energy rushed up violently to enjoy these new fields and use the force that was working for its own lower ends. This gave an opportunity for a hostile... psychic levels. It must be brought down into the vital and fill it, because it is in the vital that there is the attack. Further, nobody must go out of his body during the meditation (I mean the vital being must not go out, the mental can always do it) or psychically out of the circle. But there is one thing that must be noticed. That if the manifestations occur in spite of all there must be no fear... that the hostile beings prevent the Sadhaka from crossing over the threshold between the physical and vital world and it is also by creating fear and alarm that they are able to break in on the vital being of the body. Courage and unalterable confidence are the first necessity of the Sadhaka. I observe that in your Calcutta centre the Sadhana seems to have taken a different turn from that in the ...
... return to Ignorance comes because of the memory of the past, or because of the physical being throwing up its impurities, or the vital being throwing its impurities upon it. Therefore, in dealing with! the nervous impurities you have to see from where they come. If the vital being is sincere then the return in the nervous being comes from the physical being. 941926 The question of drinking... there was a time when I had to give up the idea of doing this work in my lifetime. There was a great push in the vital being trying to do the thing very soon. Then I had to learn to give up all those ideas and leave it to God to do whatever He likes, Page 100 The vital being is easily elated and the physical being is depressed. I too had periods of depression, but at no time I lost... and generally has an ego-centric nature. Even Ravana was a great yogi. One having a great control over the vital plane only is generally known as a Rakshasa, The Asura controls his mind and his vital being. There is a great possibility of committing a blunder in the Dattatraya path. Disciple : In the Avadhuta Gita, attributed to Datta, great stress is laid on vairagya, renunciation of the ...
... vital powers mistaken for gods ? Sri Aurobindo : They represent themselves so to the vital being and it is easy to mistake them for true gods, because the vital being in man lends itself easily to such deceptions. The second reason is that they satisfy, or promise to satisfy, desires of the vital being of man, or if there is vanity they pander to it. Disciple : In that case it seems that... says to the Truth “Satisfy my judgment and my opinions." It demands that the truth should cast itself in mental forms. The vital being insists that the truth should throw itself into its own movement of force. The vital being pulls at the higher Power; it pulls at the vital being of the Guru. Both the mind and the vital beings have got an arrière pensèe – a mental reservation in their surrender... the vital transfer itself to the physical ? Sri Aurobindo : Yes, an injury to the vital easily goes through to the physical. Disciple : Can the vital being get fatigued ? Sri Aurobindo : Generally the vital being does not get fatigued, if you can draw the force from the Universal vital or from Above. Disciple : They say that certain substances like incense, and ...
... psychic and vital worlds. But his mind was unprepared and unable to understand his experiences and judged them by the light of fancy and imagination, and erroneous mental and vital suggestions. His vital being full of rajasic and egoistic energy rushed up violently to enjoy these new fields and use the force that was working for its own lower ends. This gave an opportunity for the hostile power from the... mental or psychic levels. It must be brought down in the vital and fill it, because it is in the vital that there is attack. Further nobody must go out of his body during the meditation (I mean the vital being must not go out, the mental can always do it) or psychically out of the circle. But there is one thing that must be noticed. That if the manifestations occur in spite of all there must be no fear... that the hostile beings prevent the Sadhaka from crossing over the threshold between the physical and vital world and it is also by creating fear and alarm that they are able to break in on the vital being of the body. Courage and unalterable confidence are the first necessity of the Sadhaks. I observe that in your Calcutta Centre the Sadhana seems to have taken a different turn from that in the ...
... Truth, "Satisfy my judgment and my opinion"; it demands that the Truth cast itself in the mind's own forms. The vital being also insists on the Truth to throw itself into its own movement of force. The vital being pulls at the Higher Power and pulls and pulls at the vital being of the Guru. Both of them (the mental and the vital) have got an arrière pensée (mental reservation) in their... itself felt on the mental or the vital being, and forces them — compels them — to change. But if it is weak, the other parts take advantage of it and use the psychic sadness to their own advantage. In some cases the psychic being comes up to the surface and upsets the mental or the vital being and throws everything into disorder. But if the mind Or the vital being is stronger than the psychic,... therefore it can also receive truly. Thirdly, when the psychic being comes to the surface, it feels sad when the mental or the vital being is making a fool of itself. That sadness is purity offended. When the mind is playing its own game or when the vital being is carried away by its own impulses, it is the psychic being which says, "I don't want these things; what am I here for after all ...
... personal reference by the Mother to the vital being occurred when I wondered to her what had held me on to her through so many distracting vicissitudes of my career and despite such a multitude of frailties in me. She said: "Your vital being." I was quite taken by surprise. I said: "I thought it was my mind which kept in me some Godward balance." My vital being had always struck me as a part full of... It was quite fitting that the vital being was the vehicle of my visit. For it is through this component of the soul's many-aspected manifestation that the soul's emotion gets most effectively conveyed. Transposed to spiritual values its movement has been made most memorable to me by some words of the Mother. She once told me that the surrender of the vital being to the Divine is the most glorious... rather than by thought-out practice. And it was the vital being that reacted in two different ways. What the Mother communicated by those words which baffled one who was wont to take himself as predominantly a mental person was the fact that, once having found in the depths of me the sense of the Divine in Sri Aurobindo and her, the vital being refused to go under when its own pull towards outer ...
... have to be thrown in the fire of aspiration burning in the true vital being. It [ the illumined vital ] is in contact with the Divine Power or the higher Truth and seeks to transform itself and become a true instrument—it rejects the ordinary vital movements. Parts of the Vital Being There are four parts of the vital being—first, the mental vital which gives a mental expression by thought... Chapter VII The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness The Vital Mind and vital are two different processes of one consciousness. It [ vital ] means prāṇa —it is the life-force and desire-force in a man and the part of the being that responds to desire and is the instrument of the life-forces. The True Vital Being and Consciousness There is behind all the... the vital nature in man his true vital being concealed and immobile which is quite different from the surface vital nature. The surface vital is narrow, ignorant, limited, full of obscure desires, passions, cravings, revolts, pleasures and pains, transient joys and griefs, exultations and depressions. The true vital being on the contrary is wide, vast, calm, strong, without limitations, firm and immovable ...
... The Vital Being and Sadhana Letters on Yoga - IV Chapter IV The Lower Vital Being The Decisive Ordeal of This Yoga The cardinal defect, that which has been always standing in the way and is now isolated in an extreme prominence, is seated or at least is at present concentrated in the lower vital being. I mean that part of the vital-physical nature... in the higher mind, the psychic self or the higher and larger vital nature; for when the lower vital rises, these are pushed into the background, if not covered over for the time, by this lower vital being and this external personality. Whatever there may be in these higher parts, aspiration to the Truth, devotion or will to conquer the obstacles and the hostile forces, it cannot become integral, it... true and radical change in the law of the external nature. If, then, any sadhaka refuses in practice to admit this change, or if he refuses even to admit the necessity for any change of his lower vital being and his habitual external personality, I am entitled to conclude that, whatever his professions, he has not accepted either myself or my Yoga. I am well aware that this change is not easy; the ...
... Have you experienced the separate existence of the vital being ? V : Yes, I have. Sri Aurobindo : How did you know that it was the vital being ? V : Because I am able to see desires and impulses that come in it. Sri Aurobindo : That you can see even with the mind; have you experienced the existence of the vital being separate from the mind ? V : Yes, Seven or eight... that way. Disciple : Why is the presence of the higher Power not felt in the vital being ? Sri Aurobindo : Because the physico-vital is not yet completely taken possession of by the higher Power. The physico-vital is a very thick layer and when you work it out once, it again covers up the vital being and, for the time being, tries to appear as the whole movement in the vital. Disciple... influence of this Yoga exclusively. Disciple : What should be the Sadhaka's attitude with regard to physical illness? Sri Aurobindo : He must first of all remain completely detached in the vital being and in the mind. The illness is the result of the working of the forces of Nature. He must use his will to reject the illness and one's will must be used as a representative of the Divine Will. When ...
... Truth, "Satisfy my judgment, and my opinion"; it demands the Truth to cast itself in the mind's own forms. The vital being also insists on the Truth throwing itself into its own vital movement of force. The vital being pulls at the Higher Power and pulls and pulls at the vital being of the Guru. Both of them (the mental and the vital) have got an arrière pensée (mental reservation) in their... the mental or the vital being, and forces them to change. But if it is weak, the other parts take advantage of it and use the psychic for their own advantage. In some cases it comes up to the surface and upsets the mental and the vital being and throws all their settled arrangements and habits into disorder, pressing for a new and divine order. But if the mind or the vital being is stronger than... therefore it can also receive truly. When the psychic being comes to the surface it feels sad if it sees that the mental or the vital being is making a fool of itself. That sadness is purity offended. When the mind is playing its own game, or when the vital being is carried away by its impulses, it is the psychic being which says, "I don't want these things." "What am I here for after all?" "I ...
... December 8, 1916 This was our conversation today morning, O Lord: Thou didst wake up the vital being with the magic wand of Thy impulsion and say to it: "Awake, bend the bow of thy will, for soon the hour of action will come." Suddenly awakened, the vital being rose up, stretched itself and shook off the dust of its long torpidity; from the elasticity of its members it realised... of the whole being's concentrating on it and making it its purpose of existence. The vital being delights in adventure; but should it be allowed to fling Page 324 itself into some lamentable adventure unworthy of an instrument conscious of Thy Presence?"—"Fear nothing," was the reply. "The vital being will not be allowed to set itself in motion, it will not be asked of thee to contribute... I have the power of organising what the vital being has the capacity to realise?"—"It is to prepare thee for this that I am working at the moment; this is why thou art undergoing a discipline of plasticity Page 325 and enrichment. Do not worry about anything: power comes with the need. Not because thou hast been confined, even as the vital being, to very small activities at a time when ...
... soul—what we call soul, I mean the psychic being—it is the vital being. When the vital being leaves the body for whatever reason, the body dies or death cuts off the vital being from the body… So it is in the see of animating, that is, giving life. Is this the “vital desire-soul”, Sweet Mother? Yes, the vital soul is full of desires. The vital being is full of desires. It is built of desires. The... influence by its resistance. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness The nervous part of the being is a portion of the vital—it is the vital physical, the life-force closely enmeshed in the reactions, desires, needs, sensations of the body. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness ... one wants to open to the delight of existence, in a total beauty and harmony. This brings us quite naturally to vital austerity, the austerity of the sensations, the tapasya of power. For the vital being is the seat of power, of effective enthusiasm. It is in the vital that thought is transformed into will and becomes a dynamism for action. It is also true that the vital is the seat of desires and ...
... waking mind is not free. Once the vital being has come forward and shown its difficulty—there is nobody who has not one crucial difficulty or another there—it must be dealt with and conquered. It must be dealt with not by the mind but directly by the supramental power. Not peace and knowledge in the mind, but peace, faith, calm strength in the vital being itself (and especially in this part... The Vital Being and Sadhana Letters on Yoga - IV Chapter II The Vital and Other Levels of Being The Spirit and the Vital The Spirit itself if it wants to manifest in matter must use the vital. It is so that things are arranged. The Higher Consciousness and the Vital The two movements whose apparent contradiction confuses your mind, are the two... consciousness whose motions, now separated from each other, must join if the life-power is to have its more and more perfect action and fulfilment or the transformation for which we hope. The vital being with the life-force in it is one of these ends; the other is a latent dynamic power of the higher consciousness through which the Divine Truth can act, take hold of the vital and its life-force and ...
... revolts or collapses. The demands of physical health are often in clash with the demands of the vital being. Again, the demands of the vital being are in conflict with the demands of the mind when it wants to pursue the purity of thought and knowledge and the purity of its ideals. Often the vital being tends to make the mental being the advocate of its desires and ambitions by means of rationalisation... ation. At the same time, the pure pursuits of the mind succeed sometimes in obliging the vital being to make sacrifices, but the resultant condition is often that of disequilibrium. Still, again, the triangular disposition of the mind in its pursuit of rationality, ethicality and aesthetics is itself a complex of battle and disequilibrium. The pursuit of the truth through the channel of rationality... fulfil. Thus, each aspect of our being has its corresponding values: the values that the physical being seeks are those of health and harmony of physical beauty; the values of the development of the vital being at its highest are courage and heroism; the values of the mental being are those of clarity, impartiality and synthesis. The values of ethical being are those of goodwill and disinterested action ...
... instruments for the manifestation of the nature. In most men the soul is hidden and covered over by the action of the external nature; they mistake the vital being for the soul, because it is the vital which animates and moves the body. But this vital being is a thing made up of desires and executive forces good and bad; it is the desire-soul, not the true thing. It is when the true soul (psyche) comes... many different senses in the English language. More often than not in ordinary parlance no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire—the false soul or desire-soul—is intended by the words "soul" and "psychic" and not the true soul, the psychic being. The psychic being is quite different from the mind or vital; it stands... nce above the individual and cosmos and it is then called the Paramatma, the supreme Divine Being. This distinction has nothing to do with the distinction between the psychic and the vital; the vital being is not what is known as the Atma. The vital as the desire-soul and desire-nature controls the consciousness to a large extent in most men because men are governed by desire. But even in the surface ...
... al and other justifications and thus try to deceive the sadhaka under various guises. "Generally, the vital being is very impatient and wants to get things done quickly, on the physico-vital and physical planes. But this has very violent reactions and therefore the mental and the vital being, instead of seizing upon the higher light and power, should surrender themselves to the higher Power. We... said: "What I find is that it is not necessary to have a full and rich development of the mental and vital being for the descent of the Supermind. It is enough if there is sufficient basis to start the higher working. If you have to wait for the full development of the mental and the vital being then it would require centuries. I do not think it necessary. Rather, too much development is an obstacle... true. Even then I was not sure that it would work out successfully. Anyway, I wanted to give it a trial and so I gave it to Motilal. He took up the idea and, as you know, he took it up with all his vital being and in an egoistic way and so the vital forces found their chance. They tried to take possession of the work. As I told you it is only after several such lessons that I had to give up the idea of ...
... the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives and may survive very long the disruption of the vital being. This vital being is next in the rung to be taken up, organised and individualised by and around the psychic being. Page 179 The organisation of the vital being in view of a particular object or aim in ordinary life is common enough: the purpose is limited, the scope... ion and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed... possesses no individual character. His mind is a conglomeration of thoughts and ideas which do not particularly belong to him, but to everybody, being elements of the world-mind in general. His vital being too is a medley of desires, impulses, energies that are not personal in any sense, but pass through him or take a long or short-term asylum in him from the universal vital force. The body, being ...
... to punish the body for the faults of the vital being or of the mind was to punish John for Jack. Page 220 Sri Aurobindo : One may differ on that point too. To consider as if the body, the vital and the mind were so cut off from each other as not to have any mutual reaction is not true. So the physical can react on the vital being. Disciple : But the physical being... from the mixture – mental as well as vital. It would be quite another matter if one could keep the mind completely passive. But, evidently, that is impossible. The mind enters so much and also the vital being – they are both great and active creators. Disciple : But what you see on the vital plane – in that state – is it true ? , Sri Aurobindo : Again, what do you mean by "true”? Something... accept all the planes of life and manifest the higher consciousness in life. (There was mention of "rich development" of sadhana) Sri Aurobindo : A well-trained intellect and a strong vital being are a great hindrance as well as a great help in this yoga. They are helpful because they render the Page 183 being wide, and allow the higher activity easily. For instance, if ...
... the words. In most religions, and perhaps in most philosophies also, it is the vital being which is called “soul”, for it is said that “the soul leaves the body”, while it is the vital being which leaves the body. One speaks of “saving the soul”, “wicked souls”, “redeeming the soul”… but all that applies to the vital being, for the psychic being has no need to be saved! It does not share the faults of... instruments for the manifestation of the nature. In most men the soul is hidden and covered over by the action of the external nature; they mistake the vital being for the soul, because it is the vital which animates and moves the body. But this vital being is a thing made up of desires and executive forces good and bad; it is the desire-soul, not the true thing. It is when the true soul (psyche) comes... many different senses in the English language. More often than not in ordinary parlance no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire—the false soul or desire-soul—is intended by the words “soul” and “psychic” and not the true soul, the psychic being. The psychic being is quite different from the mind or vital; it stands ...
... says to the Truth: "Satisfy my judgment and my opinions." It demands that the Truth should cast itself in mental forms. The vital being insists that the Truth should throw itself into its own movement of force. The vital being pulls at the Higher Power; it pulls at the vital being of the Guru. Both the mind and the vital beings have got an arrière pensée — a mental reservation in their surrender. ... it gives itself up truly it receives also truly. When the psychic being comes to the surface it feels sad when the mental or the vital being is making a fool of itself. That sadness is purity offended. When the mind is playing its own game, or when the vital being is carried away by its impulses, it is the psychic being which says: "I do not want these things; what am I here for, after all? I am... Sri Aurobindo: Firstly, when the psychic awakens you grow conscious of your own soul, you know your true being. You no longer commit the mistake of identifying yourself with the mental or the vital being, you do not mistake them for the soul. Secondly, when it is awakened, the psychic being gives the sadhak the true Bhakti for God or for the Guru. That devotion is quite different from mental and ...
... the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives and may survive very long the disruption of the vital being. This vital being is next in the rung to be taken up, organised and individualised by and around the psychic being. Page 297 The organisation of the vital. being in view of a particular object or aim in ordinary life is common enough: the purpose is limited, the scope... ion and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed... possesses no individual character. His mind is a conglomeration of thoughts and ideas which do not particularly belong to him, but to everybody, being elements of the world-mind in general. His vital being too is a medley of desires, impulses, energies that are not personal in any sense, but pass through him or take a long or short-term asylum in him from the universal vital force. The body, being ...
... of occult vision, saw that the vital being of 'A' was still hovering in his deserted room and searching for his clothes. (2)After leaving his body 'B' came to the Mother's chamber Page 43 in his subtle body and sat there in quiet repose. But as soon as his mortal remains were placed on the pyre for the purpose of fiery cremation, his vital being shuddered and vanished. ... entered his son's consciousness after breathing his last, and thus reached the Mother's chamber when the young man went to her to report about his father's demise. At the sight of the Mother the vital being of the 'dead' father left the son's body, took the form of a smiling babe and ran and jumped into the welcoming arms of the Mother. (7)'H' was an early Ashramite, a great scholar and a developed... close to Sri Aurobindo. When he passed away in 1965, different parts of his being went to different destinations: his mind went to Sri Aurobindo, the psychic being merged in the Mother, and his vital being remained behind to help his near and dear ones whom he had left at death. (8)'I' was a very advanced sadhaka. His being was completely integrated: all the parts of his nature were consciously ...
... But this need not be their invariable destiny. For, if a person has been able to integrate his vital being completely around his psychic being and if this vital being comes to be always governed by the psychic without the slightest reservation or resistance coming from it, this vital being need not be discarded after the body's death: it may be left intact in the universal vital world while... psychic travels to its own world, the psychic world. On its return journey to the earth for its next embodiment, the psychic may pick up this surviving vital being and carry it along to integrate it in the next physical body. For, as this developed vital being will remain always plastic to the touch or influence of the psychic being, it need not be rejected as something inert and ossified and therefore serving... times people used to recite sacred mantras or adopt some other occult rituals in order to hasten the separation of the subtle body from the 'dead' gross physical body. Even after this separation the vital being of the dead person may continue for some days to move around his accustomed room or house or the place of his work. And this period may be indefinitely lengthened if the bereaved relatives left behind ...
... true vital being now concealed within us. This implies not only the development of spiritual equality so that one becomes equal-soul to all things, unmoved by joy and sorrow, the pleasant and unpleasant, success or failure, but also the emergence of the Page 12 true vital being which is within us behind the veil of ignorance. According to the yogic psychology, there is a vital being, pranamaya... into life, in its true nature, — the vital being that is tranquil, strong, luminous, many-energied, obedient to the Divine Will, egoless, yet capable of all action, achievement, highest or largest enterprise. But there is a second condition, which also needs to be fulfilled. The pure vital being provides us the instrumentation of a divine life, but the vital being always needs a power that can govern... otherwise change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilize the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough; it must be the descent of the whole higher consciousness ...
... true vital being? Come out? What do you call coming out? You mean that first there was the true vital being and that this expresses itself in the physical nature, the earth nature, by the vital which we see? Yes! Mother, why is it so contradictory? Why is the external world so total a contradiction of the divine world? It is exactly the same thing. It is like that. The vital being, the... the true vital being which Sri Aurobindo describes, is the vital being which is in contact with the Divine, which is entirely surrendered to the Divine and is His instrument; whereas in the ordinary earth consciousness the vital being and also the physical being do not at all belong to the Divine, they think they belong to themselves, and the only thing that counts is their own little person; and that ...
... that a vital being has incarnated in them. I have known such cases. This may happen also in the course of an illness: someone is very ill and gradually he lets go of the contact with the psychic being, then, in a swoon or some other similar state, he cuts the contact entirely and the vital being rushes into the body. I have known cases of this kind also. Or it may be a slow action: the vital being enters... of the person, goes on influencing him and finally brings about illness, attacks, especially mental illness; then a time comes when the connection with the psychic being is entirely cut and the vital being takes possession of the body. There are cases of people falling very ill and coming out of the illness altogether different from what they were. Very often it is this that happens. You have said... spiritual force which can destroy them. For example, in a vital battle (there are people who have a vital fighting power), the experience is always the same: if you fight in the vital world with a vital being, you can crush it, kill it, but it will be reborn always—always they form themselves again. I think herein lies the origin of the legends of hydras or monsters with many heads. There is only one ...
... denied its native line of fulfilment; for behind this outer life soul of desire there is in us an inner and true vital being which has not to be dissolved but brought out into prominence and released to its true working as a power of the Divine Nature. The prominence of this true vital being under the lead of the true inmost soul within us is the condition for the divine fulfilment of the objects of the... appearance. It is when there is this death of desire and this calm equal wideness in the consciousness everywhere, that the true vital being within us comes out from the veil and reveals its own calm, intense and potent presence. For such is the true nature of the vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa ; it is a projection of the Divine Purusha into life,—tranquil, strong, luminous, many-energied, obedient to... living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive-power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in ...
... chosen him. 21 March 1934 Mother, if the thought, "What you do is always for my good", is firmly established in the mind, then won't the mind be able to influence the vital being? Certainly; but in return the vital being often influences the mind and creates doubts in it. 21 March 1934 This morning during pranam there was a psychic depression. The psychic is never depressed... minutes later I felt joyful, and so on for three hours. Then I understood the whole game and I rejected it by will-power and prayer. But I really don't understand this movement. Two parts of the vital being were struggling together, each one in turn getting the upper hand. Z told me that in the mental and vital worlds there are beings who are against the anti-divine entities and who help us. ... would like to know something about this flame of Agni. It is the flame of purification, the will for progress. 9 February 1935 Page 80 What You mean by "vital soul" is the vital being, I think. The vital soul is what the ancients called the "anima", that which animates, gives life to the body. It is also sometimes called the etheric being. 11 February 1935 The inner ...
... arise at this point in the readers' mind: Are there any specific psychological signs and symptoms by which the sadhaka may come to know that he is at any particular moment mainly dominated by his vital being? Let Sri Aurobindo answer this question: "In others it is the vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will, the action; then is created the vital man, concerned... upward aspiration and tapasya of the aspirant. But this is just a small list: the misdemeanours of the disturbed vital are simply legion. But we should not forget that this is one side of the vital being. The vital is not solely and exclusively negative in character. It possesses a very helpful positive side too. The problem is that, a strong dynamism being its essential virtue, the vital may equally... life-affirmation, the same force of action and fulfilment." (The Life Divine, p. 623) The Mother also has on her part spoken on many different occasions about the protean behaviour of man's vital being. The following passage is an adapted version of what she said in one of per class talks of 1953: Page 287 "... this vital is a curious creature. It is a being of passion ...
... Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 1 The Vital Being It is said that we must be quiet, vigilant and conscious even in our vital being. What does this mean? It means to observe the vital movements, and not allow them to catch hold of you or force you into action, not to be careless and let them come in you — not to let the vital get... hand it may be due to some part of the being getting discouraged or fatigued or unwilling to follow the movement either of work or sadhana. If it is something Page 47 in the vital being, it may hide itself so as not to be exposed or cleared; if a part of the physical, it may be simply dumb and obscure, unable to express itself. Finally it may come up from the subconscient. These... If you want the Mother's contact always, you must get rid of depression and the mental imaginations that bring it. Nothing comes more in the way than that. Why does our vital being desire outer and superficial things from the Mother instead of Ananda, Light, Force? It is the small physical vital that desires and wants to deal in the same way with these things as ...
... of the vital being and the heart. Likewise vitalism stands over against materialism, and idealism or romanticism over against realism and naturalism. Bergson contra Haeckel, Paul Verlaine contra Guy de Maupassant and Théophile Gautier. But it does not mean that we shall arrive at the true universal literature if we solely cling to idealism, the vital being or emotion. True, the vital being is ... Page 53 above the body, and the creation has been extended and liberated to a great extent in it, but the universal is not met even here. The vital being is the second bondage of man. The poetry that has been created or based exclusively on the vital or the emotional stuff is clumsy and disorderly. There we find too much of the personality, the idiosyncrasy and fancy of the particular... steady purity and wideness of thought. It is not possible for lawlessness, impurity, strife and narrowness to exist in the domain of thought in the same measure as it is possible in that of the vital being and the emotions. When we ascend to this domain we find a natural indifference or aloofness; we find a poise in a wider and freer world overriding the boundaries of an ignorant ego and a bounded ...
... In the mind, there is a surface mind, the ego and so on, and the subliminal Page 215 self. In the life also, there is an outer vital personality and an inner vital being, you can say, a subliminal vital being. There is a subtle physical body behind this gross physical body. Desire-soul is the projection of the psychic being in this world of ignorance—in the mind, life and body. When... being. There is a want of harmony between various instruments of his own nature. The force in him is divided. Mind wants to do something, while the emotional being goes in another direction, the vital being pulls in a third direction. So the whole force of man's consciousness is divided. The consciousness is divided and force is divided. There is not a sort of harmony in the operation of the consciousness... t of the Page 214 self of man, not mind, life or body. The mental being in man is not his true being. Mind is his instrument. The true human being is- not the life-being or the vital-being in man. The true human being is not the body or force at work in the physical being. The true human being is a psychic being which uses mind, life and body as its instruments and is itself a projection ...
... Necessarily, the resistance in the vital being and the body, based on all their past habits, cannot be overcome in a day. In his case, it is probable that the mental has reached the point where the surrender can be made, but the vital puruṣa still refuses. If he can become conscious in his sadhana not only of the resistance on the surface but of the vital being behind in its entirety, separately... impossible. He would have to turn his back on all the old interests and pursuits and the sympathy and support of those now around him and undertake a most difficult effort and discipline which his vital being might find painful and distasteful to it. It is better if he considers long before asking for this Yoga and make sure that he has really an irresistible call. 1 January 1930 He can come in... of the mental being and mental nature opening to the Light and to some touch of a higher Ananda, with a basis of calm—the indispensable basis. This movement should continue till the heart and the vital being and vital nature also open. It is not necessary for him to make a special effort for these things. If he keeps concentrated and open and maintains his faith and the remembrance of the Mother, they ...
... all through their life, unless they are converted, which is not easy. There is a sort of association between the physical and the psychic and between the mental and the vital being. A mental being is very often a very vital being. A psychic being is very often a physical being. Children—just because this psychic consciousness is in front in them—live also altogether in their body. But as soon as one... them as weaknesses, for they curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of strength. As always, the mind, when insufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand. When the mind awakens to the awareness of the first psychic movements... and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, "Oh! he has a living soul"; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely ...
... action and fulfilment. This character of vital being and its trend of existence in which what we term good and evil are items but not the mainspring, is evident in subhuman life; in the human being, since there a mental, moral and psychic discernment has developed, it is subjected to control or to camouflage, but it does not change its character. The vital being and its life-force and their drive towards... which is not-self to it, comes into prominence and assumes an immense importance. It is here that the surface vital personality or life-self asserts its dominance, and this dominance of the ignorant vital being is a principal active source of discord and disharmony, a cause of inner and outer perturbations of the life, a mainspring of wrong-doing and evil. The natural vital element in us, in so far as it... other life-formations: the principle is the same whatever the means or the moral attitude. It is not only in the realm of interests, but in the realm of ideas and the realm of religion that the vital being of man has introduced this spirit and attitude of self-affirmation and struggle and the use of violence, oppression and suppression, intolerance, aggression; it has imposed the principle of life-egoism ...
... man who started Bahaism ? Disciple : I do not know, but it was Baha Ullah perhaps who started it. Sri Aurobindo : It seems he was an ignorant man in the beginning, but had a sort of vital being which received Page 245 the Light – perhaps, not from the very Highest but merit light and it is with that force that he created Bahais He used to see the Light descend on him... man's curse should prove true for a nation ? Sri Aurobindo : There is no reason why it should not. Do you think that one can't curse anybody? Especially if there is a strong support of a vital being it would be effective. Disciple : In that case the whole nation may be destroyed. Sri Aurobindo : It may be destroyed, if that is destined. He cursed in the same way as Mad did... is the conscious use on both the sides of a power which is unconsciously possessed by most men – the power to project oneself. In this case there seems to be active the power to project even the vital being, which is not usual. There was the capacity to receive on one side and conscious effort on the other. Disciple : I had talk with a North Indian Disciple who seems to think that a yogi who ...
... literature in the reign of Augustus Caesar, was sitting between the two poets and said, "I am sitting between sighs and tears." (Laughter) To get back to Becharlal's question: one offers one's vital being, one's heart and one's mind to the Divine, rejecting all desires, attachments, passions, and grows into the Divine's consciousness. DR. BECHARLAL: Are day-hours better than night-hours for meditation... long time in meditation? SRI AUROBINDO: Not just by sitting like that; but if one keeps awake too much at night, there is the chance of a physical disturbance. The physical has its limits. The vital being can go on feeling energy or peace or any other thing, but the physical can't be taxed beyond its capacity. The overtaxing happened to many sadhaks here. Dr. Manilal once felt such a flow of energy... but a going deep within. If one can draw the Force with equanimity and conserve it, wonderful things can be done. As I said, many sadhaks felt extraordinary energy when we were dealing with the vital being. But afterwards the sadhana came down into the physical, there was not that push any more and people began to get easily fatigued, feel lazy and unwilling to work. They began to complain of ill-health ...
... Satyagraha or non-violence. He thinks that men get purified by it. But when men suffer, or subject them- selves to voluntarily suffering, what happens is that their vital being gets strengthened. These movements affect the vital being only and not any other part. Now, when you cannot oppose the force that oppresses, you say that you will suffer. That suffering is vital and it gives strength. When the... nation gets freedom by the suffering of its leaders and other Page 57 men, it oppresses other nations in its turn. It is almost always the case with those who suppress their vital being. It allows the pressure on itself, gets strong and then finds vent in some other direction. The same thing happened to the Puritans in England. Cromwell and his men came to power and became the worst... different from "compassion" and both are different from Samata – equality. Samata is an attitude of the whole being. Pity and sentimentalism are results of nervous repulsion, some movement in the vital being. I myself, when I was young, could not read anything related to cruelty without feeling that repulsion and a feeling of hatred for those who practised it. I could not kill an insect, say, a bug or ...
... difficulty in the way with almost everybody is the difficulty of controlling the desires and impulses of the vital being. In many cases as in yours, certain strong impulses run persistently counter to the ideal and demand of the reason and the will-The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind... future. I shall answer briefly the questions you put in your second paragraph. (1) The way to set yourself right is, as I have said, to set your nature right and make yourself master of your vital being and its impulses. (2) Your position in human society is or can be that of many others who in their early life have committed excesses of various kinds and have afterwards achieved self-control and... the mind and the nerves and a collapse taking the form of an acute attack of neurasthenia. These difficulties do not mean that you cannot prevail and bring about a control of your nervous and vital being and build up a harmony of mind and character. Only you must understand the thing rightly, not indulging false and morbid ideas about it and you must use the right means. What is needed is a quiet ...
... there will be a complete faithfulness to the Divine. (Fivefold psychological perfection: faith, sincerity, devotion, aspiration, surrender.) 24.9.1929 Open with devotion your vital being to Radha's influence and you will get vital peace , the peace which leads to transformation . 25.9.1929 Through peace in the vital, aspire for the beginning of realisation . (Peace... for integral and absolute loving consecration by which will be established faithfulness and purity, the forerunners of transformation . 29.9.1929 With simple sincerity offer your vital being to the Divine and the realisation will begin. 2.10.1929 To an aspiration for the Divine Love , supported by faithfulness and sincerity in the vital , the Divine's Love will surely... faith in this silence; then only can power descend and bring mastery over the things of the earth . 8.10.1929 Aspiration and faithful devotion firmly established in a peaceful vital being and crowned by a simple sincerity —are some of the most essential conditions for a beginning of realisation . 9.10.1929 Only to those who have a true humility will power be given ...
... n and openness of the vital being on Page 853 the surface would alone make possible a similar survival of the life-part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the inner life-being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen then is that the wall between the inner self and the outer man would have broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental... persistence. The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what... secret justice of Nature. This collocation is evidently made from the view-point of a common vital-physical desire in our members: because happiness and good fortune are what the lower part of our vital being most desires, misfortune and suffering what it most hates and dreads, it proceeds, when it accepts the moral demand upon it for the curbing of its propensities, for self-restraint from doing evil ...
... difficulty in the way with almost everybody is the difficulty of controlling the desires and impulses of the vital being. In many cases as in yours, certain strong impulses run persistently counter to the ideal and demand of the reason and the will. The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind... otherwise in future. I shall answer briefly the questions you put in your second para. (1) The way to set yourself right is, as I have said, to set your nature right and make yourself master of your vital being and its impulses. (2) Your position in human society is or can be that of many others who in their early life have committed excesses of various kinds and have afterwards achieved self-control ... of the mind and the nerves and a collapse taking the form of an acute attack of neurasthenia. These difficulties do not mean that you cannot prevail and bring about a control of your nerves and vital being and build up a harmony of mind and character. Only you must understand the thing rightly, not indulging in false and morbid ideas about it and you must use the right means. What is needed is a quiet ...
... have to conquer if we mean to get back to the true self" [ p. 350 ]. It means the life-energy which comes from within and is in consonance with the psychic being—it is the energy of the true vital being, but in the ordinary ignorant vital it is deformed into desire. You have to quiet and purify the vital and let the true vital emerge. Or you have to bring the psychic in front, and the psychic will... recurrence or repetition of the same suggestions, impulses (subconscient vital) or sensations. There is a recognisable difference between the two functionings. 26 October 1935 "The true vital being ... is wide, vast, calm, strong, without limitations, firm and immovable, capable of all power, all knowledge, all Ananda" [p. 13]. Does this imply that the true vital belongs to the cosmic or s... cease with the body" [pp. 16-17]. Does this mean that it is carried by the psychic as a separate principle after death, just as the psychic sometimes carries with it a highly developed mental or vital being, or does it mean that it is taken up in the psychic as a seed-saṁskāra or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state? Page 128 It is only meant that the separative ...
... yourself into your normal physical consciousness." Questions and Answers 1929 ( 12 May ) What becomes of the vital being after death? It is dissolved. Rarely does it happen otherwise. But if you have had a very strong passion, if you were divided by fixed impulses, the vital being would break up into small pieces. Instead of going off like a vapour or a liquid, it goes off by little bits. Each... and generally do happen. When, for some reason or other, you do not agree with someone—if there is a conflict of interests, if there has been a quarrel—there is a tendency to say of him, "He is a vital being." One ought to mistrust oneself first, and afterwards what the other says. There is another case, still more interesting: I knew two persons at least who were not only under the vital influence but... let yourself go if it is an enemy, be on your guard, have great patience. And afterwards you don't pay any attention to what this man does or does not do to you. Only those who possess a perfected vital being and are completely disinterested can tell you, "This person or that one is a dangerous being." "The human being is at home and safe in the material body; the body is his protection. There are ...
... soul, I mean the psychic being—it is the vital being. When the vital being leaves the body for whatever reason, the body dies or death cuts off the Page 355 vital being from the body... So it is in the sense of animating, that is, giving life. Is this the "vital desire-soul", Sweet Mother? Yes, the vital soul is full of desires. The vital being is full of desires. It is built of desires... only in conformity with what can lead you to the divine realisation, if you abolish in yourself all desires and impulses turned towards external things, if you calm your mental being, appease your vital being, if you shut yourself against suggestions coming from outside and become immune to the action of people surrounding you, you create such a spiritual atmosphere that nothing can touch it, and it ...
... There is behind all the vital nature in man his true vital being concealed and immobile which is quite different from the surface vital nature. The surface vital is narrow, ignorant, limited, full of obscure desires, passions, cravings, revolts, pleasures and pains, transient joys and griefs, exultations and depressions. The true vital being on the contrary is wide, vast, calm, strong, without l... the surface in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge. Sri Aurobindo... without ego, for it knows itself to be a projection and instrument of the Divine; it is the divine Warrior, pure and perfect; in it is an instrumental Force for all divine realisations. It is the true vital being that has become awake and come in front within you. In the same way there is too a true mental being, a true physical being. When these are manifest, then you are aware of a double existence in you; ...
... separation and that in the reality of your being we are always united. To think that if you leave your body you will come closer to me is a big mistake; for the vital being remains what it is, whether the body be alive or dead, and if the vital being is, during one's life, incapable of feeling the nearness, the deep intimacy, how Page 162 can one reasonably hope it will suddenly be able to do... passions, of cowardice, but also of heroism—to bridle it is to turn all this towards the divine Will and submit it to this Will. The vital being seeks only power—material possession and terrestrial power. This also is false. The higher part of the vital being, like the higher part of the mental being, aspires for the Divine and suffers when far from Him. Page 192 This desire... joy. My most beloved Mother, the idea of separation opens between You and me like a frightening abyss. I am not satisfied; from where does this dissatisfaction come? It is always the vital being which protests and complains. The psychic being works with perseverance and ardour to make the union an accomplished fact, but it never complains, and knows how to wait for the hour of realisations ...
... different levels: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, you have a mental being, you have a psychic being, you have many others and all possible intermediaries. But it is a little complicated, you might not understand. Suppose you were living a life of desire, passion and impulse: you live with your vital being dominant in you; but if you live with spiritual effort, with... ravishments of mind and sense, But miss the luminous answer of the soul. The soul, the psychic being is in direct touch with the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature. One may practice yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate Page 9 in all kinds of experiences in the vital:... environment and circumstances — the mental, the vital and the physical — that is born again: it is only the psychic being that passes from body to body. Logically then, neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives or recognise itself in the character or mode of life of this or that person. The psychic being alone can remember; and it is by becoming conscious of our psychic being that ...
... the trees live to a thousand years. Do such spirits go out of animals also and possess trees ? Not likely. A certain growth and organisation of the vital being is necessary to be able to persist after death. The vital being of an animal is too unformed and fluid, too bound to the body to continue as an independent entity. When an animal dies its vitality almost immediately disintegrates... life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment; it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the body and goes out; but it finds itself in unfamiliar and inhospitable surroundings, especially if there is no one, none among his friends and relatives upon earth, to help him in the proper... out, possessing a strong vitality. It is the sap, the element of water coursing in the substance of the tree, Page 36 that is to say, the support of its life-power, to which the vital being of the dead man is drawn as its physical support and shelter. There is no question of forced imprisonment and a desire to be freed. Are they not harmful, these spirits? In what way ...
... if the trees live up to a thousand years. Do such spirits go out of animals also and possess trees? Not likely. A certain growth and organisation of the vital being is necessary to be able to persist after death. The vital being of an animal is too unformed and fluid, too bound to the body to continue as an independent entity. When an animal dies its vitality almost immediately disintegrates... life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment, it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the body and goes out; but it finds itself in unfamiliar and inhospitable surroundings, especially if there is no one, none among his friends and relatives upon earth, to help him in the proper... friendly branches spread out, possessing a strong vitality. It is the sap, the elements of water coursing in the substance of the tree, that is to say, the support of its life-power, to which the vital being of the dead man is drawn as its physical support and shelter. There is no question of forced imprisonment and a desire to be freed. Are they not harmful, these spirits? In what way? ...
... greater Light. Mind is a passage, not a culmination. ( iii ) THE VITAL BEING "There are four parts of the vital being-first, the mental vital which gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital which is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow... One, P. 353-354 Page 153 human being, its divine part.'¹ " The soul, the psychic being is in direct touch yyj, the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind H vital being and the physical nature. "² "The psychic being has always been valid, consenting to the play of mind, physical and vital, experiencing everything through them in the ignorant mental, vital... the navel ;these are the layers of the higher vital presided over by the heart centre where is the emotional being with the psychic hidden behind it. From the navel downwards is the rest of the vital being containing several layers. From the bottom of the spine downward are the layers of the physical consciousness proper, the material, and below the feet is the subconscient which has also many levels ...
... The vital being will not be allowed to set itself in motion, it will not be asked of thee to contribute all the effort of thy organising faculties, except when the action proposed is vast and complete enough to fully and usefully employ all the qualities of the being. What exactly this action will be, thou wilt know when it comes to thee .... I also warn both thee and the vital being that the... no deeper: ... not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. Again, Mirra found in Japan "an atmosphere of tension and effort... nothing and, above all, I am nothing; and yet happiness, a calm, unmixed happiness ... has come to dwell in the house of this body. 22 The next day (8 December), Mirra has a serious dialogue vital being, and next the mind, respond to the call. But the mind observes that while there seems to be no limit to the range of movement of man's vital or his mind, his field of physical action alone is ...
... nervously, that is why these things come back. The true explanation of the vision you saw of dark dancing women is not the one you put upon it. The vaishnava bhajan is one that easily excites the vital being, and if there are people there of a low nature, all sorts of dark and low forces come in to feed upon the excitement. These are the women you saw; they had nothing to do with you or with sexual impulses... physical strength this will disappear. You say too that you cannot do things now that you were easily able to do before. But then you were keeping some kind of harmonious balance between the mind, the vital being and the body, and all were strong. Afterwards you went entirely into the vital and neglected and fatigued the body; you kept yourself up only by an abnormal vital concentration and excitement. Now... is from beginning to end a mass of almost insane nonsense. I understand from it that you have returned to your former delusions and the lies imposed by some Hostile Force on your mind and your vital being. You are once more determined to revolt against my orders, to disobey my written instructions, to disregard the plain meaning of my letters. You are determined to deceive yourself by reading into ...
... that a vital being has incarnated in them. I have known such cases. This may happen also in the course of an illness: someone is very ill and gradually he lets go of the contact with the psychic being, then, in a swoon or some other similar state, he cuts the contact entirely and the vital being rushes into the body. I have known cases of this kind also. Or it may be a slow action: the vital being enters... of the person, goes on influencing him and finally brings about illness, attacks, especially mental illness; then a time comes when the connection with the psychic being is entirely cut and the vital being takes possession of the body. There are cases of people falling very ill and coming out of the illness altogether different from what they were. Very often it is this that happens. You have said ...
... centre) which ranges from the heart level (emotional) to the centre below the navel (lower vital, sensational desire centre). These three mark the domain of the vital being. It is therefore Page 196 clear that it was your inner vital being which had this experience, and its intensity and vehemence was probably due to the whole vital (or most of it) being awake and sharing in it this time. The... the common experiences of an opening Yogic consciousness and they have to be understood, simply. Here it is the breaking up of the small surface vital into the largeness of the true or inner vital being which can at once open to the Higher Consciousness, its power, light and Ananda. There is also begun a similar breaking of the small physical mind and sense into the wideness of the inner physical... to take violent possession of the body. Nothing can be more dangerous than to allow this kind of loss of control and intrusion of an alien influence. In your present condition of ignorance, the vital being not yet sufficiently open, the psychic not yet sufficiently awake, a hostile power can easily intrude and pass itself off as the divine Force. Remember that no personality and no power is to be allowed ...
... which obscures and disfigures even this limited self-knowledge; our self-view is vitiated by the constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental structure... self-ignorance; it is only by going within and seeing these things at their source that we can get out of this obscurity and tangle. For a larger mental being is there within us, a larger inner vital being, even a larger inner subtle-physical being other than our surface body-consciousness, and by entering into this or becoming it, identifying ourselves with it, we can observe the springs of our thoughts... feelings, the sources and motives of our action, the operative energies that build up our surface personality. For we discover and can know the inner being that secretly thinks and perceives in us, the vital being that secretly Page 552 feels and acts upon life through us, the subtle-physical being that secretly receives and responds to the contacts of things through our body and its organs. Our ...
... parts of his being. And, secondly, it has a subconscient consciousness of its own in which it keeps with an obstinate fidelity the past habits and past nature of the mental Page 729 and vital being and which automatically opposes and obstructs any very great upward change or at least prevents it from becoming a radical transformation of the whole nature. It is evident that if we are to have... instrument necessary to the totality of our works and it is to be used, not neglected, hurt, suppressed or abolished. If it is imperfect, recalcitrant, obstinate, so are also the other members, the vital being, heart and mind and reason. It has like them to be changed and perfected and to undergo a transformation. As we must get ourselves a new life, new heart, new mind, so we have in a certain sense to... betraying the action by fatigue, incapacity, inaptitude or falsification. It will be able too to pour a full tide of the life-force into the body and conduct a large action and joy of the perfected vital being without that quarrel and disparity which is the relation of the normal life-instincts and life-impulses to the insufficient physical instrument they are obliged to use. And it will also be able to ...
... can alone transform and divinise not only the mind and the vital being but also the body. After another 12 years — in 1938 — there was, as certain words of the Mother seem to indicate, a momentous move onward. Before 1938 the Supermind had already been within Sri Aurobindo's body because it had descended into his mental and vital being and had been functioning in it. But now the Mother could see... see the Supermind descending into the most physical part of Sri Aurobindo and directly mingling with his outermost centre of consciousness rather than indirectly through his mental and vital being. But the problem was to fix it there, a permanent light in what we may pinpoint as the physical mind, so that an immediate and settled action of the Supramental Consciousness instead of a come-and-go of it... and reaches a power of the Infinite and the Eternal, so far unmanifested, which he names Supermind. Hence his Yoga is the Supramental Yoga: it brings into play the divine truth of the mind, the vital being, the body and asks the soul in us, whose instruments these are, to surrender itself wholly to the Supramental. Truth-Consciousness, God in His highest form, so that our whole self may ascend there ...
... communion; without exception, any individual vital being that hasn't been prepared by what might be called a sufficient mental foundation would be panic-stricken. All those poor people who get scared at the least little experience had better not dabble with this—they'd panic! But as it happens—through divine grace, you might say—my vital, the vital being of this present incarnation, was born free and... reorganization. 3 Page 35 The way they are now, of course, our bodies are rigid and heavy—it's unspeakable, actually; if it weren't for that we would never grow old. For instance, my vital being is more full of energy, and thus full of youth and power to grow, than when I was twenty. There's really no comparison. The power is INFINITELY greater... yet the body is going to pieces—it's really... was the idea: for a few beings to first attain, here in this physical world, a level of realization giving them the power to materialize a supramental being. I once told you I put a body on a vital being 7 —but I couldn't have made that body material; it would have been impossible: something is lacking. Something is lacking. Even if it were made visible, it would probably not be possible to make ...
... and instinct with the former. The Life Divine, p. 186 There are four parts of the vital being — first, the mental vital which gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise Page 62 to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital which is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred... plans or else to imagine big things, stories, adventures, great doings in which oneself is the hero or the creator. Letters on Yoga, pp. 334-35 The vital mind is that part of the vital being which builds, plans, imagines, arranges things and thoughts according to the life-pushes, desires, will to power or possession, will to action, Page 47 emotions, vital ego reactions... voluntary and purposive bounds, a service of the finite ever extending itself under the eye of infinity. The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, p. 53 (b) The Outer (Surface) Vital Being (Life-Nature) Life then 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 in ...
... e terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food-sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind-sheath or mental... offers as its reward and consequence. Another and greater outcome of this stage of social evolution is the emergence of high and luminous ideals which promise to raise man beyond the limits of the vital being, beyond his first social, economic and political needs and desires and out of their customary moulds and inspire an impulse of bold experiment with the communal life which opens a field of possibility... that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence ...
... obscures and disfigures even this limited self-knowledge; our self-view is vitiated by the constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, desire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental structure... self-ignorance; it is only by going within and seeing these things at their source that we can get out of this obscurity and tangle. For a larger mental being is there within us, a larger inner vital being, even a larger inner subtle-physical being other than our surface body-consciousness, and by entering into this or becoming it, identifying ourselves with it, we can observe the springs of our... the sources and motives of our action, the operative energies that build up our surface personality. For we discover and can know the inner being that secretly thinks and perceives in us, the vital being that secretly feels and acts upon life through us, the subtle-physical being that secretly receives and responds to the contacts of things through our body and its organs. Our surface thought, ...
... the vital being can also attain immortality, if it becomes similarly individualised and integrated and at the same time becomes open on the surface consciousness to the inner vital Purusha and to the progressive action of the Infinite. The wall between the inner Page 51 self and the outer individuality would have broken down. The immortality of the mental being and the vital being would... permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity would govern the life. The mental personality and the life-personality would then subsist without dissolution from birth to birth; they would be in this sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in their sense of identity. But the immortality of the mental and vital being would still not ...
... it is your body which separates you from me is sheer stupidity.... To think that if you leave your body you will come closer to me is a big mistake; for the vital being remains what it is, whether the body be alive or dead, and if the vital being is, during one's life, incapable of feeling the nearness, the deep intimacy, how can one reasonably hope it will suddenly be able to do so just because it has... (A. 15): "The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a passage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's composite nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-experience, a working out of what... of inner organisation is necessary for this [the] psychic being to be able to have memories in the way the mental being has them..." (CWM, Vol.9 , p. 216) "...neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives..." because it is not they which are bom again." (CWM, Vol. 15, p. 135) "Only when one is consciously identified with one's divine origin, can one in truth speak ...
... the total and definitive surrender to the Divine Force, it would itself take charge of the Yoga. This self-giving is made in my soul—my mind has accepted it, but there are certain points in the vital being which hinder the perfection of the gift and pull me down at times. But now, even these defections I see with an equal eye and offer to the Divine Force—the good movements and the bad, all are parts... on the surface. When the meditation becomes deep, my feet start aching. What kind of sensation do you have? At the same time like a pressure and a pulling out. Is it perhaps the vital being rising up to separate itself? It may be that, or possibly it is a modification which is generally produced when the divine force transforms gradually even the physical substance. This substance... my higher aspiration. It is impossible to practice yoga in life. Because the vital and physical parts of the mind have remained untouched. They must be opened. Mother told me that my vital being had been repressed. There is some truth in it. My education has been purely scientific and I had no artistic culture. I did not derive any help from art. I am far from clinging to conventional ideas ...
... th& individual vital being. Society, or any collective unit, however large, is only the larger ego for the individual. The relation of the vital being of man to the higher activities of collective life is one of opposition. In fact, the individual's vital being has to be subjected to discipline in order to maintain society. If the collective life presses too much the vital being of the individual ...
... Page 237 Questions and Answers Q: You gave the example of Rasputin, the Russian Monk; was he possessed by some vital being? A. I think it was not a case of mere possession but perhaps that of an incarnation of some vital being. It may be that of a vampire. Q: Is not the presence of a Divine Principle admitted in the past ? A. Yes. The admission of the... free. That is why whey can act independently of physical organism. And when they so act, we get what are called miraculous or occult phenomena. That is nothing else but the assertion of freedom of vital being and mental being, even when it is manifested in terms of matter. Life and mind, acting freely without depending upon instrumentation or organs that are provided by matter, produce what we call the... drink for the whole night and yet not get drunk. He remained conscious and normal which shows that the vital substance can impress itself upon the physical. There can be an intervention of a pure vital being, on the plane of matter. Even matter is made sufficiently plastic to manifest powers which are absolutely against the normal operation of its so-called laws. Take the third organisation of substance ...
... fervid excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for want of something better and tries to fulfil itself through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms in the direction of what is divine and luminous; but this has to be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As the psychic personality... point of being quite unregulated, than that of the physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain material poise and balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the element of the vital being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less status. A vigorous vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vital energies, but it is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint than... true and pure mental being, the Purusha; by similarly standing back from the life activities, Page 939 it is possible to realise oneself as the inner Self of life, the true and pure vital being, the Purusha; there is even a Self of body of which, by standing back from the body and its demands and activities and entering into a silence of the physical consciousness watching the action of ...
... Right which man creates,—because ethics is concerned with action of life and his dealing with his vital being and with his fellow-men and that is always his first preoccupation and his most tangible difficulty, and because here first and most pressingly the desires, interests, instincts of the vital being find themselves cast into a Page 402 sharp and very successful conflict with the ideal... it an imperative sanction of right and slips into the crude mass or superimposes on it, but still as a part of one common and equal code, the true things of the ethical ideal. It appeals to the vital being, his desires, hopes and fears, incites man to virtue by the hope of rewards and the dread of punishment, imitating in this device the method of his crude and fumbling social practice: for that, finding... finding its law and rule which, good or bad, it wishes to make imperative as supposing it to be at least the best calculated for the order and efficiency of the community, opposed by man's vital being, bribes and terrifies as well as influences, educates and persuades him to acceptance. Morality tells man, accommodating itself to his imperfection, mostly through the mouth of religion, that the moral ...
... The Vital Being and Sadhana Letters on Yoga - IV Chapter I The Nature of the Vital Living in the Vital Man is a mental being and cannot come from the vital, although part of him may live on the vital plane or rather in connection with it. Most men in fact live much in the vital and therefore when they practise sadhana it is first on the vital plane... imprinted in that part of the vital which is capable Page 104 of such compromises, some good will come out of this wrong movement. Put the Mother's notice henceforth at the door of your vital being, "No falsehood hereafter shall ever enter here", and station a sentry there to see that it is put into execution. You have to develop discrimination so that it becomes impossible for the vital... habits. People are here to change what is wrong in their nature so that they may do an effective sadhana. If you want to change, you must first resolutely get rid of the defects of your vital being, persevering steadily, however difficult it may be or however long it may take, calling in always the divine help and compelling yourself always to be entirely sincere. As for fitness and unfitness ...
... the words. In most religions, and perhaps in most philosophies also, it is the vital being which is called "soul", for it is said that "the soul leaves the body", while it is the vital being which leaves the body. One speaks of "saving the soul", "wicked souls", "redeeming the soul"... but all that applies to the vital being, for the psychic being has no need to be saved! It does not share the faults... different senses in the English language. More often than not, in ordinary parlance, no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire —the false soul or desire-soul—is intended by the words 'soul' and 'psychic' and not the true soul, the psychic being. The psychic being is quite different from the mind or vital; it stands ...
... There is behind all the vital nature in man his true vital being concealed and immobile which is quite different from the surface vital nature. The surface vital is narrow, ignorant, limited, full of obscure desires, passions, cravings, revolts, pleasures and pains, transient joys and griefs, exultations and depressions. The true vital being, on the contrary, is wide, vast, calm, strong, without... call in the light of the Divine Consciousness from above, to bring the psychic being to the front and kindle a flame of aspiration which will awaken spiritually the outer mind and set on fire the vital being, is the way out. * Yoga means union with the Divine - a union either transcendental (above the universe) or cosmic (universal) or individual or, as in our Yoga, all three together... without ego, for it knows itself to be a projection and instrument of the Divine: it is the divine Warrior, pure and perfect; in it is an instrumental Force for all divine realisations. It is the true vital being that has become awake and come in front within you. In the same way there is too a true mental being, a true physical being. When these are manifest, then you are aware of a double existence in you: ...
... sees and the consciousness that executes and formalises what we see. The one we call Soul, the other Nature." (Sri Aurobindo); see also* Purusha. prāṇamaya puruṣa —soul in life; the (true) vital being. the physical (being) —not the body alone, but the whole physical mind, vital, material nature. physical mind —See under mind . physical vital —the part of the vital that is turned... them up; from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements can surge up into dream or into the waking state. In the ordinary man the subconscient includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and the secret body-consciousness. It is not to be confused with the subliminal: the subconscient is a nether diminished consciousness, the subliminal is an inner consciousness... three Gunas or modes of Nature. Upanishads —a class of Hindu sacred writings, regarded as the source of the Vedanta philosophy. vairāgya —distaste, disgust for the world and life. the vital (being) —the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action and of all the play of possessive and other related instincts, such as anger, fear, greed, lust, etc. The ...
... revolts or collapses. The demands of physical health are often in clash with the demands of the vital being. Again, the demands of the vital being are in conflict with the demands of the mind when it wants to pursue the purity of thought and knowledge and the purity of its ideals. Often the vital being tends to make the mental being the advocate of its Page 207 desires and ambitions by... by means of rationalisation. At the same time, the pure pursuits of the mind succeed some times in obliging the vital being to make sacrifices, but the resultant condition is often that of disequilibrium. Still, again, the triangular disposition of the mind in its pursuit of rationality, ethicality and aesthetics is itself a complex of battle and disequilibrium. The pursuit of the truth through the ...
... abjaut X when he went wrong that a great and powerful vital being came for manifestation Page 277 X Gods and it was necessary for the organisation of the vital plane of X. What is meant by organisation of the vital plane ? Sri Aurobindo : To bring about a harmony on that plan for effectuation. The vital being is for effective realisation. Disciple : What... really a fall and it shows that the course of evolution for man is not to become an Asura. That is to say, the course of human evolution is not from the animal Page 267 to the vital being and then to the Asura. Asuric life is regarded as a fall for man. If you got converted Asuric nature then you lose the chance of your evolution. Disciple : How should one protect oneself... Diseases are movements of forces. Disciple : You said that some diseases feed on the vitality of man. Sri Aurobindo : It is not diseases that feed on man's vitality. It may be a vital being sucking up man's vitality and the result may be a disease. Disciple : What is the relation between these forces : the raksasa, and the piśächa and the pramatta ? Page 269 ...
... existence in the eight planes of consciousness, manifestly. Innocence has two meanings—sinlessness and ignorance. The psychic innocence is not an ignorant condition. An ordinary vital being or a hostile vital being driven into the Asrama atmosphere by some presence from above or other wise may at any time open to its own world and source in its darker aspects and then become the cause of much ... transform men against their will. 1 September 1935 If I want to hang myself, would you say, "I can't help him against his will"? If that were your will and not merely an impulse of the vital being, nobody could stop you. 2 September 1935 All who come here did not come with a conscious seeking for the Divine. It is without the mind knowing it the soul within that brought them here. In ...
... on different levels: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, you have a mental being, you have a psychic being, you have many others and all possible intermediaries. But it is a little complicated, you might not understand. Suppose you were living a life of desire, passion and impulse: you live with your vital being dominant in you; but if you live with spiritual effort, with great... these beings remain bound together. If you have not known how to unify yourself, then at the time of death all that is dispersed: each one returns to its domain. For example, with regard to the vital being, all your different desires will be separated and each one run towards its own realisation, quite independently, for the physical being will Page 133 no longer be there to hold them together ...
... instruments for the manifestation of the nature. In most men the soul is hidden and covered over by the action of the external nature; they mistake the vital being for the soul, because it is the vital which animates and moves the body. But this vital being is a thing made up of desires and executive forces, good and bad; it is the desire-soul, not the true thing. It is when the true soul (psyche) comes... evolution in Matter, which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death, but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly take for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being there is this duality; for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which provides ...
... CAPRICIOUS VITAL Let endurance be your watchword: teach the life-force in you—your vital being—not to complain but to put up with all the conditions necessary for great achievement. The body is a very enduring servant, it bears the stress of circumstance tamely like a beast of burden. It is the vital being that is always grumbling and uneasy. The slavery and torture to which it subjects the physical... flourish on the worship of their devotees, and that is why they are always inspiring new-cults and religions so that their feasts of worship and adulation may never come to an end. So also your own vital being and the vital forces behind it thrive—that is to say, fatten their ignorance—by absorbing the flatteries given by others. But you must remember that the compliments paid by creatures on the same ...
... Converted Vital Let endurance be your watchword: teach the life-force in you—your vital being—not to complain but to put up with all the conditions necessary for great achievement. The body is a very enduring servant, it bears the stress of circumstance tamely like a beast of burden. It is the vital being that is always grumbling and uneasy. The slavery and torture to which it subjects the physical... flourish on the worship of their devotees, and that is why they are always inspiring new cults and religions so that their feasts of worship and adulation may never come to an end. So also your own vital being and the vital forces behind it thrive—that is to say, fatten their ignorance—by absorbing the flatteries given by others. But you must remember that the compliments paid by creatures on the same ...
... consciousness whose motions, now separated from each other, must join if the life-power is to have its more and more perfect action and fulfilment or the transformation for which we hope. The vital being with the life-force in it is one of these ends; the other is a latent dynamic power of the higher consciousness through which the Divine Truth can act, take hold of the vital and its life-force and... for the vital, no less than the psychic and every other part of the being, has to feel the Divine Mother and give itself entirely to her. But this must always be remembered that the vital being and the life-force in man are separated from the Divine Light and, so separated, they are an instrument for any power that can take hold of them, illumined or obscure, divine or undivine. Ordinarily... descent, the descent fulfilling that for which the ascension aspires and which it makes inevitable. When you rise with the vital from its lower reaches and join it to the psychic, then your vital being fills with the pure aspiration and devotion natural to the psychic; a the same time it gives to the feelings its own abundant Page 13 energy, it makes them dynamic ...
... the thinking mind but the vital being—the life-force and the desire nature—or some part of it at least, that usually determines men's action and their choice—when it is not some outward necessity or pressure that compels or mainly influences the decision. The mind is only an interpreting, justifying and devising agent. By your taking up the sadhana this part of your vital being has had a pressure put... the Light. To call in the light of the divine consciousness, bring the psychic being to the front and kindle a flame of aspiration which will awaken spiritually the outer mind and set on fire the vital being, is the way out. It is usually a psychic awakening or a series of strong experiences by which the sadhak comes out of this intermediary no man's land of the quiescent vital (few can avoid altogether ...
... what we speak of as the psychic being coming in front—to psychicise the whole consciousness, i.e. make it subject to the psychic truth and full of the psychic nature. At the same time the ordinary vital being has to disappear and be changed into the true vital. The soul in itself contains all possible strength, but most of it is held behind the veil and it is what comes forward in the nature that... entire consecration and dedication of all in one to the Mother [ are the signs of the psychic's coming forward ]. It is your psychic being which came in front, probably, or else it is the true vital being in you which was able to come in front because you took the psychic attitude. When the psychic being comes in front, then there is an automatic perception of the true and untrue, the divine and the... nothing; gradually the vital and physical as well as the mind get full of this psychic light and truth and sound feeling and purity and such violent attacks as you have are impossible. When the true vital being comes forward, it is something wide and strong and calm, an unmoved and powerful warrior for the Divine and the Truth repelling all enemies, bringing in a true strength and Page 356 force ...
... of people. One can gather what is the nature of one's own inner vital being—which is often very different from the physical personality that acts in front in the body. By the acting of the consciousness in these dreams the inner parts of the being begin to be more active and have more influence on the outer nature. Your inner vital being seems from the dream experiences that you have related to be very... certain elements, tendencies or possibilities that were there in the past. The feeling in the dream was the sign of that progress. A great many people have these dreams [ of flying ]. It is the vital being that goes out in sleep and moves about in the vital worlds and has this sense of floating in the air in its own (vital) body. The waves of a sea having the colour of lightning must have been the ...
... and expedient, a rule that looks first not at the growth of the soul but at the mechanical securing of Page 415 a regulated outward conduct and to secure it bribes and terrifies the vital being into acquiescence and a reluctant subordination of its own instincts and natural ventures. The virtue so created is an expediency, a social decency, a prudent limitation of egoism, a commercial ... outflowering of our soul of justice, our soul of truth, our soul of love and compassion, our soul of purity or sacrifice. And before the greatness of its imperative mandate to the outer nature the vital being and the practical reason and surface seeking intelligence must and do bow down as before something greater than themselves, something that belongs directly to the divine and the infinite. Meanwhile... a satisfied fulfilment of the egoistic desires at the expense of others, and not imperative since it is easily combated and overthrown by the earlier imposed, more naturally dominant law of the vital being. What the natural egoistic man obeys most rigorously is the collective or social rule of conduct impressed on his mind by law and tradition, jus, mores , and outside its conventional circle he allows ...
... henchmen. Hitler's Mein Kampf is a glaringly open manifesto of such greed and ambition. In Stalin Sri Aurobindo and the Mother discerned a phenomenon not merely of possession but of incarnation, a vital being born in a human form and not just employing that form as its medium — and here was the Asura-aspect. The Asura is an all-gripping "Titan" who is even more destructive than a "Giant" but with a... them guess that the folly Hitler committed of turning upon Stalin and drawing the more heinous devilry against himself had the Mother's occult goad behind it? The Mother knew exactly what Vital Being was egging Hitler on. She has dubbed him "The Lord of Falsehood", a Rakshasa and Asura in one, as it were, who arrogates to himself the title: "The Lord of the Nations." Finding Hitler going from... Gujarat in the Nationalist struggle against British domination, an expert wrestler, a fearless fighter, an all-round heroic personality. I remember Amrita telling me: "Purani has a gigantic vital being, something approaching the Mother's." He had also some occult powers. When he ran up in answer to the Mother's call, he grabbed the intruder by the arm and tried to pull him downstairs. The latter ...
... between the true soul (psychic being) and the desire-soul (the vital being) which is often mistaken for the real soul. In most men the soul is hidden and covered over by the action of the external nature; they mistake the vital being for the soul, because it is the vital which animates and moves the body. But this vital being is a thing made up of desires and executive forces, good and ...
... Matter, 78-79 Cosmic Mind, 78, 79 Culture, 279-83 and barbarism, 281; see also Barbarism not the directing light of life, 283 cf. Civilisation Desire-soul, 89 cf. Vital (being), the Divine, the, 165, 379, 357-58, 376-80 as a concrete certitude, 190 cf. Brahman; Sachchidananda Dream Self, 75, 79 Dream-State (svapna), 206-09 ordinary and yogic,... nality, see Psychic being stages of development, 17-19 Philistine, the (the sensational man), 275-78 Physical mind, see under Mind Physical vital, see under Vital (being), the Physical (being, outer, surface), the, 67-71, 337 vital-physical, 64 Prajna, 23, 209, 215, 297 Prakriti, 86, 384 higher and lower, 106 See also Nature;... Upanishad(s), 90fm\n, 296, 297 record of experiences, 184 Vedanta (Vedantic), 170-71, 303, 367, 373, 391, 393 meaning of Nirvana in, 226 Vidya, see Knowledge Vital (being), the, 17, 337 and the emotional being, 63 four parts of, 63-64 functions of, 64 higher vital, 63 lower vital, 63, 63-64 and mind distinguished, 339-40 outer ...
... attachments, desires or habits of the mind, heart, vital being or body should be clung to which come in the way of this aspiration and one object of the life. One must be ready to renounce all these completely as soon as the demand comes from above and from the divine Shakti. (2) A fundamental calm, peace and purity in the mind, vital being and all the nature. The hours of meditation should... will be felt to be external movements and you can deal with them or call down the divine aid to get rid of them. So long as the mind does not fall quiet, it is not possible to deal finally with the vital being from which these forces rise. 20 May 1927 Sri Aurobindo ...
... s, higher consciousness, and the subconsciousness. The inner or subliminal consciousness, which is the central domain of occultism, consists of the awareness of the subtle physical being, inner vital being and inner mental being, as also the awareness of what is cognized by these inner beings. It is recognized that it is always difficult for surface consciousness to open up to inner or subliminal... in it of the powers of sight, sensibility and even of conceptions. According to occult knowledge, there is in the inner realms of consciousness, a larger inner mental being, a larger inner vital being, even a larger inner subtle physical being distinguishable from surface body consciousness. Occultists in different traditions have developed varieties of methods by which one can enter into inner... the sources and the motives of one's action and the operative energies that build up one's surface personality. One discovers in oneself, the inner being that secretly thinks and perceives, the vital being that secretly feels and acts upon life through oneself, Page 19 and also the subtle physical being that secretly receives and responds to the context of things through one's body and ...
... belonging to another plane e.g. the flag of a nation. Sri Aurobindo : In a sense everything here, on this earth-plane is symbolic of something that is beyond the physical plane. Our bodies, the vital being, the mental being are all a symbol – they are a whole range of symbols. There are authentic symbols like the Vedic "cow" which means "Light" and the quadruped of that name. It was something... that there were ghosts ! Disciple : Where does fear come from ? Some say it is a function of the spleen as anger is due to the liver. Sri Aurobindo : Really speaking, fear is in the vital being. When you have thrown it away from your mind am other parts of your being you can see it still passing through you, below the navel. There is a connection between fear and your intestines. Disciple... knowledge, I don't think they had very much. A question was put about the mummies. Page 171 Sri Aurobindo : The Egyptians believed that there was a personality of the vital being that remained attached to the body and the idea in preserving the dead body was perhaps that the person might be able to take up the body again or to return to the earth plane. Disciple ...
... they are successful. Sri Aurobindo : What connection is there between morality and greatness ? Most great men were immoral. Looseness in private morality arises from a strong vital being, and that strong vital being leads to success in great works. Immorality consists in allowing the vital impulses to go out unchecked. They may arise from strength or from weakness. In case of strength the vital... very near the surface ready for expression, some parts are so hidden that they may not come out in this life. It is the object of yoga to harmonies the different parts in the mental being, in the vital being and the physical being. Then the whole is to be given a harmonious expression; and for that the external personality has to be got over and changed. Some of the elements may remain but they must ...
... agitating reaction of pleasure and the vital being will be simply beside itself. This sudden excitement is an unmistakable sign of desire. Next, to ask oneself, "If I don't get it ?". The immediate reaction of this thought will be a depression or a sense of uneasiness or disquiet, or even revolt in the vital being, which is another sign of desire. But if the vital being remains calm in either case, then ...
... the superficial vital which is touched easily by simple, outward things; there is a child in nature that bursts out like that. It is the same as the Balabhava – the child-like nature. The deeper vital being does not get so easily touched. The topic was changed at this point. Disciple : What is meant by self-offering? How to do it? Page 51 Sri Aurobindo : How to do it!... movements towards the Divine. Disciple : That fear of falling ill by keeping awake, is it not a mental fear? Sri Aurobindo : The thing is, the physical being has got a limit. The vital being can feel the energy, peace, etc. but Page 52 the physical cannot be taxed beyond its capacity. That is what happened to many Sadhaks here. They overworked till a reaction took... : I can't say; I was having many incoherent dreams and visions – that is all I can say, perhaps it was in the surface consciousness. Sri Aurobindo : Surface consciousness of the inner vital being. Such things are very common; of course, when one goes still deeper one does not see them. There is a point between the surface consciousness and the deeper vital which is full of these fantasies ...
... which is behind and of which desire is a dark and distorted reflection remains veiled, and man runs hungering after transient pleasures and finds himself overtaken by recurrent suffering. This vital being has to be completely surrendered and irrevocably consecrated, and its desires persistently discouraged and repelled, so that they may ultimately fade away from the nature, leaving the one universal... universal Will to fulfil itself in human life. Here, too,, we must remember, the object is not the repression and killing of the vital (prāṇa), but its purification and transformation. The vital being is the centre of force, and an indispensable instrument for life-effectuation; without it nothing can be achieved in life, whatever may be the power and potentialities of the ideas and visions of the... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large strong and consecrated vital being."¹ If this constant harasser of man's God-ward endeavour is once conquered and converted, life becomes a triumphal march towards Light and Bliss and immortality, a march ringing with paeans to the ...
... aspects of all existence, the Being & the Becoming, Atman & Sarvabhutani. According as the soul of man either stands out in its human becoming & lives in the twisted triple strand of the mind, body & vital being, of which we are conscious now & here, or, on the contrary, stands back in the divine unity of Sacchidananda, it enjoys either of two states of conscious experience, the individual self-consciousness... knows itself also both independently of the workings & in their more subtle movements, by itself, in itself, atmanyatmanam atmana. We perceive, besides, that man is essentially a mental and not a vital being; he lives for himself in the mind, is aware of his existence through the mind, knows & judges all things only as they form themselves to his mind. The speculation then inevitably arises whether as... workings from the material processes in which they are fettered so that our vital life & forces may be raised into a sufficient instrument for infinite Mind, having the true pranayama or control of his vital being, to discover & separate also the principle & workings of pure mind from both life & matter and use them for the attainment of an entire mastery over our internal & our external world. In the eyes ...
... not know how far he would go in the Yoga but apart from it he has something large about him. If he takes to Sadhana more intensely, he would find many difficulties in the way, especially in the vital being. It is help as well as obstacle. But if he can bring the psychic being to the surface and develop it, then he can overcome these difficulties and if he can go through, the result would be richer... Their relation must be understood and by discrimination, hostile forces coming from cosmic nature must be conquered. Then when purification is completed, there will be liberation of mental and vital being and mental and vital forces. This is ordinarily called Moksha but the real Moksha comes when there is perfection of the being and then enjoyment follows. Is it possible to see the world by s... Divine Principle. 2) Tirupatti: Should we not be conscious of our strength? You say, what is strong in me. A.G.: Yes, but you should be also conscious of your defects. You have a very strong vital being, and a good psychic being. Tirupatti: Is it to act from the psychic, more easily? A.G.: That you need not know now. The one advantage of having a good psychic is that there will be faith ...
... state when the control is removed or else in sleep. Mental control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being. The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-consciousness." 21 "When something is thrown out of the vital or physical, it very usually goes down into the subconscient and remains there as... Page 39 a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. ... There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal unlike the mostly... or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance." 29 Page 40 Sri Aurobindo has called the subliminal ...
... as an abbreviation omitting being. The vital being by which he means the being behind life-force. He writes in one of his letters: "There are four parts of the vital being — first the mental vital which gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being." Those who would know more Page 375 ...
... convinced of other worlds, higher possibilities of being, larger fields of experience for the soul. Science gives us the objective truth of existence and the superficial knowledge of our physical and vital being; but we feel that there are truths beyond which possibly through the cultivation of our subjective being and the enlargement of its powers may come to lie more and more open to us. When the knowledge... physical self and its preoccupation with physical nature and through concentration of thought and will raising oneself into the vital and then into the mental self. By doing so we can become the vital being and draw up the physical self into that new consciousness so that we are only aware of the body, its nature and its actions as secondary circumstances of the Life-soul which we now are, used by it... 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 and draw up the physical and vital being into it, so that life and body and their operations become to us minor circumstances of our being used by the Mind-soul which we now are for the execution of its lower purposes that belong to the ...
... here we are naturally led to suppose that compulsion is the only remedy, the spiritual aim will seek for a free self-rule and development from within rather than a repression of his dynamic and vital being from without. All experience shows that man must be given a certain freedom to stumble in action as well as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his freedom from wrong... but coercion only chains up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated and civilised movements; it does not and cannot eliminate him. The real virtue of the dynamic and vital being, the Life Purusha, can only come by his finding a higher law and spirit for his activity within himself; to give him that, to illuminate and transform and not to destroy his impulse is the true spiritual... heights of the spirit,—the base becoming Page 230 in the end of one substance with the peaks. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty and the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy as poor ...
... attachments, desires or habits of the mind, heart, vital being or body should be clung to which come in the way of this one aspiration and one object of the life. One must be ready to renounce all these completely as soon as the demand comes from above and from the divine Shakti. (2) A fundamental calm, peace and purity in the mind, vital being and all the nature. The hours of meditation should... will be felt to be external movements and you can deal with them or call down the divine aid to get rid of them. So long as the mind does not fall quiet, it is not possible to deal finally with the vital being from which these forces rise. The way to realise is through a quiet mind and a vital free from desires. To reject the desires and demands of the vital and to quiet the excessive activity of ...
... body, felt helpless at first, till it called the Mother. The appearance of X there might possibly have been some part of the vital of X himself, but was more probably a vital being in his shape, perhaps the very vital being who has been troubling him. When you go into the vital world, you meet many such things,—the one sufficient protection is to call the Mother. 7 September 1933 This morning... I saw the red, rolling, frowning eyes of X, threatening me. Helpless in this limitless space, I called the Mother and the atmosphere was clear. What happened in your experience was that the vital being got free from the body through its desire to unite with the Mother Page 310 (you met the Mother on the border between the vital and physical) and lived with its own life independent of ...
... forces (I am speaking of the vital being of course, not the psychic being which goes to take rest), he may feel altogether lost, not know what to do and find himself in great distress; then he sees through affinity the light of those who are thinking of him with affection and he rushes there. It happens almost constantly that a vital formation, a part of the vital being of the dead person (or at times... and are able to understand and answer him, it is perfect gymnastics! (A mathematician disciple:) The same thing applies to mathematicians, I suppose ? Yes. If at the time of death the vital being is attacked in the vital world by hostile forces or entities, does it not look for a shelter somewhere? Yes, it is for this reason that in all countries and in all religions, it is recommended ...
... the words. In most religions, and perhaps in most philosophies also, it is the vital being which is called "soul", for it is said that "the soul leaves the body", while it is the vital being which leaves the body. One speaks of "saving the soul", "wicked souls", "redeeming the soul"... but all that applies to the vital being, for the psychic being has no need to be saved! It does not share the faults ...
... that water!" It was like liquid diamond. It was a marvel, as if everything it touched were purified. And that being who came out of the huge swimming pool (it wasn't a human being: it looked like a vital being who was neither a man nor a woman) came out in a kind of bathing suit, wrapped himself up and disappeared. But otherwise ALL the doors were closed, there wasn't a soul—only me on my square, with... fine, delicate—priceless! It's charming, you know: each one with his own little flaw—they were all people I know! But there are some beings that have been in two or three persons: for example, a vital being that went from one person to another (a being I know very well, so I know it happened that way), and what I saw was the BEING, not the different persons. A vital, female-looking being (they take... because all the doors were closed and the water didn't enter where it wasn't supposed to—I saw no one drowned, no one in danger. There was no danger for anyone. And there was only one being, a vital being (he wasn't like the others I had seen downstairs). He had had great fun in that water! And he was leaving. I remember that when the water touched my feet, it was... (how can I explain?) it wasn't ...
... ... Diseases, accidents, catastrophes, wars, all that, is because the human material consciousness is so small, so narrow that it has a rabid taste for drama. And of course, behind there is the vital being having fun, influences too... anyway all that enjoys an opportunity to delay the divine Work and make things difficult. And all that takes pleasure in that naturally encourages drama. But the seed... but the body's experience was different.... Previously, the consciousness of all the other inner beings was there and would fortunately counterbalance this idiotic tendency: even the vital, the vital being which also loves grand effects, but provided at least they are great, vast, powerful enough to be on a large scale and save it from being ridiculous; and then, positively above all that, all the... by the way, but that wasn't the reason—it's again the taste for drama!... Oh, always the taste for drama!). There we are. So the problem narrows down more and more.... If your most material vital being goes out, it doesn't make you die—it puts you in catalepsy, but it doesn't make you die. What makes you die?... There are two things that make you die. One (the one that precedes the dramatic ...
... Nishikanto decide to take up some work in the Ashram so he joined the Dining Room as a chef. He realized that since the job of a chef would be strenuous it would calm down the restlessness of his vital being. He repeated his success as a chef and received Sri Aurobindo’s praise: “His cooking is excellent.” (Years later when Sri Aurobindo had stopped eating sweets, Nirodbaran had taken to him two plateful... banana? (laughter) Sri Aurobindo: He seems to be forced into yogic austerity! (laughter) Nirodbaran: The vision he had some time back seems to have come true. Once during his sleep he saw a vital being pointing to his abdomen and saying, “That is the source of your strength. I am going to finish it.” Then the being struck at the pit of his stomach like a bull with his head down. Nishikanto groaned... have been right about Nishikanto. The pit of the stomach is the vital-emotional centre, which is the source of the strength. But it would be interesting to know what happened to the scrotum of the vital being. ( laughter) [65] [4 April 1940] A little known fact: For some time Nishikanto had taught Bengali in the Ashram School; though he was extremely popular among the students for his wit he was ...
... came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint... in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual light, the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play... crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was ...
... urges for action, battle and victory - the complex that is covered under the term "vital being"; and the third aspect is what we call mind, our instrument of conception and ideation, of reflection and reasoning. But deeper psychological explorations indicate that behind what we experience as our physical being, vital being and mental being, there are as the Upanishads point out, inner sheaths supported... supported by a kind of self-consciousness which sustains and nourishes the inner physical being, the inner vital being and the inner mental being. The data of self-consciousness further reveal to us that there are deeper presences of self-consciousness and deeper powers as also profounder states of intrinsic delight and sweetness which impart to us the experiences not only of the true source of our sincerity ...
... urges for action, battle and victory — the complex that is covered under the term "vital being"; and the third aspect is what we call mind, our instrument of conception and ideation, of reflection and reasoning. But deeper psychological explorations indicate that behind what we experience as our physical being, vital being and mental being, there are, as the Upanishads point out, inner sheaths supported... supported by a kind of self-consciousness which sustains and nourishes the inner physical being, the Page 17 inner vital being and the inner mental being. The data of self-consciousness further reveal to us that there are deeper presences of self consciousness and deeper powers as also profounder states of intrinsic delight and sweetness which impart to us the experiences not only of the ...
... came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint... in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual light/the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play... crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was ...
... on a sound basis these so-called lower but stronger movements, by controlling them and purifying them into their true elements. The ordinary man, every man in fact, has to live with his body and vital being, with the physical life and the vital force as his main supports. Since these things exist, they must have a purpose. They alone can delve into the mystery of the Page 116 ordinary... from the very beginning, he at first lived by his vital instincts; he did not start on his march on earth with an assured knowledge and a refined mind, he had to begin his journey with his body and vital being as the main props. Therefore his first problem was to solve the riddle of his body and life. He did not at first seek for the Self or Supreme Being, first he had to discover his inner self, the ... the lines of inner change. As I have already explained, man begins his career as a vital-physical being, becomes a mental being at a later stage. But the trouble is that when he goes beyond his vital being into the mental, he tends to pass beyond mind into the gnosis and forgets his life and body; this is what is known as Nihilism or the Vedantic Illusionism. But as a social being, man has remained ...
... of its natural self. It is this complexity of man's inner being that renders the task of the artist very difficult. Very often he mistakes his vital being, the being interested in life and action—for his true soul. It is certainly true that this vital being—the being of life-force—can and often does, create great art. It draws its material not merely from the great ocean of life around the artist,... but by help of imagination it can create powerful new forms which have a great appeal for life. There is a plane of the higher vital being—a higher vital world—far above the plane of ordinary life of everyday, where forms of great power and beauty exist. An artist can either rise to this plane occasionally and draw inspiration for his work from there. He can straightaway bring down forms—either literary ...
... being. In fact, it is this complexity of man's inner being that renders the task of the artist very difficult. Very often he mistakes his vital being that is interested in life and movement, his desire-soul, for his true being. It is even true that this Vital being in man, his being of life-force, can and often does create great art. In all true artistic creation this vital element is needed to give... draws its material not merely from the great ocean of life around but with the help of imagination it can create powerful, new forms which have a great appeal for life. There is a plane of higher vital being, a higher vital world, —far above the plane of ordinary life of every day where forms of great power and beauty exist. An artist can either rise to this plane occasionally and draw inspiration for ...
... or the vital being will be pūrnatā, prasannatā, samatā and bhogasāmarthya. Pūrnatā is fullness. The prāna must be fall of strength and agility and a tireless drive of radiant energies. It is for the fairness and brimming wealth of the vital that the Vedic Rishis invoked the aid of the Aswins, "the twin divine powers whose special function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man... nature, Parā-prakrti, is an achievement rarely aspired for, and never yet fully realised. And if some such perfection has been at all aimed at, it was confined to the mind, the heart and the vital being, the body's divine potentialities were not fully explored, the traditional contempt for its grossness and inertia standing in the way of such an exploration. In the Integral Yoga the body is considered ...
... of the sacrifice, into which the offering is poured; the fire is self-control or it is a purified sense-action or it is the vital energy in that discipline of the control of the vital being through the control of the breath which is common to Rajayoga and Hathayoga, or it is the fire of self-knowledge, the flame of the supreme sacrifice. The food eaten as the leavings of the sacrifice... purity may appear from behind the veil of mind-action, calm and still; there is the discipline by which, when the self is known, all the actions of the sense-perceptions and all the action of the vital being are received into that one still and tranquil soul. The offering of the striver after perfection may be material and physical, dravya-yajña , like that consecrated in worship by the devotee to ...
... these risks? What precautions should he take? Shall I warn him? First of all what is meant is not that the vampire or vital being even in possession of a human body tries to possess yet another human being. All that is the description of how a disembodied (vampire) vital being takes possession of a human body without being born into it in the ordinary way—for that is their desire, to possess a human ...
... an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half ...
... the body is in pain, when one has fever or is ill, you see, or the body is very ill, the only thing to do is to come out of it, to bring out one's vital being. And then, if one is a yogi and knows, one rises just above—so as to see his body; the vital being, if it has come out in a fairly material form, can see the body; one sees his own physical body, and then at that moment, with the consciousness ...
... all through their life, unless they are converted, which is not easy. There is a sort of association between the physical and the psychic and between the mental and the vital being. A mental being is very often a very vital being. A psychic being is very often a physical being. Children—just because this psychic consciousness is in front in them—live also altogether in their body. But as soon as one ...
... already in other worlds... and so, their vital being, which is the receptacle for these forces, as soon as it leaves the body will be quite simply swallowed, and that's all. And so they will really die for good. That won't make much difference in the world. It won't change things much. Sweet Mother, what will swallow them up? A still greater vital being! ( Laughter ) You see, they have in them ...
... in them but that there are many strong partial truths which need to be corrected by others which they seem to ignore and even to exclude. Besides there are suggestions from the intellect and the vital being and also suggestions from external sources which you ought not to accept so easily as you seem to do. This mixture is inevitable in the earlier stages and there is no need to be disheartened about... always be able to have (I do not ask you to stop it altogether) but an inner calm and quiet as the true basis and atmosphere of your future development and experience, calm in the mind, the purified vital being and in the physical consciousness. A psycho-vital or psycho-physical Yoga will not be safe for you until you have this calm and an assured purity of being and a complete and always present vital ...
... much use. The difficulties you have experienced in the work you undertook arose partly from the general opposition of the money-power to the divine call, but also and very largely from your own vital being and its desires and self-regarding attitude. This vital nature of yours was always full of demands and desires and it came to regard their satisfaction as perfectly legitimate and even the right... Bombay atmosphere. I am perfectly aware that you can advance many explanations justifying your action as against what I have written. All that makes no difference. It is always the habit of the vital being to find out things by which it persuades the mind and justifies its desires; and circumstances usually shape themselves to justify it still farther. For what we have within us creates the circumstances ...
... you wish to be open to the joy of living in integral beauty and harmony. This brings us quite naturally to vital austerity, the austerity of the sensations, the Tapasya of power; for the vital being is indeed the seat of power, of enthusiasms that realise. It is in the vital that thought changes into will and becomes a dynamism of action. It is also true that the vital is the seat of desires... origin and result of various vital vibrations, so as to know whether they are favourable to the harmony, the beauty and the good health or are harmful to the poise and progress of the physical and vital being. Moreover, the senses should be utilised as instruments to approach and study the physical and vital worlds in all their complexity. Thus they will take their true place in the great endeavour towards ...
... being — see Purusha. true mental — see Purusha. true physical — see Purusha. true vital — see Purusha. Truth-Consciousness — see Supermind. the vital (being) — the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action and of all the play of possessive and other related instincts, such as anger, fear, greed, lust, etc. The... taken together. Page 127 The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest. central vital or vital proper: dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the seat of ...
... and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, “Oh! He has a living soul”; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely... but it is not that, it is his vital which is developed, which has a special capacity, is stronger than the physical inertia and gives an intensity of vibration and life and action that those whose vital being is not developed do not possess. This confusion between the vital activity and the soul is a very frequent one…. The vital vibration is much more easily perceptible to the human consciousness than ...
... reached a certain point of ascent, it comes down again. There are elements which may not come down again grossly; but still it does come down, one can’t deny it. The vital being—not necessarily, nor the mental being. The vital being, if it knows how to get connected with the universal force, can very easily have no retrogression; it can continue to ascend. And the mental being, it’s absolutely certain ...
... and a psychic tact distinguishing the false from the true, putting each thing in its place and giving it its true value or absence of value, not carried away by the excitement of the mind or the vital being. What do you mean by true? You have a subjective experience belonging to a higher plane of consciousness; when you descend you come down with it into the material and the whole of existence... of the many dangers of a too active mind. You make a formation in your mind or on the vital plane in yourself—it is a kind of creation, but subjective only; it affects only your own mental or vital being. You can create by ideas, thought-forms, images a whole world in yourself or for yourself; but it stops there. Some have the power of making consciously formations that Page 27 go ...
... succeeded in consecrating yourself and your work and business entirely and without any internal division to the Divine. Men usually work and carry on their affairs from the ordinary motives of the vital being, need, desire of wealth or success or position or power or fame or the push to activity and the pleasure of manifesting their capacities, and they succeed or fail according to their capability, power... work and the good or bad fortune which is the result of their nature and their Karma. When one takes up the Yoga and wishes to consecrate one's life to the Divine, these ordinary motives of the vital being have no longer their full and free play; they have to be replaced by another, a mainly psychic and spiritual motive, which will enable the sadhak to work with the same force as before, no longer ...
... is still retired in our depths and waits for our transcendence of the ego and the discovery of the true individual in whose universality we shall be united with all others. To transfer from the vital being, the instrumental reality in us, to the spirit, the central reality, to elevate to that height our will to be and our power of living is the secret which our nature is seeking to discover. All that... to make the very principle of our perfection. That will, that power must choose between the domination of the vital part in us and the domination of the spirit. Nature can rest in the round of vital being, can produce there a sort of perfection, but that is the perfection of an arrested development satisfied with its own limits. This she can manage in the plant and the animal, because the life and ...
... are cases of an almost immediate rebirth, sometimes even attended with a detailed memory of the events of the past life. Hell and heaven are often imaginary states of the soul, or rather of the vital being, which it constructs about it after its passing. What is meant by hell is a painful passage through some vital world or a dolorous lingering there, as for instance in many cases of suicide where... (who goes on his way to the psychic world) but of his vital sheath which falls away after death. These can join for birth the vital of some other Jiva who is being born or they can be used by a vital being to enter a body in process of birth and partly possess it for the satisfaction of its propensities. The junction can also take place after birth. Connections from Life to Life There is a vital ...
... The Vital Being and Sadhana Letters on Yoga - IV Chapter III Wrong Movements of the Vital The Phrase "Wrong Movements" The phrase [ "wrong movements" ] covers pretty nearly everything that is hurtful to spiritual progress—movements of doubt, revolt, egoistic desire or ambition, sexual indulgence are the most common, but there are plenty of others... conquest over the habits of the physical consciousness and he has nothing to do there and no influence of any kind whatever. Also dismiss any question about the "possibility" of conversion of your vital being; you should see rather that it is certain and not merely possible. This idea of identification with the dark Shakti is also another old notion which you ought to root out Page 147 without ...
... Nature-force to which it refuses assent or identification Page 503 —each time a certain movement of rejection throws it more and more outward. The mind remains unaffected; after a time the vital being which is the chief support withdraws from it in the same way, finally the physical consciousness no longer supports it. This process continues until even the subconscient can no longer rouse it up... character remain, it is not a thing to get disturbed about—only it must not be permitted to increase so as to disturb the sadhana or get too strong for the restraining will of the mental and higher vital being. It is best not to pay too much attention to this [ sex- ]movement, Page 510 but to let it drop off quietly by lack of support and assent from the mind and the higher vital. ...
... seat of desire is not so much in the emotional as in the lower vital—but the desires rise up from there into the emotional part and even into the thinking mind. It is always the habit of the vital being to find out things by which it persuades the mind and justifies its desires; and circumstances usually shape themselves to justify it still farther. For what we have within us creates the circumstances... action. You should not therefore be discouraged by the difficulty, but go on with the necessary perseverance of the will to press it out of existence. It is the small habits of the lower vital being which gather all their strength to resist eviction and try to occupy the consciousness. Page 256 When they come you must learn to detach your inner consciousness from them entirely so ...
... The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender,— an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing—the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature; rejection of the movements of the lower nature—rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being,—rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may ...
... sound as our present science of physical life and the existence of Matter. Still we can Page 213 see broadly that not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others. An ancient occult knowledge tells us that we... and freedom of the Spirit. Page 219 × What is spoken of here is mind as it acts directly in life, in the vital being, through the heart. Love—the relative principle, not its absolute—is a principle of life, not of mind, but it can possess itself and move towards permanence only when taken up by the mind into its ...
... always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the spirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise... if the race is to arrive or even to survive. The evolutionary nisus is pushing towards a development of the cosmic Force in terrestrial life which needs a larger mental and Page 1092 vital being to support it, a wider mind, a greater wider more conscious unanimised Life-Soul, Anima, and that again needs an unveiling of the supporting Soul and spiritual Self within to maintain it. A rational ...
... is open to the vital man to lift himself beyond the conceptions and energies natural to the desire-soul and the desire-plane. He can develop a higher mentality and, within the conditions of the vital being, concentrate upon some realisation of the Spirit or Self behind or beyond its forms and powers. In this spiritual realisation there would be a less strong necessity of quietism; for there would be... never come anywhere near to a true and integral perfection; for the conditions of the desire-world are like those of the physical improper to the development of the complete spiritual life. The vital being too must develop spirit to the detriment of his fullness, activity and force of life Page 469 in the lower hemisphere of our existence and turn in the end away from the vital formula ...
... unison they are intended to serve only a limited and intermediate office. We can easily see how largely man, even though in his being an embodied soul, is in his earthly nature the physical and vital being and how, at first sight at least, his mental activities seem to depend almost entirely on his body and his nervous system. Modern Science and psychology have even held, for a time, this dependence... system; it enables us to circulate the vital energy equally through the body and direct it also where we will according to need, and thus maintain a perfect health and soundness of the body and the vital being; it gives us control of all the five habitual operations of the vital energy in the system and at the same time breaks down the habitual divisions by which only the ordinary mechanical processes ...
... have perfect immunity, it must get the vital parts and the emotions themselves purified. The will to enjoy is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right functioning of the life in obedience to the working ...
... the consciousness. The first is a more outer and confused activity of the awakening subliminal mind and life which is clogged with and subject to the grosser desires and illusions of the mind and vital being and vitiated in spite of its wider range of experience and powers and capacities by an enormous mass of error and deformations of the will and knowledge, full of false suggestions and images, false... with a temporary life and consciousness and, it may be, carrying in them in one way or another some kind of beneficent or maleficent action or some willed or unwilled effectiveness on our minds or vital being or through them even on the body. These transcriptions, impresses, thought images, life images, projections of the consciousness may also be representations or creations not of the physical world ...
... greater reality, on exaggerations of vital instinct and sensation, on physical wrynesses and crudities and things unhealthily strange. The thought-mind, losing the natural full-blooded power of the vital being, pores on these things, stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an illusion of some forceful sensation of living." Much Romanticism on the European Continent took this way and acquired... beauty or responsive in mood, a response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied yearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible and sensible universe." Man's modern outlook on himself, in the warp and weft of Space and Time and in the stress ...
... ফেললাম ও তার পুরুষাঙ্গ কেটে দিলাম ৷ ...তখন দেখি আমার চেহারা মহাকালীর মত ভীষণ হয়েছে ৷ উ: এই পুরুষটী কোন vital force হবে, হয়ত sex impulseএর একটা force ৷এই অনুভূতিতে তােমার vital being তাকে কেটে ফেলেছে ৷ সাধকের vital being এইরূপ যােদ্ধা হওয়া চাই – খারাপ vital forceর বশ না হয়ে, ভীত না হয়ে তাকে meet করবে আর বিনাশ করবে ৷ 23.3.36 ন: মা, আমি দেখছি আমার মাথাটা খুব শান্ত পবিত্র আলােকিত হয়ে ...
... rising to an instinctive reason and mind and purposeful force in the insect, as a more organised and Page 222 conscious and emotional, even a roughly and narrowly thinking and planning vital being in the animal, and has persevered till it has broken into some half opening on itself in the thinking, reasoning, willing and aspiring nature of man, the Manu, the mental creature. Here at present... the evolution of the consciousness, of mind and, if any such thing there be, of what is beyond mind,—and in that case as its last stride has been the evolution of the mental being, man, out of the vital being, the animal, so its next stride will be to evolve out of mental man a greater spiritual and supramental creature. Page 223 50 All mind and life on earth are the progressive ...
... said that the conscious part of his personality is not much more than a few leaves floating on a mud pool. It is the subconscious that determinates his vital being, full of fright, insecurity, egoism, aggression, cruelty. And it is his vital being that predominantly determines his mentalisations and thinking. Add to that a physical body subject to injury, illness and death, subject to a sexual urge ...
... the ugly little brat was an exteriorisation of his lower-vital being of lust and concupiscence and possessiveness. "Do you understand now," he wrote, "why you are not allowed to stay here? It is this formation of your life in the past. He wants food which is wholly denied here. That is why you have to depart again and again. Your lower vital being is still too much alive and kicking to let you stay on ...
... there was a whole world of difficulties I was unaware of. In the vital I knew, because I'd had to do battle there—which was fine with me! Just imagine, this time I have been given a warrior as my vital being. A magnificent warrior, neither male nor female, and as tall as this room 1 —he is splendid. I was so happy when I first saw him. "Well," I thought, "that's worth my while!" Yes, there are... without knowing anything, Satprem had sensed a kind of warrior, very luminous and white, reminding him of the god Kartik , son of the Universal Mother, armed with a spear. Later, Mother said that her vital being was a "diamond-warrior." × Japa : the continuous repetition of a mantra. ...
... ( Later, Mother again speaks of her vision of the tall white being armed with a kind of halberd: ) What was standing there was a manifestation of one of my states of being, a part of my vital being, or rather one of my innumerable vital beings—because I have quite a few! And this one is particularly interested in things on earth. A projection of yours—an emanation? You know, mon petit... take volumes to tell it all. And then, more often than not (not always, but more often than not), what took part in this or that life was a particular yogic formation of the Page 222 vital being—in other words something immortal. 2 And when I came this time, as soon as I took up the yoga, they came back again from all sides, they were waiting. Some were simply waiting, others were working ...
... environment and circumstances—the mental, the vital and the physical—that is born again: it is only the psychic being that passes from body to body. Logically, then, neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives or recognise itself in the character or mode of life of this or that person. The psychic being alone can remember; and it is by becoming conscious of our psychic being that... not on a completely wrong track? And how can reincarnation be demonstrated scientifically in any other way? The memories you refer to, which are mentioned in newspapers, are memories of the vital being that, exceptionally, has gone out of one body in order to enter another. It is something that can happen, but it is not frequent. The memory that I refer to is that of the psychic being, and one ...
... 247 the sense of a single person, a single being. But there are many of them, and there are in particular concentrations on different planes: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, a mental being, a psychic being, and many others with all possible intermediaries.... So when you leave your body, all those beings will scatter. It's only if you are a very advanced yogi and have... center that those beings remain linked together. If you haven't been able to unify yourself, then at the time of death, all that will scatter: every being will go back to its own region. With the vital being, for example, your various desires will separate and each of them will go and chase its realization quite independently, because there will no longer be a physical being to hold them together. While ...
... Chidanandam, Mother India, April 1970. pp. 147-148. Page 3 "Why not? Transformation would be complete if one could bring down the thing that you have got in the mind and the vital being into the physical also, into the very cells of the material body. The conditions are that you should be able to keep the same deep peace, wideness, strength and power and plasticity from the mind... necessary for the complete development of the Sadhana. The work of the two together alone brings down the Supramental Truth into the physical plane. A. G. acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind; he represents the Purusha element whose strength is predominantly in illumined knowledge (intuition, supramental or spiritual) and the power that acts in this knowledge ...
... Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction... worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance. Our waking state is unaware of its connection with ...
... not know how far he would go in the Yoga but apart from it he has something large about him. If he takes to Sadhana more intensely, he would find many difficulties in the way, especially in the vital being. It is a help as well as an obstacle. But if he can bring the psychic being to the surface and develop it, then he can overcome these difficulties and if he can go through, the result would be richer... Their relation must be understood and by discrimination, hostile forces coming from cosmic nature must be conquered. Then when purification is completed, there will be liberation of mental and vital being and mental and vital forces. This is ordinarily called Moksha but the real Moksha comes when there is perfection of the being and then enjoyment follows. Is it possible to see the world by s ...
... refuse! Inscrutable are the ways of the supramental, what? But, good Lord, that is not the Supramental—there are no such contradictions in the Supramental. These are "the ways" of the mental-vital being in its search for the Supramental or rather for the Divine on any plane—and that is a very different affair. It is only a colloquy on the way between the vital and the psychic, the one saying, "Here... otherwise change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the whole higher consciousness ...
... integration and openness of the vital being on the surface would alone make possible a similar survival of the life part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the inner life being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen then is that the wall between the inner self and the outer man would have broken down and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and vital ...
... powerful and complicated way that it was a problem to find out which one. or two, of the three were in prominence. They always tried to cover, or at least colour, any good movement of the mind or the vital being or of the enlightened physical. The tamas or inertia did not actually tire me physically or mentally. All along I was carrying on about eight hours of physical work and two to four hours... I do not remember to have written 'good' — but maybe I meant people who have either a clear and strong activity Page 14 of the mind (the intellectuals) or an energetic vital being which rejects tamas. I was not speaking of anything moral or spiritual. When one's inner peace and silence are not disturbed, then how does the inertia intrude into the physical ...
... found that a sexual sensation came into me. How did this happen? It comes in because it has been the habit of the vital to admit such movements. In what way does the vital being partake in matters of sex? Page 59 By desire, joy, personal attraction, passion and in many other ways. When one becomes more and more aware of... It is absolutely necessary to get rid of sex interest. But the night dreams will only disappear after the waking mind is perfectly free. In last night's dream some vital being took the form of a near relative of mine, so that she could approach me easily and request me to accompany her. When we reached her room she expressed her sexual desire. I refused her emphatically ...
... psychic control to be got? SRI AUROBINDO: By constant remembrance, consecration of oneself to the Divine, rejection of all that stands in the way of the psychic influence. Generally it is the vital being that stands in the way with its desires and demands. But once the psychic opens, it shows at every step what is to be done. Soon after the Mother came in and all of us sat in meditation with her... in their work. They could work without fatigue for hours and hours. But they overdid it. One has to be reasonable even in spirituality. That tremendous force was felt when the sadhana was in the vital being. When the sadhana started in the physical, things were different. The physical is like a stone, full of Aprakasha and Apravritti, darkness and inertia. NIRODBARAN: Sometimes one feels a sort of ...
... three ranges can be distinguished the lower becoming more and more turbid and turbulent and fierce or more and more self-centred and selfish. These levels can best be seen by their impact on our vital being and formations there. The first, the highest one, the meeting or confluence of the Mind and the Vital is the Heart, the centre of emotion, the knot of the external or instrumental vehicle, of the... intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asura – Asura, the mentalised vital being. The Asura or the Titan stands where consciousness descends Page 45 from the Mind into the Vital or Life – Force. He is the personification of ambition and authority and arrogance ...
... I tried looking for it, but did not find it anywhere. And then I gave up all hope, saying it is gone for ever. And I am sure it is not stolen by a human being, but a vital being has hidden it. Of that I am convinced, that a vital being has stolen it, so that with all these secrets I do not disturb their authority and their control over these kingdoms. Anyway, perhaps it is not needed now. That is ...
... banana? (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: He seems to be forced into yogic austerity! (Laughter) NIRODBARAN: The vision he had some time back seems to have come true. Once during his sleep he saw a vital being pointing to his abdomen and saying, "That is the source of your strength. I am going to finish it." Then the being struck at the pit of his stomach like a bull with his head down. Nishikanto groaned... have been right about Nishikanto. The pit of the stomach is the vital-emotional centre, which is the source of his strength. But it would be interesting to know what happened to the scrotum of the vital being. (Laughter) After this, Satyendra gave Sri Aurobindo a Bengali poem to see, as requested by Mridu. The poem was written by Jyoti on the presentation copy of her book Red Rose to Mridu . ...
... everything is swallowed up, such that only a diminutive shadow remains beneath an onerous burden. But the seeker who has silenced his mind and no longer falls prey to ideas, who has quieted his vital being and is no longer overcome and scattered at every instant by the great confusion of feelings and desires, discovers in the newly acquired clarity of his nature something like a new youth, a new and... number of gradations it can reach. We will also find that this consciousness is independent of the thoughts, feelings, and desires of our small frontal being; it is independent of the mind, of the vital being, and even of the physical body; in certain particular conditions, which we will discuss later, it can even go outside the body to have its own experiences. Our body, our thoughts, our desires are ...
... start the Psychic Research Society of London. There were eminent intellectuals and scientists who joined that body. The medium of the phenomena was a lady who used to be possessed by a vital being, and that vital being was capable of handling material things in such a way as to defy all the laws of physical science. The lady was lifted out of her chair to the ceiling directly without any intervening ...
... beauty exerts on the human heart. But it also expresses the most common reaction of the desire-soul, the Kamanamaya Purusha, to the experience of beauty. Byron here represents the ardent cry of the vital being in man for the possession of beauty. Coupled Page 99 with the experience of beauty is the tragic vein of disappointment and a justification of the possessive impulse. ... even the dark night holds in her heart the immortal hope for the Dawn; from the world of sorrows the human being feels devotion for the Divine. Here there is no distracted cry of the human vital being to possess beauty. There is instead an ardent aspiration to offer his devotion to the object of love which the poet feels akin to the Divine, Page 100 Keats wrote those immortal ...
... , Page 82 expresses the most common reaction of the desire-sou1,-the Kamanamaya purusha-to the experience of beauty. Byron here represents the ardent cry of the vital being in man for the possession of beauty. Coupled with the experience of beauty is the tragic vein of disappointment and a justification of the possessive impulse. In Shelly's experience of beauty... stars and even the dark night holds in her heart the immortal hope for the Dawn. From the world of sorrows the man feels devotion for the Divine. Here there is no distracted cry of the human vital being Page 83 to possess beauty. There is instead an ardent aspiration to offer his devotion to the object of love which the poet feels. akin to the Divine. Keats wrote those immortal ...
... world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight.... To tread down altogether the prāṇa, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by Page 255 which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported, to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied... the prāṇa from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument.,.. To rid the prāṇa of desire and incidentally to reverse the ordinary poise of our nature and turn the vital being from a troublesomely dominant power into the obedient instrument of a free and unattached mind, is then the first step in purification. As this deformation of the psychic prāṇa is corrected, the ...
... fasting on yoga? Sri Aurobindo : On what? Disciple : The effect of fasting on yoga. Sri Aurobindo : Oh, on yoga? It gives a sort of excitement or an impetus to the vital being but the general effect does not seem to be sound or healthy. I fasted twice : once in Alipore jail for ten days and another time in Pondicherry for twenty-three days. At Alipore I was in full... where and how you experience the unity. If it is in the mind you feel your mind as one with the Cosmic Mind; in that case your own mind does not exist. If you feel the unity in the vital, then your vital being becomes a part of the cosmic vital, one with cosmic life. You can experience the Unity on the physical plane; then you feel your body as a speck of Universal Matter. Or, the identity can be above ...
... The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my own failings a small one? Were the obstacles less in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something... Pondicherry. It was, of course, Sri Aurobindo himself who had first given the idea to Motilal Roy - it was evidently intended to be a sort of controlled experiment. But Motilal "took it up with all his vital being and in an egoistic way", with the result that the lower vital forces took possession of the work and gave it a direction that was far from satisfactory. The Chandernagore group made "Commune, Culture ...
... becomes hunger and conscious desire in the vital being. Love is the transfiguration of desire, a desire of possessing others but also of self-giving; at first subject to hunger and the desire of possession it reveals its own true law by an equal or greater joy in self-giving.—The inert subjection of the will in the atom to the not-self becomes in the vital being the sense of limited capacity and the struggle ...
... with that radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body, vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being. In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an ānandamaya... s has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself ...
... supported you in your ideal of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, what made it possible for the inner psychic call to persist all along, and brought you safe to us through all dangers and deviations, is your vital being. It is the strength and loyalty of the Vital that has ensured your return in spite of numerous obstacles." The Mother's speech was quite a startler to me. I had always blamed my Vital... Gaza, a Borobudur temple-complex, a King Lear, a Ninth Symphony, a Sistine-Chapel-ceiling. And the supramentalisation of matter depends essentially on the reckless self-abandonment of man's vital being to the Divine's call. The Mother once told me: "When the Vital surrenders to the Divine we have a marvellous event. Something indescribably beautiful and grand takes place — the absolute sweep ...
... world, however, you have to use your will: there, too, distance is less rigid, but the movement is not immediate: the will has to be exercised. Inevitably, (in a dream) a wound received in the vital being is translated in the physical body.... If you receive a blow in the vital, the body suffers the consequence. More than half of our illnesses are the result of blows of this kind... men are not conscious... lose three-quarters of their power. And if you call upon us for help, then, even the last quarter is gone. You have no idea of the almost magical effect of staring fearlessly into the eyes of a vital being.... So, to sum up... never be afraid and in all circumstances call for the right help to make your strength a hundred fold stronger. What are nightmares? These are your sorties into the vital ...
... the Subconscient — the part of the being which is below the level of the mental, vital and physical consciousness; in the average person, it includes the larger part of the physical mind, the vital being and the body-consciousness. Subconscious mind — the inner or subliminal mind. the Subliminal —comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner... vital and emotional vital taken together. The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest. central vital or vital proper : dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the ...
... Aurobindo to that of a street criminal with the psychic being of a London cab driver. (Stalin, on the contrary, was not human, in the sense that he did not have a soul but was a direct incarnation of a vital being.) ‘It is the vital possession that gives [Hitler] his size and greatness,’ said Sri Aurobindo. ‘Without this vital Power he would be a crudely amiable fellow with some hobbies and eccentricities... perhaps the most ruthless of them all, was Joseph Stalin. It has already been mentioned that, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Stalin was not an ordinary human, but a directly incarnated vital being with no soul. As in the case of so much else concerning Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, this assertion is supported by facts, and Stalin’s dire deeds are recorded in history for all to read. In ...
... Ananda in the consciousness, their workings there—the realisation of the divine or spiritual love, the perception of one's own psychic being, the discovery of one's own true mental being, true vital being, true physical being, the realisation of the overmind or the supramental consciousness, the clear perception of the relation of all these things to our present inferior nature and their action on... matter. But—well, if it is not, then there is another way—it is what we call the integration, the harmonisation of the being. That cannot be done from outside, it cannot be done by the mind and vital being—they are sure to bungle their affair. It can be done only from within by the soul, the Spirit which is the centraliser, itself the centre of these radii- In all of them there is a truth that can ...
... (dynamic centre) which ranges from the heart level (emotional) to the centre below the navel (lower vital, sensational desire centre). These three mark the domain of the vital being. It is therefore clear that it was your inner vital being which had this experience, and its intensity and vehemence was probably due to the whole vital (or most of it) being awake and sharing in it this time. The experience ...
... -yes, by the Mother even in the period when she was busy with the Mantra's magic - is the sine qua non. What I understand your author to harp on is that a little quieting of the mind and of the vital being are all that is required as the background to the Mantric practice. Naturally, one has to reduce the great Supramental Yoga to this if one's purpose is to catch the ear of a large following, particularly... will-power. There have been occasions when I wanted something to happen or to be done and a force went forth from the ideative mind but backed by an urge from the heart-centre and a drive from the vital being - and Io, the impossible-looking event which had been willed and aspired after took place. But on other occasions there was only a passing on to the Mother of what I wished for and surrendering entirely ...
... dedicated to the goal of the transformation of humankind and the world. The reason for this necessity was that one person can be cosmically expanded in his or her consciousness and even in his or her vital being, but not physically, as the physical being is materially limited to the body and the cells it contains. The Mother’s ‘very first question’ originated certainly from the same consideration. She realized... very, very unhappy about being a cat, it wanted to be a human being. It had an untimely death. It used to meditate, it certainly did a kind of sadhana of its own, and when it left, a portion of its vital being reincarnated in a human being. The little psychic element that was at the centre of the being went directly into the human species, and even what was conscious in the vital of the cat went into a ...
... out of the material Inconscience. It seems even to be the fact that the vital worlds are the natural home of the Powers that most disturb human life; this is indeed logical, for it is through our vital being that they sway us and they must therefore be powers of a larger and more powerful life-existence. The de scent of Mind and Life into evolution need not have created any such untoward developments... life-worlds where the type of things expresses itself in formations originative of those to which he was attached in his earthly body or akin to them and therefore exercises a natural attraction on the vital being after its exit from the body. But, apart from these subtler life-states, the traditional accounts of other-worldly existence contain, though as a rarer more elevated element not included in the popular ...
... planes are not bound to the forms like the physical. The forms there are expressive, not determinative. What is important on the vital plane is the force or feeling and the form expresses it. A vital being has a characteristic form but he can vary it or mask his true form under others. What is primary on the mental plane is the perception, the idea, the mental significance and the form expresses that... Vayu and Indra are cosmic godheads presiding over the action of cosmic principles—they are not the manomaya purusha or pranamaya purusha in each man. You have a mental being or purusha in you and a vital being or purusha, but you cannot say that you are in your mind Indra or in your vital Vayu. The Purusha is an essential being supporting the play of Prakriti—the Godhead (Indra, Vayu) is a dynamic being ...
... Nature and arrive at a higher divine consciousness, if one wants to be free? By Prakriti [ in a passage in Bases of Yoga] is meant universal Prakriti. Universal Prakriti entering into the vital being creates desires which appear by its habitual response as an individual nature; but if the habitual desires she throws in are rejected and exiled, the being remains but the old individual prakriti... Prakriti determined it [ the habit of response to vital movements ] and the soul or Purusha accepted it. In the acceptance lies the responsibility. The Purusha is that which sanctions or refuses. The vital being responds to the ordinary life waves in the animal; man responds to them but has the power of mental control. He has also as the mental Purusha is awake in him the power to choose whether he shall ...
... the navel, these are the layers of the higher vital presided over by the heart centre where is the emotional being with the psychic hidden behind it. From the navel downwards is the rest of the vital being containing several layers. From the bottom of the spine downward are the layers of the physical consciousness proper, the material, and below the feet is the subconscient which has also many levels... existence entering into touch with a supraphysical power or world or part of it and moved to bring it down into the earth life. Or it may be an impulse in the vital or other plane itself, e.g. a vital being moved to extend his action Page 130 towards the earth and establish there a kingdom for himself or the play of the forces for which he stands in his own domain. Or it may be a pressure ...
... creation, each complete in its separate existence. The evolved spiritual individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual community or communities in the same world as mental man and the vital being of the animal, but each working out its independent existence in a loose relation within the terrestrial formula. The supreme power of the principle of unity taking all diversities into itself and... higher powers descend first into the mind and occupy the mind centres because these are nearest to themselves in intelligence and knowledge-power; if they descend first into the heart or into the vital being of force and sensation, as they sometimes do because these happen to be in some individuals more open and call them first, the results are more mixed and dubious, imperfect and insecure than if things ...
... the values of the higher consciousness and Ananda from which they derive and are its modifications in an inferior nature and it corrects their deformations. It takes similarly the movements of the vital being and consciousness and relates them to the movements and imparts to them the significances of the spiritual life of the self and its power of Tapas. It takes the physical consciousness, delivers it... Ananda of the Ishwara. All the spiritualised sensation and emotion are experienced as pure moulds of the consciousness and Ananda. The physical being itself is experienced as a conscious form and the vital being as an outpouring of the power and possession of the life of the spirit. The action of the supermind in the development is to manifest and organise this highest consciousness so as to exist and ...
... Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of... or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities Page 442 whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance. Our waking state is unaware of its ...
... mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to ... distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character and inner action. To rid the prana of desire and incidentally to reverse the ordinary poise of our nature and turn the vital being from a troublesomely dominant power into the obedient instrument of a free and unattached mind, is then the first step in purification. As this deformation of the psychical prana is corrected, the ...
... from this swoon of the Inconscience. Purusha indeed consents to assume the apparent form of itself which Prakriti constructs for it; it seems to become the Inconscient, the physical being, the vital being, the mental being: but in all these it remains still in reality itself; the light of the secret conscious Being supports and informs the action of the inconscient or emergingly conscious energy of... ion; it quiets the frontal movement of Prakriti in the individual consciousness and concentrates exclusively on the concealed inner being,—on the Self or on the true inner, psychic or mental or vital being, the Purusha,—to disclose it. But when it has done so, it need not remain in this opposite exclusiveness; it can resume its integral consciousness or a global consciousness which includes both being ...
... Life on earth may be said to be the result of the pressure of this life-world on the material, inconscient existence of the physical universe. Our own manifest vital being is also only a surface result of a larger and profounder vital being which has its proper seat on the life-plane and through which we are connected with the life-world. Moreover, the life-world is constantly acting upon us and behind ...
... individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and a harmless freedom can be founded. Collectivism at least insists upon that unity by entirely subordinating... is much in it that is exaggerated and imperfect. Its seers seem often to preach an impossible self-abnegation of the vital life and an asceticism which instead of purifying and transforming the vital being, seeks to suppress and even kill it; life itself is impoverished or dried up by this severe austerity in its very springs. Carried away by a high-reaching spirit of revolt, these prophets denounce ...
... What precautions should he take? Shall l warn him? First of all what is meant is not that the vampire or vital being even Page 309 in possession of a human body tries to possess yet another human being. All that is the description of how a disembodied (vampire) vital being takes possession of a human body without being born into it in the ordinary way—for that is their desire, to possess ...
... spiritual, political or social work to do in the world and led them away to disappointment and failure. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Mind The vital mind is that part of the vital being which builds, plans, imagines, arranges things and thoughts according to the life-pushes, desires, will to power or possession, will to action, emotions, vital ego reactions of the nature. It must... justifying the dictates of these powers, imposes their dictates on the reason instead of governing by a discriminating will the action of the life-forces. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness The true thinking mind does not belong to the physical, it is a separate power. The physical mind is that part of the mind which is concerned with the physical things ...
... presence there of a certain consciousness; and surely the plant has a vital being. Mother, does a plant have its own individuality and does it also reincarnate after death? This may happen, but it is accidental. There are trees—trees especially—which have lived long and can be the home of a conscious being, a vital being. Generally it is vital entities which take shelter in trees, or else ...
... reached a certain point of ascent, it comes down again. There are elements which may not come down again grossly; but still it does come down, one can't deny it. The vital being—not necessarily, nor the mental being. The vital being, if it knows how to get connected with the universal force, can very easily have no retrogression; it can continue to ascend. And the mental being, it's absolutely certain ...
... is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, — an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing — the mind's will, Page 31 the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature; rejection of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, ... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, — rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda ...
... and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, "Oh! He has a living soul"; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the first difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and tamas of the purely... but it is not that, it is his vital which is developed, which has a special capacity, is stronger than the physical inertia and gives an intensity of vibration and life and action that those whose vital being is not developed do not possess. This confusion between the vital activity and the soul is a very frequent one.... The vital vibration is much more easily perceptible to the human consciousness than ...
... example, to the individual vital plane there corresponds a cosmic vital world. When a human being is sufficiently developed he possesses an individualised vital being with organs of sight, hearing, smell, etc. So a person who has a well-developed vital being can see in the vital world with his vital sight, consciously and with the memory of what he has seen. This is what makes a vision. It is the same ...
... shake the being. Gradually the vital being grew accustomed to find Page 317 harmony in the intensest action as it had in passive surrender. And once this harmony was sufficiently established, there was light again in all the parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete. Now in the heart of action the vital being has discovered the perception of Infinity ...
... takes to Satyagraha or non-violence. He thinks that men get purified by it. But when men suffer, or subject themselves to voluntary suffering, what happens is that their vital being gets strengthened. These movements affect the vital being only and not any other part. Now, when you cannot oppose the force that oppresses, you say that you will suffer. That suffering is vital and it gives strength. When the ...
... Mother’s Agenda 1962 January 15, 1962 You spoke last time of putting a body on a vital being. Is that being still alive? Who was it? I have spoken of this before. I told the story of the Chinese revolution, and how this being left me, saying.... It was just five years before the Chinese revolution. I've told the... it's all lost. But had it been noted down, hour by hour, minute by minute, it would have made an extraordinary scientific document on the occult—extraordinary! He never noted it down. But that vital being who was given a body—did it live on earth for any length of time? No, never. Never? He stopped at the subtle physical—he refused to go any farther. It was Satan, the Asura 1 of Light ...
... planes are not bound to the forms like the physical. The forms there are expressive, not determinative. What is important on the vital plane is the force or feeling and the form expresses it. A vital being has a characteristic form but he can vary it or mask his true form under others. What is primary on the mental plane is the perception, the idea, the mental significance and the form expresses that... came here. You have never heard of a double being? If I want to hang myself, would you say, "I can't help him against his will"? If that were your will and not merely an impulse of the vital being, nobody could stop you. This is what, perhaps, a human being would say, who has no knowledge of the play of forces? If I have knowledge of the play of forces, why do you want me to ignore ...
... him. SRI AUROBINDO: He is a man with an abundant vitality. With that vitality there is nothing that he could not have done. But at the same time there is no discipline, order and control in the vital being. He has written some very fine poems in English. He had made a name here as a doctor and, as soon as he entered the Ashram, people wanted to crowd in to be treated by him. He was successful with... NIRODBARAN: Can one gain anything and advance by that? SRI AUROBINDO: Why not? But there is the question: what and how far? Physical and vital Tapasya can give some control over the body and the vital being. But it looks more like Nigraha, forceful suppression. NIRODBARAN: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with divine realisation. SRI AUROBINDO: What do you mean by divine realisation? ...
... Becharlal's question) : What about it? DR. BECHARLAL: The effect of fasting on Yoga? SRI AUROBINDO (as if the question now were not so perplexing after all) : It gives a sort of excitement to the vital being, but the effect does not seem. to be very sound. I fasted twice—once in Alipore jail for ten days and the other time in Pondicherry for twenty-three days. At Alipore I was in full yogic activity... You break that wall or what is called the lid and you feel your individual self in the Infinite or you feel you are the Infinite. The opening can be vertical or horizontal—at various levels, the vital being, the heart, etc. CHAMPAKLAL: Is it true that illness comes from sadhana? SRI AUROBINDO: From sadhana? NIRODBARAN: I think he means that illness may come in the course of sadhana for purification ...
... or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they with-draw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance.¹ The intelligence of the subliminal being preserves the... bliss and universal delight of being. And all this experience will be in all parts of his being. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his ...
... work and carry on their affairs from the ordinary motives of the vital being, need, desire of wealth or success or position or power or fame or the push to activity and the pleasure of manifesting their capacities,... When one takes up the yoga and wishes to consecrate one's life to the Divine, these ordinary motives of the Vital being have no longer their full and free play; they have to be replaced ...
... to the individual vital plane there corresponds a cosmic vital world. When a human being is sufficiently developed he possesses an individualised vital being with organs of sight, hearing, smell, etc. So a Person who has a well-developed vital being can see in the vial world with his vital sight, consciously and with the memory of what he has seen. This is what makes a vision." (CWM, Vol. 10, p ...
... with that radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body, vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being. In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an anandamaya... s has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself ...
... come frequently in physical contact with the Mother to shake off the ego. I don't see how that could get rid of the ego. Once when the Mother was showing love, the vital being felt it should surrender itself to her. Now it keeps hankering for a bit more of the same thing. It is the ego that is showing itself in its true character. Formerly, it was associating... nature, for it is the superficial ego in the physical consciousness, irrational and instinctive, that refuses to go. After a long introspection I discovered that the ego or the vital being rises up on its own and not because of outer reasons. It rises because it is its nature to do so; it wants to keep hold of the being which it considers its property and field of experience ...
... strayed into in-tellectuaUty); but there are large domains in him that are wholly unconscious, that is to say, move in mechanical rounds, a passive slave of external impacts. I am referring to his vital being and his physical being. Even like the mind these too must admit into themselves the light of the consciousness in order to free themselves from the influence of other external forces and attain... because it has fallen unconscious, therefore it has entered into this life of bondage and slavery and mechanical existence. When life becomes conscious, the life-energy becomes luminous, the vital being gradually gains self-control and self-direction. Instead of being moved about by irresponsible and irrepressible desires and impulses it attains a clarity as to what it should desire and what ...
... strayed into intellectuality); but there are large domains in him that are wholly unconscious, that is to say, move in mechanical rounds, a passive slave of external impacts. I am referring to his vital being and his physical being. Even like the mind these too must admit into themselves the light of the consciousness in order to free themselves from the influence of other external forces and attain the... reality, because it has fallen unconscious, therefore it has entered into this life of bondage and slavery and mechanical existence. When life becomes conscious, the life-energy becomes luminous, the vital being gradually gains self-control and self-direction. Instead of being moved about by irresponsible and irrepressible desires and impulses it attains a clarity as to what it should desire and what it ...
... three ranges can be distinguished— the lower becoming more and more turbid and turbulent and fierce or more and more self-centred and selfish. These levels can. best be seen by their impact on our vital being and formations there. The first, the highest one, the meeting or confluence of the Mind and the Vital is the Heart, the centre of emotion, the knot of the external or instrumental vehicle, of the... intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asura— Asura, the mentalised vital being. The Asura or the Titan stands where consciousness descends Page 44 from the Mind into the Vital or Life-Force. He is the personification of ambition and authority and arrogance ...
... three ranges can be distinguished—the lower becoming more and more turbid and turbulent and fierce or more and more self-centred and selfish. These levels can best be seen by their impact on our vital being and formations there. The first, the highest one, the meeting or confluence Page 25 of the Mind and the Vital is the Heart, the centre of emotion, the knot of the external or in... 44 the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the Asura —Asura, the mentalised vital being. The Asura or the Titan stands where consciousness descends from the Mind into the Vital or Life-Force. He is the personification of ambition and authority and arrogance, he is the intolerant ...
... personal effort as a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender as follows: "... —an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing — the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature; rejection of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, c... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, —rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, and Ananda ...
... have arisen or been constructed to Page 60 serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance.'³ The intelligence of the subliminal being preserves the... bliss and universal delight of being. And all this experience will be in all parts of his being. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: 'His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his ...
... without anaesthesia, or walking two or three miles with one leg and arm blown off by a cannon-ball have been known to occur. The present nature of man is governed mostly by his mental or vital being. But man can govern his nature by the spiritual entity, his psychic being that is in him. The being that ordinarily acts in man is some part of his nature, either his mental or his vital personality... surrender you gain. A constant aspiration has to be maintained in order to make the surrender effective. Aspiration and surrender are the two processes of our nature, of the mental and the vital being. They are—even when they act powerfully in nature, from the true being, the true Self trying to express itself. The constantly awake ideal in the mind, a flame in the heart, a will in the vital ...
... Intuitive Consciousness. The Intuitive Consciousness or the level of Intuition is not the same as the action of intuition in the man's nature. It is true, intuition works in the mind, it works in the vital being, it can work in the body. But that is not the Intuitive Consciousness. It is intuition coming down in the nature of man. In fact, many people come to know many things by intuition in ordinary life... Q : You spoke about two processes for rending the Veil, What are they? A : One is by going within—that is, withdrawing the consciousness from outside and entering the inner mind, inner vital being and other subliminal parts. The second process is by allowing the Higher Power to descend into oneself. Q : There are so many persons who speak about the All, the One as the Real and rest ...
... greater worlds. Page 172 CANTO III THE GLORY AND FALL OF LIFE Having left the limits of the physical mind Aswapathy entered the world of life, the plane of vital being. To this plane belong change, doubt, adventure, toil without repose. Life pursues a goal which seems to recede like a mirage as it is pursued. In fact, this plane of pure life-force was "the manifest... beings there are living in the "griefless country under purple suns". To Aswapathy these vital beings and their realms were no longer dreams but realities. This realm of pure Vital Being rose to breathless summit regions where "Only a miracle's high transfiguring line Divided life from the formless Infinite". It is this highest vital plane of being that really ...
... movements of the Life-force, ''full of ardour". They had their higher movements full of mixture. For example, one could enter here into "the valley of the wondering Gleam", intermediate zone of the vital being full of deceit and danger because of the false light it shows. Those who are attracted by this "wandering Gleam" are agents of life-force, not its masters. This current of Life-force flowed past... glad uplift and a new working came." Then a transformation of nature followed in which "every act" of Savitri "became an act of God." In her heart "all the emotions gave themselves to God". Her vital being was tamed "to do a work of God on earthly soil." In the body "a firm ground was made for Heaven's descending might." Thus the entire human part of Savitri became harmonious. Once Nature's veil ...
... says at one place :— "Little by little, the vital being was habituated to find harmony in the most intense action, as it had found it in passive surrender. And once this harmony was sufficiently established, there was light again in all parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete. "Now the vital being has recovered in the midst of action the perception ...
... it after some years. Paul Brunton claims to have met some spirit hoary with age on the hill near the pyramids. Sri Aurobindo : The Egyptians believed that at the time of death the Ka, the vital being, went out of the man and after a thousand years, if the body was preserved, it would return to it. Brunton, I suppose, materialized the belief. Disciple : Is it possible to revitalize the... because revival is done in two ways : One, is to bring back the spirit of the man which is still not far away, the other is to get some other spirit that consents to come. Disciple : Can the vital-being be called back to the body? Sri Aurobindo : Yes, if it has not gone away very far it can be pulled back to the body. (The subject was changed) Disciple : There is chance of "C" ...
... personal effort: ...the triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender—an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing—the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being...rejection of the movements of the lower nature, rejection of the mind's Page 24 ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge... selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of light, power ...
... vital and there is a depth of the vital; the height of the life and the depth of the life. He finds, when he expands his consciousness from the physical human being to an inner being, that he is a vital being as well as the cosmos; this is the life-belt, the life-universe, which is independent of earth-life since all life is not confined to earth. There is a big belt of life-force and life-universe... veil divides it from the Absolute, from the Infinite; so each instrument of human nature is capable of contacting almost directly the supreme consciousness. That is why the mind cannot govern the vital being fully, cannot perfect it; the vital has its own right to approach the Supreme. The life force in man would not submit permanently to the 37 Page 37 dictate of either ...
... d then you wake up with a start. You were convinced that you were fine in your bed but in reality you had gone out of your body. Some vital being was pursuing you. As soon as you reentered your body and the soul found its shelter you were safe from this vital being. You woke up. So you understand how man has to suffer after death. The soul then has left the body. It is in a terrible state then. ...
... personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender, - an aspiration vigilant, constant, unceasing - the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature; rejection of the movements of the lower nature-rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, co... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may ...
... necessary for the complete development of the Sadhana. The work of the two together alone brings down the supramental Truth into the physical plane. A.G. acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind; he represents the Purusha element whose strength is predominantly in illumined knowledge and the power that acts in this knowledge, while the psychic being supports... stages, or first conditions .... The second thing we have to know and remember is that nothing is perfectly done unless all is perfectly done. It is not sufficient to open the mind and the vital being and leave the physical being to its obscurity. ... The third thing to remember is that if all is to be changed and done then there must be complete surrender. ... ... on one side no lack ...
... rebellious Angel who wanted Page 181 to take his place? Then, as an associated recollection crossed her mind, Mother said, "Do you remember I once told you I had clothed a vital Being in a body?" "Is that Being still alive?" Satprem queried. "Who was it?" "I have spoken of this before," she replied. "I recounted the story of the revolution in China, and how... voice. "But had it been noted down hour by hour, minute by minute, it would have made an extraordinary scientific document on the occult. He never noted it down." Page 182 "But this vital Being clothed in a body," Satprem brought Mother back to his earlier question, "did he live on earth for any length of time?" "No, never." "Never?" "He stopped at the subtle physical ...
... single power. For there are many strands, many degrees, many forms of energy of Nature. There is in the world of birth an energy of physical being and nature, arising out of the physical an energy of vital being and nature, arising out of the vital an energy of mental being and nature, arising out of the mental an energy of spiritual or supramental being and nature. And each of these forms of energy has ...
... vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words Page 130 expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond ...
... grosser intensity which emotion puts on in the stress of the active outward nature. The life depicted is the life of the soul and not, except as a form and a helping suggestion, the life of the vital being and the body. For the second more elevated aim of art is the interpretation or intuitive revelation of existence through the forms of life and Nature and it is this that is the starting-point of ...
... the Mother, but this is a special action of hers and usually she sees the persons whom she has to help. But she has seen only X 's mental being and it was still interested in earthly things; his vital being she has not seen and it is that that usually comes for help. Some however come at a later stage of the passage and not at first. 8 December 1936 Page 583 ...
... its precise meaning. It is quite true that "in our path the attitude is not one of forceful suppression, nigraha "; it is not coercion according to a mental rule or principle on an unpersuaded vital being. But that does not mean either that the vital has to go its own way and do according to its fancy. It is not coercion that is the way, but an inner change, in which the lower vital is led, enlightened ...
... retains the memory of its earthly life and so survives consciously. The artist, the philosopher and other developed persons who have organised, individualised and to a certain extent converted their vital being can be said to survive, because they have brought into their exterior consciousness some shadow of the psychic entity which is immortal by its very nature and whose aim is to progressively build ...
... course for assistance if necessary. He did so and lo! the tiger suddenly dwindled into an insignificant cat! You have no idea of the almost magical effect of staring fearlessly into the eyes of a vital being. Even on earth, if you deal in this way with all those incarnations of the vital powers which we ordinarily call animals, you are assured of easy mastery. A physical tiger will also flee from you ...
... environment and circumstances,—the mental, the vital and the physical,—that is born again: it is only the psychic being that passes from body to body. Logically, then, neither the mental nor the vital being can remember past lives or recognise itself in the character or mode of life of this or that person. The psychic being alone can remember; and it is by becoming conscious of our psychic being that ...
... was very, very unhappy for being a cat, it wanted to be a man. It had an untimely death. It used to meditate, it certainly did a kind of sadhana of its own, and when it left, even a portion of its vital being reincarnated in a human being. The little psychic element that was at the centre of the being went directly into a man, but even what was conscious in the vital of the cat went into a human being ...
... you must be very silent, must observe yourself very clearly. And you must be very humble; that is, be willing not to play a great part in all this story. The misfortune is that usually either the vital being or the mental being or even the physical being is very anxious to play a part, very anxious. So it swells up, takes up a lot of place, covers the rest; and it covers it so well that one can't even ...
... strange, there is still another thing I was speaking about today. The most important thing in this case is the last state of consciousness in which one was while both were joined together, when the vital being and the body were still united. So the last state of consciousness, one may say the last desire or the last hope or the last aspiration, has a colossal importance for the first impact the being has ...
... of depression that falls upon you: you lose confidence, you lose hope, you have the Page 93 feeling you will never be able to do anything, you are cast down. It means there is in your vital being something which is naturally egoistic, surely a little vain, which needs encouragement to remain in a good state. So it is like a little signal for those forces which intimates to them: "You can ...
... Chapter 1 of The Mother . Sweet Mother, it is written here: "A... submission... of the inner Warrior who fights against obscurity and falsehood." 1 Who is this "inner Warrior"? It is the vital being when it is converted. The vital turned completely to the Divine is like a warrior. It has even the appearance of a warrior. The vital is the place of power and it is this power which impels it to ...
... necessary for the complete development of the sadhana. The work of the two together can alone bring down the supramental Truth into the physical plane. A.G acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind; he represents the Purusha element whose strength is predominantly in illumined (intuitive, supramental or spiritual) knowledge and the power that acts in this knowledge ...
... psychic which organises his existence—only in what may be called the main lines, because for intervening in the details there would have to be a conscious union between the outer being, that is, the vital being and physical being, and the psychic being, but usually this does not exist. So externally, in the details... for example, there was someone who in deep perplexity said to me, "Well, if it is the ...
... He does not seem to consider this quality as something very, very desirable, from the way he treats this presence—exactly that! He prefers to it the ideas of his mind, prefers the desires of his vital being and the habits of his physical. The Mother Questions and Answers (1954): 9 June 1954 Sweet Mother, What is the role of the soul? But without the soul we wouldn't exist! The ...
... them to him, he can receive them. The most important point is that he shall not indulge any spirit of greed or desire under any excuse or colour Page 761 and should be unaffected in his vital being by the presence or absence of these things that satisfy desire. 5 March 1931 All that is simply the unreasoning repetition of the old blindness. There can be no understanding if your mind insists ...
... attack at various places and create or simulate different illnesses. Probably it is an after result of the ravage on the organism created by the Kalazar. In most cases it indicates a weakness in the vital being which opens it to pressure from hostile influences belonging to the lower vital worlds. [3] I had given Barin an answer to your former letter, but it may either not have been sent or else ...
... beginning in Yoga, first, because he was in dead earnest; secondly, because he had a clear and solid mind and a strong and tenacious will in complete control of the nerves; thirdly, because his vital being was calm, strong and solid; finally, and chiefly, because he had a complete faith and devotion to the Mother. As for seeing the Divine in the Mother at first sight, he is not the only one to do that ...
... part of it in one way or another, but it need Page 153 not change the vital nature, a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the whole higher consciousness ...
... Mother. It is better to write if you have them, than to be silent about it. 9 June 1933 Today a thought came to me: "Why are you forcing yourself so much with regard to the control of the vital being? Better not bother about opening your thoughts and desires to the Mother; rather leave her to work on you." If you want the Mother to work through you, you must lay before her your thoughts and ...
... naturally takes it with the essence of its past experience and in coming back it takes up a mental, vital and physical existence which has the mark of the ego and the ignorance. * "The true vital being... is wide, vast, calm, strong, without limitations, firm and immovable, capable of all power, all knowledge, all Ananda". (P. 13) Does this imply that the true vital belongs to the cosmic ...
... matter. But—Well, if it is not, then there is another way—it is what we call the integration, the harmonisation of the being. That cannot be done from outside, it cannot be done by the mind and vital being—they are sure to bungle their affair. It can be done only from within by the soul, the Spirit which is the centraliser, itself the centre of these radii. In all of them there is a truth that can ...
... formed individuality, fully conscious and having its own qualities, you would all be fused into one another and be indistinguishable. Even if we go only a little inwards, into the most material vital being, there is such a mixture between the vibrations of different people that it is very difficult to distinguish any of you. And if you did not have a body, it would be a sort of inextricable pulp. Therefore ...
... birth and evolution—puts forward a representative of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya puruṣa , on the vital plane the true vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , on the physical plane the true physical being, annamaya puruṣa . Each being therefore is, so long as the Ignorance lasts, centred round his mental, vital or physical Purusha ...
... fervid excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for want of something better and tries to fulfil itself through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms in the direction of what is divine and luminous; but this has to be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As the psychic personality ...
... —that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being* for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life---- To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation ...
... retains the memory of its earthly life and so survives consciously, The artist, the philosopher and other developed persons who have organised, individualised and to a certain extent converted their vital being can be said to survive, because they have brought into their exterior consciousness some shadow of the psychic entity which is immortal by its very nature and whose aim is to progressively build ...
... necessary. He did so and lo! the tiger suddenly dwindled into an insignificant cat! Page 65 You have no idea of the almost magical effect of staring fearlessly into the eyes of a vital being. Even on earth, if you deal in this way with all those incarnations of the vital powers which we ordinarily call animals, you are assured of easy mastery. A physical tiger will also flee from you ...
... that, being unillumined and ignorant, stand in the way of your approach to the Divine. All desires, whether good or bad, come within this description; for desire itself arises from an unillumined vital being and its ignorance. On the other hand you must accept all movements that bring you into contact with the Divine. But you accept them, not because they are good in themselves, but because they bring ...
... Victory over Falsehood The lords of Falsehood hold, at present, almost complete sway over poor humanity. Not only the lower life-energy, the lower vital being, but also the whole mind of man accepts them. Countless are the ways in which they are worshipped, for they are most subtle in their cunning and seek their ends in variously seductive disguises. ...
... Truth VICTORY OVER FALSEHOOD The lords of Falsehood hold, at present, almost complete sway over poor humanity. Not only the lower life-energy, the lower vital being, but also the whole mind of man accepts them. Countless are the ways in which they are worshipped, for they are most subtle in their cunning and seek their ends in variously seductive disguises. ...
... to tell the constructing mind: "You don't think this is true, and yet it is ." The mind has readily recognised that it was mistaken and has surrendered completely to all that Thou willest. The vital being is quiet and satisfied in all circumstances. All feeling dwells in an equal and pure peace; the whole being is flooded with Thy vast, eternal light; Thy love penetrates and animates it. And yet the ...
... everything you were thinking of is now escaping you, you wait very quietly for something in your head to begin to understand the content of the experience. There are people—many—who are weak in their vital being. When they have this sensation of infinity, eternity, in their very small person, in their very little strength, it is so different from the impression they have constantly, that they understand ...
... January Questions and Answers (1950-1951) 25 January 1951 "The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. It can set in motion everything, build up and realise, it can also destroy and mar everything. It seems to be, in the human being, the ...
... consciousness and the instruments through which consciousness manifests. Let us take the instruments: there is the mental being which produces thoughts, the emotional being which produces feeling, the vital being which produces the power of action and the physical being that acts. The man of genius may use anything at all and make something beautiful because he has genius; but give this genius a perfect ...
... contrary, have taken care to develop the higher states of consciousness. So, to say "each one bears his cross" is true of the external consciousness (of material happenings, happenings which touch the vital being, the emotional being and the mental being); for such people there will always be a considerable number of catastrophes, all the more because catastrophes seem to be proportionate to the capacity ...
... body. If you change its habits in the least, it is quite bewildered, it doesn't know any longer what to do, it says, "Excuse me, excuse me! but that's not how one goes about living." Those whose vital being is very active and dominating may succeed in awakening the body, and if they have the spirit of Page 366 adventure (which happens very often, for the vital is an adventurous being), the ...
... discipline, one is able to leave one's physical body, go out in the vital and move about quite consciously, Page 276 acting quite consciously in this vital world; then to leave one's vital being asleep and go out mentally, acting and living in the mental world quite consciously and with similar relations—for the mental world is in relation with the mental being, as the physical world is ...
... Divine, there is also its aspect of Power." Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 163-64 What have you not understood? Sri Aurobindo says that the vital part, the vital being is the greatest obstacle because it is unregenerate, and that there would be a possibility of transforming it if it surrendered entirely to Love and Knowledge; but as its predominant quality is force ...
... living, desire must be abolished and replaced by a purer and firmer motive-power, the tormented soul of desire dissolved and in its stead there must emerge the calm, strength, happiness of a true vital being now concealed within us. Next, life as it is is driven or led partly by the impulse of the life-force, partly by a mind which is mostly a servant and abettor of the ignorant life-impulse, but in ...
... a new life, a new world. And naturally, the liberation begins on the highest planes of consciousness: it is easier for the mind or the higher intelligence to conceive of new things than for the vital being, for instance, to feel things in a new way. And it is still more difficult for the body to have a purely material perception of what a new world will be. Yet this perception must precede the material ...
... "which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations ..." 20 The vital being or life-nature is made up of desires, feelings, instincts and impulses. The life-energy which animates the body (Prana) is an aspect of the vital. The body too has its own distinct consciousness ...
... only in conformity with what can lead you to the divine realisation, if you abolish in yourself all desires and impulses turned towards external things, if you calm your mental being, appease your vital being, if you shut yourself against suggestions coming from outside and become immune to the action of people surrounding you, you create such a spiritual atmosphere that nothing can touch it, and it ...
... all yourself to Krishna. In your nature there are many obstacles, chiefly a great activity of the outward-going mind and a thick crust of the impure lower Prakriti that covers the heart and the vital being. Quieting of the mind and purification of the nature are what you must have before you can fulfil your aim. Aspire for these two things first; ask for them constantly from above. You will not be ...
... an occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really rebellious in its very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and persists even when it is trained by the growing application to it of the enlightening reason. ...
... greater reality, on exaggerations of vital instinct and sensation, on physical wrynesses and crudities and things unhealthily strange. The thought-mind, losing the natural full-blooded power of the vital being, pores on these things, stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an illusion of some forceful sensation of living. This is not the real issue, but the way to exhaustion and decadence ...
... Ananda in the consciousness, their workings there, the realisation of the divine or spiritual love, the perception of one's own psychic being, the discovery of one's own true mental being, true vital being, true physical being, the realisation of the overmind or the supramental consciousness, the clear perception of the relation of all these things to our present inferior nature and their action on ...
... are two centres or parts of the consciousness—one is a witness, sākṣī , and observes, the other consciousness is active and it is this active consciousness that you felt going down deep into the vital being. If your mind had not become active, you would have known where it went and what it went there to experience or do. When there is an experience, you should not begin to think about it, for that is ...
... into the habit of hearing voices and seeing and feeling things which are only partly or sometimes true but mixed with much that is false and misleading. It is good that there was something in your vital being which rejected it. The dream is evidently an indication of the difficulty you are experiencing. The sea is the sea of the vital nature whose flood is pursuing you (desires are the sea water) ...
... Varuna. For first the seeker found the ultimate reality to be Matter and the physical, the material being, the external man our only self and spirit. Next he fixed on life as the Reality and the vital being as the self and spirit; in the third essay he penetrated to Mind and the mental being; only afterwards could he get beyond the superficial subjective through the supramental Truth-Consciousness to ...
... and collective need. But after a time it must become apparent that the knowledge of the physical world is not the whole of knowledge; it must appear that man is a mental as well as a physical and vital being and even much more essentially mental than physical or vital. Even though his psychology is strongly affected and limited by his physical being and environment, it is not at its roots determined ...
... identification with the conscious physical life, because the body is or seems to be the frame and determinant here of the mental and vital movements and capacities. Or it may identify itself with the vital being, the life-soul in us and its emotions, desires, impulses, seekings for power and growth and egoistic fulfilment. Or it may rise to a conception of man as a mental and moral being, exalt to the first ...
... sometimes on that in her which is most intimately spiritual. It awakens rare outbreaks of mysticism, a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos; it refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuousness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception. It carries with it a seeking for exquisite lyrical form, touches narrative ...
... place for a fixed object? What is it within us or without us that sends forth the mind on its errand ? What guides it to its object? Then there is the Life-force, the Prana, that works in our vital being and nervous system. The Upanishad speaks of it as the first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya, āsanya ; it ...
... rajasic vital nature is a surface creation of Prakriti, it is not the true being; however persistent it seems, it is only a temporary combination of vital movements. Behind is the true mental and vital being supported by the psychic—this true being is calm, wide, peaceful. By drawing back and becoming separate one creates the possibility of living in the peace of this inner Purusha no longer identified ...
... answer to its direct appeal and recognise at once the truth behind the object, behind your vanished physical self,—you will greet your psychic being or your Atman or at least your inner physical or vital being. Perhaps also you won't. Poetry also seems to be striving towards the same end by the same means—the getting away from mind into the depths of life or, as the profane might put it, arriving at truth ...
... call in the light of the Divine Consciousness from above, to bring the psychic being to the front and kindle a flame of aspiration which will awaken spiritually the outer mind and set on fire the vital being, is the way out. What you see and know at present is not the whole of what exists. You do not see your mind and you know only a little part of it—yet your mind exists and is part of your being ...
... spiritual self-offering. It [ pain and struggle in offering oneself to the Divine ] simply means that your sacrifice is still mental and has not yet become spiritual in its character. When your vital being consents to give up its desires and enjoyments, when it offers itself to the Divine, then the yajna will have begun. What I meant was that the European sense of the word is not the sense of the word ...
... medium's subconscient mind (using subconscient in the ordinary, not in the Yogic sense), that of the sitters, vital sheaths left by the departed or perhaps occupied or used by some "spirit", i.e. some vital being, the departed himself in his vital sheath or else something assumed for the occasion (but it is the vital part that communicates), elementals, spirits of the lowest vital physical world near earth ...
... you did not feel it because you were living on the surface altogether and the surface is all crowd and clamour. But in all men there is this silent Purusha, base of the true mental being, the true vital being, the true physical being. It was by your prayer and aspiration that the thing came, to show you in what direction you must travel in order to have the true rasa of things, for it is only when one ...
... itself it cannot carry you on the way, it will only make your progress slow and stumbling. There must be something in you that will open itself directly to the Truth and Light. The unregenerated vital being of man cannot do that because it demands of the higher Power that it shall satisfy the vital desires, demands, ambitions, vanity, pride, etc., before it will accept the Truth. The unillumined mind ...
... very usual experience. It means that for a moment you were no longer in your body, but somehow either above or outside the body consciousness. Page 436 This sometimes happens by the vital being rising up above the head or, more rarely, by its projecting itself into its own sheath (part of the subtle body) out of the physical attachment. But it also comes by a sudden even if momentary liberation ...
... becomes too directly aware of the vital plane, its worlds, its beings, and the direct action of their formations on the earthlife. One has to become aware also at the same time of one's own true vital being and act from it and not from the surface or desire vital in relation to all these things. All this effect does not come at once,—it develops as the contact with the cosmic Life increases. Page ...
... and the nerves, more than anything else. There is something there that expects the illness, accepts it when it comes and gives it free play. He must learn to keep calm and quiet in the mind and vital being, to refuse to regard the illness and the tendency to it in the body as something normal to it, regarding it rather as something imposed from outside, and he must believe firmly that it must and will ...
... and surrender of the vital part. It must learn to demand only the highest Truth and to forego all insistence on the satisfaction of its inferior impulses and desires. It is this adhesion of the vital being that brings the full satisfaction and joy of the whole nature in the spiritual life. When that is there, it will be impossible even to think of returning to the ordinary existence. Meanwhile the ...
... can get much knowledge too both of our concealed parts of nature and of things happening to us behind the veil and of others which are of concern for the development of our parts of nature. The vital being in us then may get very much attracted to this range of experience, may want to live more in it and less in the outer life. This would be the source of that wanting to get back to something interesting ...
... that are not dreams (i.e. the waking consciousness is lost for the time, but it is replaced not by sleep but by an inward conscious state in which one moves in the supraphysical of the mental or vital being). There is no reason why one should not have a burning aspiration in sleep, provided one is conscious in sleep. In fact, the condition you describe was not sleep—it was simply that the co ...
... experiences—such as those narrated in a recent letter—and can build up a strong consciousness which can enter any plane without fear or danger. As to your experience about the inkstand. When the vital being goes out, it moves on the vital plane and in the vital consciousness, and, even if it is aware of physical scenes and things, it is not with a physical vision. It is possible for one who has trained ...
... are not clear. On the other hand it may be due to some part of the being getting discouraged or fatigued or unwilling to follow the movement either of work or of sadhana. If it is something in the vital being, it may hide itself so as not to be exposed or cleared; if a part of the physical, it may be simply dumb and obscure, unable to express itself. Finally, it may come up from the subconscient. These ...
... there. It was so with a place near Villianur some years ago. There is the same tendency with suicides at a particular place. It is a sort of powerful formation that remains there with or without a vital being (spirit) in charge of the formation. It sometimes happens that by a carefully formed formation like this and through the instrumentality of a third person whose movements they control, the ...
... No, [ the vital ego is ] certainly not [ a hostile power ]—it is part of the ordinary human nature, everybody has it. It has to be purified and transformed, the ego being replaced by the true vital being of which it is a distorted shadow. The forces of the lower nature are often rebellious and resist transformation out of attachment to the familiar movements of the Ignorance, desire, vanity, pride ...
... together—the Grace of the Divine Mother and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender. Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards ...
... Mother with Letters on the Mother Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati Yesterday night I saw Maheshwari above my head, Mahakali in my vital being and Mahalakshmi seated in my mind and heart. Each one radiated a different light from her body. Then I saw a few subtle powers descending into my being. Maheshwari's natural place is in the higher ...
... determined by his mind and his vital desires. This is the thing you have to remember. Your psychic being is capable of giving itself to the Mother and living and growing in the Truth; but your lower vital being has been full of attachments and sanskaras and an impure movement of desire and your external physical mind was not able to shake off its ignorant ideas and habits and open to the Truth. That was ...
... Mother, she is not allowed to approach me. The infant in the Mother's arms is the symbol of the psychic being. The soul in direct touch with the divine Truth is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature ( manas, prāṇa, anna of the Taittiriya Upanishad); one may practise Yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason, power and all kinds of experiences in the vital ...
... in the world of our darkened mortal view of things there reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which envelops heaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physical consciousness and our vital being. It is here that Dawn the daughter of Heaven rises with the radiances of her Truth, with the bliss of her boons; putting off the darkness like a black woven robe, as a young maiden garbed in light ...
... the double meaning of the words used, go, dadhi and yava . × Perfect and vast energy in the vital being corresponding to the infinite and immortal light of the Truth in the mental being. ...
... lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking; the saint is moved by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being; the others stand in the vital kinetic nature driven by a higher spiritual energy and turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-given work or mission, the service of some divine Power, idea ...
... approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental ...
... enthusiasm, by the height and ardour of the soul's aspiration, by the philosophic aloofness or the strict logical intolerance of our intellect, by the eagerness of our will or by a sick disgust in our vital being discouraged by the difficulties or disappointed by the results of life,—by any or all of these motive-forces,—with a sense of the entire vanity and unreality of all else than this remote Supreme ...
... life and our death are a constant effort of being to return. Page 184 × Perceived as the life being or vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa . × The mental being, manomaya puruṣa . ...
... native foundation. A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self-perfection. The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes ...
... can impose upon it the influence, colour, shape, character, direction of our ideas, our knowledge, Page 756 our more enlightened volition and thus more effectively bring our life and vital being into harmony with our higher powers of being, ideals and spiritual aspirations. In our ordinary state these two, the mental and the pranic being and energies, are very much mixed up and run into ...
... selfishness, ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of human nature, rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion and desire. Sattwa produces a ...
... spirit; they will be the aims, the fruits, the lines of working laid down by the Divine from his light above, not anything claimed by the ego for its own separate sake. The mind, the heart, the vital being, the body itself will be satisfied with whatever comes to them from the dispensation of the Master of the being and in that find a subtlest and yet fullest spiritualised satisfaction and delight; ...
... knowledge and conscious experience as the out-flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that Page 696 one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his ...
... and the world, unmattavat , or with an entire disregard whether of the conventions and proprieties of fitting human action or of the harmony and rhythms of a greater Truth. It acts as the unbound vital being, piśācavat , the divine maniac or else the divine demoniac. Here too there is no mastery or supreme sublimation of nature. There is only a joyful static possession by the Self within us and an ...
... slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of the spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental or a vital being descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change can begin, the veil between the subliminal ...
... sacrifice—the one thing needful—is the Divine Presence and the Divine Consciousness and Power in us, and if that is gained, all else will be added. This is a transformation of the egoistic will in our vital being, our desire-soul and desire-nature, and it is far more difficult than the other. The third step is to get rid of the central egoism and even the ego-sense of the worker. That is the most difficult ...
... infinite being, infinite consciousness and will, infinite bliss and the infinite comprehensive and self-effective knowledge of supermind, four divine principles; to the latter belong mental being, vital being, physical being, three human principles. In their apparent nature the two are opposed; each is the reverse of the other. The divine is infinite and immortal being; the human is life limited in time ...
... Mother and Sri Aurobindo and himself is to change the "programming" of the cells and reveal the Supermind in them by a certain inner process? Except for an endeavour to silence the intellect, the vital being and the physical mind, no sadhana is required. It is as if the numberless spiritual experiences which lay behind the final stage of the Mother's sadhana for the world were of no importance and ...
... plays, this biune reality is present in one form or another, openly concordant or apparently divided. We have thus in the realm of evolutionary existence a mental being facing mental Nature, a vital being fronting vital Nature, a physical being opposite physical Nature: these beings are experienced by us according as our consciousness assumes a mental or vital or physical poise. And all of them ...
... glimmers and picturesque phrases. That is what you may call the illumined style in a semi-decorative form; the illumined style as such in its proper functioning is something which is beyond both the vital being and the mental being. You have some inward glow of things by which you feel the hidden significance of objects and of persons and of occasions. You have the illumined style wherever imagery is at ...
... adequate limpidity that deeply moves us without directly shaking up our sensations as Shakespeare does and tearing like him at our emotional roots. The typical Shakespearian seizure of our vital being in the Macbeth-passage can be gauged also by comparing it to Gray's eighteenth-century "gem": The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, ...
... its own Romanticism of the delicate and beautiful, the imagina-tive and spiritual. "It awakens... a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos; it refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuous-ness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception" and, throwing its force and fire and greater depth of passion across ...
... Evolution would end in a Man-God, crown of the earthly cycles. But Mind is not all; for beyond mind is a greater consciousness; there is a supermind and spirit. As Nature laboured in the animal, the vital being, till she could manifest out of him man, the Manu, the thinker, so she is labouring in man, the mental being till she can manifest out of him a spiritual and supramental godhead, the truth conscious ...
... basis and materials with general human nature and with his type, race, class, nation, but yet possessed of its own principle of particular individuation. It is this which reigns in his mentality, vital being, physical being and stamps itself upon them, but in itself it is neither mental, vital nor physical, but proceeds from a secret principle superior to all these; mind, life and body are only means ...
... awhile by surges of doubt and despondency, but the rock will emerge firm and indestructible. Faith is of the heart, the inner heart where lives the psychic being. The outer heart is the seat of the vital being, the life personality. That like the mind may Page 347 believe and then lose its belief, doubt comes from the mind, the vital and the physical consciousness. [The greater the intensity] ...
... has read me half of it (really remarkable), and she's just read a description of the vital world, of life.... Mon petit, it's certainly beyond the human consciousness: it's the consciousness of a vital being that can write that—it gave me a fever. It's gone; now it's Page 30 completely gone, but it gave me a fever. And I didn't feel any discomfort, nothing: I just admired, saying to myself ...
... 1971 June 23, 1971 ( Mother listens to the reading of various letters of Sri Aurobindo for the next Bulletin and selects this one: ) "What your vital being seems to have kept all along is the 'bargain' or the 'mess' attitude in these matters. One gives some kind of commodity which he calls devotion or surrender and in return the Mother is under obligation ...
... until the next life. But he has remained conscious and came to you. That's exceptional. ( silence ) We'll see what happens.... Perhaps he's sick? I don't know. Or else it left because the vital being (vital and physical) violently pushed it away. Page 243 Yes, it's more likely.... He's thrown himself into rather terrible things. ( after a silence ) I don't see him anymore ...
... comes. You have to be very stubborn about these things. Try. Anyway, even if you don't sleep, it's always restful to stretch out on your bed or a mat and go limp; it's a good rest for the vital being, and it can't do you any harm. ( A little later, concerning the last conversation: "On the surface, it's a very humble work, nothing sensational. There are no illuminations filling you with ...
... × It will break and dissolve a year later. As Mother will explain to Satprem later, the "transition" consisted in removing Satprem's entire vital being (which normally causes one to die) in small doses. × It is the same experience as that of the two ...
... intellect in Sri Aurobindo's verse. The intellect succeeds so well not only because its perceptions and discriminations are Spirit-touched but also because the poet puts behind them a vigorous "vital" being, carried over from his youth when it had its royal self-deployment in the impassioned narratives. Invitation brings this elan vital very effectively forward, even swamping the play of ideas ...
... rather say: I shall tell her everything quite frankly. 11 December 1932 Dear Mother, I am never satisfied, even though You have given me Page 66 a very rare chance. My vital being always wants more and more; it is never satisfied with what You give it. My child, I am going to reveal something that you will try to understand: you are dissatisfied not because I fail to give ...
... body that after some hours the doctors believed he would be saved. But it couldn't last (it wasn't possible—a part of the brain had come out). Well, when not only his soul but his mental being, his vital being, and all the rest had been properly collected and organized over his body and had realized that the body had become quite unusable, it was over—they gave up the body and it was over. I was keeping ...
... spade and make an untiring personal effort, with a calm and steady aspiration, tremendous will and fearlessness. This requires a strong, courageous and at the same time peaceful and God-oriented vital being to develop during the sadhana. The visions also show in general for man, as seen and experienced in particular by Champaklal, the existence and aspects of the Divine in relation to man. As a physical ...
... power in the vital.” Four days later she returned to this experience: “It was one of my aspects of being who was present there, like that – who manifested itself like that. It’s a part of my vital being, or rather of my innumerable vital beings (for there are quite a lot). And it is the one who is particularly interested in things concerning the Earth. … But this one [the tall white being] is not ...
... supramental being exists. Unity is the Divine. From that we come, in that we live, to that we go. ‘There is nothing but That.’ The Mother was familiar with the Unity-experience in her mental and vital being, for in these parts she had realized Unity. But the cells, in their materiality, represented extreme division. Her sadhana — it should be stressed again and again — was happening exactly on that ...
... 1920 (it might be a useful yogic exercise to try and imagine what these words mean) and how he stopped the publication of the Arya in January 1921 because the Supramental was descending in his vital being. The Mother, inwardly one with him, participated in his progress: ‘All progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made too.’ When the world of the cosmic forces in the person of the God Shri Krishna gave its ...
... suggestion send them to him, he can receive them. The most important point is that he should not indulge any spirit of greed or desire under any excuse or colour; and should be unaffected in his vital being by the presence or absence of these things that satisfy desire. Sri Aurobindo ###(Undated?) Q. What should be the true necessity of a sadhaka? Should he try to get extra things from ...
... formation different from creative power? A. You make a formation in your mind or on the vital plane in yourself—it is a kind of creation, but subjective only; it effects only your mental or vital being. You can create by ideas, thought-forces, images—a whole world in yourself or for yourself; but it stops there. Some have the power of making consciously formations that go out and effect the ...
... possible to educate a child by keeping the psychic being always in front? Yes, it is possible, provided the educator himself remains always in the psychic consciousness. Isn't a child mainly a vital being? He is vital in the sense that the mind is not sufficiently developed to govern—it is the vital that has the upper hand. 19 September 1947 ...
... will tell you what you should do and what you should not. This Consciousness does not do anything violently and forcibly but gently and gradually. It does not work only in the mind and the vital being but also in the body. It takes great care of the body and everything else. I am putting this Consciousness around you. You will see and feel it. It will tell you everything. It is always ...
... after only three or four years. It takes much longer than that. But you are young, you have all of life before you; you need not be impatient. You say that you are often depressed. It is the vital being that gets depressed when its desires are not satisfied. In ordinary life, one has to struggle to satisfy one's desires; here one struggles not to do so. Actually, whatever path one follows, success ...
... take an unprepared plunge into it might make it still more difficult. You should read first and understand the "Life Divine" and make sure that your resolution is on a firm basis and your mind and vital being ready to enter into a new inner life. Our help will be with you and our blessings. 24 February 1941 It is true that I have pardoned X, for the Divine Grace pardons everything, but it ...
... Somebody has said, "Sex is of the mind. The act is no problem. Sex is a problem to us because we are not sufficiently creative." Is not sex a thing not only of the mind but also of the vital being and the physical? What is it essentially and intrinsically? And how is the attraction between the sexes to be completely erased from the being? Sex seems rather to be more of the body. It is ...
... because her mind was in such a confusion as a result of her desires, that she would not have been able to understand what I would have written. Since then, I have tried to work on her mental and vital being to make it a little more open and receptive, so that she may understand that Page 251 love for children and the growing hope for the future that they represent in the creation, does not ...
... trials always come as a divine grace to show us the points in our being where we fall short and the movements in which we turn our back on our soul by listening to the clamour of our mental being and vital being. If we know how to accept these spiritual blows with due humility, we are sure to cover a great distance at a single bound. 22 February 1965 Be absolutely convinced that everything ...
... a few of them, I don't know) took refuge on the earth when the moon was dying. And that was the origin of the Chinese race. They are very peculiar.... They don't at all have the same kind of vital being as all the other human beings, not at all. Theirs is a strange vital. What kind of vital? Page 217 Cold. Cold: intellectual and cold. Cold. It's very insensitive. And the strange ...
... required blush. In spite of the little romance Sri Aurobindo had jocularly encouraged in Amrita's early days, Amrita was not considered by the Mother to have an experienced and seasoned "vital being" where sensual matters were concerned. Thus, while admiring Jules Romain's psychological acumen along with his style in his famous series of novels, Les Homines de la bonne volonte, she asked ...
... connection the topic you have raised of X is pertinent. He is claiming to be supramentalising his body. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have clearly said that the supramentabsation of the mind, the vital being and the physical consciousness have to precede the body's supramentalisation - and that there would be a failure in the Integral Yoga if the true soul has not emerged and taken charge of the sadhana ...
... from that heart straight, untouched by the circumspect mind. Not that the mind has no role to play in matters of the depths. Sometimes what hails from them is interfered with by the dramatising vital being so that the psychic form does not emerge in all its truth. Then the mind, if it has been well trained, gets the authentic sense of that form and cuts away the excrescences. Occasionally, even the ...
... inner being." Evidently the Avatar is not only a descent from above but also an "inner being", a soul, evolving from below an individual psychic entity passing from life to life with a new mind, vital being and body are each birth in order to compass a manifold experience. The next problem is expressed in the query put to Sri Aurobindo about himself and the Mother: "We believe that both you ...
... the supramental realisation was complete in him except that the Supermind had not yet permeated his body-substance - if the Truth- Consciousness had already descended into his inner mind, inner vital being and even subtle-physical nature - why could it not emerge into the gross-physical from within instead of being glimpsed up to the end above his head with its tail dangling just beyond? The ...
... Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20. p. 224 . × Movements of the vital being or life-nature, made up of instincts, passions, and desires. × Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga ...
... predominance of the vital nature is the chief cause of psychological disturbances. For, the human being at the present stage of evolution is primarily a mental being; therefore to be dominated by the vital being is to act contrary to one's nature as a mental being. So, in order to overcome the force of instincts, impulses, desires and feelings of the vital nature, it is necessary to have recourse to mind ...
... in the future. At that time, when you come to work here, Mina too will have to come here and work." After this I began to talk of my personal difficulties. I put before the Mother a map of my vital being so that she might work on it. I drew her attention again to the need in me for being poised not only in the psychic but also overhead. She agreed. "You must break through the lid and sit above. Have ...
... my chest I feel too much weakness. Do not believe that your body is breaking; it is not true, your body is very strong and will be quite healthy as soon as the inner quiet and poise of your vital being will allow it to remain calm, balanced and restful. 19 November 1934 ...
... death of both of them. In spite of the little romance Sri Aurobindo had jocularly encouraged in Amrita's early days, Amrita was not considered by the Mother to have an experienced and seasoned "vital being" where sensual matters were concerned. Thus, while admiring Jules Romain's psychological acumen along with his style in his famous series of novels, Les Hommes de la bonne volonté, she asked Udar ...
... surface, in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of the Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge. Letters ...
... ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of human nature, rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion and desire. Sattwa produces ...
... change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the whole higher c ...
... will tell you what you should do and what you should not. This Consciousness does not do anything violently and forcibly but gently and gradually. It does not work only in the mind and the vital being but also in the body. It takes great care of the body and everything else. I am putting this Consciousness around you. You will see it and feel it. It will tell you everything. It is ...
... possible only when the separate formation of the individual personality is dissolved and the separate limited functioning of the instruments is made silent. The organs in man—his senses, vital being, heart, mind and the inner being—are so many concentrations and therefore limitations of consciousness meant and developed to cognise, express and execute very finite movements of the finite and ...
... grateful also for what is given without grumbling because you are not given still more. My love is always with you. Have faith in it and you will cure. With simple sincerity offer your vital being to the Divine and the realisation will begin" ...
... weaknesses because they put a check upon the free expression of their impulsions based on the power of force. As usual, the mind, when it is not sufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature whose crushing laws it does not know well through their half-conscious mechanism. When the mind awakens to the consciousness of the first psychic movements, it ...
... Part II — Spiritual Games Champaklal Speaks “What do You Want?” An all-surrendering love by which the whole vital being becomes purified and one-pointed.—Amal Full conversion and consecration of the physical consciousness. Liberation from all sexual impulses and desires.—Pavitra To be taken right into the Beyond in surrender.—Datta Deep and complete ...
... being. On the other hand to affirm that the fact that you have it is a reason why you should not go on with the Yoga is not reason- able either. It is something that is no essential part of your vital being which has plenty of reserves of strength in it, but a small tendency of a small part which has unduly magnified itself owing to past struggles and comes up strongly in periods of depression. When ...
... speak—there is nothing of the kind in the mind of Sahana. When she broke out against you, it had nothing to do with Yoga—she had forgotten everything about Yoga at the moment—but was an outbreak of the vital being in its crudest from and she was at the same time as angry with us as with you because we had supported you in the Maitreyi affair and taken your side. As soon as we brought her back to her proper ...
... To use the terms of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the first process is to perfect the faculties and activities of the annamaya kosha, pranamaya kosha and manomaya kosha, — of the physical being, vital being and mental being, — Page 25 and proceed to develop and perfect the faculties of Vijnāna Purusha and the Ānandamaya Purusha; this will lead us to the knowledge of the law of the ...
... maker, and when Varuna the Mighty comes, he sunders the three-fold cord. The upper cord of the mind flies upward releasing the wings of the Soul into superconscient heights; the middle cord of the vital being parts both ways and all ways, and the constrained life breaks out into a happy breadth of existence; the lower cord of the Physical being collapses downward taking with it the alloy of our bodily ...
... of the inconscient. The movement of Ashwins is a movement of Ananda that always bestows health, youth, strength, wholeness to the physical man; it bestows capacity of action and enjoyment to the vital being; and it imparts energy of the light to the mental being. To fashion the chariot of the Ashwins is to provide to the physical, to the vital and to the mental members of the human personality with ...
... governed and moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of knowledge. The saint is moved by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart, and he has grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being. The saint is also marked by devotion that lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking. The soldier of the spirit, the hero of God's battle and the gentle and ...
... the ultimate ends that personality seeks to embody express and fulfil. Corresponding to each capacity, there are; specific values. Our physical being seeks the value of health and strength; our vital being seeks the value of harmony and heroism; our rational Acuity seeks the value of truth and universality; our moral will seeks the good and the right; our aesthetic sensitivity seeks the value of beauty ...
... satisfied. As for his internal world, he asks if it is his goal to suppress the limits to the expansion of his ego or to allow a free field to the unlimited desires of the force of his egocentric vital being; he seems to be wanting neither. A number of mental ideas and ideals are competing with each other for their full realization and fulfilment; for a time, he chooses one in preference to the other; ...
... the supramental being and even the bliss being. It is these states of the Purusha which are described in the Taittiriya Upanishad as annamaya purusa, the physical being, prānamaya purusa, the vital being, manomaya purusa, the mental being, vijanānamaya purusa, the supramental being, and ānandamaya purusa, the bliss being. It is the individual being that accepts the identification, by means ...
... " 53 Or else, to use the terms of the Taittiriya Upanishad, we may perfect the faculties and activities of the annamaya purusha, pranamaya purusha, and manomaya purusha, the physical being, vital being and mental being, develop the operations and faculties of the vijnanamaya purusha and anandamaya purusha, and come to know the law in the universe of the Truth and of the Bliss, and realise the ...
... or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when Page 39 they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance." 31 According to the Mandukya Upanishad ...
... moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of Knowledge. The saint is moved by the awakened psychic page - 33 being in the inner heart, and he has grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being. The saint is also marked by devotion that lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking. The soldier of the spirit, the hero of God's battle and the gentle and ...
... Mind Heaven (Dyaus, the three heavens) Life-force The Mid-Region (Antarisksha) Matter Earth (The Three Earths) We draw from the life-world our vital being. We draw from the mind-world our mentality; we are ever in secret communication with them. We can consciously dwell in them. We can also rise into solar worlds of the Truth and enter into the portals ...
... infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his ...
... that we may turn at once. The Kathopanishad speaks of three fires and five fires, indicating that the soul that is fire is to be found at three levels, the level of the body, the level of the vital being, and the level of the mental being. The Kathopanishad also tells us that the mental being is not the highest, since the faculty of knowledge is even higher than the mind. It further tells us that ...
... dead; it has its own inherent life and is able to conduct a journey. When the psychic being leaves the body on the death of the body, it carries three elements with it, namely, the mental being, the vital being and the subtle physical being which were developed in the body during its life. The departing soul at the time of death chooses what it will work out in the next birth and determines the character ...
... section with an admonition from Sri Aurobindo addressed to the sadhakas who would like to grow in true faith: "Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect. An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn ...
... answer to its direct appeal and recognise at once the truth behind the object, behind your vanished physical self, - you will greet your psychic being or your Atman or at least your inner physical or vital being. Perhaps also you won't.... I have written so much, you will see, in order to say nothing - or at least to avoid your attempt at putting me in an embarrassing dilemma." 6 (5) "...our ...
... Divine, p. 424) There is also a category of dreams which may be called 'pre-monitory' or 'previsional'. If there is no interference of the constructing mind and its imaginations nor of the vital being and its interpretative preferences, if the recording consciousness remains sincere and passive, then these premonitory and previsional dreams can reveal to the sadhaka important events of the future ...
... the world, unmattavat, or with an entire disregard whether of the conventions and proprieties of fitting human action or of the harmony and rhythms of a greater Truth. It acts as the unbound vital being, piśācavat, the divine maniac or else the divine demoniac." 2 But this sort of 'static possession by the Self' or 'the unregulated 1 Letters on Yoga, pp. 64-65. (Italics ...
... heights of the spirit, the base Page 41 becoming in the end of one substance with the peaks. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty and the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy as poor ...
... is much in it that is exaggerated and imperfect. Its seers seem often to preach an impossible self-abnegation of the vital life and an asceticism which instead of purifying and transforming the vital being, seeks to suppress and even kill it; life itself is impoverished or dried up by this severe austerity in its very springs. Carried away by a high-reaching spirit of revolt, these prophets denounce ...
... soul of a seeker is overpowered by (i) spiritual enthusiasm, (ii) by the ardour of aspiration, (iii) by the philosophic aloofness, (iv) by the eagerness of will, or (v) by a sick disgust in the vital being discouraged by the difficulties or disappointed by the unexpected results of life, the sadhaka may be led to experience "a sense of the entire vanity and unreality of all else than this remote Supreme ...
... the mind of the sadhaka remains shut up in its own ideas and preferences and because of that acts as an obstacle to the action of the divine Shakti in its ādhāra; "if it is found that the vital being of the sadhaka is whirling in the vortex of its greeds and desires; "if it is found that the physical being of the sadhaka has mortgaged itself to the inert movements and habits that normally ...
... of hours every day. Sri Aurobindo has denounced this bargaining give-and-take attitude on the part of some inmates. It is worth quoting here what he has said in this connection: "What your vital being seems to have kept all along is the 'bargaining' or the 'mess' attitude in these matters. One gives some kind of commodity which he calls devotion or surrender and in return the Mother is under ...
... creation, each complete in its separate existence. The evolved spiritual individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual community or communities in the same world as mental man and the vital being of the animal, but each working out its independent existence in a loose relation within the terrestrial formula. The supreme power of the principle of unity taking all diversities into itself and ...
... seems to have turned beautifully towards the Mother and that is why she is able to use him as an instrument in curing cases of illness. The remaining parts seem to be still egoistic. Perhaps if his vital being were less egoistic, he would achieve greater things in his medical practice and in his inner sadhana. He can cure the people all right, in spite of ego — the force too does work through ...
... in full action supported by the inertia. The vital was restless, agitated and wanted activity, like talking etc. The inner being was feeling void since it could not supply as much energy as the vital being needed. Could you kindly explain such a reaction? It may be because you have been bringing down Force. So the vital got a reaction, "Let me be forceful and active too." Or it may be ...
... then I was not sure that it would work out successfully. Anyway, I wanted to give it a trial and gave that idea to Motilal. Then he took up the idea and, as you know, he took it up with all his vital being and in an egoistic way. So the vital forces found their chance. They tried to take possession of the work and the workers.' Like Motilal Roy, Paul Richard found himself unable to bear the pressures ...
... in the lower planes of body, life and mind. 42The human being has many elements in himself, quite distinct from each other. He has first of all a body, which is made of matter. Next he has a vital being, which is the energy, power, or prana element in him; then he has the mind, which is his rational, intellectualizing element. The vital is that in man which gives him life, energy, power dynamism ...
... which man's spiritual consciousness unfolds itself and which form the consummation of mystic life." I don't agree—unless it is a sadhana of the vital plane which then naturally expresses the vital being = love-excitement, love-quarrels, viraha , 75 revolt, despair, rupture etc., etc., frequent surrenders, unions, partings. Dutt has said that according to the Ancients, pleasure of the sex-act ...
... reading. Pepper is not to be eaten with fruits — it is very bad for it would spoil the effect of the fruit. Is not a greedy desire for food and drink a movement of the vital being? Can it be felt as a physical need? Yes. The first effect of such a desire is on the physical. Y told me that if anything comes to us without our Page 185 ...
... change these vital defects? A steady attitude of self-giving is bound to cure and transform. The working may take some time. Can sadness help one cure dryness in the vital being? I do not know that sadness has the power to cure. I have myself followed the Gita's path of equanimity — but for some the psychic sadness may be necessary. But I think it is more an ...
... did not feel it because you were living on the surface altogether, and the surface is all crowd and clamour. But in all men there is this silent Purusha, base of the true mental being, the true vital being, the true physical being. It was by your prayer and aspiration that the thing came, to show you in what direction you must travel in order to have the true rasa of things, for it is only when one ...
... n of Rabindranath. Not that the movement was totally absent before the advent of Rabindranath. But it is from him that the current has received the high impetus and overflooded the mind and the vital being of the Bengali race. We can recall here the two great artists who commenced modernism – Madhusudan and Bankim. But in their outlook there was still a trace of the past, in their ideas and expressions ...
... hymn, Sri Aurobindo writes: The Aswins...are born or manifested from Heaven...their movement pervades all the worlds, the effect of their action ranges from the body through the vital being and the thought to the superconscient Truth...They are therefore N ā saty ā , lords of the movement, leaders of the journey or voyage... Page 285 'In ...
... particular line of thought with any kind of steadiness or order. Our heads are full of noise like a market-place without any peace or restraint or harmony. If the mind is in such a state, the vital being is still worse. You cannot keep count of the strange desires and impulses that play about there. If the brain is a marketplace, the heart is no better than a mad-house. Well, I shall not now enlarge ...
... I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me. . No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 2 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where ...
... Mother attempted could not be fully achieved because the foundations were not properly laid, the basic ground was not prepared. Any higher structure of the mind and Overmind must be built upon man's vital being and physical life. The new creation left out of account these realities of basement, so we had to come down, forgetting for the moment the higher realisation, into these darker regions and make a ...
... in the last analysis, of starry vocables, quanta of articulate life-energy. Yes, Shakespearean syllables are indeed the glorious members cut out of the body as it were of a beautiful vital being transmuted into heavenly luminaries. In the world of poetry Dante is a veritable avatar. His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive ...
... the man. It is really something that belongs to the inner man; in a game, it is a quality of the inner body-consciousness. It needs a harmony between the consciousness of the body and the inner vital being, it implies a natural sense of measure and rhythm. - In our days, we did not know anything of all this. We did have the gift of imagination and feeling, but now is the day of science. You have ...
... concentrated. They have to present a united front and function towards an ever-increasing consciousness and knowledge. As for the mental faculties so for the faculties of the vital. The normal vital being in man is in a greater and perhaps more dangerous chaos. The impulsions, emotions, upsurges that belong to this domain have not so much to be developed or increased as to be purified, made conscious ...
... limitations and released into the broader reality. These threefold limitations are repeated in each of the statuses of being or consciousness. Thus the mind has a mental being, a vital being and a physical being. So the mind has mental limitations and vital limitations and also physical limitations. The mind's mental limitations are its notions and concepts, constructed ideas and fabricated ...
... but coercion only chains up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated and civilised movements; it does not and cannot eliminate him. The real virtue of the dynamic and vital being, the Life Purusha, can only come by his finding a higher law and spirit for his activity within himself; to give him that, to illuminate and transform and not to destroy his impulse is the true ...
... one, as I did with the thoughts when I was at Baroda. This method is more powerful and the results too are quicker. There is also a mental control, but there it is the mind trying to control the vital being. The control is only partial and temporary. The thing is rather suppressed within and can come out on any opportunity. I have heard of a Yogi in Benares who was bathing in one of the ghats. In ...
... there are people who can get them. without first establishing the quietude, but it is very difficult. NIRODBARAN: Is there a veil in the heart also? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, a veil or wall of the vital being with its surface consciousness and emotional disturbances. One has to break through that to what is behind the heart. In some people the Force works behind the veil because it would meet with many ...
... between Yeats, R and J! When R was sending me his poems, I found some fine lines amidst a mass of nonsense. With his wonderful vital energy he could have succeeded in any line he took up, but his vital being was rather undisciplined. PURANI: When he showed me his poems I told him to try to improve his form and advised him to see Amal's poems. He saw them and said, "That chip of a boy—what does he ...
... egoism of an ascetic, of a saint – it is s ā ttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient r ā jasic pride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every step ...
... consisting, in the last analysis, of starry vocables, quanta of articulate life-energy. Yes, Shakespearean syllables are indeed the glorious members cut out of the body as it were of a beautiful vital being transmuted into heavenly luminaries. In the world of poetry Dante is a veritable avatar. His language is a supreme magic. The word-unit in him is a quantum of highly concentrated perceptive ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: But why should it be so considered? If the Divine in them chose that path the question settles itself. PURANI: Could they really drop their nature? What becomes the mind, the vital being and the physical? SRI AUROBINDO: What do you mean by "their nature"? They no longer have any nature when they enter into Laya; they drop it. SATYENDRA: Cannot the human soul, the psychic being ...
... illness from the subconscious in their sleep or dreams. They don't know it and get the disease. Moreover, the physical being is habituated to these things and easily accepts the suggestions; the vital being too. But if the inner consciousness is awake, the suggestions can't act. DR. MANILAL: I don't accept suggestions, Sir. SRI AUROBINDO: Who is "you"? DR. MANILAL: I, Manilal, Sir! (Laughter) ...
... the psychic being, yes. NIRODBARAN: In Kirtan, people easily go into Dasha (a kind of trance). SRI AUROBINDO: There are other effects too—sometimes undesirable sexual ones. Very often the vital being, instead of the psychic, is roused. EVENING PURANI: Some people conjecture that Hore-Belisha has resigned because of his difference with the generals. SRI AUROBINDO: But, isn't the War Ministry ...
... love? (Laughter) Love is a fine flower, but unity of consciousness is the root. People become egocentric because, when they receive something of the higher power, they gather it into their vital being and turn it over to their lower nature. They think the power is their own. When we were only a few people and the Ashram had not grown much, A and B tried to convert all sorts of people to sp ...
... Nirodbaran ): You have to take this extract back to Dilip and tell him I have read it. Say that it is a big yogic experience—a psycho-spiritual one. It shows a going through the psychic down into the vital being and finding there the unitarian principle, the principle of oneness with everybody. Huxley speaks of "dark peace" because it is down below that he goes and from there opens to the Light above. All ...
... people? Why can't Dakshina sleep? Thinking? NIRODBARAN: No, vital restlessness. He says everything is a chaos. SRI AUROBINDO: Well, he has to build a cosmos out of it. He has to quiet the vital being. NIRODBARAN: S told me of an experience. She feels a stillness coming down upon her and she becomes perfectly still, without any vibration. Then the stillness melts and the outline of her body ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: That is a different matter. Each one will of course receive in his own language. An Englishman won't receive in Bengali or Gujarati. That depends on the response of the mind, the vital being or whatever it may be . About Ahimsa (non-violence), animals feel if a person is really non violent or not and they approach person according to that feeling. But what I want to know is whether Jainism ...
... own friend, as well as one's own enemy. But, then, to fight that enemy, no outside courage is required, it is there within the being. You understand me? Fear is something that dwells either in the vital being or in the body. You may call it man's original sin, which can be conquered by the force of will. That is exactly what I learned to do when I grew older. Whenever I found myself afraid of any particular ...
... vital and physical consciousness, elements enough to enable it to support a descent of the higher force. Page 69 How does fasting bring about a state of receptiviry? Usually the vital being is concentrated very much in the body. And when the body is well fed, it draws its force and energy through the food – it is one way of absorbing energy, almost the the only way, at least the more ...
... of the body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is su ...
... concentrated. They have to present a united front and function towards an ever increasing consciousness and knowledge. As for the mental faculties so for the faculties of the vital. The normal vital being in man is in a greater and perhaps more dangerous chaos. The impulsions, emotions, upsurges that belong to this domain have not so much to be developed or increased as to be purified, made conscious ...
... first. . I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me. . No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. ² So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where she ...
... superimposed' one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the Page 218 life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other levels like these. A miracle happens, that is to say, a material formation behaves ...
... own particular limitations and released into the broader reality. These threefold limitations are repeated in each of the statuses of being or consciousness. Thus the mind has a mental being, a vital being and a physical being. So the mind has mental limitations and vital limitations and also physical limitations. The mind's mental limitations are its notions and concepts, constructed ideas and fabricated ...
... lives in and through every other and all together live in everyone. The whole forms an indissoluble integral and unitary life. This collective integration means all individuals have one mind, one vital being, even one physical consciousness, not of course one material body but still a feeling of the' kind. One mind or one vital or one physical consciousness does not mean everyone has the same identical ...
... Chakravarti with the advice, 'Take Krishna as the symbol of the immanent Divine, the Divine within you.' And, 'in a month the whole work was done.' 1896-1907 Period of cultivation of the vital being and aesthetic consciousness. Comes in contact with leading artists of the period including Rodin and Matisse. Meets Emile Zola. Six of her paintings are exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale ...
... refer to a universal family open to all differences and even all divergences. . . . But in any case, mutual misunderstanding and lack of collaboration can only come from the outer, physical and vital being which is formed in this life and is not yet under the rule and influence of the psychic. As soon as one is united with one's psychic, all the conflicts of clashing bad wills can no longer exist. ...
... People should be educated through exhibitions and teaching to understand, appreciate and develop all kinds of Page 15 arts, literature, poetry, music, etc., so that their vital being gets trained in refinement and beauty. Mental Education Consult the Mother's writing on 'Mental Education5. ' General Education of the People General Education ...
... begins, in this microscopic cleansing. The cleansing must begin somewhere. "When is it going to happen?" For the mind or the higher intelligence to conceive of new things is easier than for the vital being, say, to feel things in a new way. And for the body it is still more difficult to have a purely material perception of what a new world will be. Yet, this perception must PRECEDE the material tr ...
... interested in the outer cure of my cough than in profiting inwardly by it. It is obvious that if you discover the psychological reason of the cough, that is to say what in your physical or vital being resists the penetration of the Divine Force in your body, not only will you have profited from the illness for making a big progress, but also, the body itself will begin the long work of transformation ...
... of divers inter-connected planes of consciousness. And Man himself: isn't he a composite entity - so far as the evolutionary scene is concerned - made up of a psychic being, a mental being, a vital being and a physical being? And men differ widely, in the degree of their self-awakening, in the energy of their faculties, in their assumption of responsibility. A simple law will not therefore cover ...
... touches them, cannot balance the desire for money. To win money from their hands for the Divine means Page 600 to fight the devil out of them; you have first to conquer or convert the vital being whom they serve, and it is not an easy task. 3 And now, in the course of a message on 6 January 1955, the Mother declared that a day would come when all the wealth of this world, freed at last ...
... conscious with the true consciousness"; and for that "faith and surrender and fidelity and openness are conditions of some importance." 22 Sri Aurobindo also found that in some disciples the vital being seemed to have maintained a commercial attitude towards the Ashram, treating it as a sort of communal hotel or mess, and the Mother as the dignified hotel-keeper or mess-manager: "One gives ...
... and made her presence felt by a group of friends by picking up a pencil, writing a few words, signing her name and even shifting an object.31 On another occasion she was able to move, in her vital being, up and down a train, and she saw everything without herself being seen.32 But Mirra didn't attach any special importance to such occult adventures. She knew well enough that occultism was ...
... personality, could preserve continuity even after death: The artist, the philosopher and other developed persons who have organised, individualised and to a certain extent converted their vital being can be said to survive, because they have brought into their exterior consciousness some shadow of the psychic entity which is immortal by its very nature and whose aim is to progressively build ...
... feelings of dignity, nobility and magnanimity and self-sacrifice that our enlightened temperament and the dynamic parts of our nature may aspire for. Mahālaksmī floods our heart and our higher vital being with love and sweetness, with harmony and happiness, and a serene peace and repose even in the midst of a thousand calls of our creative energies. Mahāsaraswatī fulfils all the high aspirations ...
... it is tainted by egoistic cravings and insistences. Abhimān however much it may have been associated with certain legendary forms of bhakti , is a disturbing and impeding movement of the vital being. "The sooner you get rid of abhimân," writes Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, "the better. Any one who indulges abhimân puts himself under the influence of the hostile forces. Abhimân has nothing to ...
... Inconscient, it is a meeting place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of ...
... soul's deity, A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed, A joy that drags not sorrow as its shade". Sāvitrī, Book I, Canto 4. Explaining how the life-force in man, his vital being is unable to attain its most constantly pursued aims of absolute knowledge, absolute power, and absolute delight, he affirms that it has a vision Page 110 of gods in heaven, but is ...
... it not a part of Divine realization? What is Divine realization? Page 82 Sri Aurobindo : Experience of peace and bliss is a spiritual realization. If one gains control of the vital being by the influence of the Self – that is a divine realization. Disciple : But one can have the necessary control by the mind – rather than try such physical and outward control. Sri Aurobindo ...
... strange! I asked the Mother, “What can be the reason, Mother? I have never become nervous wherever I have sung before!” The Mother replied, “You forget in whose Presence you were singing. Your vital being became nervous before that Divine Presence.” Once in one or two months the Mother used to hear our music in the hall before Amrita’s room — Dilip and myself, either of us alone, or together. Those ...
... and Time". He wants to prove, roughly, that pain, sex and time, give you the three levels of rise of the organism in the process of evolution. With pain, the evolution of the living organism or vital being begins and in sex it reaches a certain animal level, so to say, and in 'time' it comes to mental consciousness. This is just mentioned to show that in living organism, in matter, there is no experience ...
... idea. Thus, every act is a symbol with her and the symbol hides a living power. In spite of all her efforts. Nature is yet not successful in carrying out her purpose on this level of the higher vital being. "But what she needed most she cannot build". She finds everything else but misses the Infinite. Then, Aswapathy found on the levels of the higher vital world, that there was a consciousness ...
... life we will come to the subject when we take Page 165 up the detail of the process. Then he takes up the three powers, and that is important to understand. They are mind, vital being and matter— mind, life and body. In Chapters 18,19 and 20, he deals with the Mind and Life to show how they are derived from the Supermind, how there is a derivative action from the Supra-mental ...
... this beautiful and really genuine feeling? I wish I could keep up this sweet feeling and not trouble you with all these silly things any more. SRI AUROBINDO: It is the small habits of the lower vital being which gather all their strength to resist correction and try to occupy the consciousness. When they come you must learn to detach your inner consciousness from them entirely so that even when they ...
... happened in your last experience. What you felt as a part of you, yourself but not your physical self, rising to meet the higher consciousness above, was this inner being; it was your (inner) higher vital being which rose in that way to join the highest self above — and it was able to do so because the work of purifying the outer vital nature had begun in earnest. Each time there is a purification of the ...
... very open and ready to change all one's ideas, be they personal, social or national. "Take taste and food," Sri Aurobindo said. "I was once a violent non-vegetarian. Then I found that it was my own vital being that was demanding meat. Well, I gave it up and for years together I went on taking whatever came my way. Then I found even what people call 'tasteless' and 'bad' food has got a taste in it." Isn't ...
... and heaviness. Indeed it is even striking how closely he monitored his own body's functions, and with what minuteness. After all, he did say that "it is not sufficient to open the mind and the vital being and leave the physical being to its obscurity." If we simply look, for instance, at a few first entries in his diary of 1912, what do we find? "18.1.1912—The roga [disease or disorder] that ...
... Night the worlds as he sees them are born. And these other worlds between the luminous upper and the tenebrous lower ocean? They are here. Page 373 Man draws from the life-world his vital being, from the mind world his mentality; he is ever in secret communication with them; he can consciously enter into them, be born into them, if he will. Even into the solar worlds of the Truth he can ...
... consciousness, the Ritam; they are born or manifested from Heaven, from Dyaus, the pure Mind; their movement pervades all the worlds,—the effect of their action ranges from the body through the vital being and the thought to the superconscient Truth. It commences indeed from the ocean, from the vague of the being as it emerges out of the subconscient and they conduct the soul over the flood of these ...
... offers as its reward and consequence. Another and greater outcome of this stage of social evolution is the emergence of high and luminous ideals which promise to raise man beyond the limits of the vital being, beyond his first social, economic and political needs and desires and out of their customary moulds and inspire an impulse of bold experiment with the communal life which opens a field of possibility ...
... whether the spiritual and religio-philosophical view of life and the government of civilisation by its ideas and motives or the rationalistic and external view of life and the satisfaction of the vital being governed by the intellectual and practical reason give the best lead to mankind. And granting the value and power of a spiritual conception of life, we can ask whether the expression given to it ...
... or a compromise, a spiritualising of life and mind as much as possible. And because the difficulty most constantly insistent on man's mentality in practice is that presented by the claims of his vital being, by life and conduct and action, the direction taken by this preparatory endeavour consists mainly in a spiritualising of the ethical supported by the psychical mind—or rather it brings in the spiritual ...
... status of the gradations of Nature, the Spirit takes a poise of its being proper to that gradation; in Mind-Nature it becomes the mental being, Page 365 in Life-Nature it becomes the vital being, in nature of Matter it becomes the physical being, in supermind it becomes the Being of Knowledge; in the supreme spiritual status it becomes the Being of Bliss and pure Existence. In us, in the ...
... to read it. But when Amrita asked if he too could do so she refused. It would seem that its frankness in sexual matters would have brought it unnecessary trouble for Amrita's non-experienced vital being, whereas Udar was too blasé to be affected. I am sure the Mother would have thought of me also in the same way as of Udar. It was rather surprising to see her admiring Lenin. Sri Aurobindo ...
... foundation of personality will be abolished. Contrary to what we might believe, their difference—their "superiority"—will not be expressed by the expansion of the mental being, or the inflation of the vital being in the limits within which we are presently confined, but in the surpassing of these limits. No exaltation of the ego, therefore, but its quashing. If they are to be greater, this cannot happen by ...
... Integral Yoga in particular. Extra power, force and protection are needed and numbers are one way of achieving this. I am not a visionary person. One cannot have all the powers to be had, but my vital being can detach itself and travel off to other levels. Some years ago I flew over the Himalayas. I went to a spot in Central Asia. When I entered a doorway there was a long hall full of men from around ...
... Visions of Champaklal Visions of Champaklal A Sheet of Cloth with Snow-white Light 1980-09-11 Some kind of activity of the vital being seems to be going on. Then a power from the higher world comes and takes up the individuals in a protective sheath of the inner self and absorbs their consciousness into the psychic plane. His hands with their various ...
... which gradually enters the cells of the body and through an interplay of various forces—as indicated by the colours—it transforms them as symbolised by the numerous living figures representing the vital being getting merged into the light of the higher consciousness. Outside was seen a golden universal Purusha, the physical embodiment of the Supramental Truth. His “body was composed only of suns, implying ...
... and it is this which must become your normal consciousness and the basis of the supramental development. In order that it may so become, the mind has to be made calm and strong, the emotional and vital being purified and the physical consciousness so opened that the body can hold and retain the consciousness and power. I notice that at the time you had it the body also expressed it. This is sign that ...
... being and recurs either in the waking state when the control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being. The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-consciousness. In order to make a true and complete change, one has to make all these conscious, to see clearly what is still there and to reject them ...
... blessings The Mother 2.2.1946 Continue to open yourself and the psychic consciousness will grow in you and the Light refine and illumine whatever is left of the shadows in the mind and vital being. Sri Aurobindo My dear child, now I can call you in truth my dear child as I feel you quite close to me having taken shelter in my arms for good—and you are welcome there with all my love. ...
... weakness because they put a check upon the free expression of their impulsions based on the power of force. As usual, the mind, when it is not sufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature whose crushing laws it does not know well through their half-conscious mechanism. When the mind awakens to the consciousness of the first psychic movements, it ...
... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being—rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish ...
... oneself should be "allowed," that is, acted out, not repressed. Sri Aurobindo has often remarked about the way in which the mind is thus used by the desire-nature for rationalizing the urges of the vital being. Regarding this aspect of the mind, which he calls the vital mind, he writes: The vital started in its evolution with obedience to impulse and no reason—as for strategy, the only strategy ...
... am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 27 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where ...
... Pure psychic is Divine Principle. Should we not be conscious of our strength ? You say, what is strong in me. Yes, but you should be also conscious of your defects. You have a very strong vital being, and a good psychic being. Is it more easy to act from the psychic ? That you need not know now. The one advantage of having a good psychic is that there will be faith and certainty that ...
... previously in the teachings of other Masters. But after a while I came to recognize readily the similarity between the pain-body and some aspects of what Sri Aurobindo calls the life-nature or the vital being, which is a distinct part of the human constitution as he describes it. Life energy is beautiful, says Eckhart, when it flows freely, but when it is trapped, it produces contraction and pain. The ...
... and the nerves more than anything else. There is something there that expects the illness, accepts it when it comes and gives it free play. He must learn to keep calm and quiet in the mind and vital being, to refuse to regard the illness and the tendency to it in the body as something normal to it, regarding it rather as something imposed from outside, and he must believe firmly that it must and will ...
... each complete in its separate existence. The evolved spiritual individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual community or communities in the same world as mental man and the vital being of the animal, but each working out its independent existence in a loose relation within the terrestrial formula. The supreme power of the principle of unity taking all diversities into itself ...
... excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for want of something better and tries to fulfil itself through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms in the direction of Page 93 what is divine and luminous; but this has to be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture ...
... unregulated, than Page 17 that of the physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain material poise and balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the element of the vital being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less status. A vigorous vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vital energies, but it is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint ...
... repetition of whatever has impressed itself upon the body-consciousness. Letters on Yoga, p. 353 The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of Page 33 the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-consciousness. Letters on Yoga, p. 898 The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other main parts of the Nature ...
... a temporary life and consciousness and, it may be, carrying in them in one way or another some kind of beneficent or maleficent action or some willed or unwilled effectiveness on our minds or vital being or through them even on the body. These transcriptions, impresses, thought images, life images, projections of the consciousness may also be representations or creations not of the physical world ...
... because her mind was in such a confusion as a result of her desires, that she would not have been able to understand what I would have written. Since then I have tried to work on her mental and vital being to make it a little more open and receptive, so that she may understand that love for children and the growing hope for future that they represent in the" creation, does not mean that each one and ...
... imagination and the nerves, more than anything else. There is something that expects the illness, accepts it when it comes and gives it free play. He must learn to keep quiet and calm in the mind and vital being, to refuse to regard the illness and the tendency to it the body as something normal to it, regard it rather as something imposed from outside and he must believe firmly that it must and will go ...
... are not only the Sons and Daughters of Man but also the Sons and Daughters of God. Read the Western philosophers, worldly or religious, and you will find the soul confounded or identified with the vital being, with the mind, or with both, so widespread is the confusion concerning what we should understand with utter clarity because it is the mainspring of our life, the lever of our becoming, and that ...
... being and who are exceptionally villainous,’ said the Mother. And K.D. Sethna writes: ‘In Stalin Sri Aurobindo and the Mother discerned a phenomenon not merely of possession but of incarnation, a vital being born in a human form and not just employing that form as its medium.’ 46 Sri Aurobindo saw Stalin as a greater danger than Hitler. ‘On the face of it, Stalin and Hitler were most unlikely allies ...
... evolution of the consciousness, of mind and, if any such thing there be, of what is beyond mind, – and in that case as its last stride has been the evolution of the mental being, man, out of the vital being, the animal, so its next stride will be to evolve out of mental man a greater spiritual and supramental creature.” 50 “Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality, – he may imagine ...
... when I see myself, I am very tall. What has happened? … It is the new being … When is this going to express itself physically? I don’t know. It is a being from the subtle physical. It is not a vital being, it is a being from the subtle physical. And I am tall and strong … It has no age, it is neither young nor old … it is completely different. And tall, strong … A day will come that it will be visible ...
... the psychic vision and the feelings of the inner heart to become its guides, though it is by this vision and this feeling that bhakti grows and conquers. So too the passions and desires of the vital being and its ego may block the way and prevent the self-giving of the mind and heart to the Divine. The inertia, ignorance and incon-science of one’s physical consciousness, its attachment to fixed ...
... Ashram education was the vital. ‘Of all the aspects of education, the education of the vital is perhaps the most important, the most indispensable,’ wrote the Mother. 22 And she explained: ‘The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, it can build and realize ...
... ourselves, who think that we are separated from the rest of the world in the fortress of our material body, are pervaded by all kinds of invisible elements and influences, as science has found out. Our vital being is like an open house to others; we catch their pleasant or unpleasant moods, the little poisoned arrows they aim at us unseen, their inner discomfort or disorders and, exceptionally, their health ...
... Sri Aurobindo would complete the Integral Yoga by a transformation of his very body so that, just as there would be no ignorance or obscurity in the mind and no impurity and incapacity in the vital being, the body would acquire a divine nature and be free from disease, ageing and death. What he as well as the Mother would achieve was intended to be repeated in their disciples. Not that one would ...
... letting each verbal vibration surround and penetrate you. A mantra like them has both an illuminative and a formative power in the highest degree to evoke the soul and open not only the mental and the vital being but also the body to the Ineffable that presses Page 237 towards us to make all things new and true. In the midst of the inner and outer atmosphere created by such lines, the ...
... horse buckled except those of the one named Ruksh. "Ruksh" is the later Persian form of the ancient Aryan word "Rakshasa", meaning "Giant" and denoting a type of what Sri Aurobindo would call a Vital Being. The Rakshasa is the violent devourer as distinguished from the Asura who is the cold-blooded scheming destroyer and dictator, as well as from the Pishacha, who is the foul-minded perverted filth-fiend ...
... transforming the mind of matter in her own body and added: "This transformed bodily mind has survived the death of her body." It is the last phrase which is revelatory. Not only the transformed vital being and the subtle-physical have survived her body's death and been assimilated into her new mode of existence and accompany her supramental form: even the bodily mind, by being transformed to a considerable ...
... a more natural impulsion than the thinking mind: hence the sight and insight needed for genuine poetry can be stirred more continually when the poetic part in one is functioning from within the vital being or in close contact with it even when the intellectual being is lord of one's self. And there is one particular element which the intellectual Milton, by outgrowing his vital being's Elizabethan ...
... devil who makes of you his plaything and takes his greatest pleasure in torturing you. When someone is in the grip of a devil, which is the cause of his sufferings, the body may die, but the vital being who feels the sufferings will, after the dissolution of the body, continue to feel as much and perhaps even more. But there is none more deaf than he who refuses to hear. No child can be ...
... life-experience, and but for this saving element, this greater power, interest, significance, the physical existence would have for it no value. This life mentality is supported by our secret subliminal vital being and is in veiled contact with a life-world to which it can easily open and so feel the unseen dynamic forces and realities behind the material universe. There is an inner life-mind which does not ...
... beings on one and the same plane: that is to say, it is not an Absolute and cannot explain the primary relations of the Absolute. They work themselves out in detail by Time and seem to our mental and vital being to be determined by it; but that seeming does not carry us back to their sources and principles. We make the distinction of conditioned and unconditioned and we imagine that the unconditioned became ...
... beauty or responsive in mood, a response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied yearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible and sensible universe. Ordinarily it is through the imagination Page 110 and the intellect and the soul ...
... and fury, Signifying nothing. Here is a "thought", a judgment on life, and its origin would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital being, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are strongly vital in their vibration and texture. But yet in this passage there is a greater power that has ...
... work is complete. Your mind and psychic being are concentrated on the spiritual aim and open to the Divine—that is why the Influence comes down into the head and as far as the heart. But the vital being and nature and the physical consciousness are under the influence of the lower nature. As long as the vital and physical being are not surrendered or do not on their own account call for the higher ...
... this character—of which one kind, that which has most struck our perceptions, has been called presentiment. These movements are instinctive perceptions, obscure intuitions of the sense mind and the vital being, and like all that is instinctive in man have been suppressed, rendered rare or discredited as unreliable by the engrossing activity of the mental intelligence. If allowed a free scope, these could ...
... with the ideal of right or the intellectual knowledge. The will itself takes different shapes, the will of the intelligence, the wishes of the emotional mind, the desires and the passion of the vital being, the impulsions and blind or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature, and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best a precarious concord among discords. The will ...
... —that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the ...
... desire, equal to its task, but turns it into the three lower forms,—pain and pleasure, sukha-bhoga duḥkha-bhoga , and that rejection of both which we call insensibility or indifference. The prana or vital being has to be liberated from desire and its inequalities and to accept and turn into pure enjoyment the rasa which the understanding and aesthesis perceive. Then there is no farther obstacle in the ...
... possess spiritually and, so far as may be, become. Not with the knower in him alone, nor with the will alone, nor with the heart alone, but with all these equally and also with the whole mental and vital being in him he aspires to the Godhead and labours to convert their nature into its divine equivalents. And since God meets us in many ways of his being and in all tempts us to him even while he seems ...
... evolution in Matter, which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death, but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly take for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being there is this duality; for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which provides ...
... satisfactions to man, they are creators of bliss, mayas. These indications are perfectly clear. They show that the Ashwins are twin divine powers whose special function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man in the sense of action and enjoyment. But they are also powers of Truth, of intelligent action, of right enjoyment, they are powers that appear with the Dawn, effective powers of action born ...
... তােমার অনুভূতি খুব ভাল – উপরের শক্তির চক্র (কাৰ্য্যকরী-গতি) নামছে নীচ প্রকৃতিকে আলােকিত ও সচেতন করবার জন্য, আর এদিকে মায়ের কার্য্যের জন্য ভিতরের higher vital পুরুষ সামনে এসেছে – আমরা যাকে বলি true vital being ! তােমার কাজ দেখে মা খুব সন্তুষ্ট হয়েছেন ৷ কোন ভয় নেই – অহংকার ইত্যাদিকে স্থান না দিয়ে সরলভাবে মায়ের কাজ করে যাও, সবদিকে উন্নতি হয়ে যাবে ৷ 18.4.35 এই সব difficulties সাধনায় হয়ই ...
... Nodhas Gautama SUKTA 58 A hymn to Agni of the woodlands, the Flame that feeds on and enjoys the pleasant things of the earthly being and when the emotional and vital being is offered to the gods becomes a creator of the divine birth and a giver of the supreme bliss and the immortal rapture. नू चित्सहोजा अमृतो नि तुन्दते होता यद् दूतो अभवद् विवस्वतः । वि साधिष्ठेभिः ...
... pours out the waters of the Truth upon all our triple existence mental, vital and physical and by its power removes all sin and evil and falsehood from our lives. He creates the free wideness of our vital being above our broken search for the delightful objects of our desire, sets the plenitude in our battling life-forces, the yield of heaven in the shining herds of Page 546 thought; he has ...
... communicate with the higher planes, an Asura below representing the development of many lives, a Rakshasa force behind constantly weakened and fading, but not yet cast away by the drawing up of the vital being by the others, also several other minor deva kinds in the psychic being, that is the best I can manage. (Rapports avec la Soc. Theosoph) The fraternity is due to the fact that both are working ...
... all; for soul-discovery is not complete without a psychic new creation of the mental, vital and physical instrumentation of nature. The mind will be recast by the soul's intuition of Truth, the vital being by its perception of power and good, the body and whole nature by its command for light, harmony and beauty. Our nature will become that of a true psychic entity, not a brute creation unified by ...
... good for metrical romances of a sort, for Page 21 war poetry and popular patriotic poetry, or perhaps any poetry which wants to be an "echo of life"; it may stir, not the soul, but the vital being in us like a trumpet or excite it like a drum. But after all the drum and the trumpet do not carry us far in the way of music. But even high above this level we still do not get at once the greater ...
... he added, wherever he was sufficiently at ease, the preoccupation of thought, art and culture. The economic impulses of the group were worked out as a mechanical necessity, a strong desire in the vital being rather than a leading thought in the mind. Nor was the society regarded or studied as an economic organism except in a very superficial aspect. The economic man held an honourable, but still a c ...
... as an unfolding of the spirit in the material world. Our unfolding has its roots in the soil of the physical life; its growth shoots up and out in many directions in the stalk and branches of the vital being; it puts forth the opulence of the buds of mind and there, nestling in the luxuriant leaves of mind and above it, out from the spirit which was concealed in the whole process must blossom the free ...
... in part of the being which allows the forces to invade, drawing back from them and losing ground instead of facing and destroying them. Flying When you find yourself flying it is always the vital being in the subtle body in the vital world that is doing it. Flying during sleep over houses, streets, etc. simply means that the consciousness in the vital sheaths has gone out and is moving over ...
... and heart which enabled you even to throw out for a time the sexual obsession from your vital consciousness. But, as often happens, soon after all that is obscure, egoistic, self-centred in the vital being rose up in revolt and created a confused farrago of desires, demands, disappointments, grievances, misapprehensions, 2 Page 223 false reasonings and especially a wrong attitude of ...
... animal demands, but the divine Ananda which is above and beyond them and which the indulgence of these degraded forms would prevent from descending, is the great thing that the aspiration of the vital being must demand in the sadhaka. If that [ contempt ] is your feeling about women the sooner you get rid of it the better—for it is very silly. As for shyness etc., it should be got rid of, but ...
... vital world in which such things [ as music and song ] exist. Page 436 × The correspondent wrote that the vital being never seems to tire of the enjoyment of food, even though it results in illness, pain and misery for the body.—Ed. × ...
... connected you with the Mother and turned all the movements of your being towards her or drew them from her or made them united with and dependent on her. It had so done with all your mental and vital being and its movements and it had guarded you against all wrong mental and vital suggestions and attacks, showing you what was true and what was false. Now it is this psychic being which has manifested ...
... that are not dreams (i.e. the waking consciousness is lost for the time, but it is replaced not by sleep but by an inward conscious state in which one moves in the supraphysical of the mental or vital being). The Yogic sleep is good only when it is Yogic enough to contain something, to be an inner consciousness or an experience of other planes. The jāgarti is important—to be conscious in the ...
... happened in your last experience. What you felt as a part of you, yourself but not your physical self, rising to meet the higher consciousness above, was this inner being; it was your (inner) higher vital being which rose in that way to join the highest Self above—and it was able to do so, because the work of purifying the outer vital nature had begun in earnest. Each time there is a purification of the ...
... on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature. The soul, the psychic being, is in direct touch with the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature ( manas, prāṇa, anna of the Taittiriya Upanishad). One may practise Yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate in all kinds ...
... Anahata chakra—it is therefore the opening of the Anahata that is most important for the unveiling of the psychic. The Manipura (navel centre) and the Swadhisthana below it are the seats of the vital being, the Muladhara is the seat of the physical. The opening of the Manipura gives one the free play of the inner vital consciousness and it is very helpful, no doubt, for the influence of the psychic ...
... allow the psychic vision and the feelings of the inner heart to become its guides, though it is by this vision and this feeling that bhakti grows and conquers. So too the passions and desires of the vital being and its ego may block the way and prevent the self-giving of the mind and heart to the Divine. The inertia, ignorance and inconscience of one's physical consciousness, its attachment to fixed habits ...
... part of the external vital nature on the surface. This anger and severity is a wrong form of something that in itself has a value, a certain strength of will and force of action and control in the vital being, without which work cannot be done. What is necessary is to get rid of the anger and to keep the force and firm will along with a developed judgment as to what is the right thing to do in any ci ...
... nature and your life. 2 February 1945 Continue to open yourself and the psychic consciousness will grow in you and the Light refine and illumine whatever is left of the shadows in the mind and vital being. 2 February 1946 An increasing advance on the road to the entire psychic change is what is most important in the sadhana, for that is the straight road to the spiritual transformation. Devotion ...
... in an exaggerated misery and suggestions of personal tragedy and catastrophe, the blame for which it wants to lay on the Divine. If you want to get rid of these attacks, it is this part of your vital being that you must change, its acceptance of these false suggestions, its want of fortitude in facing the difficulties of the sadhana. If you refused to indulge this vital tamasic tendency and the voices ...
... ordeal into which you have entered; but unhappily you seem to have departed from the guidance of the Mother in the crucial point. You seem to have deliberately rejected the peace and silence of the vital being in the fear that it would bring stagnation. As a result the strong habit [of] vital formation came into play and you began to call down lights and powers and build things in [yourself] 4 in your ...
... and it is this which must become your normal consciousness and the basis of the supramental development. In order that it may so become, the mind has to be made calm and strong, the emotional and vital being purified and the physical consciousness so opened that the body can hold and retain the consciousness and power. I notice that at the time you had it the body also expressed it. This is a sign that ...
... things still cherished and supported by your mind and will. Page 369 Either you will make no progress at all here or if the power works on you it will work to break the resistance of the vital being and if you still support that resistance the nature of this struggle and the consequences may be of a serious and undesirable character. The power that works in this Yoga is of a thorough-going character ...
... consciously governed from there and that these might both move in a wide universal consciousness not limited by the body.. (3) The other prāṇa , the restless one of which you became aware, is the vital being, the being of desire and life-movement. The work of the Power has been directed towards quieting the restless movements and making it wide in consciousness as with the Mind. The large body you felt ...
... animal demands, but the divine Ananda which is above and beyond them and which the indulgence of these degraded forms would prevent from descending, is the great thing that the aspiration of the vital being must demand in the sadhaka. The other question was about your difficulty in getting rid of the aboriginal in your nature. That difficulty will remain so long as you try to change your vital nature ...
... and you ignore all the rest in which you were in fault. I will assume, however, that all this was unintentional and that, in writing such a letter, you were unconscious of the movements of your vital being which inspired its spirit and tone. I would suggest that in your relations with others,—which seem always to have been full of disharmony,—when incidents occur, it would be much better for you ...
... The Mother in the Life of the Ashram The Mother with Letters on the Mother The Mother in Sole Charge of the Ashram What your vital being seems to have kept all along is the "bargain" or the "mess" attitude in these matters. One gives some kind of commodity which he calls devotion or surrender and in return the Mother is under obligation to supply satisfaction ...
... matter. But— Well, if it is not, then there is another way—it is what we call the integration, the harmonisation of the being. That cannot be done from outside, it cannot be done by the mind and vital being—they are sure to bungle their affair. It can be done only from within by the soul, the Spirit which is the centraliser, itself the centre of these radii. In all of them there is a truth that can ...
... (and what he [ a sadhak ] has described is very much Page 194 like undergoing an influence). Otherwise there may be harm done by two different methods getting mixed together—e.g. the vital being awakened to a Bhakti-Ananda influence on that plane before it is purified and ready. The Guru's Help in Difficulty I think this saying of Ramakrishna's 2 expresses a certain characteristic ...
... otherwise change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body Page 398 and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the ...
... Mother does and that what she does is suited to the needs of each one, but the vital does not believe it, and it is not yet well established Page 350 in the mind. How can I make my vital being understand that the Mother is never partial? One way is to have entire faith in the Mother—the other is to believe that she is wiser than yourself and must have reasons for everything she does ...
... little noise, however slight, is sufficient to startle you out of your sleep. During the night I am not afraid of certain things, but during the day I am afraid of them. Why? That means your vital being is older than your physical being. "There is no doubt that from many points of view our subconscient has greater knowledge than our habitual consciousness." "On Dreams" , Words of Long ...
... another viewpoint there is something very personal in the nature of an attraction or repulsion; for these movements are not the same for everybody and depend mostly on the quality of vibration of the vital being in different people. There are men who not only do not feel any repulsion for creatures like snakes, but have even a liking for them, a vital attraction and preference. The world is full of things ...
... desire or care for it. There are some men who have a very strong formative power of this kind and always they see their formations realised; but because they have not a well-disciplined mental and vital being, they want now one thing and now another and these different or opposite formations and their results collide and clash with one another. And these people wonder how it is that they are living in ...
... always wavering, always doubting, always fearful, you create a disharmony in your being, which not only retards your progress, but can be the origin of all kinds of disturbance in the mind and vital being and discomfort and disease in the body. Page 91 ...
... even if it at all touches them, cannot balance the desire for money. To win money from their hands for the Divine means to fight the devil out of them; you have first to conquer or convert the vital being whom they serve, and it is not an easy task. Men who are under the sway of vital creatures can change from a life of ease, cast away enjoyment and become intensely ascetic and yet remain just as ...
... it is something weak and sentimental, made up of the pettiest feeling, brittle, superficial, exacting. And this baseness and brutality or this self-regarding weakness they call love! Is our vital being to take part in the Divine love? If it does, what is the right and correct form of participation it should take? Where is the manifestation of Divine love intended to stop? Is it to be confined ...
... and loves Thee in all things, in everything that is; it is fully conscious of this, and as the outer being is surrendered to it, it too is conscious; the mind knows and never forgets; the purified vital being no longer has any attractions and repulsions, and more and more does it taste of the joy of Thy Presence in all things and always. But the heart seems to have fallen asleep in a slumber of exhaustion ...
... two or three days later; at that time probably he had gone out altogether from his body and wanted definitely to inform me about what had happened and he had found that cat. For cats live in the vital being, they have a very developed vital consciousness and can easily be taken possession of by vital forces. But these two examples are quite extraordinary, for they both came about almost in the same ...
... is like that. However, not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! Their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. If one does not submit oneself to rules there, one may live as Europeans ...
... replace or transform the activities of the Ignorance. * Page 30 The soul, the psychic being is in direct touch with the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature. One may practise Yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate in all kinds of experiences in the vital; one may establish ...
... higher truth. ( After a silence Mother continues :) The individual consciousness extends far beyond the body; we have seen that even the subtle physical which is yet material compared with the vital being and in certain conditions almost visible, extends at times considerably beyond the visible limits of the physical body. This subtle physical is constituted of active vibrations which enter into contact ...
... body.... This may be after hundreds or thousands of years, for in those domains all that is organised is no longer necessarily subject to the deposition which here we call "death". As soon as a vital being is fully harmonised, it becomes immortal. What dissolves it and breaks it up are all the disorders within it and all the tendencies towards destruction and deposition; but if it is fully harmonised ...
... élite which knows this. Most of the time things go as they can; anything at all happens and people don't even realise what is happening. So, in these conditions how do you expect to be born with a vital being sufficiently pure to be of help to you? One is born with a slough to clean before one begins to live. And once you have made Page 260 a good start on the way to the inner transformation ...
... dream getting blows on my face. Well, when I woke up the next morning, I had a red mark in the same place, on the forehead and the cheek.... Inevitably, Page 26 a wound received in the vital being is translated in the physical body. But how does it happen? There must be some intermediary? It was in the vital that I was beaten. It is from within that this comes. Nothing, nobody touched ...
... a hostile being which gets hold of this body. There have been cases like that, children who seemed to be dead, that is, the psychic being had left the body, and before it had died completely, a vital being had entered and taken its place. Such cases have been known. And these beings are demons. In life they become veritable demons. There are not many of them. There are beings of the vital, but of ...
... how to appreciate clearly and judiciously, but it doesn't mean that he tastes with his tongue. Page 59 How does fasting produce a state of receptivity? It is because usually the vital being is very closely concentrated on the body and when the body is well fed it takes its strength from the food, its energy from the food, and it is one way... it is obviously almost the only way; not ...
... enough for the body not to enter into trance. Among sleepers some even move about often in their sleep: there is one part of their being which is exteriorised but the most material part of their vital being is in the body. And as Page 52 long as that is there, it is altogether in the domain of life. First of all, it is not easy to detach from the body exactly that part which leaves it at ...
... hasn't that fluidity which can enable us to merge into the Divine." But this was absolutely necessary, for without this... if you simply went out of your body (most of you can't do it because the vital being is hardly more individualised than the physical), if you came out of your body and went into the vital world, you would see that all things there intermingle, they are mixed, they divide; all kinds ...
... He does not seem to consider this quality as something very, very desirable, from the way he treats this presence—exactly that! He prefers to it the ideas of his mind, prefers the desires of his vital being and the habits of his physical. I don't know how many of you have read the Bible; it is not very entertaining to read it, and besides, it is very long, but still, Page 161 in the Bible ...
... one about that miser who thought of nothing but his money; he had hidden his hoard somewhere and always used to go to see it. After his death he continued to come as a ghost (that is to say, his vital being), to watch over his money. Nobody could go near the place without meeting with a catastrophe. It is like that, if you have worked to bring out something, it is always realised. It may be realised ...
... lose their faculties, at least for the moment. In the end they will come to themselves. But it takes time to recover, it comes as one progresses, through successive illuminations. Between the vital being and the mental, which progresses faster generally? That depends on people. It is the vital in those who have a stronger vital and the mental in those who have a stronger mental being. You mean ...
... does not seem to consider this quality as something very, very desirable, from the way he treats this presence — exactly that! He prefers to it the ideas of his mind, prefers the desires of his vital being and the habits of his physical. I don't know how many of you have read the Bible; it is not very entertaining to read it, and besides, it is very long, but still, in the Bible there is a story ...
... supra-physical power or world or part of it and moved to bring Page 8 it down into the earth-life. Or it may be an impulse in the vital or other plane itself, e.g., a vital being moved to extend his action towards the earth and establish there a kingdom for himself or the play of the forces for which he stands in his own domain. Or it may be a pressure from above; let us ...
... and the physical. "When the psychic being awakens, you grow conscious of your own soul; you know your self. And you no longer commit the mistake of identifying yourself with the mental or with the vital being. You do not mistake them for the soul" (p. 86). A radical change of consciousness amounting to a reversal of consciousness takes place: the ordinary consciousness, in which one identifies oneself ...
... inner, higher truth. (After a silence Mother continues:) The individual consciousness extends far beyond the body; we have seen that even the subtle physical which is yet material pared with the vital being and in certain conditions almost visible, extends at times considerably beyond the visible limits of the physical body. This subtle physical is constituted of active vibrations which enter into contact ...
... medium's subconscient (using subconscient in the ordinary, not in the yogic sense) and that of the sitters, vital sheaths left by the departed or perhaps occupied or used by some spirit or some vital being, the departed himself in his vital sheath or else something assumed for the occasion (but it is the vital part that communicates), elementals, spirits of the lowest vital physical world near earth ...
... Being Psychic Change—First Necessity The soul, the psychic being is in direct touch with the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature. One may practise yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate in all kinds of experiences in the vital; one may establish even ...
... body is only an instrument and a shadow.” There are three statements here which have raised questions. First, “What is the mental personality?” In each human being the body is animated by the vital being, and governed, or partially governed, by a mental being. This is a general rule, but the extent to which the mental being is formed and individualised varies greatly from one individual to the next ...
... vital which has nothing particularly pleasant about it... The most important thing in this case is the last state of consciousness in which one was while both were joined together, when the vital being and the body were still united. So the last state of consciousness, one may say the last desire or the last hope or the last aspiration, has a colossal importance for the first impact the being has ...
... hasn’t that fluidity which can enable us to merge into the Divine.” But this was absolutely necessary, for without this… if you simply went out of your body (most of you can’t do it because the vital being is hardly more individualised than the physical), if you came out of your body and went into the vital world, you would see that all things there intermingle, they are mixed, they divide; all kinds ...
... élite which knows this. Most of the time things go as they can; anything at all happens and people don’t even realise what is happening. So, in these conditions how do you expect to be born with a vital being sufficiently pure to be of help to you? One is born with a slough to clean before one begins to live. And once you have made a good start on the way to the inner transformation and you go down to ...
... he is born; one should be able to foresee the events of his physical life, his state of health and approximately how long his body will last. But then there comes into play the formation of his vital being (the being of desires and passions, but also of impulsive energy and active will) which brings with it its own destiny. This destiny affects the physical destiny and can alter it completely and often ...
... birth and evolution—puts forward a representative of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya puruṣa , on the vital plane the true vital being, prāṇamaya puruṣa , on the physical plane the true physical being, annamaya puruṣa . Each being, therefore is, so long as the Ignorance lasts, centred round his mental, vital or physical Purusha ...
... one wants to open to the delight of existence, in a total beauty and harmony. This brings us quite naturally to vital austerity, the austerity of the sensations, the tapasya of power. For the vital being is the seat of power, of effective enthusiasm. It is in the vital that thought is transformed into will and becomes a dynamism for action. It is also true that the vital is the seat of desires and ...
... instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill. Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but ...
... perverse movements. And this brings us quite naturally to the second aspect of vital education which concerns the character and its transformation. Generally, all disciplines dealing with the vital being, its purification and its control, proceed by coercion, suppression, abstinence and asceticism. This procedure is certainly easier and quicker, although less deeply enduring and effective, than a ...
... is only an instrument and a shadow. There are three statements here which have raised questions. First, "What is the mental personality?" In each human being the body is animated by the vital being, and governed, or partially governed, by a mental being. This is a general rule, but the extent to which the mental being is formed and individualised varies greatly from one individual to the next ...
... some beings must reach a certain Page 117 realisation here in the physical world that would give them the power to materialise a supramental being. I told you that once I endowed a vital being with a body, but I would never have been able to... it would have been impossible to make this body material: something is missing, something is missing. Even if it could be made visible, it probably ...
... longer periods. The other experiences show that the faculty of inner vision is opening; this is also a part of the yoga. The fire seen by you must have been the fire of aspiration lit in the vital being. The other things you saw are not definite enough to be interpreted. Continue your progress. Our blessings and protection are always with you. 1 11 March 1931 Last night after ...
... fetters; Thou didst teach it to be freely active through all forms and no longer exclusively through those it considered till then as its own, that is, as its natural means of expression. The vital being had already realised this liberation long ago and knew how to enjoy the plenitude of sensations and emotions in all forms capable of manifesting life. But the mental being had not yet learnt how ...
... find out a solution which can rcason- Page 92 ably satisfy both parties; there is always one for men of goodwill. Here must be mentioned the training of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. It can set in motion everything, build up and realise, it ...
... you can master the body and its needs." I can't tell you that, because that's not how it is for you. I mean it may be—it may be—that even an inner transformation (a complete conversion of the vital being, for instance) wouldn't necessarily bring an improvement in your health. It is here where.... It's not something I see imperatively. And to go back to ordinary life would be the end of everything—of ...
... certainty. The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my failings a small one? Were there less obstacles in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something ...
... example, I saw one of them trying to incite anger in someone so that this person would deliver a blow—a spiritual blow. And this formation had a dagger in his hand (a vital dagger, you see, it was a vital being: gray and slimy, horrible), he was holding a very sharp dagger which he was flaunting, saying, 'When a person has done something like that (pretending that someone had done an unforgivable thing) ...
... consciousness? The movement comes from a subconscient layer which is not allowed to express itself in the daytime. Is it because there is no mental control in the dream state and hence the vital being is free to act as it likes? Page 23 No true and constant control is established in that part as yet. An experiment: This morning while supervising work, I prayed with concentration ...
... the strictest scientific control. So they do genuinely occur in rare instances, but they are no sign of sanctity. There is nothing spiritual about them. What is at work is purely a capacity of the vital being. And often the mediums are people of very low character, with not a trace of anything saintly. But to come back to the point. In connection with great or holy men all sorts of stories get started ...
... only refer to a universal family open to all differences and even all divergences. But in any case, mutual misunderstanding and lack of collaboration can only come from the outer physical and vital being which is formed in this life and is not yet under the rule and influence of the psychic. As soon as one is united with one's psychic, all the conflicts due to clashing bad wills can no longer exist ...
... right away that that force, that consciousness which holds everything together in really superconscious cells (they don't have at all the ordinary type of consciousness; ordinarily, it's the inner, vital being [ Mother touches the heart center ] that's conscious of oneness, that is, conscious of being a being), that this aggregate of cells is now an aggregate OF ITS OWN WILL, with an organized consciousness ...
... and to put one's interest, hope and faith in the inner life and consciousness turned towards the Divine, aspiring for the Divine and capable of receiving the Divine's Force and Help. But often the vital being or some part of it takes a kind of perverse pleasure in giving a dramatic importance to each and every difficulty and thus cuts the contact with the inner being and the Divine's Force. Page 230 ...
... its creation and its victory over all opposing forces." × "An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted by ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards ...
... them as weaknesses, for they curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of strength. As always, the mind, when insufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand. When the mind awakens to the awareness of the first psychic movements ...
... balance. And spontaneously, without thought. But then... it was taken away ( gesture as if someone came to take that strength away from Mother ). So I suspected that during my sleep, a part of the vital being ( laughing ) had come back, and naturally I was beginning to live again!... So it was taken away. And the body is being given an education: it's being taught how to will—the true way of being ...
... disorganizations come from the vital and the mind, from their influence. ( silence ) Recently, I got a letter, I forget from whom or where, but it was from someone in Europe, someone who saw my vital being, and someone else who saw my mental being. You know that they have been sent away (they go on working, seeing people, going and coming...). So that person saw it as I myself know it (which surprised ...
... its head. What's the name of this young nincompoop? ... I'll send him this ( Mother writes ): "The memories you are referring to, those mentioned in the newspapers, are the memories of the vital being, when exceptionally it has come out of a body in order to enter another. That happens, though not frequently. The memories I am referring to are those of the psychic being, and one is conscious of ...
... physical life and the existence of Matter." 3 When that day arrives the man of science will wake to the discovery that "not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, strivings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the life-existence of others.... Our life-energies 1 Vide: ...
... Spirit within which is his real self. This failure to distinguish our true being from its surface instruments lies at the root of all our failures to tackle human problems. Ordinarily it is the vital being or the desire-self in us that rules and governs our conduct. It is the dominance of the crude, ignorant, selfish and dangerous vital nature of man that is at the base of all our troubles and d ...
... on each plane of nature, in the form of a representative Purusha or being that is proper to that particular plane. Thus, in man, there is a mental being corresponding to the mental nature, a vital being corresponding to the vital nature and a physical being answering to the physical nature. Now in the evolutionary emergence so far effectuated here upon earth, the dual aspect of Chit-Shakti ...
... tissues of the Page 418 body. By helping the children to internalise the senses we open access to all the richness of the child's inner world and to their subtle body. We work the vital being through games and exercises that help to differentiate and control energy, and, with older groups, through exploration of emotions and attitudes. We approach the mental being through attention ...
... imagination? It is a very usual experience. It means that for a moment you were no longer in your body, but somehow either above or outside the body consciousness. This sometimes happens by the vital being rising up above the head or, more rarely, by its projecting itself into its own sheath (part of the subtle body) out of the physical attachment. But it also comes by a sudden even if momentary liberation ...
... there is a lot of it in the offering—especially in this Kali Yuga, I should say. It simply means that your sacrifice is still mental and has not yet become spiritual in its character. When your vital being consents to give up its desires and enjoyments, when it offers itself to the Divine, then the yajna will have begun. What I meant was that the European sense of the word is not the sense of the word ...
... happened afterwards to the Egyptian? PURANI: I believe he went back to the hill. SRI AUROBINDO: Then one can't say what exactly happened? The Egyptians held that at the time of death the Ka or vital being goes out of the body and after many years can return to it if preserved. That is the tradition behind mummification. Perhaps Brunton materialised the tradition? (Laughter) PURANI: Brunton cites ...
... used by the forces. What is hypnotism? Doesn't it mean that the subject's will-power is replaced by somebody else's? I know a case of exteriorisation where the operator was able to exteriorise the vital being of the subject in an almost material form and replace it by another's and not by the operator's own. If one replaced it by one's own, there could be no operation. But these operations are extremely ...
... know it. What is called genius is the reflection from the higher planes—from the Intuitive Mind, for example. But it does not mean that one is living in that plane. There may be reflections in the vital being also. ...
... AUROBINDO: Yes, he simply refused. They said, "You Bengali coward!" He replied, "Bengali or no Bengali, I am not doing it." (Laughter) PURANI: But this Mudra is very dangerous unless one's vital being is pure. SRI AUROBINDO: I am afraid Barin's wasn't quite pure! (Laughter) PURANI: (After some time) : To go back to X and Z: X said to Z that he could remain without company, etc., like ...
... Causeless vital habit, constructing things in order to have an excuse for being dissatisfied. It is the nature of the vital, there is no other why. It seems something has happened in my vital being. The displeasure, depression and despair it now feels really have nothing to do with physical occurrences; they are only excuses it projects for its justification. For while these outer circumstances ...
... fellow anyhow. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, he is interesting. SATYENDRA: He lays great stress on love. SRI AUROBINDO: That means the heart. And that again is a sign of his action working through the vital being. : SATYENDRA: Some of the people who go to see him are not impressed. Others feel a sense of love towards him. Ramdas also acts through love; he mixes with people and serves them out of love: ...
... But he is waiting to break his silence and he writes that when he does speak a great miracle will take place. SRI AUROBINDO: He wants to act by the mind, I suppose. Now he is acting through the vital being, but the mental is more effective and so he is waiting for it. Lele also used to act through the vital. Once I remember somebody wanted to weep and he thought that if he couldn't weep, he would not ...
... the soul has no stain. PURANI: No, that's how I argued with him saying that according to Hindu philosophy the soul is pure and immaculate. It can have no stain. SRI AUROBINDO: He means the vital being, perhaps. PURANI: Yes, he was a very self-contradictory man. At one moment he would say one thing, at the next another. When others had gone, Purani said Hitler was not getting any inspiration ...
... that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition ...
... of a raw and crude and aboriginal nature. Man is here simply the eater, a true brother of the rest of the animal kind, one in blood with the tiger and the wolf. He is the sheer biological or vital being – the Rakshasa – into whom the light of the Mind has not yet descended, at least not to the extent of effecting an appreciable change in his original and primitive texture. It is a world ...
... individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and a harmless freedom can he founded. Collectivism at least insists upon that unity by entirely subordinating ...
... interior existence, the realm of subtle subjective supraphysical experiences and of dreams and visions and heavenly intimations, a veritable world of wonderful illuminations, that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw by inward-drawn concentration from their absorption in surface activities. 1 Katha Upanishad, II. 1.1. 2 Mandukya Upanishad, 3. 3 Savitri ...
... appearance of 'equality'. These phoney samat ā s may be recognised by the following signs: (i) Tamasic samat ā : The blind torpor of the physical nature and the heavy inertia of the vital being may lead to a temporary numbness of the reacting consciousness, which, in its turn, may create in the sadhaka a distaste for the joys of life and an ossified insensibility. (ii) Rajasic samat ...
... true and radical change in the law of the external nature. If, then, any sadhak refuses in practice to admit this change or if he refuses even to admit the necessity for any change of his lower vital being and his habitual external personality, I am entitled to conclude that, whatever his professions, he has not accepted either myself or my yoga." (Letters on Yoga, p. 1306) We should not forget ...
... sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, — rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, Tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda ...
... Sri Aurobindo has this to say: "The will itself takes different shapes, [i] the will of the intelligence, [ii] the wishes of the emotional mind, [iii] the desires of the passion and the vital being, [iv] the impulsions and blind or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature. And all these make by no means a harmony, but at best a precarious concord among discords. The ...
... inner existence. It is the realm of subtle supraphysical experiences and visions and heavenly intimations, a veritable world of wonderful illuminations, and it is in this realm that our mind and vital being retire when they manage to withdraw by inward-drawn concentration from their absorption in surface activities. Here are some verses from Savitri describing the nature of the inner awakening ...
... attentive and quiet and silent mind is an asset not only for the discovery of the deeper ethical, aesthetic, psychic and spiritual realities, but also for manifesting their truths and powers. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its ...
... the heart, the vital and the body are the four instruments of manifestation of the Spirit. Thus, there is the mental being which produces thoughts, the emotional being which produces feelings, the vital being which produces the power of action and the physical being that acts and gives form to everything else. Now, the basic duty of a teacher is to help his students in the task of developing these four ...
... out into open expression what was held covered in the symbolic language of the Veda as a mystery and a secret. Ajataśatru's explanation of sleep and dream, passages of the Praśna Upanishad on the vital being and its motion are some of the examples of Upanishadic symbolism. Along with the Veda, Upanishads rank as Śruti, since they embody revelations and intuitions of spiritual experience. The Upanishads ...
... physical behind our gross body. Similarly, behind the complex of our desires, emotions and superficial or deep-seated longings and attractions and repulsions, in short, what we may call the superficial vital being, there is the inner vital which is the source of our larger and wider action which is the cause of our frequent or rare outbursts of exhibition of superhuman strength and power. There is also behind ...
... attentive and quiet and silent mind is an asset not only for the discovery of the psychic and spiritual realities, but also for manifesting the psychic and spiritual truths and powers. (ii) The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its ...
... same plane. In other words, Time is not Absolute and cannot explain the primary relations of the Absolute. These primary relations work themselves out in detail by Time and seem to our mental and vital being to be determined by it; but that seeming does not carry us back to their sources and principles. "We make the distinction of conditioned and unconditioned," Sri Aurobindo points out, "and we imagine ...
... infinite energy, all knowledge and conscious experience as the out-flowing of that consciousness, and all in the terms of that one Ananda. His physical being will be one with all material Nature, his vital being with the life of the universe, his mind with the cosmic mind, his spiritual knowledge and will with the divine knowledge and will both in itself and as it pours itself through these channels, his ...
... development of the body, life and mind. It is the caitya purusha, which is realised more and more distinguished from manomaya purusha, prānamaya purusha, and annamaya purusha (mental being, vital being and physical being). The experience of the caitya purusha is a major experience of Karma yoga,, since through that experience the entire process of Karma yoga begins to be guided by direct intuition ...
... beginning in Yoga, first, because he was in dead earnest; secondly, because he had a clear and solid mind and a strong and tenacious will in complete control of the nerves; thirdly, because his vital being was calm, strong and solid; finally and chiefly, because he had a complete faith and devotion to the Mother. As for seeing the Divine in the Mother at first sight, he is not the only one to do that ...
... contrary each attack will leave one more forward and stronger than before. I am told that when the struggle is strong there intervene some forces of light against the ego and the vital being. May I be told what forces of light are concerned with my present condition? Forces that try to bring the true consciousness and to replace these stupidities of the ordinary vital nature ...
... Guidance from Sri Aurobindo - Volume 2 THE VITAL BEING How to liberate myself from the vita! strife and struggle? Allow no demand of the human vital to rise up — clamour of egoistic revolts— or if one rises see that you or no part of you identifies itself with it. How is it that in spite of my rejection the suggestions ...
... aim of life, which fulfils itself in the fullness of life and man's being in the individual and the group. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy; it will be all things to all, but ...
... of quarrelling or even fighting, find out a solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there is always one for men of goodwill. Here must be mentioned the training of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. It can set in motion everything, build up and realise, it ...
... to bubble up with all sorts of ideas and feelings etc. but to remain quiet and learn to think and feel only what is true and right. How is one to establish a homogeneity in the vital being? Reject all disturbance and call in more and more peace and equality from above into the vital. If you get peace then to clean the vital becomes easy. If you simply clean and ...
... Is that ego to be rejected outright? Or is it to be transformed so that it demands nothing but only gives itself to the Mother? The ego has to be thrown out— it is the true vital being that gives itself to the Mother. H told me, as one goes on progressing higher and higher one's ego tends to become greater and greater till the Overmind is reached. Is that so? ...
... consciousness. Page 123 In one's working time, one's self can experience peace and watch quietly, but mechanical thoughts of an obscure type can still keep running. Is it the vital being that is non-cooperative in the sadhana? That is for you to observe. There are usually parts of the vital and physical which do not take great interest in the sadhana — until the whole ...
... mind became aware of the others' thoughts. Page 207 After I become aware of others' thoughts, if I am not careful and if I let them enter me they may take hold of my vital being and disturb my consciousness. If they come and pass, it is all right, but I must not stick to them. Certainly, but if you don't know where they come from, still they might come in and ...
... the body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is su ...
... superimposed one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other levels like these. A miracle happens, that is to say, a material formation behaves in an abnormal way because ...
... I am God still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve." 1 So this vital being in man in bis Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where she ...
... modest commonplace experiences, as a shoemaker, for example. But what was left and what manifested itself was something very characteristic of the great musician. He had disciplined his mental and vital being and even his physical being in view of his musical capacity and this formation remained firm and sought to reincarnate. The musical being was originally organised and fashioned around the psychic ...
... and physical consciousness, elements enough to enable it to support a descent of the higher force. Page 95 How does fasting bring a state of receptivity ? Usually the vital being is concentrated very much in the body. And when the body is well fed, it takes its force and energy through the food—it is one way of absorbing energy, almost the only way, at least the more important ...
... movement Page 150 was carrying – the whole merging as it were into a sea of rich peace and silence. The poet's eloquence is most intimately married to his silence. On one side, his vital being, athirst for delight, is overwhelmed with the mass of Nature's wealth, luxuriant in colours and smells, in peals of laughter and rhythms of dance; his senses enamoured of beauty are eagerly prone ...
... still unevolved in human form; Even if he is not, he becomes in me.... No magic can surpass my magic's skill. There is no miracle I shall not achieve. 25 So this vital being in man in his Rakshasic hunger and Asuric self-conceit rejects the Divine Power that is in fact behind him too, supporting him. The Goddess, in the wake of her predecessor, goes back from where she ...
... g; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges ...
... You may call it a disguise, but it is a very successful disguise, for people who see it most often get thoroughly convinced that what they see is indeed God himself. And yet such a god is only a vital being. Even so, the beings of the Over mind are stupendous in comparison with us, human beings, who are truly bewildered whenever we come in contact with such entities. And Supermind and supramental beings ...
... Mother attempted could not be fully achieved; for the foundations were not properly laid, the basic ground was not prepared. Any higher structure of the mind and overmind must be built upon man's vital being and physical life. The new creation left out of account these realities of basement, so one had to come down, forgetting for the moment the higher realisation, into these darker regions and make ...
... modest, commonplace. experiences, as a shoemaker, for example. But what was left and what manifested itself was something very characteristic of the great musician. He had disciplined his mental and vital being and even his physical being in view of his musical capacity and this formation remained firm and sought to reincarnate. The musical being was originally organised and fashioned around the psychic ...
... or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance." 33 According to Sri Aurobindo, the intelligence of ...
... enfeebled us physically, vitally, mentally and spiritually. It has omitted from our educational programme those arts and sciences which can make our body strong and healthy, which can make our vital being heroic and courageous, and our mental being subtle, complex and comprehensive. Philosophy, which was for long a part of the cultural education in our country, accessible even to the rustic, has been ...
... most is what will feel itself as if magnetically attracted towards you. To fear something is almost equivalent to being already a prey to its probable attack and invasion. Our emotionally charged vital being refuses to be convinced about the veracity of this occult principle. On the contrary, it almost believes that to maintain a constant trepidant anxiety about something is the best defence against ...
... bring out into an open expression what was held covered in the symbolic Vedic speech as a mystery and a secret. Ajatashatru's explanation of sleep and dream, passages of the Prashna Upanishad on the vital being and its motion are some of the examples of Upanishadic symbolism. 12 Along with the Veda, Upanishads rank as Shruti, since they embody revelations and intuitions of spiritual experience. The ...
... change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the whole higher co ...
... a particular line of thought with any kind of steadiness or order. Our heads are full of noise like a market-place without any peace or restraint or harmony. If the mind is in such a state, the vital being is still worse. You cannot keep count of the strange desires and impulses that play about there, If the brain is a market-place, the heart is no better than a madhouse. Well, I shall not now enlarge ...
... may call it a disguise, but it is a very successful disguise, for people who see it most often get thoroughly convinced that what they see is indeed God himself. And yet such a god is only a vital being. Even so, the beings of the Overmind are stupendous in comparison Page 4 with us, human beings, who are truly bewildered whenever we come in contact with such entities. And Supermind ...
... did not even touch a drop of water during the twenty-four hours. But that did not keep me indoors doing nothing. I roamed the streets as usual, shouting "Bande Mataram" with the processions. The vital being in us, in its enthusiasm and excitement, cares not a whit for anything. Something rather out of the ordinary came to pass one day. There was an order served on the town as a whole and on certain ...
... the man. It is really something that belongs to the inner man; in a game, it is a quality of the inner body-consciousness. It needs a harmony between the consciousness of the body and the inner vital being, it implies a natural sense of measure and rhythm. In our days, we did not know anything of all this. We did have the gift of imagination and feeling, but now is the day of science. You have the ...
... rather a mental animal. Page 59 The mind is not yet the master in his Adhara; the true master who rules and handles the mental faculty is the life principle, the animal in him, his vital being, which again in its turn is a slave of the obscure brute matter in him. So man, in spite of all his mental splendour, is a dangerous creature—dangerous, for the vital in him is leading him towards ...
... obedience to leadership and spirit of fair play so necessary for a healthy and progressive life, individual and collective. The vital, the life-energy part of man, is more difficult. "The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passion and revolt. It can set in motion everything, build up and realise, it ...
... fighting, find out a solution which Page 40 can reasonably satisfy both parties; there is always one for men of goodwill. Here must be mentioned the training of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depression, of passions and revolt. It can set in motion everything, build up and realise, it ...
... capacity of using that knowledge. Growth is an activity that interests the whole being. The body grows by the assimilation of suitable food, by exercise, practice and training. The emotional and vital being grows by contacts with other forms of life and beauty, by exchange of feelings and emotions, by a natural expansion in a suitable harmonious environment. Mind grows by dealing with objects and situations ...
... thorns. It was quite painful. I started calling Mother. Mother answered: "There, everything is all right." Saying this she brought me back into the body. She then explained to me that I had seen a vital being. But it can do us no harm because we can get back into the body at once. During this experience I was not frightened at all at any moment. This sort of occult education went on for some time ...
... this conscious power or force is operating in the plant, in the metal, and in the animal. Sometimes, even in man, it works in compartmental or tight divisions. His mind often does not know what his vital being is doing. There is a novel by R. L. Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", that is based on, the perception of the double personality where the same consciousness is working in one part quite unknown ...
... cosmic consciousness. And this can be done not by simply wanting it, but by increasing the instrumental capacities of human nature. Man is given certain instruments,—senses, nervous being, vital being, emotional being and mental being. These have certain capacities and they are capable of development. Man's intellectual capacity, his reasoning power, comprehension etc. can be developed. When ...
... everlasting time. Sri Aurobindo wrote a poem "In hori's aeternum" "Eternity in an hour". Blake, I think, wrote about "Eternity in a grain of sand." Man has in him his natural instruments —mind, heart, vital being, nervous and physical being—and Page 152 the true Self, the Spark of the Divine. Man can awaken his true Self and identify it with the Eternal, and immortal. It is then possible ...
... as will help to bring out the deeper spiritual or psychic feeling or Bhava. The life depicted is the life of the soul and not, except as a form and a helping suggestion, the life of the vital being and the body. For the second more elevated aim of art is the interpretation or intuitive revelation of existence through the forms of life and Nature and it is this that is the starting-point of ...
... development of this life-force in this triple formation. Life as nervous energy carries the force of form as a sensation to modify mind. You take life at one end, it becomes nervous energy in the vital being. And when you say "you see", the question is : what is seeing ? Seeing is form carried to the mind as a sensation, is it not? You do not get the whole form inside you; that cannot be done. So what ...
... a system of self-control and of mental concentration which is a great contribution of Buddhism. It got entangled, as other systems of psychological disciplines also did, into the regions of the vital being and often neglected the eightfold path for the grace of the various powers of the Buddhistic pantheon. Buddhism accepts rebirth as a necessary corollary to the doctrine of Karma which renders the ...
... possible because the psychic being in him is undeveloped. There is nothing in his being that can resist the vital force. Mussolini has, comparatively, a developed psychic being and a very strong vital being, But in his last photograph he seems to have weakened. Either he is physically unwell or is aging or perhaps he has misused his powers. Disciple : Hitler feels responsible for all the Aryans ...
... about, many will find it difficult; there will be some who will progress and others who will not and will drop out. Already some like X had dropped out, when the Mother took a decision about his vital being –"you will have to change". Before that he was swimming in his art and other things, but as soon as this came he dropped out. All these things – attachments, sex-impulse etc. – finally find refuge ...
... "Now what you call pity is something quite different from compassion and both are different from Samata. Pity and human sentimentalism are a result of nervous repulsion – some movement in the vital being. I myself, when I was young, could not read of any act of cruelty without feeling that repulsion and a feeling of hatred for those who did it. I could not kill an insect, say a bug or a mosquito ...
... 17 2.2.1946 Continue to open yourself and the psychic consciousness will grow in you and the Light refine and illumine whatever is left of the shadows in the mind and vital being. SRI AUROBINDO My dear child, now I can call you in truth my dear child as I feel you quite close to me having taken shelter in my arms for good — and you are welcome there with ...
... are attracted by these powers. In the spiritual and the psychics even in mental sadhana, power can come, but it comes automatically without one asking for it. Y. was another M. with a powerful vital being. At one time I had strong hopes about him. But people whose sadhana is on a vital basis pass into what I have called the Intermediate Zone and hardly go beyond the vital. It is like a jungle and ...
... 41 S: May I know, Mother, how many centuries ago You descended upon earth? M: I have never left the earth since it was formed. 42 S: What You mean by "vital soul" is the vital being, I think. . M: The vital soul is what the ancients called the "anima", that which animates, which gives life to the body. It is also sometimes called the etheric being. 43 S: Which path ...
... hypnotism: What is hypnotism? Doesn't it mean that the subject's will-power is replaced by somebody else's? I know a case of exteriorisation where the operator was able to exteriorise the vital being of the subject in an almost material form and replace it by another's and not by the operator's own. If one replaced it by one's own, there would be no operation. But these operations are extremely ...
... VII Another exercise set by the Mother was "What do you want?", and this question also elicited a few revealing answers: Page 328 An all surrendering love by which the whole vital being becomes purified and one-pointed. (Amal) I pray constantly to Him to give me the realisation of the harmony between the inner and the outer that I may devote myself entirely and truly to ...
... each other reducing life to a battlefield or an insurrection. This is how "all life is an education pursued more or less consciously, more or less willingly". The problem is to encourage in the vital being "the movements that express the light". If the education of the vital is begun as soon as the child can use his senses, "many bad habits will be avoided and many harmful influences eliminated" ...
... presence of the three fires can be explained, according to Nolini, in two ways: in the Vedic times they represented Heaven, Self and Earth; in our times they may be taken to represent the mind, the vital being and the body. 29 Page 792 IX Thus was the divine seed cast on Auroville's sacred soil on the Mother's birthday. As conveyed to Mr. Anger, Matrimandir was ultimately to dominate ...
... journey of the supraphysical planes after the death of his present body,—the insistent material preoccupation of the nature will pull it down to earth. But if he has sufficiently developed his vital being and the mental; if he has, consciously or subconciously, developed an affinity with any of the supraphysical worlds, his post-mortal sojourn in that world becomes almost a certainty. Take, for ...
... this lesson can be imprinted in that part of the vital which is capable of such compromises — some good will come out of this wrong movement. Put the mother's notice hence-forth at the door of your vital being "No falsehood hereafter shall ever enter herein" and station a sentry there to see that it is put into execution. 27.3.33 Your idea about Mother's mysterious smile is your own imagination ...
... a particular line of thought with any kind of steadiness or order. Our heads are full of noise like a market-place without any peace or restraint or harmony. If the mind is in such a state, the vital being (prāna) is still worse. You cannot keep count of the strange desires and impulses that play about there. If the brain is a market-place, the heart is no better than a mad- house. Well, I shall ...
... Page 268 if the foothold of his consciousness is in the physical being; or a vital man, if he lives predominantly in the tossing desires and ambitions and passions of his life- being or vital being. Similarly a man may be called mental or intellectual, if he lives not so much in his physical and vital as in his mental being. But a physical man. may have vital desires and ambitions and also ...
... inspired delight. But it must be "a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below," "an aspiration vigilant, constant, un- ceasing—the mind's will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature." 1 Nothing like it has ever been conceived or attempted before in the past, for at no period of the spiritual history of ...
... apply this Power [Supermind] to the physical plane," Sri Aurobindo told the assembled group of disciples in Page 314 July 1926. "Something was done in the mind and also in the vital being but not in the physical." He explained. "Firstly, the Yogis did not care for these questions of the physical plane. Secondly, they had other, more direct, means of dealing with them." But ...
... mind, man has an infinite capacity to be devilish. He brings to the help of his devil a mind, and the devil himself can't be so bad as man with his mind when he puts it at the service of his vital being It is the egoistic ignorance of man which makes him think he is the highest in creation," he reiterated. It was difficult for the disciple to accept that downgrading. He could not conceive ...
... them. Now if I had gone and told them: 'you think it is God you are praying to! it is only a formidable vital Spider that is sucking your force.' Surely it would not have been very charitable on my part. But everywhere it is almost the same thing. There is a vital Force presiding. And vital beings feed upon the vibrations of human emotion. Very few are they, a microscopic number, who go to the temples... where there was real peace and quiet and some true aspiration. Barring that, everywhere it is but a web of adverse vital forces that use everything for their food. The bigger the congregation, the more portentous the vital deity. Besides, in the invisible world it is only the vital beings that like to be worshipped. For, as I have said, that pleases them, gives them importance. They are puffed up with... entire region between the spiritual world and the material, belonging to the vital beings and Page 109 it is this region that is full of such things as are liked by them, because they are their food. They are happy, they feel important when men call them, pray to them, make their offerings to them: the being that has the largest number of adorers is the most satisfied, the most glorified ...
... them. Now if I had gone and told them: 'you think it is God you are praying to! it is only a formidable vital Spider that is sucking your force,' surely it would not have been very charitable on my part. But everywhere it is almost the same thing. There is a vital Force presiding. And vital beings feed upon the vibrations of human emotion. Very few are they, a microscopic number, who go to the temples... where there was real peace and quiet and some true aspiration. Barring that, everywhere it is but a web of adverse vital forces that use everything for their food. The bigger the congregation, the more portentous the vital deity. Besides, in the invisible world it is only the vital beings that like to be worshipped. For, as I have said, that pleases them, gives them importance. They are puffed up with... region between the spiritual world and the material, belonging to the Page 79 vital beings and it is this region that is full of such things as are liked by them, because they are their food. They are happy, they feel important when men call them, pray to them, make their offerings to them: the being that has the largest number of adorers is the most satisfied, the most glorified, the most ...
... passions and influences. There are also other kinds of beings on the vital plane which are called the Pisachas and Pramathas. They manifest more or less in the physico-vital. On the physical plane the corresponding forces are obscure beings, more forces than beings, what the Theosophists call the elementals. They are not strongly individualised beings like the Rakshasas and Asuras, but ignorant and obscure... wait their time. Very few [ vital beings ] come upon earth—they prefer to get hold of human beings and make them their instruments. They do not evolve. They have no evolved or evolving psychic being and they dread to incarnate just because they would then be obliged to progress and evolve the psychic. There is no particular number [ of vital beings that surround a person ]—but sometimes... Divine in its strength". The mental and vital Asuras are only a deviation of that power. The Gandharvas are of the vital plane but they are vital Gods, not Asuras. Many Asuras are beautiful in appearance and can carry even a splendour or light with them. It is the Rakshasas, Pisachas, etc. who are ugly or evil in appearance. Some of the vital beings are very intelligent—but they do not make ...
... Hitler and his chief lieutenants Goering and Goebbels are certainly vital beings or possessed by vital beings, so you can't expect common sense from them. The Kaiser, though ill-balanced, was a much more human person; these people are hardly human at all. The nineteenth century in Europe was a preeminently human era—now the vital world seems to be descending there. 18 September 1936 Stalin, Lenin... out of nothing and directed its operations. Stalin was not so much the vital as the physical mind working out details; after Lenin's death he took charge and arranged everything by this faculty. 25 January 1937 Edward Windsor Edward VIII is becoming a plain-clothes sentinel now (once more) of his realm instead of being quondam august keeper! Most are lost in a ferment. But I don't understand... when Lenin was there) and turned several catastrophes into successes either by military operations or tactics. If Lenin was the mind of the Bolshevist Revolution, Stalin was its vital—a very solid, steadfast and intuitive vital. Page 203 But where did you read that? It must be someone who since Stalin became powerful has exaggerated his share in the work. When Lenin lived he alone was al ...
... The dream about Chandulal and the bandits was a happening in the vital world or else a symbolic scene witnessed there. In the first case, the bandits are vital beings attacking the work,—in the second, hostile forces, suggestions etc. The one thing clear in it is that Champaklal is a prompt and effective fighter on the vital plane. 2.7.1932 Sri Aurobindo ...
... left ), a plate of grapes and yet another plate of grapes, like that. One was for you and one for me. Since two or three days, there are some vital beings eager to manifest their goodwill, and this was like the expression of their goodwill. In the vital, food is very often grapes, very frequently. Grapes of incomparable beauty, besides. And grapes are the fruit of life. So I suppose that's why. There... centimetres ). ( silence ) I tried to express what happened this morning, and what kept coming to me was: "But the experiences aren't literary, they can't be expressed." ( silence ) Some vital beings said to me, "There was a time when you used us and we were very happy. Why aren't you using us anymore now?" So I replied to them, "If you want to do work, I'm certainly not going to stop you!"... that's not the way levitation works, it's not because one escapes from the law of gravity: it's because physical bodies are supported by materialized vital forces (slightly materialized). So then, it put me back in contact with those forces and beings, and last night they said that to me; they told me, "Why aren't you using us any longer? We were quite happy!" I said, "Come along and do some work!" ...
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