... independent of the body and of the symbols of the physical world which alone we call natural phenomena, as if Nature had no greater phenomena and no greater realities than those of gross Matter. The vital man, moulded consciously or unconsciously by these influences, is the man of desire and sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion, the kinetic individual: he may and does... self-dominating and self-formative mind and will conscious of an ideal and turned towards its realisation, the high intellect, the thinker, the sage, less kinetic and immediately effective than the vital man, who is the man of action and outer swift life-fulfilment, but as powerful and eventually even more powerful to open new vistas to the race, is the normal summit of Nature's evolutionary formation... the surface being or found ourselves wholly on Matter, it is impossible to go higher and vain to expect that there can be any new transition of a radical character in our evolutionary being. The vital man, the mental man have had an immense effect upon the earth-life, they have carried humanity forward from the mere human animal to what it is now. But it is only within the bounds of the already established ...
... and will that constitute this superiority. In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger dynamis of action than Page 1074 the mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life-force: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life. But it is his use of mind that enables him... real and various than the first pettiness of the life constructed for itself by our normal physical humanity, a joy of being which is larger and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital man or the surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence. A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness... , and in the end the mental man by his power of knowledge, his science, is able to extend the mastery of existence far beyond what life in matter could accomplish by its own agencies or what the vital man could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct without that increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power over existence and over Nature must come when a still greater consciousness ...
... created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all else is incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and expression of the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are... are or can be other elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these happen to be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The nature of the vital man is more active, stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and chaotic, often to the point of being quite unregulated, than Page 17 that of the physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain ...
... is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all else is incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and expression of the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are... are or can be other elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these happen to be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The nature of the vital man is more active, stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and chaotic, often to the 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, ...
... economical well-being. These were directed on one side to success, expansion, opulence and the right art and relation of these activities, but on those motives, demanded by the very nature of the vital man and his action, was imposed the law of the Dharma, a stringent social and ethical ideal and rule—thus the whole life of the king as the head of power and responsibility was regulated by it in its... the one which most easily draws us outward and away from the inner self and the diviner aim of living, it was the most strenuously linked up at every point with the religious idea in the way the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times by the constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social and civic act, at a later period by religious rites, ceremonies, worship, the calling in of the ...
... asceticisms or a positive neglect of the physical frame. But we have not either to be affected in mind by hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-health or attach the importance which the physical and vital man attaches to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor must this instrumental importance be allowed to assume the proportions of a necessity;... is overcome. For when we feel the physical being to be not ourselves, but only a dress or an instrument, the repulsion to the death of the body which is so strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man must necessarily weaken and can be thrown away. Thrown away it must be and entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being ...
... 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... it is as harmful as it can otherwise be helpful. Even in ordinary life the vital has to be controlled by the mind and mental will, otherwise it brings disorder or disaster. When people speak of a vital man, they mean one under the domination of vital force not controlled by the mind or the spirit. The vital can be a good instrument, but it is a bad master. The vital has not to be killed or destroyed ...
... Aurobindo's Page 1 direction in this regard is definite and unambiguous. He says: "... the repulsion to the death of the body which is so strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man must... be thrown away. Thrown away it must be and entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being. That brand must be... time and finally being forcefully dragged away through the dismal portal of physical dissolution. The second argument against the futility of any fear of death follows a different line. The vital man is in passionate egoistic love with his physical life and is strongly attached to all its possibilities. To him death is altogether antithetical to life and is therefore evil in its very nature. But ...
... 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 mental interests and pursuits, or a vital man may have the latter ...
... one side of its operation in the functioning of the three gunas. It is true that in this birth men fall very largely into one of four types, the man of knowledge, the man of power, the productive vital man, the man of rude labour and service. These are not fundamental divisions, but stages of self-development in our manhood. The human being starts with a sufficient load of ignorance and inertia; his... develops the rajasic guna in him and we get a second type of man who is driven by a constant instinct for useful creation, production, having, acquisition, holding and enjoying, the middle economic and vital man, the Vaishya. At a higher elevation of the rajasic or kinetic quality of our one common nature we get the active man with a more dominant will, with bolder ambitions, with the instinct to act, battle ...
... temperament, always there, has come aggressively to the Page 157 surface and triumphed over the traditions of Christian piety and Latinistic culture. This triumphant emergence and lead of the vital man and his motives has been the whole significance of the great economic and political civilisation of the nineteenth century. Life in society consists, for the practical human instincts, in three activities... come to a truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high idealistic, rational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes only a polishing, a gloss, a clothing and mannerising of the original uncouth savage. The modern attempt of reason in the form of a broad and thorough rational, utilitarian ...
... living of the race,—but after all where is there yet any element in human life or society which is perfect, rational or ideal? As yet at least none; still we get on somehow with life, because the vital man in us, who is the dominant element in our instincts and in our actions, cares for none of these things and is quite satisfied with any just tolerable or any precariously or partly agreeable form of... thinkers, the idealists, are always a minority and in the end an ineffectual minority, because though always in the end they do get their way partly, their victory yet turns into a defeat; for the vital man remains still the majority and degrades the apparent success into a pitiful parody of their Page 555 rational hope, their clear-sighted ideal or their strong counsel of perfection. ...
... lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder. Above physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation, there is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic, vital.... The vital man... is the man of desire and sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion, the kinetic individual: he may and does lay great stress on the material existence, but he gives... self-dominating and self-formative mind and will conscious of an ideal and turned towards its realisation, the high intellect, the thinker, the sage, less kinetic and immediately effective than the vital man, who is the man of action and outer swift life-fulfilment, but as powerful and eventually even more powerful to open new vistas to the race, is the normal summit of Nature's evolutionary formation ...
... ascends. One may thus work out a comprehensive process of self-development by a sort of inclusive process of self-enlargement and transformation. The evolution of the material man into the vital man, from the vital man into the mental man, from the mental man into the supramental man and from that stage into the divine man, daivyam janam, to use the Vedic term Page 22 Illustration of other ...
... between the elements of man & the elements of metre. Just as in man there is the outward food-plasm and within it the vital or sensational man conditioned by & conditioning the food-plasm & within the vital man the emotional or impressional man similarly related and again within that the intellectual man governing the others and again within that the delight of the spirit in its reasoning existence & within ...
... beatitude of joy and liberates his soul into immeasurable peace that man becomes capable of immortality. To widen is to acquire new births. The aspiring material creature becomes the straining vital man; he in turn transmutes himself into the subtle mental and psychical being; this subtle thinker grows into the wide, multiple and cosmic man open on all sides of him to all the multitudinous inflowings ...
... art, science or literature; but there too, though freer & better satisfied, he is both fettered by his nerves and body and hedged in by the limitations of the mind itself. The mind in sensational & vital man, incapable of an universal catholicity of possession and enjoyment, measures, divides, erects standards & hedges, rooted customary habits of capacity, fixed associations of enjoyment and fixed as ...
... October 29, 1932 Khitish Sen's sonnet is a good poem—he should write more Bengali poetry. As for the substance it expresses not so much a sign of the sceptic as the attitude of the vital man to whom unmixed happiness, joy, unity, a life without suffering, strife and unrest would seem quite unsatisfying; he complains of pain and sorrow when they come and rages against God and Fate; ...
... occult knowledge was confined to a few; it was not spread in the whole mass of humanity. The mass of humanity evolves slowly, containing in itself all stages of the evolution from the material and the vital man to the mental man. A small minority has pushed beyond the barriers, opening the doors to occult and spiritual knowledge and preparing the ascent of the evolution beyond mental man into spiritual and ...
... fingers' ends and carefully put in its place in his brain also—but he did not make the mistake of writing a philosophical treatise in verse. A man of great urbanity, a perfectly balanced mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate Page 372 like Catullus, an Epicurean ...
... be called by no other name,—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 ...
... imperative of an ideal law, we have not come to the end of our search or touched the truth that delivers. There is, no doubt, something here that helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man in us, an insistence that overpasses the individual and collective needs and desires of a humanity still bound to the living mud of Matter in which it took its roots, an aspiration that helps to develop ...
... hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to be used were exhausted; the very forces that the ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power for his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against the throne of Necessity ...
... well as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his freedom from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow. Society for its own sake has to coerce the dynamic and vital man, 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 ...
... command upon every Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga to overcome all attachment to life in the body and renounce "the repulsion to the death of the body which is so strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man.... Thrown away it must be and entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation are the stigma left by his animal origin on the human being. That brand must be utterly effaced ...
... such benefits? The Yogis have been busy with their own salvation while the world has remained just the same. SRI AUROBINDO: Evolution has proceeded from matter through animal to physical man, vital man, mental man and spiritual man. When mental man or spiritual man appears, the others don't disappear. The tigers and serpents don't become men. In this upward growth of the human consciousness you ...
... technology be learnt? 3. What is the difference between art and technology? 4. Observation of the different levels of being in man: the distinction between the physical man, the vital man, the mental man, the spiritual man and the integral man. 5. Topic for deep study and reflections: "Unity of knowledge" or "All knowledge, scientific, philosophic or yogic, tends ultimately ...
... immanent in it; and it evolves on the material plane by a process of rebirth of the individual. In this process of evolution, the individual moves up the scale of being from the physical man and vital man till in mental man he enters the world of ideas and realm of conscious morality, dharma. It is this achievement, this victory over unconscious matter that constitutes the concept of evolution in India ...
... knowledge was confined to a few, it was not spread in the whole mass of humanity. The mass of humanity evolves slowly, containing in itself all stages of the evolution from the material and the vital man to the mental man. A small minority has pushed beyond the barriers, opening the doors to occult and spiritual knowledge and preparing the ascent of the evolution beyond mental man into spiritual ...
... The Taittiriya Upanishad, for example, sees in Man several layers of reality and significance: annamaya, prānamaya, manomaya, vijñānamaya and ānandamaya corresponding to the physical man, vital man, mental man, supramental man and the wholly realised man resting in the sachchidānanda consciousness. Page 426 The great crossing has to be from the aparārdha hemisphere of ...
... European painter will express with sovereign power the soul through character, through the active qualities, the ruling powers and passions, the master feeling and temperament, the active mental and vital man: the Indian artist tones down the outward-going dynamic indices and gives only so much of them as will serve to bring out or to modulate something that is more of the grain of the subtle soul, something ...
... be called by no other name,—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 ...
... devotion he cannot do it. It is difficult for the ordinary Christian to be of a piece, because the teachings of Christ are on quite another plane from the consciousness of the intellectual and vital man trained by the education and society of Europe—the latter, even as a minister or priest, has never been called upon to practise what he preached in entire earnest. But it is difficult for the human ...
... yield up the fortress of the moral law to the life-instinct, the aesthetic instinct and intelligence flourished as a rather glaring exotic ornament, a sort of rare orchid in the button-hole of the vital man, and reason became the magnificent servant of Life and Matter. The titanic development of the vital Life which followed, is ending as the Titans always end; it lit its own funeral pyre in the con ...
... takes upon all such violent endeavours; she waits to master them by their concessions to her own law. If mankind is to be spiritualised, it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being. It may be questioned whether such a mass progress or conversion is possible; but if it is not, then the spiritualisation of mankind as a whole is ...
... more governed satisfaction of the rajasic ego. But for the vital plane also it is possible, even as on the physical, to rise to a certain spiritual greatness in its own kind. It 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 ...
... It is especially difficult for the Christian to be of a piece, Page 314 because the teachings of Christ are on quite another plane from the consciousness mf the intellectual and vital man trained by the education and society of Europe — the latter, even as a minister or priest, has never been called upon to practise what he preached in entire earnest. But it is difficult for human ...
... called by no other name, — 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 ...
... fingers' ends and carefully put in its place in his brain also—but he did not make the mistake of writing a philosophical treatise in verse. A man of great urbanity, a perfectly balanced mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate like Catullus, an Epicurean who took life ...
... ? How should technology be learnt? What is the difference between art and technology? Observation of the different levels of being in man: the distinction between the physical man, the vital man, the mental man, the spiritual man and the integral man. Topic for deep study and reflection: "Unity of knowledge" or "All knowledge scientific, philosophic or yogic, tends ultimately to be ...
... 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 with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement, life- Page 285 enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination ...
... learnt? 3. What is the difference between art and technology? 4. Observation of the different levels of being in man: the distinction Page 97 between the physical man, the vital man, the mental man the spiritual man and the integral man. 5. Topic for deep study and reflections: "Unity of knowledge" or "All knowledge, scientific, philosophic or yogic, tends ultimately to be ...
... been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (1) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has ...
... as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his freedom from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow .Society for its own sake has to coerce the dynamic and vital man, 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 ...
... been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the' Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (I) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura. that is to say, one who ...
... Life."³ It has brought into play two contradictory tendencies : mutual strife and assistance, competition and co-operation. European culture has given to the world the practical, dynamic man, the vital man. Life in a society consists of three kinds of activities: ( 1 ) Domestic and social life, ( 2 ) Economic activity as producer and consumer, ( 3 ) Political status and action. In Asia ...
... or in dream Page 151 begin to fight, while there are others who call for protection. If one has the psychic attitude one need not fight. Fighting is for the mental and the vital man; in the case of the mental type the fight is with ideas. Disciple : Some people regard quarrelling with the Divine as the psychic way. Sri Aurobindo : In that case, many people ...
... do that? The Yogis have been busy with their own salvation while the world has remained just the same. Sri Aurobindo : Evolution has proceeded from matter through animal to physical man, vital man, mental man and spiritual man. When mental man or spiritual man appears the others do not disappear. So, the tiger and serpent do not become man. In this upward growth of the human consciousness you ...
... has worked much more as an expression of the vital in man than of the mental will. Speech breaks out as an expression of the vital and its habits without caring to wait for the control of the mind; the tongue has been spoken of as the unruly member. In your case the difficulty has been increased by the habit of talk about others — gossip, to which your vital was very partial, so much that it cannot even... even yet give up the pleasure in it. It is therefore this tendency that must cease in the vital itself, not to be under the control of the impulse to speech, to be able to do without it as a necessity and to speak only when one sees that it is right to do so and only what one sees to be right to say, is a very necessary part of yogic self-control. It is only by perseverance and vigilance and a strong ...
... the vital when it is converted. The converted vital is for the Divine like a warrior. The vital in man is the region of power and it is that which drives him to fight, to fight and conquer. It is the most difficult element to deal with: for it is this capacity to fight that also produces in the vital the spirit of revolt and independence, the will to follow its own will. But when the vital understands... that prevent the transformation: the powers of the vital are strong enough to conquer the enemies. The antidivine forces are in the vital world: from there they spread upon the physical. But their own seat is in the vital and it is the converted vital that can effectively deal with them. But the conversion is difficult. The higher vital finds it much less difficult to surrender, for it is... is under the influence of the mind and sometimes even of the psychic; it understands them more easily. It is less difficult than the lower vital, for the latter is essentially the stronghold of desires and blind impulsions. The lower vital, even when it surrenders, when it does what it is asked to do, is not wholly happy, it suffers Page 125 and only pushes down the impulse to revolt ...
... means the vital when it is converted. The converted vital is for the Divine like a warrior. The vital in man is the region of power and it is that which drives him to fight, to fight and conquer. It is the most difficult element to deal with: for it is this capacity to fight that also produces in the vital the spirit of revolt and independence, the will to follow its own will. But when the vital understands... obscurity that prevent the transformation: the powers of the vital are strong enough to conquer the enemies. The anti-divine forces are in the vital world: from there they spread upon the physical. But their own seat is in the vital and it is the converted vital that can effectively deal with them. But the conversion is difficult. The higher vital finds it much less difficult to surrender, for it is under... under the influence of the mind and sometimes even of the psychic; it understands them more easily. It is less difficult than the lower vital, for the latter is essentially the stronghold of desires and blind impulsions. The lower vital, even when it surrenders, when it does what it is asked to do, is not wholly happy, it suffers and only pushes down the impulse to revolt, it obeys unwillingly and does ...
... accordance with a plan, a specific plan, recognised and used by each one, whereas the vital part of the being likes excitement, the unexpected, adventure—all that makes games attractive—above all, competition, the effort to win, victory over the opponent, all these things; it is the vital impulse, and the vital in man being the seat of enthusiasm, ardour, normal energy, when the attraction of the unexpected... higher realisation, it is something which should be taught everywhere, in every school, every family, every home: man was made to be a mental being, and merely to be a man—we are not speaking of anything else, we are speaking only of being a man—life must be dominated by reason and not by vital impulses. This should be taught to all children from their infancy. If one is not dominated by reason, one is... as they grow up; but the fact that the control of reason over life is absolutely indispensable even for good health, is not always accepted by the inferior man for whom life has no savour unless he can live out his passions. I remember a man who came here a very long time ago, to stand as a candidate for the government. It so happened that he was introduced to me because they wanted my opinion of ...
... planet. Yes, all that [ humans, animals, vegetables, minerals ] is the earth consciousness—mineral = matter, vegetable = the vital-physical creation, animal = the vital creation, man = the mental creation. Into the earth consciousness so limited to mind, vital, matter has to come the supramental creation. Necessarily at first it cannot be in a great number—but even if it is only in a few at... Page 296 The Vital World and the Supramental Descent When there is a pressure on the vital world due to the preparing Descent from above, that world usually precipitates something of itself into the human. The vital world is very large and far exceeds the human in extent. But usually it dominates by influence not by descent. Of course the effort of this part of the vital world is always to... to maintain humanity under its sway and prevent the higher Light. The vital descent cannot prevent the supramental—still less can the possessed nations do it by their material power, since the supramental descent is primarily a spiritual fact which will bear its necessary outward consequences. What previous vital descents have done is to falsify the Light that came down as in the history of C ...
... is very difficult and to be successful in it one must have endless endurance and persistence and a will that no failure can weaken. Indeed, the vital in man's nature is a despotic and exacting tyrant. Moreover, since it is the vital which holds power, energy, enthusiasm, effective dynamism, many have a feeling of timorous respect for it and always try to please it. But it is a master that nothing... Articles Articles On Education Vital Education Of all education, vital education is perhaps the most important, the most indispensable. Yet it is rarely taken up and pursued with discernment and method. There are several reasons for this: first, the human mind is in a state of great confusion about this particular subject; secondly, the undertaking is... Nature and the determinisms of material and vital life, unless a higher element comes in in time, a conscious will which, refusing to allow Nature to follow her whimsical ways, will replace them by a logical and clear-sighted discipline. This conscious will is what we mean by a rational method of education. That is why it is of prime importance that the vital education of the child should begin as early ...
... subject; secondly, the enterprise is very difficult and to be successful in it one must have endurance, endless persistence and an inflexible will. Indeed, the vital in man's nature is a despotic and exacting tyrant. Moreover, since it holds within itself power, energy, enthusiasm, effective dynamism, many have a feeling of timorous respect for it and try always to please it. But it is a master... On Education IV THE EDUCATION OF THE VITAL Of all education, the education of the vital is perhaps the most important and the most indispensable. Yet it is rarely taken up and followed with understanding and method. There are several reasons for this: first, human thinking is in a great confusion over what concerns this particular subject;... of a material and vital life, unless there is a luminous intervention of a higher element, a conscious will which will not let nature follow its whimsical procedure but replace it by a logical and clearseeing discipline. This conscious will is what we mean by the rational method of education. That is why it is of prime importance that the education of the child's vital should begin as early ...
... particular subject, secondly, the enterprise is very difficult and to be successful in it one must have endurance, endless persistence and an inflexible will. Indeed, the vital, in man's nature, is a despotic and exacting tyrant. Moreover, since it holds within itself power, energy, enthusiasm, effective dynamism many have a feeling of timorous respect for it and try always to please it. But it... A Scheme for The Education of Bengal VII. THE EDUCATION OF THE VITAL OF all education, the education of the vital is perhaps the most important and the most indispensable. And yet is it rarely taken up and followed with understanding and method. There are several reasons for it: first, human thinking is in a great confusion over what concerns this ... of a material and vital life, unless there is a luminous intervention of a higher element, a conscious will which will not let nature follow its whimsical procedure, but replace it by a logical and clear-seeing discipline. This conscious will is what we mean ' by the rational method of education. That is why it is of prime importance that the child's education of the vital should begin as early ...
... Birenda in a softer and more expansive mood explained about “Chakras” and centres, about how the coccyx is the “mooladhar”, etc., etc. He further explained that suppressing some movements of the “vital” in man — without transforming them nor giving them an expression, i.e., venting them — often creates problems at certain centres; the idea is to release this suppressed energy etc., etc. He used to... She apologised and quietly retreated. The man continued. Then Birenda asked him to lie down and himself massaged and manipulated — and when he had finished with him, the man got up with the bend more than half straightened out! On another occasion an old gentleman (a Bengali) came, accompanied by his doctor son. They came from Tripura. They said the old man had Parkinson’s Disease. He shook all over... a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips asked Rajnish (a student of his) to give some vibration (by hand only — Birenda detested mechanical vibrations) to the old man’s coccyx. Rajnish did so — and wonder of wonders — the old man stopped shaking. The doctor watched wide-eyed and stunned. Birenda burst out laughing and asked “ki holo — lèje kichchu hoyni bolle?” (what — you said there was nothing ...
... our spiritual and our Page 9 outward experience—whereas the point of view on which you lay stress is that they are not what they ought to be or what the mind, ethical feeling and the vital in man feel that they ought to be. That this world is full of queer, ugly and inharmonious things is the very plain and self-evident fact with which we have to start,—wherever we may want or hope to arrive... certain spiritual impersonality, then you grow in equality, purity, peace, detachment, you get the power of living in an inner freedom not touched by the surface movement or struggle of the mental, vital and physical nature, and this becomes a great help when you have to go beyond the impersonal and to change the troubled nature also into something divine. The Divine and the Atman The Divine is ...
... kind as man's. But all these 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... But here it must be Nature at her highest and widest in him, not at her lowest or in some limiting movement. In her lower vital activities it is desire that Nature takes as her most powerful leverage; but the distinct character of man is that he is a mental being, not a merely vital creature. As he can use his thinking mind and will to restrain and correct his life impulses, so too he can bring in the... purer motive-powers the domination of the vital and sensational force that we call desire. He can entirely master or persuade it and offer it up for transformation to its divine Master. This higher mentality and this deeper soul, the psychic element in man, are the two grappling hooks by which the Divine can lay hold upon his nature. The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer, vaster ...
... conversion each part of it must undergo and the most effective means for the conversion. How to disengage from this knot of thinking mortal matter the Immortal it contains, from this mentalised vital animal man the happy fullness of his submerged hints of Godhead, is the real problem of a human being and living. Life develops many first hints of the divinity without completely disengaging them; Yoga... escaping from the restrictions of the vital and physical formula of being. But even this is not all that man is or can be: he has in him the power to evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being. In Yoga we have to travel beyond the physical... ling evolution. But matter too is capable of refining to subtler forms of substance in which it becomes more apparently a formal density of life, of mind, of spirit. Man himself has, besides this gross material body, an encasing vital sheath, a mental body, a body of bliss and gnosis. But all matter, all body contains within it the secret powers of these higher principles; matter is a formation of ...
... men's thoughts. There are good ones, there are bad ones; and behind that there are all the formations of the vital world, a world essentially hostile to the Divine. Only the vital in man, under the psychic influence, can change and become a collaborator in the divine work. Otherwise, the vital world is essentially formed of beings hostile to the divine work, and those who open themselves to these... comprised of extracts from letters written in reply to the queries of disciples. "The forces that stand in the way of sadhana are the forces of the lower mental, vital and physical nature. Behind them are adverse powers of the mental, vital and subtle physical worlds. These can be dealt with only after the mind and heart have become one-pointed and concentrated in the single aspiration to the Divine... substance. It is the thing of which something is made. And precisely, what is important is that people usually think that mind is just a mode of activity, whereas there is a mental substance as there is a vital Page 306 substance and physical substance. And as there is a substance, there is a corresponding world with an autonomous existence, that is to say, there can be a mind without any physical ...
... have a Page 298 nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before. It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know,... restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole. The subliminal self stands behind and supports the whole superficial man; it has in it a larger and more efficient mind behind the surface mind, a larger and more powerful vital behind the surface vital, a subtler and freer physical consciousness behind the surface bodily existence. And above them it opens to higher superconscient as... conversion each part of it must undergo and the most effective means for the conversion. How to disengage from this knot of thinking mortal matter the Immortal it contains, from this mentalised vital animal man the happy fullness of his submerged hints of Godhead, is the real problem of a human being and living. Life develops many first hints of the divinity without completely disengaging them; Yoga ...
... has worked much more as an expression of the vital in man than of the mental will. Speech breaks out as the expression of the vital and its habits without caring to wait for the control of the mind; the tongue has been spoken of as the unruly member. In your case the difficulty has been increased by the habit of talk about others,—gossip, to which your vital was very partial, so much that it cannot even... inventions is one of the universal Page 87 illnesses of the Asram. It is a disease of the vital aided by the physical mind which makes itself an instrument of the pleasure taken in this barren and harmful pursuit of the vital. Control of the speech, refusal of this disease and the itch of the vital is very necessary if inner experience has to have any true effect of transformation in the outer... oneself go in the vital stream of an externalised consciousness—it was that which I said I had told you not to do. It [ a feeling of dispersion ] is of course because the consciousness is thrown out in these things [ light talk and laughter ] and one comes out of the inner poise and has difficulty in going back to it—especially as there is a sort of dispersion of the vital energy. If one attains ...
... the essence of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it for the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action is occult and not obtruded on the surface." (p. 3) xvii In most human beings, generally the actual governor or leader who drives one is the vital, for "man usually lives in his vital and the body is its instrument ... because it is the inmost part of our being, supporting all other parts—mental, vital, physical. Though in theory the psychic is the true master of the being who puts forth and uses the instruments of mind, life and body, in actuality in most human beings the psychic is entirely veiled and overshadowed by its mental, vital and physical instruments. The outer consciousness of the human being "lives amongst... However, though covered over and dominated by mind, vital and physical, the psychic fire is never extinguished by them, for the psychic being is the eternal self "that carries the consciousness from life to life" (p. 16). It is the true and persistent individual whereas our normal self made up of xviii mind, vital and body is only a passing shadow of the true individual. ...
... doubts and disputes and is the enemy of its enlightenment and change; not insisting on its own movements as the vital in man insists and persistently opposes its refractory desires and ill-will to every divine influence; not obstructing and entrenched in incapacity, inertia and tamas as man's physical consciousness obstructs and clinging to its pleasure in smallness and darkness cries out against each... her power, often holds them back from her instruments and personalities and follows that she may transform them the way of the seeking mind, the way of the aspiring psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the imprisoned and suffering physical nature. There are conditions that have been laid down by a Supreme Will, there are many tangled knots that have to be loosened and cannot be cut abruptly... luminous wisdom; those that have vision she admits to her counsels; on the hostile she imposes the consequence of their hostility; the ignorant and foolish she leads according to their blindness. In each man she answers and handles the different elements of his nature according to their need and their urge and the return they call for, puts on them the required pressure or leaves them to their cherished ...
... don't have that perversity that's in the human mind. I believe it is with this kind of mental functioning and under the direct influence of the vital that man has become an ill-willed being. The Titans are ill-willed beings but the Titans are beings of the vital world manifested in the forces of Nature: they want to do evil for the pleasure of doing it, to destroy for the pleasure of destroying. People... of the insect species is a vital origin, that the fashioners are those of a vital type, that is, beings who not only symbolise but represent and live upon the ill-will in the world. These are very conscious of their ill-will, and it is deliberate. The ill-will of men is usually only a kind of reflection—an imitation or a reflection—of the will of the beings of the vital, a will clearly hostile to creation... victim, it happens that both the tiger's and the snake's victims give themselves up in a kind of delight of being eaten. An experience is narrated of a man who was in the bush with his friends and had lagged behind and was caught by a tiger, a man-eater. The others came back when they saw that he was missing. They saw the tracks. They ran after him, just in time to prevent the tiger's eating him. When ...
... much more as an expression of the vital in man than of the mental will. Speech breaks out as the expression of the vital and its habits without caring to wait for the control of the mind; the tongue has been spoken of as the unruly member. In your case the difficulty has been increased Page 803 by the habit of talk about others,—gossip, to which your vital was very partial, so much that it... I passed no personal opinion or judgment for or against this or that person. You must not expect me to take any other attitude. This is a place meant for Yoga and sadhana; personal relations of the vital kind with their attractions and repulsions, quarrels and explanations and reconciliations belong to the ordinary life and nature. All these clashes which arise whenever you mix with X come from... pointed out his to X when he was ready to recognise them. It is a pity that you should clash whenever you meet together a little, but you know yourself why Page 801 it is so. So long as any vital weakness remains it cannot be otherwise. Certainly it cannot be remedied by "submitting to his demands and his ego". 16 November 1935 It is perfectly true that the egoistic sense of possession ...
... The Higher Lines of Karma The third movement of mind labours to bring the soul of man out of the tangle of the vital and mental forces and opens to him a field in which the mind raises itself, raises at least the head of its thought and will, above the vital demands and standards and there at that top of its activities, whatever its other concessions to the lower Karma... 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 himself an easy latitude. The reason generalises the idea of a moral law carrying with it an obligation man should heed and obey but may disregard at... lowering and limiting claim of a vital and physical Karma. It is true that his lower being remains subject to the law of life and of the body, and it is true also that he must strive either to find in life or to bring into the world around him some law of truth, of right and good, of beauty, of love and joy, of the mind's will and mastery, for it is by that effort that he is man and not the animal and without ...
... physical or an understanding nexus of the vital forces. There is a mental energy of his being that overtops, pervades and utilises the terrestrial action and his own terrestrial nature. This character of man's being prevents us from resting satisfied with the vitalistic law of Karma: the lines of the vital energy are interfered with and uplifted and altered for man by the intervention of the awakened... matter and has to act in and through this world of the vital and physical energy and to consent to and make something of the lines of the vital and physical Karma. Man, then, since he is a mental being, a means of the evolution of the mental self-expression of the spirit, cannot confine the rule of his action and nature to an obedience to the vital and physical law and an intelligent utilisation of... element in Tapasya. Man is a mental being seeking to establish a control over the life forces he embodies or uses, and one condition of that mastery is a necessary self-control, a restraint, an order, a discipline imposed on his mental, vital and physical being. The animal life is automatically subjected to certain measures; it is the field of an instinctive vital Dharma. Man, liberated from these ...
... higher consciousness be established only in a few people? Yes, all that is the earth consciousness—mineral = matter, vegetable = the vital-physical creation, animal = the vital creation, man = the mental creation. Into the earth consciousness so limited to mind, vital, matter has to come the supramental creation. Necessarily at first it cannot be in a great number—but even if it is only in a few at... Through the descent and manifestation of the supermind, a new race will be born—a new creation. But what exactly will this new creation be? The supramental being on earth, as man is the mental being, the animal the vital etc. 8 May 1934 When I hear people talking about the supramental descent it makes me somewhat sceptical. They expect that when the descent happens everything will soon be... absurdity that any man can be made a Krishna or a Sri Aurobindo, any woman a Mother, any X a Tyagaraj, any Y a Tansen, any Z a Shakespeare, any A a Raphael, any B a Vyasa or a Valmiki? ... I have never said any or all of these things. These egoistic terms Page 280 are not those in which I think any more than these egoistic ambitions are those in which my vital moves. It is a higher ...
... sadness, hostility towards the Mother ] belong to the universal vital Nature, but the vital of man also shares in them, makes itself a centre and field of the play of these wrong forces: in that sense they are in you. But by constant rejection they are pushed out; you feel them no longer rising in you but coming from outside. The vital still admits them because it is not yet pure of the old habit of... the outer man and the inner Spirit. This part of the vital [ which wants to revolt ] has no precise reasons to support itself with—it takes hold of any mood of disappointment or strong sense of difficulty. It is a factor in all human natures,—restless, desiring, eager, despondent, unstable. Stand back from it and do not allow it to govern or move you. There is a right part of the vital which must... A vital reaction means a response of the vital to the touch or pressure of an idea, action, event, person or thing. E.g. if someone speaks something you do not like and you get angry, that is a vital reaction. Or if a woman passes and you feel sexual desire, that is a vital reaction. Or if something unpleasant happens and you get a depression, that is a vital reaction. Most disturbances of the ...
... can acquiesce in subjection and yet make true & vital progress, growing to strength in its chains, is a lie. The idea that mitigations of subjection constitute freedom or prepare a race for freedom or that anything but the exercise of liberty fits man for liberty, is another lie. The teaching that peace and security are more important and vital to man than liberty is a third lie. Yet all these lies... still more for the comfortable sense of personal righteousness which they foster. The bourgeois is the man of good sense and enlightenment, the man of moderation, the man of peace and orderliness, the man in every way "respectable", who is the mainstay of all well-ordered societies. As a private man he is respectable; that is to say, his character is generally good, and when his character is not, his... discouraged and tended to disappear and in their place there was an enormous demand for the bourgeois qualities. The safe, respectable man, satisfied with ease and not ambitions of command, content with contemporary repute and not hankering after immortality, the superficial man who unable to think profoundly could yet pose among his peers as intellectual, who getting no true culture, wore a specious appearance ...
... nothing but an error of misdirected enthusiasm xxiii and the folly of the presumptuous vital in man. The dark doom to which humanity is now apparently hurtling headlong down under the impact of its external opulence and inner penury can be averted only if there dawns in man a greater spiritual consciousness adequate to meet and master the increasing technological potentialities... From Man Human to Man Divine INTRODUCTION: A View, in Advance, of What the Book is About The book From Man Human to Man Divine bears an unusual title and, as the title indicates, it deals with the evolutionary destiny of man. Man's past, present and future have been thoroughly discussed here in the wide perspective of the total earthly existence... Chapter of our book takes up for its study another aspect of man's besetting problems, the problem of human relations. It is well recognised that ever since the dawn of human history, man has been actuated by a persistent dream of triple harmony: harmony within man himself, social harmony between man and man, and the harmony between man and the world around him. But, alas, all these three basic ...
... recognised that avidy ā ca vidy ā li ṅ gam. To such a Page 64 spiritual vision, positive and dynamic, "all man's age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour... and have behind their limited apparent... control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, - for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or word-expression, - all... and therefore unnecessary and eliminable, when one tries to deny the right of existence to the other. And this is nothing but an error of misdirected enthusiasm and the folly of the presumptuous vital in man. A positive spirituality appreciates the worth of the achievements of Science in its own domain: it does not deny the reality of the rich harvest that men of science have gleaned from an ...
... Their own experience? That is not valid for the average sensational man; his deepest pleasure is necessarily vital and sensational; it is only valid for the men who make the statement, they being the intellectual self with an ethical training that has survived from a dead Christianity. In order for it to be true of the sensational man, he must cease to be sensational, he must undergo a process of spiritual... Eternal with the grosser & temporary manifestations of Prakriti such as his own vital passions of lust & ambition; the Deva, being sattwic & a child of light, sees clearer. When Napoleon cried out, "What is the French Revolution? I am the French Revolution," he gave utterance to that sense of his being more than a mere man, of his being the very force & power of God in action, which gave him such a ... accuracy. That truth is found only in the clear & luminous teaching of the Vedanta; it is this, that the compound result we call man is a compound result and not the single simple homogeneous being our senses would believe; he is composed of several elements, corporeal, vital, mental, intellectual and essential; and his true self is none of these heterogeneous factors of the element the Self lives in ...
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