... not altogether and, as it were, unwillingly, partially, unsatisfactorily,—what then? We often find that ethics and religion especially, when they find themselves in a constant conflict with the vital instincts, the dynamic life-power in man, proceed to an attitude of almost complete hostility and seek to damn them in idea and repress them in fact. To the vital instinct for wealth and wellbeing they oppose... the monk, the solitary, the world-shunning saint. Commencing with discipline and subordination they proceed to complete mortification, which means when translated the putting to death of the vital instincts, and declare that life itself is an illusion to be shed from the soul or a kingdom of the flesh, the world and the devil,—accepting thus the claim of the unenlightened and undisciplined life itself... the life of the society, as happened in India in the early Buddhist centuries. But beyond a certain point it tends, not really to kill, for that is impossible, but to discourage along with the vital instincts the indispensable life-energy of which they are the play and renders them in the end inert, feeble, narrow, unelastic, incapable of energetic reaction to force and circumstance. That was the final ...
... which makes of the majority slaves provided with these primary wants and necessities and ministering under compulsion to a few who rise higher and satisfy larger wants. These are the wants of the vital instincts, called in our philosophy the prāṇa koṣa , which go beyond and dominate the mere animal wants, simple, coarse and undiscriminating, shared by us with the lower creation. It is these vital wants... its good things in their hands in the intermediate period of human progress. Page 438 But the aesthetic faculties entering into the enjoyment of the world and the satisfaction of the vital instincts, the love of the beautiful in men and women, in food, in things, in articles of use and articles of pleasure, have done more than anything else to raise man from the beast, to refine and purge... and, when overstressed, tends to hamper a higher development by the obstruction of soulless ceremony and formalism. Its great use was to discipline the savage animal instincts of the body, the vital instincts and the lower feelings in the heart. Its disadvantage Page 440 to progress is that it tends to trammel the play both of the higher feelings of the heart and the workings of originality ...
... extremest consequences of one side of the Indian outlook or inlook and is nowhere accepted as it is for its own sake. Asceticism ranges rampant, is at the head of things, casts its shadow on the vital instincts and calls man to exceed the life of the body and even the life of the mental will and intelligence. The Western mind lays an enormous stress upon force of personality, upon the individual will ...
... would appeal to the idea of human unity, a real and vital principle. But if the idea of unity can appeal to the human mind, so too can the idea of separative life, for both address themselves to vital instincts of his nature. What guarantee will there be that the latter will not prevail when man has once tried unity and finds perhaps that its advantages do not satisfy his whole nature? Only the growth ...
... summon It to appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or pin It like an insect under its examining microscope? Can the vital animal hold up as infallible the standard of its vital instincts, associations and impulses and judge, interpret and fathom by it the mind of man? It cannot because man's mind is a greater power working in a wider, more complex way which the animal vital co ...
... and overcome. A mental acceptance or enthusiasm for the sadhana is not a sufficient guarantee nor a sufficient ground for calling people, especially young people, to begin it. Afterwards these vital instincts rise up and there is nothing sufficient to balance or prevail against them, only mental ideas which do not prevail against the instinct but on the other hand also stand in the way of their natural ...
... deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it. But this brotherhood and love will not proceed by the vital instincts or the reason where they can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings and other discordant instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there are plenty of other ...
... Keats: "Ode on the Poets". Page 306 days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of tra ...
... which has, as it were, flowered into life and mind moves and acts in another way than an inert body or even a vitalised body. Man's intelligence and reason have reoriented or tend to reorient his vital instincts and reactions, even his bodily functions and forms. A conscious regulation, even refashioning of his life and body is the very essence of human consciousness, the urge of his nature, instead of ...
... ² Keats: "Ode on the Poets". Page 78 days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses.., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of tra ...
... sense are not so when they are viewed from another standpoint. The moral consciousness seeks to rescue man from the animal consciousness. Its effort is to be delivered from the inferior vital instincts and rise to something higher, genuinely human. It does that or tries to do that by cultivating a feeling of repulsion, even of horror towards things that are sought to be rejected, cast out ...
... even for high ideals ? Is it concerned with Truth, with God, with Beauty, with any high ideal ? If we observe the working of Life we find it is rather concerned with physical (needs, desires, vital instincts, greed, ambitions, impulses. These are real to it; the rest is shadowy. It is true that society gives these ideals a place in its life, but its heart is not there e. g. ethics has a place in collective ...
... every being and everything, and it is through Him and by Him that we must enter into relation with them. There is no other way to a real and abiding unity. The modern man, led by his reason or vital instincts, will no doubt try, as he has indeed been trying, all avenues of human unity, but a day will surely arrive when, wearied and foiled, he will turn to the Life of his life and receive his first ...
... summon It to appear as a candidate for admission before a Board of Examiners or pin It like an insect under its examining microscope? Can the vital animal hold up as infallible the standard of its vital instincts, associations and impulses, and judge, interpret and fathom by it the mind of man? It cannot, because man's mind is a greater power working in a wider, more complex way which the animal vital ...
... capacities in the animal are automatically moved and strictly limited, almost even constituted by the lower nervous being. All animal perceptions, sensibilities, activities are ruled by nervous and vital instincts, cravings, needs, satisfactions, of which the nexus is the life-impulse and vital desire. Man too is bound, but less bound, to this automatism of the vital nature. Man can bring an enlightened ...
... impurities and disorders. Nature manages it all well enough for her own purposes, when left to herself; but the moment the blundering mind and will of the human being interfere with her habits and her vital instincts and intuitions, especially when they create false or artificial habits, a still more precarious order and frequent derangement become the rule of the being. Yet this interference is inevitable ...
... the scent from the flowers. By the time it reached the wall this came up to the supraliminal mind as a vague but powerful sense of something missed and attractive on the way. Working through the vital instincts & cravings by vital impulse which dominantly determines the movements of the insect, this sense immediately enforced a backward flight. If the other butterfly had not intervened, it is possible ...
... extent affected by it. 2 If consciousness and light is not brought into the subconscient, then there can be no change. For it is in the subconscient that there are the seeds of all the old lower vital instincts and movements and however much they may be cleared in the Page 611 lower vital itself, they may sprout up again from below. Also the subconscient is the secret basis of the bodily ...
... deeper brotherhood, a yet unfounded law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it. But this brotherhood and love will not proceed by the vital instincts or the reason.... Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there are plenty of other passions to combat it. It is in the soul that it must find its roots." 29 Only when ...
... Page 54 into a truly rational being who seeks after truth at any cost and whose reasoning intelligence is made really free and is no more under the subjugation of his physical and vital instincts, desires and passions. "Mano... prana-sarira-neta", "Mind should be the leader of the vital and the physical", and not the other way round. When the case is different, one is apt to confuse licence ...
... by a veil of ignorance or any disguise.' However, let me say here straightaway that the mind by itself cannot understand the Supermind. This is not surprising: after all, the animal, with its vital instincts and sensations, cannot follow the workings of man's mind. The Supermind represents a level and realm of consciousness radically different from and superior to Mind, just as, in the evolutionary ...
... sense are not so when they are viewed from another standpoint. The moral consciousness seeks to rescue man from the animal consciousness. Its effort is to be delivered from the inferior vital instincts and rise to something higher, genuinely human. It does that or tries to do that by cultivating a feeling of repulsion, even of horror towards things that are sought to be rejected, cast out. The ...
... which has, as it were, flowered into life and mind moves and acts in another way than an inert body or even a vitalised body. Man's intelligence and reason have reoriented Or tend to reorient his vital instincts and reactions, even his bodily functions and forms. A conscious regulation, even refashioning of his life and body is the very essence of human consciousness, the urge of his nature, instead of ...
... that the Tantric discipline represents a continuation or perhaps the remnant of a much older practice. Man did not come to live by his intellect 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 ...
... Savitri II THE OVERHEAD PLANES OF CONSCIOUSNESS At the present stage of the evolutionary advance, man has a body, certain vital instincts and passions, and a directing and controlling mind. Mental man is a great improvement on the mere animal, but he is also a prey to various dissatisfactions. What is the reason? Sri Aurobindo's ...
... AUROBINDO: Because they have seen things with their own eyes and know and are practical people. The Statesman has always been for some self-government for India. Englishmen have got a correct vital instinct. They know that it is a time of necessity, while the ruling class is shut up in its traditions and runs in grooves. The Labour Party can now exert its pressure on the Government. SATYENDRA:... course if the Congress had been conciliatory it would have been easy for the British Government. They can't accept whatever the Constituent Assembly decides. SATYENDRA: Englishmen here have their own vital interest at stake. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, but that interest is also connected with England and if England goes, they also go. ...
... and practical dealing with the facts and difficulties of life. Not, be it noted, by any power of clear intellectual thought or by force of imagination or mental intuition, but rather by a strong vital instinct, a sort of tentative dynamic intuition. No spirituality, but a robust ethical turn; no innate power of the thought and the word, but a strong turn for action; no fine play of emotion or quickness ...
... supreme result, to be exalted into an identity in knowledge, force, consciousness, act, joy of existence with the Divine Shakti; to feel a dynamic movement not dominated by mortal desire and vital instinct. and impulse and illusive mental free will, but luminously conceived and evolved in an immortal self-delight and an infinite self-knowledge. For this is the action that comes by a conscious... discovery of the potential powers and capacities of the human body and the life-energy: playing in it. In the dynamic synthesis of the Integral Yoga, this contribution has been incorporated with certain vital modifications and given an important place in its comprehensive scheme of spiritual values. RAJAYOGA Unlike Hathayoga, Râjayoga does not start with the body and the life-energy... quest and worship. A living and constant self-consecration in action and an uncompromising rejection of egoistic desires is the He- most effective method of Karmayoga. As most men live in their vital-physical being, predominantly concerned with the satisfaction of their desires and wants, the practice of Karmayoga is usually attended with rapid and remarkable results in the general purification ...
... national and empires have existed in recent times, not consciously for the sake of a wider aggregation as did the imperial Roman world, but to serve the instinct of domination and expansion, the land hunger, money hunger, commodity hunger, the vital, intellectual, cultural aggressiveness of powerful and prosperous nations. This, however, does not secure the nation-unit from eventual dissolution in a... So also with the ideal of uniformity; for with many minds, especially those of a rigid, mechanical cast, those in which logic and intellectuality are stronger than the imagination and the free vital instinct or those which are easily seduced by the beauty of an idea and prone to forget its limitations, uniformity is an ideal, even sometimes the highest ideal of which they can think. The uniformity... upon the completest individual freedom and freedom also of natural unforced grouping. A compromise might also be reached, a dominant regimentation with a subordinate freedom more or less vital, but even if less vital, yet a starting-point for the dissolution of the regime when humanity begins to feel that regimentation is not its ultimate destiny and that a fresh cycle of search and experiment has become ...
... driven by the necessity of strengthening themselves and by an enlightened self-interest, may come to see that the recognition of national autonomy is a wise and necessary concession to the still vital instinct of nationalism and can be used so as to strengthen instead of weakening their imperial strength and unity. In this way, while a federation of free nations is for the present impossible, a system... present inequalities between nation and nation are removed or else the whole world rises to a common culture based upon a higher moral and spiritual status than is now actual or possible. The imperial instinct being alive and dominant and stronger at present than the principle of nationalism, the evolution of great empires can hardly fail to overshadow for a time at least the tendency to the development ...
... fastening on perversities, on all that is ugly, glaring and coarse on the plea of their 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... feeling mind of his characters. But this can only be done without detriment to the vital power of the poetic spirit and the all-seizing effect of its word, when there is a balance maintained between thought and life, the life passing into self-observing thought and the thought returning on the life to shape it in its own vital image. It has been remarked that the just balance between thought and the living... higher reach we gain when we get above the limited crude physical mind, above the vital power and its forceful thought and self-vision, above the intellect and its pondering and measuring reason, and tread the illumined realm of an intuitive and spiritual thinking, an intuitive feeling, sense and vision. This is not that vital intuition which is sometimes confused with a much broader, loftier, vaster and ...
... or only a light and ethereal hold, accepts it as a starting-point for the expression of other-life, is attracted by all that is hidden and secret". 22 While the Teutonic genius goes by a strong vital instinct rather than by clear intellectual thought or force of imagination or intellectual intuition, the Celtic has a quick and luminous intelligence, a Page 51 rapid and brilliant imagination... 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 the drama, "makes it... another term of Sri Aurobindo's) is not necessarily Romantic any more than all poetic production from the plane of the Intelligence is bound to be Classical: still the real Romanticism springs from vital passion and power, the joy and pain, wonder and terror and beauty of the life-soul feeling, thinking, imagining, and turning everything into the values proper to its own drive of desire. The poetic ...
... becomes more and more subject to rajas, the principle, the power, the qualitative mode of action and passion impelled by desire and instinct. There is then formed and developed the animal nature, narrow in consciousness, rudimentary in intelligence, rajaso-tamasic in vital habit and impulse. Emerging yet farther from the great Inconscience towards a spiritual status the embodied being liberates sattwa... the supreme result, to be exalted into an identity in knowledge, force, consciousness, act, joy of existence with the Divine Shakti; to feel a dynamic movement not dominated by mortal desire and vital instinct and impulse and illusive mental free-will, but luminously conceived and evolved in an immortal self-delight and an infinite self-knowledge. For this is the action that comes by a conscious subjection... are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and Page 101 divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully se ...
... fastening on perversities, on all that is ugly, glaring and coarse on the plea of their 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... However, through the entire low-pitching, by Rousseau's temperament, of the revelation he had enjoyed ran still a great and glimmering idealism with a democratic sweep, and the vast vague emotions and instincts which pulled that revelation Page 101 down and took hold of his intellect could win almost the whole age to his side by the very force of that intellect and by the sudden flash within... gusto that it has chilled and thinned away into sentiment verging at its extreme on an unreal fineness. "There is then an attempt," says Sri Aurobindo, 4 "to get back to the natural fullness of the vital and physical life, but the endeavour fails in sincerity and success because it is impossible; the mind of man having got so far cannot return upon its course, undo what it has made of itself and recover ...
... the thought is there from the beginning, for the Rakshasa has already established it in the human mould in the fifth pratikalpa. It now, however, in the Asura ceases to be subservient to the vital & animal instincts & becomes the instrument instead of a vigorous, violent & clamorous intellectual ego. As the main type is that of the Asura, there is always a tendency to subordinate the lower ego to the... but in the mental world which stands behind the earth-life; for earth has seven planes of being, the material of which the scenes and events are alone normally visible to the material senses, the vital of which man's pranakosha is built and to which it is responsive, the mental to which his manahkosha is attached, the ideal governing his vijnanakosha, the beatific which supports his anandakosha, &... hereafter. The animal proper is a lower type. Certain devas of the manasic plane in the Bhuvarloka descend in the higher type of animal. They are not mental beings proper, but only half-mental vital beings. They live in packs, tribes etc with a communal existence. They are individual souls, but the individuality is less vigorous than the type soul. If they were not individual, they would not be ...
... knowledge by identity and they now emerge by degrees in a form strangely diminished and tentative. First, there emerges a crude or veiled sense which develops into precise sensations aided by a vital instinct or concealed intuition; then a life-mind perception manifests and at its back an obscure consciousness-sight and feeling of things; emotion vibrates out and seeks an interchange with others; last... that imply an involved sensation; there is a seeking for growth, light, air, life-room, a blind feeling out, which is still internal and confined within the immobile being, unable to formulate its instincts, to communicate, to externalise itself. An immobility not organised to establish living relations, it endures and absorbs contacts, involuntarily inflicts but cannot voluntarily impose them; the ... justifies our desires and actions, nourishes our ego. This vital intervention is not indeed always in the direction of self-justification and assertion; it turns sometimes towards self-depreciation and a morbid and exaggerated self-criticism: but this too is an ego-structure, a reverse or negative egoism, a poise or pose of the vital ego. For in this vital ego there is frequently a mixture of the charlatan ...
... Froebel, "is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage, and at the same time typical of human life as a whole." Dr. Montessori" says: "The child's aptitude for work represents a vital instinct, and it is by work (not play — sic) that the child organizes his personality." To her it is work, not play which is typical of humanity — Homo Laborans should be man's title even more than Homo... an essential part of the cycle of activity involved — almost the crowning joy of the whole procedure. This incident was the beginning of that principle of "free choice of activity" which became so vital a factor in the Montessori system. Here again let us notice that it was the discovery which came first and the method followed after. Shortly after this Montessori replaced the one big, locked cupboard... attitude of love and reverence for the child as a spiritual being that they are in complete unity — not in the details of their system nor in their philosophy of life. According to Montessori — the vital thing in a true educational method is the activity of the child, and that the function of the teacher is to direct the child's spontaneous energies. This is also Froebel's fundamental maxim; "Education ...
... the instinct of sexual desire is too strong in her and unsatisfied and this indicates the need of the social and family life, not a life of Yoga. The family life accompanied with whatever religious worship or practice of bhakti she can manage is her proper field at present. For one with these unsatisfied instincts to live in the Asram would on one side be bad for her,—it would raise up a vital struggle... kind of vital passivity in her to men and this kind of passivity is very attractive to the masculine sex instinct. As the movements in you are not mental but in sensation, it is possible that your subconscient vital has somehow felt this in her subconscient temperament and got the attraction. These movements are not vitally willed or mental—they belong to that shadowy region of submerged vital physical... here, because if vital relations are debarred, nothing remains except a simple exchange of words? What about the true (not the pretended) psychic and spiritual—forgetting sex? The relation has to be limited as it is because sex immediately trots into the front. You are invited to live above the vital and deeper than the vital—then only you can use the Page 712 vital aright. Buddha was ...
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