... place will occultism have in the supramental life? Why particularly occultism? Because everything will be known, won't it? Why occultism? There is a place for everything in the supramental life. Does this interest you specially? According to what we know about occultism, it is the science which shows us things that are invisible to us, the invisible world, the invisible forces...... supramental world all this will be known. What do you understand by occultism? The knowledge of the invisible world and invisible forces. And so—I don't quite understand. In the supermind one will no longer have any knowledge, or what? One will have the knowledge already, so... Already.... But then it will be an occult knowledge! I don't quite understand. Occultism is a special... this in particular? That is what I don't understand! Why particularly occultism? Because I thought that all knowledge of the invisible world entered the sphere of occultism. Yes. So, now, in ordinary life man is unconscious, half conscious; but in the full consciousness he would also have the full consciousness of occultism. No, this is all very well, but do you believe that in the supramental ...
... 5) The nature, constituents and situation of invisible worlds. The first three questions are of a curious interest, the last two cover a very wide field. All except the fourth belong more or less to a kind of knowledge pursued with eager interest by a growing number of inquirers, but still looked on askance by the human mind in general,—the occult sciences. The Hindu Scriptures and books of philosophy... queries in the form in which he has put them. He will find for instance a long description of invisible Page 451 worlds,—invisible, that is to say, to our physical senses,—in the Vishnu Purana, but it is picturesque rather than precise. We do not think he will find much about the constituents of the worlds or the size of subtle bodies. The form of the third question lends itself to misconception... the nature of man and the destiny of the human soul and its relation with the Supreme, or else they deal with the regulation of ethics, society and the conduct of daily life. Occult knowledge has been left to be acquired by occult teaching. Nevertheless it was possessed by the ancient sages and our correspondent will find a great deal of more or less scattered information on these and cognate questions ...
... phrase I used―I believe it was last week―when I spoke of the "threshold of occultism". So a question is put to me about this occult world, that is to say, Page 215 the world invisible to ordinary physical eyes, and I am asked for explanations or comments on the beings who live in these worlds which are invisible to ordinary eyes. I am even told that I speak very often of negative entities... Well, the occult world is not one single region where everything is mixed, which only becomes occult because we can't see it. The occult world is a gradation of regions, one could perhaps say, of more and more etherial or subtle regions, anyway, those farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having... fears and weaknesses. Before undertaking these activities one needs a complete preparation of self-purification and widening of the consciousness which is absolutely indispensable. In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental formations. One can find there all one wants. In fact, one very often finds there exactly what one expects to find. There are hells ...
... Mysticism and Occultism Mysticism is more or less an emotional relation with what one feels to be a Divine Power—it is a relation very intimate, emotive and intense with something invisible which one takes for the Divine. Occultism is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science, altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry or... or physics; for occult knowledge is very much like scientific knowledge, only science deals with material objects and forces, while occultism deals with invisible entities and energies, their potentials of combination and association. And as by your chemical or physical knowledge you control material phenomena, in the same way by the occult knowledge you control subtle phenomena, make them active and... latent Page 92 in you, you can develop it by practice; but if you have not, you can try for 50 years, it will come to nothing. Everybody cannot have the occult power; it is as if you said that everybody in the world could be a musician or a painter or a poet. There are people who can and there are those who cannot. Usually, if you are interested in the subject, unless it is a mere idle ...
... Mysticism and Occultism MYSTICISM is more or less an emotional relation with what one feels to be a Divine Power – it is a relation very intimate, emotive and intense with something invisible which one takes for the Divine. Occultism is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science, altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry or physics;... physics; for occult knowledge is very much like scientific knowledge, only science deals with material objects and forces, while occultism deals with invisible entities and energies, their potentials of combination and association. And as by your chemical or physical knowledge you control material phenomena, in the same way by the occult knowledge you control subtle phenomena, make them active and... aptitude. If you have the power latent in you, you can develop it by practice; but if you have not, you can try for 50 years, it will come to nothing. Everybody cannot have the occult power; it is as if you said that everybody in the world could be a musician or a painter or a poet. There are people who can and there are those who cannot. Usually, if you are interested in the subject, unless it is a mere idle ...
... 1953 I have not said [in the preceding letter] that everything is rigidly predetermined. Play of forces does not mean that. What I said was that behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men and by Yoga (by going inward and establishing a conscious connection with the cosmic Self and Force and forces) one can become conscious... inward consciousness can see the play of invisible forces at every step which act on men and bring about events without their knowing about the instrumentation. The difference created by Yoga or by an inner consciousness—for there are people like Socrates who develop or have some inner awareness without Yoga—is that one becomes conscious of these invisible forces and can also consciously profit by... most external constituents, circumstances or causes; but each happening is the outcome of a complex nexus of forces which we do not and cannot observe, because all forces are to us invisible,—but they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the Infinite: some of them are actualities working to produce or occasion a new actuality, some are possibles that are near to the pre-existent actuals and ...
... It seems this lady 1 was quite preoccupied with maladies. Page 273 You said that this physical world was a projection of invisible worlds. Then why should the divine Emanations come into the physical world to transform it? They have only to do the work in the invisible planes; then the projections will be good. That indeed is a serious question!... You know the image sometimes... projected till it met a screen and on the screen it made an image, and this image on the screen is the physical world. And it is a mere image. The physical world which everyone takes as the only reality is simply an image. It is the image of all that happens in what we call the invisible. It becomes visible to us because there is a screen which intervenes and stops the vibrations and that produces... things, one can work just on the point that serves as the symbol of the whole universe. And from the occult standpoint, earth (which is nothing from the astronomical standpoint; in the immensity of the astronomical skies, earth is a thing absolutely without interest and without importance), but from the occult and spiritual point of view, earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. For it is much more ...
... who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw, give a very similar description, whether they be from here or there; they use different words, but the experience is very similar and the handling of forces is the same. This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies. They are... to unite with that of the universe: one ends by universalising oneself. And it is Page 356 altogether a concrete process which gives an objective experience of invisible worlds and even enables one to act in these worlds. There are, then, only a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary—more or less wildly imaginary—but that... really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure consists then in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in becoming sufficiently a master of them so as to be able to go out of them successively, one after another. There is indeed a whole scale of subtleties, increasing or decreasing according to the direction in which you go, and the occult procedure consists in ...
... with a density ... analogous to that of the domain in which they live .... In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental formations .... There are hells, there are paradises, there are purgatories .... 22 Such being the nature of the interlinked occult worlds Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried kingdoms of the graded Law... dubious denizens of the worlds invisible. As for Mirra, at the beginning, and all along, she was but a votary of Truth, a seeker of harmony and unity, and occultism was never anything more for her than a handmaiden in the service of the Divine. She has herself acknowledged how (probably in 1904) when she went to paint in the room of a comrade, he began talking of the occult (his own brother had... greater forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature ... and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge. 16 III At first Mirra seems to have merely stumbled into occultism, even as spiritual experiences too ...
... Kingdoms of the Invisible. V Enter Max Théon, the adept in occultism. But already Mirra had had her taste of the graded occult worlds. Beyond Matter and Form and Colour, beyond their façade of Beauty wasn't there the stairway of the worlds invisible, the vital worlds of the little life, the sinuous creatures of the subtle-vital, the teasing and fascinating dream-worlds, the frightening... beyond Théon's influence and giving occultism no more than a peripheral and strictly subordinate place in the total scheme of her life. VI If Beauty, or the exploration of form and significance in Matter, wasn't by itself enough, if occultism, or the exploration of the worlds invisible and the mastery and the manipulation of the beings of the vital worlds, wasn't enough either, what, then... their mighty union's poise The figure of the deathless Two-in-One, A single being in two bodies clasped, A diarchy of two united souls,... A dual Power at being's occult poles ...nameless and invisible: ... 7 But although this mystic Two-in-One relationship is difficult to grasp for the mere mind, it is not beyond the range of a seasoned sadhak's experiential knowledge, and ...
... Occult Forces The Hidden Forces of Life Occult Worlds and Entities …last week―when I spoke of the “threshold of occultism”. So a question is put to me about this occult world, that is to say, the world invisible to ordinary physical eyes, and I am asked for explanations or comments on the beings who live in these worlds which are invisible to ordinary... Well, the occult world is not one single region where everything is mixed, which only becomes occult because we can’t see it. The occult world is a gradation of regions, one could perhaps say, of more and more etherial or subtle regions, anyway, those farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having... fears and weaknesses. Before undertaking these activities one needs a complete preparation of self-purification and widening of the consciousness which is absolutely indispensable. In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental formations. One can find there all one wants. In fact, one very often finds there exactly what one expects to find. There are hells ...
... German Aspiration Hitler and his God Things Visible and Invisible It is a symptom of the confusion in the Western “consensus mentality”, supposedly materialistic and scientific, that occultism remains a subject of suspicion while millions accept the occult ceremonies of their Churches without questioning them, and while thousands of the social elite are... : “The modern German occult revival 1880-1910”. There he writes about that period: “Occult science tended to stress man’s intimate and meaningful relationship with the cosmos in terms of ‘revealed’ correspondences between the microcosm and macrocosm, and strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasis upon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualities respecting... thousandfold and directly inspire the Germanenorden and Nazism. The tragic events of the First World War, like all great crises, produced a new wave of occult interest. The post-war period was a time in which, as Ulrich Linse formulates it, “many nervously disposed people occupied themselves with occult and mystical things, and showed themselves exceptionally receptive to suggestive influences. It ...
... if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God. The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments can show to us. Occult Forces [ Occult forces: ] The forces that can only be known by going behind the veil of apparent phenomena—especially the forces... change them. The Place of Occult Knowledge in Yoga To know and use the subtle forces of the supraphysical planes is part of the Yoga. You take a very utilitarian view of spiritual things. Whatever develops in the sadhana, provided it is genuine, has its place in Page 565 the total experience and knowledge. A knowledge of the occult worlds and occult forces and phenomena has its... Questions of Spiritual and Occult Knowledge Questions of Spiritual and Occult Knowledge Occult Knowledge and Powers Letters on Yoga - I Chapter I Occult Knowledge Occultism and the Supraphysical [ Occultism: ] The knowledge and right use of the hidden forces of Nature. What did he himself [ Ramakrishna ] say about it—that it was the sins of ...
... unhabitual and therefore apparently impossible. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Himself and the Ashram: The Stone-Throwing Incident …you must not mix up magic with occultism. Occultism is a science and it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the capacity to handle them, as one has the capacity of handling material forces if one has studied them scientifically. Magic: these are different kinds... life-power and the greater forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature, and of all that is in connection with the subliminal, including the subconscient and the superconscient, and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge... ation and re-materialisation. These are occult processes and are vulgarly regarded as magic. Ordinarily the magician knows nothing of the why and wherefore of what he is doing, he has simply learned the formula or process or else controls elemental beings of the subtler states (planes or worlds) who do the thing for him. The Tibetans indulge widely in occult processes; if you see the books of Madame ...
... together with astrology the most practiced form of occultism. Spiritism in its many varieties has been since times immemorial a way of contacting the invisible worlds and the beings that are supposed to populate them; it plays an important role in the world’s myths and legends. Nowadays spiritism is called “channelling”, which is essentially the same occult practice. The denigrating ways in which some... painting was influenced by the occult movements in the world around him, especially in Munich. “The thesis that there is a fourth dimension of space, since 1870 supported by several theories and discussed in popular scientific publications, had deeply penetrated the public consciousness around the year 1900, as had the connection of the fourth dimension with the spirit world … The concept of the fourth... the First World War. The cubists, futurists, rayonists and suprematists believed in their ability to make the fourth dimension visible.” 670 The “new age” phenomenon around 1900 was as varied as the wave which shocked the world from the mid-1960s onwards. It was, as indicated before, closely connected with the various trends of the völkisch movement. Theosophy and spiritism, and occultism in general ...
... other,—invisible Personalities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood and Evil. Modern thought is aware of no invisible forces other than those revealed or constructed by Science; it does not believe that Nature is capable of creating any other beings than those around us in the physical world, men... if there are invisible cosmic forces physical in their nature that act upon the body of inanimate objects, there is no valid reason why there should not be invisible cosmic forces mental and vital in their nature that act upon his mind and his life force. And if Mind and Life, impersonal forces, form conscious beings or use persons to embody them in physical forms and in a physical world and can act... there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man;—this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, ...
... the first human body. According to spiritual and occult knowledge, consciousness precedes form; consciousness by self-concentration produces its form; whereas, according to the materialist idea, it is form which precedes consciousness and makes it possible for consciousness to manifest. For those who have some knowledge of the invisible worlds and a direct perception of the play of forces, there... memories—say that the first man or the first human pair or the first human individuals were materialised in accordance with an occult method, something like the one Sri Aurobindo foretells for the future supramental process; that is, that beings belonging to higher worlds have, by a process of concentration and materialisation, built or formed for themselves bodies of physical matter. It probably wasn't... one takes the purely materialist point of view. People believe that because it is a materialist point of view, it is the easiest to prove, but quite obviously it is the most difficult. If we take the occult standpoint, there have been traditions, based perhaps on certain memories, but as they are altogether beyond any material proof, this knowledge is considered to be even more problematic than scientific ...
... the years following 1880, the fault line between two worlds, the occult aspects of existence came to the fore again. This actually seems a “normal” development when put against the background of those years. Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-rays, Giuglielmo Marconi sent the first messages on invisible waves, and Henri Becquerel, followed by Marie and Pierre... that all spirituality is of necessity occult, although all occultism is not necessarily spiritual. Occultism has always been part of the European culture, but it was often driven underground because the impatient European temperament never allowed it to reach maturity. (“Most Western occultism is long on text and short on practice – contrary to forms of occultism found in the East, which rely on strict... 647 Together with Theosophy re-emerged occultism, the exploration of realities which are not accessible to our ordinary senses. Because the human being has been constituted complex and diverse, occultism has always been its natural, prime fascination, along with religion. The practice of both is in fact one and the same – a Church which condemns occultism will use magical formulas to change bread ...
... Supreme Lord. And this was not the invisible power: it was concrete, it was tangible, it was MATERIAL. Page 370 × Pralaya : apocalypse, end of a world. × Formations, in occult language, refer to all the psychological... true power, a very material power. For I often feel that things could come into being, they could be realized in the consciousness above (and the vision is there, the Power is there, I have it—the invisible power over the earth). But when you come down to the material plane, everything is uncertain. Page 369 Whereas with X, once things have come down, they no longer dissipate. This is certainly... totally to Him (that is not enough), but Him because He has taken total possession of the human instrument. At times, I feel that I'll never get over the difficulty. We are besieged by this enormous world of hostile forces—oceans of forces, churning and combining and submerging each other in gigantic pralayas, 1 then again regrouping and combining. When you see that, it feels as if you had to be the ...
... something invisible which is or is taken for the Divine. That is mysticism. Occultism is exactly what he has said: it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as the knowledge of chemistry for material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces,... fearful terror that it was truly painful to see it. And all these people believe this is something holy! But it is a web of the hostile vital forces which use all this to feed upon. Besides, in the invisible world hardly any beings love to be worshipped, except those of the vital. These, as I said, are quite pleased by it. And then, it gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and feel very happy... Explanations". "Q: What is the place of occult power in Yoga? "A: To know and use the subtle forces of the supraphysical planes is part of the Yoga. "Q: What is the meaning of occult endeavour and power? "A: It depends on the context. Usually it would mean power to use the secret forces of Nature and an endeavour by means of these forces. But 'occult' may mean something else in another context ...
... believed.’ …” 49 What was it that made Sebottendorff a fervent German nationalist and anti-Semite – he who had been steeped into the occult tradition of the Near East? Maybe it was the very discipline of inner values, of concentration and the awareness of an invisible but elementary hierarchy, peculiar to all true spiritual exploration. In his reaction to the superficial Western way of living and his... name “occultism”. “Glauer began a serious study of occultism”, writes Goodrick-Clarke. “His interest in exotic religions had been kindled when he saw the Mevlevi sect of whirling dervishes and visited the Cheops pyramid at El-Giza in July 1900. His companion Ibrahim told him of the cosmological and numerological significance of the pyramids and aroused Glauer’s curiosity about the occult gnosis... himself to a study of the Cabbala and collecting alchemical and Rosicrucian texts … The Termudis were Freemasons … Glauer was initiated into the lodge by old Termudi and subsequently inherited his occult library. In one of these books Glauer discovered a note from Hussein Pasha, describing the secret mystical exercises of traditional Islamic alchemists, still practised by the Baktashi sect of dervishes ...
... divine unreachable tops. 160 Savitri's childhood and girlhood are a wonder apart, for while she is apparently at home in the world of Nature and man, she is also not of it, she is ruled by an occult godhead, and it is as though, Invisibly protected from our sense The Dryad lives drenched in a deeper ray And feels another air of storms and calms ... On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take....' The occult powers behind the phenomena of Nature lend Savitri their graces and their strengths, as Nature moulds Lucy; but Savitri draws to herself other powers too, from the home and base of all: An invisible sunlight ran within her veins And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliances ... FLAME' There are two backgrounds to the central drama played in Savitri . There is the cosmic background, sketched already in Books II and III—'The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds' and 'The Book of the Divine Mother', and there is the human background, to be sketched now in Book IV, 'The Book of Savitri's Birth and Quest'. The wider cosmic background includes the smaller human ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3 On Occultism IT has been often said and it is very true that as soon as you enter the domain of the invisible, the very first things you meet are literally frightful. If you have no fear, then alone you are safe; but the least fear means the utmost peril. It is for this reason that in ancient days the aspirant... was doing occultism when I was twelve years old. But I must tell you I had no fear, I had fear of nothing. Here you come out of the body, you are connected with the body by the very tiniest, almost imperceptible, bit of thread, as it were. If the thread snaps, there is an end of it all, the end of your life. So you come out into another world and begin to look about and see what kind of world it is. Generally... represent? I told the painter that perhaps in the course of the day or at some time he was angry with some one and indulged in violent thoughts, wishing him harm, etc. Now as in the physical world, so too in the occult world there is a law of action and reaction or return movement. You cherish a bad thought; it returns upon you as an attack from outside. So the tiger might have represented some bad thought ...
... The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7 Section Four On Occultism It has been often said and it is very true that as soon as you enter the domain of the invisible, the very first things you meet are literally frightful. If you have no fear, then alone you are safe; but the least fear means the utmost peril. It is for this reason that in ancient days... was doing occultism when I was 12 years old. But I must tell you I had no fear, I had fear of nothing. Here you come out of the body, you are connected with the body by the very tiniest, almost imperceptible, bit of thread, as it were. If the thread snaps, there is an end of it all, the end of your life. So you come out into another world and begin to look about and see what kind of world it is. Generally... represent? I told the painter that perhaps in the course of the day or at some time he was angry with some one and indulged in violent thoughts, wishing him harm etc. Now, as in the physical world, so too in the occult world there is a law of action and reaction or return movement. You cherish a bad thought; it returns upon you as an attack from outside. So the tiger might have represented some bad thought ...
... his life-being, and this corresponds on the occult plane to an invisible Nature which is of a like character and whose occult powers can be called into activity by a knowledge and methods to which the lower vital intuitions and instincts may open a door of access. This might be formulated in a first stage of religious belief and practice which would be occult after a crude inchoate fashion in its character... away from his early recourse to occultism and magic; the presence and felt influence of gods and invisible powers recedes as more and more is explained by natural workings, the mechanical procedure of Nature: but he still feels the need of a spiritual element and spiritual factors in his life and therefore keeps for a time the two activities running together. But the occult elements of religion, though... utilisation of this knowledge; so were created magic and the other early forms of occultism. At some time it must have dawned on him Page 898 that he had something in him which was not physical, a soul that survived the body; certain supernormal experiences which became active because of the pressure to know the invisible, must have helped to formulate his first crude ideas of this entity within ...
... family and carry out our domestic duties, to be a good and moral man, a perfect citizen, patriot, worker for the country, is far more spiritual than to sit in idle meditation seeking for a remote and invisible Deity. Philanthropy, altruism, service to mankind are represented as the true spiritual things. Mental idealisms, ethical strivings, aesthetic finenesses are put forward by the modern mind as things... with his castor oil can come and wash it out or beat it into dust in a moment? If there are such great spiritual men in Europe [ as a book reviewer claimed ], they seem to have the gift of invisibility. Or perhaps he means intellectuals like Romain Rolland or else Roman Catholic priests and cardinals or the Reverend Holmes or pacifists like Lord Robert Cecil or in the past Tolstoy who spent his... But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions. Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the ...
... Sweet Mother, are there any magicians who do not work magic for their personal interest? You mean magical rites? Because, you see, you must not mix up magic with occultism. Occultism is a science and it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the capacity to handle them, as one has the capacity of handling material forces if one has studied them scientifically. Magic: these are different kinds... proves that you don't have it!" That's all, my children? Sweet Mother, I have heard that the magicians who use occult powers for their work suffer a great deal after their death. Is it true? What sort of magicians are you speaking about? Any kind? Those who have occult powers and use them for their personal interest? You mean these? Yes. I don't know whether they suffer after their... accomplish a work with the spontaneous powers of spiritual realisation, that is well understood. But one may say that everybody does that, because just the fact of thinking means that you are acting invisibly; and according to the power of your thought your action is more or less wide-spread. But to use small magical formulas to obtain a result is something that has no true relation with the spiritual ...
... body have wakened to their true reality. Sheath after sheath of the subtle physical experience the entry of thehigher powersin it. A world unseen unknown by outward mind appears in the silent spaces of the soul. And what does Aswapati see in it, in that world invisible to our outward faculties? He sees the Perfect Ones wearing the glory of a deathless form. They are lain in the arms of the Eternal’s... Witness’s occult rooms with mind-built walls On hidden interiors, lurking passages Opened the windows of the inner sight. He owned the house of undivided Time. Here is Aswapati who is making tremendous progress after two early major spiritual realizations, of static Oneness and dynamic Power, of the Passive Brahman and the Active Brahman. In him now a greater being sees a greater world. To... Man-handling of Savitri A Question of a Comma A world unseen, unknown by outward mind Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul. He sat in secret chambers looking out Into the luminous countries of the unborn Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true And all that the life longs for is drawn close. He saw the Perfect in their starry ...
... rises through the mortal's hemisphere, Till borne by runners of the Day and Dusk It enters the occult eternal Light And clambers whitening to the invisible Throne. 119 If the Rose guides the aspirant through world after coloured and ecstatic world towards "some far unseen epiphany", the Flame likewise guides him through "a pale-sapphire ether of God-mind/... Savitri XII 'The Heavens of the Ideal' The tireless traveller of the worlds, Aswapati continues the ascent, looking out for new worlds still: At each pace of the journey marvellous A new degree of wonder and of bliss, A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair, A great wide step trembling... God-mind/ Towards some gold Infinite's apocalypse." 120 Aswapati is rather at home in both the kingdoms of the Ideal— the worlds of the Rose and the Flame. They offered to the Traveller at their gates A quenchless flame or an unfading flower, Emblem of a high kingdom's privilege. 121 But he realises that even in these deathless kingdoms there ...
... Religion and Occultism Religions have an element of occultism, — sometimes this element is predominant, sometimes preserved only in rituals, sometimes even largely exiled or condemned. In modem times, as a result of excessive rationalization, there has come about a discrediting and condemnation of most of the occult elements which seek to establish communication with that which is invisible. In a sense... development of occultism, one witnesses in some parts of the world how occultism deviated into white and black magic or into romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. This deviation was the reason as to why it became easy to discredit the field of occultism. But in Egypt and the East, occultism arrived at a greater... consciousness. Great perils of occultism arise from great mixtures of knowledge and ignorance that are found in the domains in which occultism normally dwells. Occultism provides a very large field of self-knowledge and world-knowledge; it enables the individual to go behind his own surface consciousness and also penetrate behind the appearances of the physical world; occultism provides an entry and even ...
... the same. What are the "invisible worlds"? That is a formidable question! You have heard and read that we are made up of various states of being: physical, vital, mental, psychic, spiritual, etc. Well, all these inner states of being correspond to invisible worlds. There is a physical world, a vital world, a mental world, a psychic world, and many spiritual worlds, a whole range of more and... physical world and see what this mental world is like, what is going on there, what are its characteristics and so on. These things are not invisible in themselves—they are invisible to the physical consciousness and the physical senses, but not to the corresponding inner states of consciousness or the corresponding inner senses. For, by a systematic development one can acquire senses in these worlds and... correct to say that it is within you. It extends beyond you too, but it is in another dimension. And one can say that there are as many dimensions as there are different worlds. Certainly all these invisible worlds—so-called invisible worlds—are contained, so to say, in the material universe. But they don't occupy the place of other things. To make an imperfect comparison—it is valid only as a comparison—you ...
... figure of the invisible, Unveiled all Nature's meaning in a form, Or caught into a body the Divine." Music expressed "celestial yearnings", and song absorbed the heart "linking the human with the Cosmic cry". She mastered "the world-interpreting movements of the dance" which mould "idea and mood to a rhythmic sway and posture." "Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds" lifted "the... outbreak of life tries to reach the skies in its rapture and has no outward communication with the world that surrounds it yet it has an occult and inborn unity with all (that surrounds it) and grows with all, so grew Savitri. All phenomena which strike us only as merely physical have in reality behind them occult presences and psychological reactions as well. There are Presences of spirits Page 271 ... reign." She saw and sensed Subtle, Occult forms and Presences around to which ordinary human beings are blind and therefore her acts were profound and symbolic of another power. Her sight, her brain were flooded by another Light, and therefore her eyes saw the world with another vision. All objects were to her living and not inert or inconscient, and she heard occult messages conveyed by the touch of ...
... mystery that the world has always felt vaguely as the background against which the mundane drama is enacted. The truth, therefore, about it will best be seized if we consider the support given to the Allied cause from the very outset and all through its darkest hours by one who has stood in the modern world as the greatest explorer of the occult background - Sri Aurobindo. The support... resists by sheer inertia, the anti-divine by a various strategy of attack. And the attack comes from occult dimensions of being. Behind the evolutionary earth-scene there are typal worlds Page 35 fixed in a certain order and harmony of their own. These worlds are of darkness as well as of light. There is no progress on their own levels, they are content with... contentment with full self-play does not preclude their desire to extend the play of their satisfaction from the occult to the material. They make the earth-scene their battlefield. And, as the earth-scene starts with an involution of the Divine, a concealment of the Spirit, the occult worlds of darkness find an easier role than those of light. "On the black rock of the Inconscience" they build their ...
... reduced the world. About this occult revival the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes: “Occult science tended to stress man’s intimate and meaningful relationship with the cosmos in terms of ‘revealed’ correspondences between the microcosm and macrocosm, and strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasis upon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualities ... could now communicate over long distances by telegraph and telephone. And were the invisible rays, of which so many variants were being discovered, any less occult than the visitors from beyond death and the strange matter in which they appeared? “The magic came out of the laboratories,” not only out of the occult séances. In those days “the scientists were still incapable to explain how waves with... spiritist, wrote: “Spiritism is not a religion, it is a science of which we hardly know the ABC. Physical science teaches us that we live in the middle of a world which is invisible to us, and that it is not impossible that there are beings (equally invisible to us) who also live on the Earth in an order of perception totally different from ours.” 39 After all, this was the time of William Crookes’ cathode ...
... way. They speak of a hierarchy and think it is the men who govern and have subordinates. But the true hierarchy is an occult hierarchy, and this occult hierarchy had as its purpose the manifesting, the expressing of a more profound hierarchy which is a hierarchy of the invisible worlds. What is the "transcendent Mother"? Don't you know that there are three principles: the transcendent, the universal... transcendent aspect, and note that this transcendent aspect is permanent. We speak as though things had unfolded in time at a date which could be fixed: the first of January 0000, for the beginning of the world, but it is not quite like that! There is constantly a transcendent, constantly a universal, constantly an individual, and the transcendent, universal and individual are co-existent. That is, if you ...
... It's the word Yahveh , and it must not be uttered. But the prayers speak of the "Elohim," and the Hebrew word "Elohim" is plural, meaning "the invisible lords." So there was no one and only God for Théon, only the unthinkable Formless; and all the invisible beings who claimed to be one and only gods were Asuras. Page 455 He used to call Christ "That young man"! ( Laughter ) It was very... feet with a piece of blue cloth (when you sleep, of course, your feet are bare); put a piece of blue cloth over your feet and it keeps you in your body. ??? It's the result of Madame Théon's occult experiences, from which they made a general rule. But the reason for a loose-fitting robe is obvious: it's important not to get cold during such experiences, and there shouldn't be Page 454... terrible than idealists, they're the worst. They're worse than the bad people. Oh, if you mean the puritans, the Protestants... dreadful! They're the worst. Catholicism still retains something of the occult sense, and after all, they have a certain adoration for the Virgin, which keeps them in contact with something that's not asuric. The last Pope, who's dead now [Pius XII], had broadened both his ...
... view the whole world is a marvel; every operation of thought, speech or action is a miracle, a thing wonderful, obscure, occult and unknown. Even the sneer on the lips of the derider of occultism has to pass through a number of ill-understood processes before it can manifest itself on his face, yet the thing itself is the work of a second. That sneer is a much greater and more occult miracle than the... on, a withdrawal into mystic secrecy, a continual reference to the infallible knowledge of the male & female Popes of Theosophy or, when that seems to need bolstering, to the divine authority of invisible and inaccessible Mahatmas. We in India admit the Guru and accept the Avatar. But still the Guru is only a vessel of the infinite Knowledge, the Avatar is only a particular manifestation of the Divine... Austerlitz, wrote Hamlet or formulated the Vedanta philosophy? If I believed that strange dogma, I should no longer hold myself entitled to disbelieve anything. Materialism seems to me the most daring of occultisms, the most reckless and presumptuous exploiter of the principle, Credo quia impossibile , I believe it because it is impossible. If these minute cells can invent wireless telegraphy, why should it ...
... able to prevent popular occultism from taking on enormous proportions even in the present so-called techno-scientific world. The credulous and the desperate pay vast amounts of money for the services of often unskilled occultists, giving in to the ineradicable need to be shown a glimmer of light in the darkness of existence, to find protection against the countless invisible dangers threatening them... turned into practice. The Mother has often reminisced about the fantastic occult world of Tlemcen. However interesting those anecdotes or those countless occult miracles may be, the broad picture behind them is much more important. Alma and Théon had immediately felt who Mirra essentially was and they gave her an intense occult training, in 1906 and 1907, both times from July to October. Mirra’s unusual... them from the cradle to the grave, or to obtain a modicum of power in a world in which the human being is one of the most helpless of creatures. The lack of skill and knowledge or the false pretensions of the practitioners of occultism cannot be a valid argument against the existence of the occult. Were it so, the same argument could be used, for instance, against medical science. Among the occultists ...
... also said in answer to the question of a young student: ‘[Occultism] is the knowledge of the invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science. It is altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry, for it is the same kind of knowledge as that of chemistry regarding material things. It is a knowledge of invisible forces, their various vibrations, their interrelations, the... 3: Explorations of the Occult Occult knowledge without spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, for one who uses it as for others, if it falls into impure hands. Spiritual knowledge without occult science lacks precision and certainty in its objective results; it is all-powerful only in the subjective world. The two, when combined in inner or outer action... existence within the perceptual scope of the human being, be they material or not, for immaterial is not synonymous with unreal or non-existent. The Mother therefore said: ‘[Occultism] is a knowledge which in the modern world is hardly recognized as scientific, but which is scientific in the sense that it has precise procedures and that, if one reproduces the circumstances exactly, one obtains the ...
... subtle it is, the more its extension tends to fuse with that of the universe: you finally become universal. It is an entirely concrete process that makes the invisible worlds an objective experience and even allows you to act in those worlds. × In Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's terminology, 'psychic' or 'psychic being'... details on going out of each successive body into the next, more subtle one ) There are subtle bodies and subtle worlds that correspond to these bodies; it is what the psychological method calls 'states of consciousness,' but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult process consists in becoming aware of these various inner states of being, or subtle bodies, and of mastering... direction—and the occult process consists in making a more subtle body come out from a denser body, and so forth, right to the most ethereal regions. You go out through successive exteriorizations into more and more subtle bodies or worlds. Each time it is rather like passing into another dimension. In fact, the fourth dimension of the physicists is only the scientific transcription of an occult knowledge ...
... have "a control over the whole material world" is too big a proposition; a local and partial control is more possible or, more widely, certain kinds of control over matter. 24 October 1938 About the occult phenomenon of the house and the stones etc. What was it? I gave this as one instance of actual occult experience and action in accordance with occult law and practice, showing that these... materialisation and rematerialisation. These are occult processes and are vulgarly regarded as magic. Ordinarily the magician knows nothing of the why and wherefore of what he is doing, he has simply learned the formula or process or else controls elemental beings of the subtler states (planes or worlds) who do the thing for him. The Tibetans indulge widely in occult processes; if you see the books of Madame... on the boy; Bijoy and he were sitting side by side and the stone was thrown at them from in front, but there was no one visible to throw it—the two were alone in the room. So unless it was Wells's invisible man—! We had Page 387 been only watching or sometimes scouting around till then, but this was a little too much, it was becoming dangerous, and something had to be done. The Mother from ...
... particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind waves, thought currents, waves of emotion, e.g. anger, sorrow, etc., which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all—they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them... Existence of Spiritual Force Even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or of subjective forces was open to doubt and discussion in which there could be no material certitude—while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of spiritual force. Each... some justification for thinking that a force has been used on him and put into him and that it was a spiritual power that acted. But in another case medicines may be used, while at the same time the invisible force may be called for to aid the material means, for it is a known fact that medicines may or may not succeed—there is no certitude. Here for the reason of an outside observer (one who is neither ...
... beautiful books he had written, with his good wishes and affection. His wife Sehra who loved me and treated me like her own daughter was once attacked severely in her sleep by the invisible beings of the vital world. This incident was not a mere dream but a concrete experience. In relation to it, I was amazed to read in Amal's book Our Light and Delight p. 206: ...I may end by striking... well emerge into the body with concrete changes in it if we are truly receptive!" The Mother, while teaching me occultism during our Savitri Page 223 work , disclosed to me the mysteries of the higher as well as the nether worlds. And yet another book of his, The Mother: Past-Present-Future, pp. 161-2; Amal stated my experiences and Nolini-da'... open. Suddenly, while I was wondering, I found her standing near me and I had the same feeling as when she used to embrace me in the old days. I was still in amazement. She then became invisible but I distinctly heard her parting words: "I am coming." (A comment by Nolini) "She showed to you her living presence still continues." Recently Amal presented ...
... them from remaining awake. If these people meet in good time someone who can help them in a methodical development, they can become very interesting instruments for the study and discovery of this occult world. In all ages there have been initiatory schools, which took up these particularly talented people and educated them in this kind of science. These schools were always more or less secret or hidden... That depends upon you, my children! I practised occultism when I was twelve. But I must say I had no fear, I feared nothing. One Page 40 goes out of one's body, but is tied by something resembling an almost imperceptible thread; if the thread is cut, it is all over. Life also is ended. One goes out, and then can begin seeing the world he has entered. And usually the first things one sees... could tell you a little story. I knew a Danish painter who was quite talented and who wanted to learn occultism. He had come here, you know, had met Sri Aurobindo; he had even done his portrait. That was during the war, and when he came back to France, he wanted me to teach him a little of this occult science. I taught him how to go out of his body e., and the controls, all that. And I told him that ...
... had quite exceptional abilities. And he used to attend all the séances with the idea of learning, to convince himself and have tangible proofs of the existence of an invisible world, the concrete and real existence of an invisible world. He had seen all that could be seen, under the strictest control, in the most scientific way possible—all the tests were provided for, down to the least detail. He told... mental and vital vibrations of the people who use the planchette, and it is their own subconscious ideas which they bring up, ninety-eight times out of a hundred. 1 If they are in contact with invisible entities, it may be all sorts of things but nothing very advisable! Almost with certainty it could be said that it is not what people think it is, in the sense that most often they try to evoke... very valuable occupations. They are pastimes, amusements. And this has never served to prove anything to anybody. One could say, "Oh! It is to make you understand that there is an inner life, an invisible life, and it puts you in touch with things you don't see and proves to you that they exist". That is not true. Unless you have a spiritual being within you, capable of awakening and living its ...
... "Without conscious occult powers, is it possible to help or protect from a distance somebody in difficulty or danger? If so, what is the practical procedure?" Page 252 Then a sub-question: "What can thought do?" We are not going to speak of occult processes at all; although, to tell the truth, everything that happens in the invisible world is occult, by definition. But still... formation, and that every mental formation is an entity independent of its fashioner, having its own life and tending to realise itself in the mental world―I don't mean that you see your formation with your physical eyes, but it exists in the mental world, it has its own particular independent existence. If you have made a formation with a definite aim, its whole life will tend to the realisation of this... and even more of those who know how to love. But as I said, the power is limited and there is great petition in that world. Therefore, even if one has no knowledge at all but has trust Page 253 in the divine Grace, if one has the faith that there is something in the world like the divine Grace, and that this something can answer a prayer, an aspiration, an invocation, then, after making ...
... earth-transformation and rendered more effective their fight with the occult Evil that acts upon earth from its headquarters on the vital plane either directly or through human beings open to it. The Overmind dynamism, preliminary to the Supermind power which was the ultimate aim, came into repeated use during the Second World War. This war brought into play two figures whom Sri Aurobindo and... and the Mother recognised as extending into the physical plane the occult Evil at its most dangerous. Hitler was seen as possessed by the Rakshasa-aspect of that Evil. The Rakshasa is a devouring "Giant" who openly declares his enormous greed and makes no secret of his ambition to dominate the world with a master-race of ruthless henchmen. Hitler's Mein Kampf is a glaringly open manifesto of... from that day no brick-pieces came furiously flying or slowly dropping. Peace was completely restored. Kameshwar was told not to bother the police. The Mother had turned off the invisible culprits by her own invisible means. The second extraordinary phenomenon is very recent. The time was a little after 2 a.m. on 19 December 1978. I happened to be awake in bed. In the bed across the room ...
... and occult working supplies forces and can watch over the members of the execution of a world event; but to put it like that makes the actual workers too much of automata which they are not. 25 January 1937 Certainly, my force is not limited to the Asram and its conditions. As you know it is being largely used for helping the right development of the war and of change in the human world. It is... particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind waves, thought currents, waves of emotion, e.g. anger, sorrow etc. which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all—they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them... in the sadhana. 28 July 1935 Sri Aurobindo's Force and World Events Somebody told X that Sri Aurobindo brought about the Russian revolution through Lenin. X told Y that people here were over-credulous to believe such things. Y insisted that such things were possible, but X seems to be unable to understand the working of occult forces. As far as I can see, if it is possible to cure dangerous ...
... direct instructions, guidance and constant help nothing could have been achieved. While teaching me occultism during our Savitri work, the Mother disclosed to me the mysteries of the higher luminous worlds, as well as the horrible nether worlds. In fact she took my consciousness to those worlds in order to give me experiences and make me understand the hidden truth of things, so that I could express... all is excellent. For picture thirteen, she wrote: I have removed the trident and the snake as they are not needed. We want a more Universal Deity. See that the end of the way is lost, invisible in the pinkish white Light emanated by the Sun of Bliss. When I sent her the sketches as usual, she wrote: In the second and the third pictures, the head of the Transcendent and of God must... in the paintings. We had wished to finish the whole of Savitri . And of course, we were going fast in the work, which was not child's play or a joke. The whole thing was based purely on occult and subtle things. Whenever I was doing painting, I used to see the same thing in my dreams and visions. Also, when I finished the paintings late at night, I found them living. Here I remember that once I ...
... Occult Forces The Hidden Forces of Life Magic, Miracles and the Planchette In occultism there is the “rebound”. You send out a bad thought, it returns to you as an attack. That is exactly one of the reasons why you must have a complete control over your feelings, sensations, thoughts, for if you become angry with someone or think badly of him, or if, still... mental and vital vibrations of the people who use the planchette, and it is their own subconscious ideas which they bring up, ninety-eight times out of a hundred. 9 If they are in contact with invisible entities, it may be all sorts of things but nothing very advisable! Almost with certainty it could be said that it is not what people think it is, in the sense that most often they try to evoke... But in fact, it is not at all that. It is your own thought that comes back to you. And the person may be absolutely unaware of all that has happened, for—and this is one of the commonest laws in occultism—if you make a formation, for instance a mental formation that an accident or something unpleasant should happen to a certain person and you send out this formation, if it so happen that this person ...
... trod, we have the occult, as genuine as in any spectral perceptions of Coleridge's - or of Blake's, either, when he speaks of The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, or when, dazzled by the dreadful beauty he symbolises as "Tyger", he asks, In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? The occult is also as genuinely in... brooks, the stationary rocks, The moving waters, and the invisible air. Whate'er exists hath properties that spread Beyond itself, communicating good, A simple blessing, or with evil mixed; Spirit that knows no insulated spot, No chasm, no solitude; from link to link It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds. This is the freedom of the universe. Here we may... children say as little as possible about making." Obviously Wordsworth's God is more than visible and tangible Nature, but He is not all outside Nature: He is not the maker of a world quite other than Himself: the world is His own emanation and it is what it is - good, bad, indifferent -through a difference of manifestation or non-manifestation by His substance in terms of space and time, of matter ...
... concerns of the natural world. Still, before we accept the version — The nameless yearning of the garden wet — let us look at the original line in the company of those preceding and succeeding it: Wounded with beauty in the summer night Young Idas tossed upon his couch and cried, "Marpessa, O Marpessa!" From the dark The floating smell of flowers invisible, The mystic yearning... expressing very well a slightly different form of this feeling. It runs: "The ecstasy of breathing, through the sound of falling rain, the per-fume of invisible and everlasting lilies." Here there is a wet gar-den in a darkness — the rain-washed lilies are "invisible"; but the ecstasy is of the man and not of the flowers. Where the flowers are concerned, the adjective "everlasting" transfers the man's mystical... shown under the shadow of the supernatural. And this transformation is begun by the presence of the rain which permeates them with a sky-quality and it is more intensely prepared by the epithet "invisible" which has not only the immediate suggestion of being hidden in dark-ness, in night, but also the remote suggestion of belonging to another order than the visible universe. There is also the piquant ...
... gleams, "flickers on the face of Destiny", either directly occult or indirectly so with a kinship to the visionary vein that is at its best in AE. Perhaps the finest instance of the half-visionary half-occult mood is in "Fingers of Light": On this dark corner of my cell Fingers of Light fall — slow and white — From the invisible crescent moon; Ethereal seems the prisoned night! ... reality, a sky of the Ineffable, nirvanically calm yet not empty, a high world of untroubled pure puissances. This transcendental height haunts Nirodbaran and his poetry catches now and again glimmers and vibrations from if, but perhaps the major portion of his work is more an inwardness of the mystic mind exploring occult vistas of its own or mirroring in lovely lakes and torrents the colours and... mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of the occult planes differ from those of ours. Look at the ...
... "flickers on the face of Destiny", either directly occult or indirectly so with a kinship to the visionary vein that is at its best in AE. Perhaps the finest instance of the half-visionary half-occult mood is in Fingers of Light: On this dark corner of my cell Fingers of Light fall - slow and white — From the invisible crescent moon; Ethereal seems the prisoned night... reality, a sky of the Ineffable, Nirvanically calm yet not empty, a high world of untroubled pure puissances. This transcendental height haunts Nirodbaran and his poetry catches now and again glimmers and vibrations from it, but perhaps the major portion of his work is more an inwardness of the mystic mind exploring occult vistas of its own or mirroring in lovely lakes and torrents the colours... mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of the occult planes differ from those of ours. Look at ...
... able to do her work; but this is quite different from the outside practical working on the material plane where the methods must necessarily be different, although the occult working and the material working can and do join and the occult power give to the material working its utmost efficacy. As for the one who is helped not feeling the force at work, his knowing might help very substantially the effective... vision. For in the centre of the forehead between the eyebrows is the centre of the inner mind, inner will, the inner vision and when that opens one begins to see and know what is to the physical eye invisible and to the surface mind unknowable. 11 October 1935 It is an obsession from the subconscient physical bringing back habitual thoughts, "I can't call rightly—I have no real aspiration" etc.;... each other and always the answer is given. The occasions are of all kinds, but whatever the need that occasions the call, the Force is there to answer it. That is the principle of this action on the occult plane. It is not of the same kind as an ordinary human action and does not need a written or oral communication from the one who calls; an interchange of psychic communication is quite sufficient to ...
... orientalist precursor, Sebottendorff, renowned astrologer and closely connected with the Turkish aspects of occultism and sufism, Karl Haushofer and his son Albrecht, well acquainted with the Eastern religions and spirituality, Hess, significantly born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, an occult crossroads between East and West, and Himmler, with his interest in yoga and the Bhagavad Gita. This short... “true democracy”, in his opinion infinitely superior to the despicable political system commonly called as such, based on the masses and on vote counting. However, at the top of the pyramid, and invisibly present everywhere else, there was the Führer, fervently awaited and, now that he had manifested himself as Leader of the German Volk, venerated as the messiah who would redress all injustices and... wanted to bring the Reformation to a successful end, and Joseph Goebbels, the Catholic who projected his apocalyptic expectations on Hitler and his Third Reich. There was a pronounced tendency towards occultism in Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Master of the Thule Society, and Eckart and Rudolf Hess, both members of this Society; in Otto Rahn, the SS-man with a mission to find the Holy Grail; and in Heinrich ...
... the state of consciousness of the parents. For it goes without saying that there is a stupendous difference between conceiving a child deliberately, with a conscious aspiration, a call to the invisible world and a spiritual ardour, and conceiving a child by accident and without intending to have it, and sometimes even without wanting it at all. I don't say that in the latter case there cannot also... with reference to an old Indian tradition, the occult knowledge of the sage-king Page 332 Pravanahana who is mentioned in the Upanishads (Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka): "It is said that after death, the soul of one who has done good deeds takes the path of the ancestors, 'pitriyana', it becomes smoke, night, etc., attains to the world of the fathers and finally to the lunar paradise... possible things sometimes happen like that. Quite probably―at least I hope so―the person who described this may have observed a phenomenon of this kind; I hope it is not a mere mental construction of his occult imagination.... It raises a few practical problems! But still, of course, there is nothing impossible. Only, it is difficult to imagine the soul entering the rain, which enters the seed, which makes ...
... particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind waves, thought currents, waves of emotion, e.g. anger, sorrow, etc., which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all—they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them... serious, the intention being to point out that even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or of subjective forces was open to doubt and discussion in which there could be no material Page 186 certitude—while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of spiritual... some justification for thinking that a force has been used on him and put into him and that it was a spiritual power that acted. But in another case medicines may be used, while at the same time the invisible force may be called for to aid the material means, for it is a known fact that medicines may or may not succeed—there is no certitude. Here for the reason of an outside observer (one who is neither ...
... pages of the chapter ) Oh, it's splendid, mon petit! On the way to conquering the world.... You see, it really has come. I called and called and called, and it has come ( gesture of descent ). It has come. I am very happy. It's splendid.... I personally have the feeling there is a close and invisible connection between America's aspiration, as it is now, and the book. I have the feeling... me, the introduction to your book 1 was supposed to be published in January.... But now January is almost over. It was sent to France to the publisher of "Planète" [a magazine devoted to occultism and parapsychology]—I still don't know if they're going to take it, but it was sent to them. In America it's doing VERY WELL. It's already been sent to many people. And so now you've got an e... Satprem a note that she sent to an Aurovillian ) "It is the old methods of yoga that demand silence and solitude. "The yoga of tomorrow is to find the Divine in work and in contact with the world." ( Then a quotation from Sri Aurobindo that Mother wants to include in the next "Bulletin." ) "The power that works in this yoga is of a thorough-going character and tolerates in the ...
... to simplify one can say that the old world, the creation which Sri Aurobindo calls the overmental, was in a characteristic way the age of the gods and therefore the age of religions. The flower of man's effort towards that which was higher than him gave birth to numerous religions, to a religious relation between the souls of the select few and the invisible world, and at the summit of all that, as an... Mother - I: Aims and Principles Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world of the beauty of the future that must be realised. He came to give not a hope but a certitude of the splendour towards which the world moves. The world is not an unfortunate accident, it is a marvel which moves towards its expression. The world needs the certitude of the beauty of the future and Sri Aurobindo has... life towards the divine Reality, leaving the world where it was, as it was. Our new vision, on the contrary, is the divinisation of life, the transformation of the material into a divine world. But this work could have been a simple continuation, an amelioration, an enlargement of the old world as it was. What has happened is truly a new thing: A New World has been born. It is not the old that is ...
... calf with its front legs holds the hind legs of its mother.² Needless to say these are signs and symbols and figures of a language seeking to express truths and realities of an invisible world, spiritual and occult. We are reminded of the "twilight" language of the poet-saints (Siddhacharyas) of Bengal of much later days. There is no end to the problems that face Dirghatama with his almost... ry re-course upward towards the radiant fullness in the solar Supra-Consciousness at the summit. He is however not only energy, he is also delight (vāma). For he is the Soma, the nectarous flow, occult in the Earth's body. For Earth is the storehouse of the sap of Life, the source of the delightful growths of Life here below. Page 167 ... him, for his eyes turned inward to other domains and saw strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become ...
... conscient universal and supracosmic Being with whom it brings us into union, and this conscious experience of union with the Invisible, always renewable and verifiable, is as valid as our conscious experience of a physical world and of visible bodies with whose invisible minds we daily communicate. Synthesis of Yoga, p. 531 Page 198 ... physical; to know it is part of a complete knowledge. The knowledge of the supraphysical has been associated with mysticism and occultism, and occultism has been banned as a superstition and a fantastic error. But the occult is a part of existence; a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is... is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for there is and ...
... The truth of things, however, need not always be concerned with the occult and spiritual and we should be ready to perceive the overhead utterance, even the mantra, in a delineation of earthly matters. Of course, Sri Aurobindo could not be loyal to his revelatory mission if Savitri did not give wide scope to the occult and spiritual themselves and, with vision and rhythm proper to the summits... Alone a process of events was there And Nature's plastic and protean change And, strong by death to slay or to create, The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. 28 But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is remarkable, with... latter as if from an all-round fastness. The v in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the v in "invisible" not only supports and 27. Ibid., p. 216. 28. Ibid., pp. 254-55. Page 236 increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular ...
... photographs and calculations are ready for our scrutiny. Don't we believe them? The secrets of the occult world are likewise revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo, for with his special gift of double vision or universal sight he had seen them and been them, and he has brought us news from the Invisible — from zero and from infinity! The identification of Aswapati's Yoga with Sri Aurobindo's should not... envelops him "with its stupendous limbs," and he is now able to invade the occult Invisible: A voyager upon uncharted routes Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown, Adventuring across enormous realms, He broke into another Space and Time. 30 After a Divina-Commedia-like journey covering the world-stair — Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried... the threatened confrontation: "A world's desire compelled her mortal birth." 25 And so we are winged back to the days of Aswapati's first awakening — his perception of the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world, his soul's breakthrough to freedom, his crystal-gazing into the "Secret Knowledge", his exploration of the occult stairway of the worlds. The main bulk of Savitri ...
... days that shook the world', - and thus war, civil war, revolution, reaction were all to scream 'Havoc!' and unleash the hounds of confusion. In describing the world of 1915 and after as "the very definition of chaos", Sri Aurobindo was at once excruciatingly accurate and astonishingly prophetic. But, then, the outer struggle has its prototype in the invisible occult worlds, where really things... often appeal to a higher force. The appeals sometimes come to me. During the Second World War many appeals came and there was always a helping answer. 6 What is clear is that despite the near-paralysis of her body, Mirra was able with infinite freedom to influence men and events all the world over through occult means. "All external circumstances have changed," she wrote in her diary on 19th... phenomenal world. Page 137 III The meditation for 24 May 1915, although coming more than a month later, is actually linked up with earlier entries. Only now Mirra is able fully to size up the earlier paradoxical experiences of utter physical helplessness and glorious occult effectivity. With her body as if chained to a chair, she had nevertheless travelled widely in the occult countries ...
... independent vital world constituted entirely differently from our gross material earth. Says he: "As through a magic television's glass Outlined to some magnifying inner eye They shone like images thrown from a far scene Too high and glad for mortal lids to seize" It almost lays bare the process of occult vision by which a man is able to see the subtle worlds. The process of... breaking up of the atom when he speaks of "The Kingdoms of Godheads of the Little Mind": "And Nature's plastic and protean change And, strong by death to slay or to create, The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force." Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 10. While speaking of the higher planes of consciousness above the mind he takes advantage of the scientific image by the spontaneous... In the same breath he speaks of "The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind, Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters" Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 5. and "Mid an obscure occult machinery, Captured the mystic Morse whose measured lilt Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force." (ibid.) The first part of this refers to the cave-dwelling Panis of the ...
... sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual... Alone a process of events was there And Nature's plastic and protean change And, strong by death to slay or to create, The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. [pp. 254-55] But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with... the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying ...
... spread its sparse ranked armies through the Inane, Manufactured the stars from the occult radiances, Marshalled the platoons of the invisible dance; I formed earth's beauty out of atom and gas, And built from chemic plasm the living man. 9 Savitri better understand the principle of this world and not chase the will-o'-the-wisp. She must lend herself to see and recognise the laws... transformation takes place in the person as much in the soul of the aspirant. The darkness of Nature is left behind and thought and feeling and the physical activities become suddenly spirit-charged; occult invisible domains of light and force open out. The deathless Flame aspires to reach "the Being's absolutes." In a veiled Nature's hallowed secrecies It burns for ever on the altar of Mind, ... intent of lifting up every bit breathing of him to the gracious worlds of dazzling happiness, worlds over which shines the Sun of Truth. He had the glory of Being; he shall have the glory of adventurous Becoming. Indeed, because of this plunge evolution out of inconscience has become possible. But this inconscience itself is occultly creative; as a contributive aspect of that evolution Death has become ...
... that the first human pair materialized through an occult process. "That is to say, beings belonging to higher worlds built or formed a body of physical matter by a process of concentration and materialization; it wasn't that the lower species progressively brought forth a body which was the first human body." Mother with her spiritual and occult knowledge was in a good position to discount, or... called. The word is Yahveh, and should not be uttered. The prayers speak of 'Elohim,' and the Hebrew word Elohim is plural, meaning the invisible lords.' So, for Theon, there was no one and only God. but solely the Unthinkable Formless; and all the invisible beings who claimed to be one and only gods were Asuras." Page 93 ... Supreme Lord vis-á-vis the terrestrial realization, it wasn't to his liking that humanity should progress mentally, thus gaining a knowledge which would enable it to stop obeying him! That is Théon's occult explanation." "And what does the serpent represent physically?" Satprem asked, thinking no doubt of the original sin! "Why," exclaimed Mother, "it is the vibration of evolution!" "I ...
... A mightier image of desire and hope, A vaster formula, a greater scene. 76 Higher still and higher, onward and forever onward, Nature circles above, aiming "at a target kept invisible". Here the atmosphere is ethereal rather than dense—more and more ethereal with the flight into the higher regions. Aswapati sees Nature's variegated strivings, the colours have a blinding dazzle... the hidden wings of her songster hopes, A glimmer of blue and gold and scarlet fire. 77 Aswapati is fascinated by it all and moves freely amidst the "live symbols" of Nature's occult power; and her manifold—if as yet flawed —magnificence casts a profound spell upon him. Some 'clue' there certainly must be that can guide the seeker through her labyrinthine ways of passion and power;... 'THE KINGDOMS AND GODHEADS OF THE GREATER LIFE' From the "grey anarchy" of the lower vital' world, Aswapati now approaches the 'higher vital' world, a region ineffectual and purposeless still, where life see-saws between vain denial and dubious hope. It is a world of deceptive illuminations and spasmodic actions, of hopes unrealised and possibilities unfulfilled. Life goes round ...
... legs holds the hind legs of its mother." (I.164-17.) Needless to say these are signs and symbols and figures of a language seeking to express truths and realities of an invisible world, spiritual and occult. We are reminded of the "twilight" language of the poet-saints (Siddhacharyas) of Bengal of much later days. There is no end to the problems that face Dirghatama with his... radiant fullness in the solar Supra Consciousness at the ·summit. He is .however not only Page 14 energy, he is also delight (vāma). For he is the Soma, the nectarous flow, occult in the Earth's body. For Earth is the storehouse of the sap of Life, the source of the delightful growths of Life here below. Page 15 ... for his eyes turned inward to other domains and saw strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic-poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become ...
... and difficult plan Page 323 In the wide workshop of the wonderful world, Moulded in inward Time his rhythmic parts.... A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts Under its arches dim with infinity Mid heavenward brooding of invisible wings.... One-pointed to the immaculate Delight, Questing for God as for... combination of thrilled spirituality and occult vision directed towards a soul-fulfilling Beyond which is brought home on the breath of a Mantra whose music conveys most profoundly the sense of the supreme Ineffable - this many-faceted whole gets distributed into three equally inevitable moments at considerable intervals packed with extra matter of great spiritual and occult importance: Awakened to new... read extracts to the Mother. This observation rests on what Huta has recorded in the article entitled Spiritual and Occult Truths and published in Mother India, February 21,1978. The Mother disclosed to her in 1961 "how she had achieved in her tender age the highest occult truths, how she had realised all the visions set forth in Savitri". Here indeed is a marvellous flash of psychic autobiography ...
... sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual... process of events was there And Nature's plastic and protean change And, strong by death to slay or to create, The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath blows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with its dense humming sound dextrously... the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring Page 163 in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity ...
... these photographs and calculations are ready for our scrutiny. Don't we believe them? The secrets of the occult world are likewise revealed to us by Sri Aurobindo, for with his special gift of double vision or universal sight he had seen them and been them, and he has brought us news from the Invisible - from zero and from infinity! The identification of Aswapathy's Yoga with Sri Aurobindo's should not... envelops him "with its stupendous limbs", and he is now able to invade the occult Invisible: A voyager upon uncharted routes Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown, Adventuring across enormous realms, He broke into another Space and Time. 38 After a divina-commedia-like. journey covering the world-stair - Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried... of the threatened confrontation: A world's desire compelled her mortal birth. And so we are winged back to the days of Aswapathy's first awakening - his perception of the heavy and weary weight of this unintelligible world, his soul's break-through to freedom, his crystal-gazing into the 'Secret Knowledge', his exploration of the occult stairway of the worlds. The main bulk of Savitri is ...
... other worlds, is as yet unfathomable for the average human mind of today. The knowledge he has utilised as the basis of that poetry is the Yogic knowledge which has yet not become the common possession of human consciousness. That poetry will be appreciated better when, some time in future, humanity — or at least a part of it — has received glimpses of those invisible yet very real occult worlds... 58 pp.74-75. 59 p. 75. 60 p. 76. 61 p. 76. 62 p. 25. Page 367 connection with "A hostile and perverting Mind at work" 63 in the dark world of Night. It captured the oracles of the occult gods, Effaced the signposts of Life's pilgrimage, Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time, And on the foundations of the cosmic Law Erected its... tables drawn, Cast into a scheme the triple act of the One. 39 And the next one which follows almost immediately after this last, is also an excellent one: Out of the chaos of the Invisible's moods Derived the calculus of Destiny. 40 36 p. 201. 37 pp. 323-24. 38 p. 198. 39 p. 269. 40 p. 270. Page 362 How much is suggested by this single ...
... beginning to Page 862 know, there are surely others which we do not yet know; there are at work invisible life forces and obscure psychological forces. For these subtler powers have to be admitted even in the physical evolutionary theory to account for natural selection; if the occult or subconscious energy in some types answers to the need of the environment, in others remains unresponsive... Supermind to the higher status of the Divine Knowledge. This world is a world of the Ignorance and intended to be that only; there need be no intention to bring down the powers of the higher hemisphere into the lower half of existence or to manifest their concealed presence there; for, if they are at all existent here, it is in an occult incommunicable immanence and only to maintain the creation, not... evolution with birth as its machinery,—for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as its machinery. The first by itself would mean only a cosmic evolution; for the individual would be a quickly ...
... vibration which has already been felt, and so can easily be traced back to when and where. Oh, there are amusing things. Egypt was an extremely occult age, at that time they really had occult knowledge. So that gives you a power over the invisible, you can act there consciously. There was one thing (which I told you, I think): at one moment (it didn't last long), but for a few days, there was... disappeared. But it's a very strong impression, linked to certain memories and ( psychic ) impressions like the ones I said: they aren't ideas, but ... [vibrations]. There was a capacity to make the invisible speak, you understand. They had a machine. It must have been destroyed with the rest? The oldest memory that exists is the first Chinese attempts. It's in China that a machine to reproduce sound... The two things came together. I was surprised. I must admit I said, "Well, well!..." Because Paul Richard (unless he fell into complete stupor after I left him, I don't know!), I had given him much occult Page 211 knowledge, including the ability to leave his body and enter another. So ... It's not impossible. And for some time (for about a week), I'd been seeing his thought coming here ...
... Lady Macbeth; that is why Lady Macbeth who goes to the limit of wickedness with hardly a care in the world is the greater sufferer because we must remember how the forces which are occult are also retributive forces; they can avenge an evil action which has been caused by an intervention of evil occult forces, and it is they who rob Macbeth of his sleep and it is they who make Lady Macbeth a sleep-walker... character and you have the real sense of agencies from behind the scene taking charge of the world-stage and naturally the Elizabethan stage too. That may be why Sri Aurobindo, being sensitive to and so aware of all these forces, ranked Lear as the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Now these occult agencies are also at play in Macbeth and from the first you have the keynote set with the witches... remain a humanist and not forget the human life that you have to lead in the world. That would be something Page 433 almost Aurobindonian. Here we have to think of human limits as such. The human temperament, the human sensorium is so balanced that it can stand a certain amount of pressure and no more from occult forces. Even spiritual forces at times send people crazy. In the Ashram itself ...
... of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual... process of events was there And Nature's plastic and protean change And, strong by death to slay or to create, The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. 31 But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath blows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with its dense humming sound dextrously... the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring is that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying ...
... crucial years for the world. Little noticed by the common man. Hitler and Mussolini, Nazism and Fascism were gathering force before breaking into a furious, whirling maelstrom that would soon hit the world, sweeping all before it. And in the invisible, occult plane Sri Aurobindo and Mother were fighting the rising of the Dark; so that the children of Wotan do not wholly possess the world. We all harbour... sit on the floor, take off his spectacles, put them aside, and lay his head on Mother's lap. Mother would put her hand on his head, stroke it gently, and then both of them go off into some unknown world with her right palm on his head. We would look on entranced at the Tenderness incarnate of Divine Love; Sri Aurobindo and Dilipda? An infinitude of Knowledge answering finite's myriad questions ...
... p. 124. × ‘Mahatma’ means ‘great soul.’ In theosophy mahatmas are invisible sages who direct the course of history or exert an occult influence on the activities of humanity. × The caduceus is the staff... Presence.’ She thought of ‘all those who were watching over the ship to safeguard and protect our course … [and] of all the inhabitants of this vast sea, both visible and invisible’ 46 – as she thought, moving between two worlds, of the dear ones they had left far behind and those they were going to join. There is no indication that Mirra had any inkling of who or what was awaiting her at the end... pierced her heart. As the Mother she would later say that art is a great means of spiritual progress, and she would often tell her young, bright-eyed audience during her evening talks about the occult levels or worlds where sound and music originate, and about the composers whose music she had loved so much. César Franck, she would say, had a psychic opening and created his music under the direct influence ...
... ‘outwards’ in the divulgence of the new Force. If the Mother had wanted the occult power source which is Matrimandir to be built, then it can only have been, in a vision without religion, with the intention of speeding up the transformation of the Earth. The Mother said several times that Auroville exerts an occult influence in the world. That what vibrates in the cell, vibrates in the universe. That what... financial — with endless discussions, friction and quarrels about trifles. The Mother listened, gave advice, counsel and encouragement. Really, the certainty in the subtle worlds concerning Auroville must have been very firm and the invisible protection very powerful to allow the Mother to proceed with the foundation of the most utopian of all utopias: ‘the cradle of the overman.’ All non-Aurovillians... selfishness), refuse to allow this, the Asura of Falsehood, the Lord of the existing Order, would not stand it and launch his legions to hold on to his empire. Without a powerful occult protection the ‘cradle of the New World’ would never be able to exist; very soon it would become another Tell-el-Amarna, a hill of sand in the desert. How many hills of this kind dot the road of the long march of humanity ...
... this perfection and direct sense though it may be of different kinds, for the occult world of one is not that of another. But when there is the intervention of the intellectual mind in a poem this intervention may produce good lines of another power, but Page 415 or after—there is an alternation of the subtler occult and the heavier intellectual notes and the purity of vision becomes blurred... the Occult The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult is due to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered—it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, almost sensation of the occult, a light not of earth flowing through without anything to stop it or to change it into a product of the terrestrial mind. When one writes from pure occult vision... intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible—reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible, suppress as much of the form as may be and you get nearer that behind which is invisible. It is the same impulse that pervaded recent endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the reality; let us suppress ...
... slow, creeping, imperceptible or even occult action is followed by a run and an evolutionary saltus across the border. It is in some such way that the transition from the lower to higher grades of consciousness seems to have been made in Nature. In fact, life, mind, supermind are present in the atom, are Page 739 at work there, but invisible, occult, latent in a subconscious or apparently... but the extent and way of this mutual modification and de termination are fixed by the inhabitant and all-containing Spirit through a secret indwelling light and force of supermind, an occult gnosis,—an invisible self-knowledge and all-knowledge. If there is to be an entire transformation, it can only be by the Page 733 full emergence of the law of the spirit; its power of supermind or... something within, something occult, knows that it is not the intention of the deeper conscious Soul-Nature, the Purusha-Prakriti, to be satisfied with his present lowness and limitations. To climb to higher altitudes, to get a greater scope, to transform his lower nature, this is al ways a natural impulse of man as soon as he has made his place for himself in the physical and vital world of earth and has a ...
... result or as a secondary part of itself a supramental vision that needs the support of no image, can concretise what is to the mind abstract and has the character of sight though its object may be the invisible truth of that which has form or the truth of the formless. This vision can come before there is any identity, as a sort of previous emanation of light from it, or may act detached from it as a separate... superstition. This is also why “serious” people, or people who think themselves serious, do not accord any value to this phenomena and call them hallucinations. And yet, in those who are interested in occult phenomena, this type of perception often precedes the emergence of the capacity of vision which may be in course of formation. But you must guard against mistaking this for true vision. We shall... Their coming does not depend upon your thought or will; it is real and automatic. Just as your physical eyes see things in the physical world, so the inner eyes see things and images that belong to the other worlds and subtle images of the things of this physical world also. Visions are of all kinds—some are merely suggestions of what wants to be or is trying to be, some indicate some approach of the ...
... there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the fall occult, mystic, spiritual purpose." Sometimes Sethna writes a poetry full of mystic suggestions, as in Evanescence: Page 427 Where lie the past noon-lilies And vesper-violets gone ? Into what strange invisible deep Fall out of time the roses of each dawn ? They draw... vast moon upon the deep.... Fuelled with forests I come, an ape on fire, A brown beast burning towards the unbarred Blue. Not to have ever seen such aspects is the world's idea of sanity. But, for the mystic poet, these things are realities. The language is a discovery. Sri Aurobindo tells us that in the past the English language has been plastic enough to succeed ...
... building out of themselves our surface evolution. A psychic entity is there behind these occult Page 20 activities which is the true support of our individualisation; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ego is a superficial construction of... a small part of our being and by far the larger part of us is below the surface. Or, more accurately, it is behind the frontal Page 22 consciousness, behind the veil, occult and known only by an occult knowledge. Modern psychology and psychic science have begun to perceive this truth just a little. Materialistic psychology calls this hidden part the Inconscient, 1 although practically... surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by going within. Equally, what we call our physical being is only a visible projection of a greater and subtler invisible physical consciousness which is much more complex, much more aware, much wider in its receptiveness, much more open and plastic and free. Letters on Yoga, pp. 348-49 There are always ...
... 233. × “Occult” is what is invisible, “spiritual” is what belongs to the realms above our rational consciousness. Therefore all that is spiritual is necessarily occult, but all that is occult is not necessarily spiritual – far from it, for it may belong to or emanate from realms much lower than rational... materialistic dogma of scientism, which abandoned the world-view of the Great Chain of Being for what Ken Wilber calls “flatland”, has made it worse. The authentic occult traditions, Hermetism for instance, knew a lot more about the human being than either Christianity or modern Science. The simple reason is that their knowledge was based on occult or spiritual experience. 45 They also had a far... first it has gone all the way downwards). Looking up from our position on material Mother Earth towards the “heavens” with their hierarchical regions of invisible beings, and normally lacking any conscious connection with those higher worlds, we feel there is a gap between the two realms, between the higher and lower hemispheres of global existence. The very concrete experience of this gap is at ...
... physical science by its progress open to occultism?” The Mother answered: “It does not call it ‘occultism’, that is all. It’s only a matter of words. They are making sensational discoveries – which people with occult knowledge already knew thousands of years ago. They have taken a big detour and are now arriving at the same thing … They will end up practising occultism without knowing that they are doing... are, we will still be left with the wave packets from which particles derive. No scientist expects that those packets will ever be observed. So science is conceding that invisibles exist, and more. It also concedes that these invisibles precede the visible and create or in some way give rise to it.” 26 “Since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, [science] will be unable to cry a halt”, Sri... ( The Life Divine , pp. 652-53) “Science is in its own way an occultism”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, – for there ...
... swift-footed pride in the forest raged And a serene mistress read nature's tomes. Still from the invisible fount of wisdom Poured sudden truths that bring vision to our sight. 7 May 2002 Page 17 Canto Sixteen Ascending the slopes of mind Aswapati Now stepped into a world of sapphire thought That looks at unborn luminous ideas Knowing themselves which live in... through countless martyrdoms Must advance and do well on the occult way. But like a volcano burning upside down A will lived in the mystery of the night And saw the charming that can be true on earth. 2 June 2002 Page 46 Canto Forty-Five Things of beauty were there in death's dream world And all around prince Satyavan cast a spell Of joy and honeyed... On life's tree time has built her nest of pain And as the eternal's guard there stands death. But her vision and work aim at heaven-fire A-kindled in this half-lit terrestrial day. An invisible presence prompts her movements Even as in the mute trance of matter Through dimness of her eyes looks out the sun. Slowly the discoverer voyages on seas Reaching calm waters across the ...
... examples of this kind of knowledge. To quote a few: A gas belched out from some invisible Fire, Of its dense rings were formed these million stars. 33 Sri Aurobindo gives here the spiritual explanation of the origin of the cosmos, in science called the "singularity" named the Big Bang. The invisible—but very real—Fire is none other than Agni. The following quotation belongs... in the Intuitive Mind is revelatory in character. Here are some verses from Savitri indicating how sight functions in this Intuitive Mind plane: Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible. 23 Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight. 24 Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs. 25 Its fiery edge of seeing... fact, Aswapati's travel over worlds heaped upon worlds in a complex cosmogony mounting from the plinth of the plane of Matter right up to levels of higher Mind and the plane of the Cosmic Being leading to worlds of greater Knowledge. Aswapati represents the aspiring human soul down the millenniums of evolution in his search for the truth of himself, of the world and of God. He acquires ...
... spoke to you about are sexless, they were neither man nor woman; and in the vital world there is an entire part of the vital creation which is the result of these beings, an entire part which has no sex. Besides, the gods too made a world which was sexless. It is the world of angels, what are called angels, what in occultism are called fashioners. But these are sexless spirits; they are represented with... where there aren't beings, because that's the very principle of this universe: individual creations. Everywhere there are individual creations but they have different densities. Most of them are invisible except to those with a similar density, and only those who have the capacity of coming out of their bodies and going for a stroll can see these things. But so long as you use these eyes you can't... What, the wives of the gods who were troubled by the asuras? Yes! They too are closer to the material world? Is it in the vital world or in... It is in the vital world. (Pavitra) Mother, in the mind also, there are beings of the mind... There are beings of the mental world which are also sexless, not all, but many. There are many of them. There are some of these mental formations ...
... to find any satisfaction or support or help or joy... in anyone else, you will always fall on your nose one day, and that always hurts.... 22 There is an occult hierarchy of powers corresponding to the hierarchy of the invisible worlds, and one should beware of false loyalties. One should therefore be careful to rely on the Divine alone, on the Divine Shakti, - not on the false or flawed lower... may be won, which will then act upon the world, the collectivity and their undesirable vibrations so as to change and transform them, at least to some extent. Certainly, it will be a difficult undertaking; "but I repeat that we are not here to do easy things, we are here to do difficult ones". 20 VIII Always the same watchword: invade the Invisible, dare the impossible, accomplish the un... whole truth about the Past and the kind of recital that written History usually gave. If one cultivated the talent to enter the occult domain of the physical mind, one could find entry into its inner countries and read the entire past as from a printed book: In the mental world... there is a domain of the physical mind which is related to physical things and keeps the memory of physical happenings upon ...
... sat and brooded out the issue of peace or war, and the Mother brought all her immense proliferation of occult knowledge into the assessment of the European and world situation. On 14 December, while discussing another subject, Sri Aurobindo was to remark: I am not occupied with details of occult working. I have left them to the Mother. She often hears what is said at a distance, meets sadhaks on... of the fracture hinted at some occult intervention. 14 The Hitler-peril, although halted for the nonce by the Munich Agreement, was far from being exorcised away and the real trial of strength between the forces of Light and Darkness was still to come. The world was very near the brink, it was almost touch and go. But in their anxiety for the world's welfare, Sri Aurobindo and the ... hands were doing their work . Once she told Nirod: "I can see everything. I have eyes at the back of my head." At a time when her consciousness was far away, perhaps somewhere in the occult regions of the world-stair, her limbs and senses still seemed to function properly. Her feeling for atmosphere was uncanny, and Page 402 she could look into the uttermost truth of things ...
... everything: the slightest thing becomes complicated. These last few days I have had examples of all the possible complications of the physical world, including practices of hypnotism and so-called black magic and all the phenomena that take place in the invisible realm, but just adjoining the physical—like certain materializations, certain disappearances (incidents I saw and was obliged to note; I was... know what comparison I should use, but I am certain there are some things that are invisible this way ( Mother rotates her wrist in one direction ), and visible that way ( gesture in the other direction ). My impression is that what we see as a considerable difference between the tangible, the material, and the invisible or the fluid, is only a change of position. Perhaps an internal change of position... last few days: a will to disorganize all my personal life. And causing power failures is one of the known occult methods (I don't know how it's done, in fact, but that man who wrote books and came here a very long time ago, Brunton, said it was one of the tricks known to those who practice occultism: a sudden failure of the lights). There are lots of other such tricks designed to disorganize people's ...
... positive entities which help the evolution. Well, the occult world is not one single region where everything is mixed. The occult world is a gradation of regions, of more and more ethereal or subtle regions, farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having its forms and inhabited by beings with... beings of the other worlds. Let us revert to our earlier discussion and close the topic of whether the supraphysical worlds exist at all or not. We give below in this connection the summarised adaptation of what the Mother spoke in her evening class of July 11, 1956: Page 53 I am asked for explanation or comments on the beings who live in the worlds invisible to ordinary physical... Another point: if you learn to leave the lower vital world in close proximity to the earthly physical world and make your progressive ascension, you will find that as you mount, you will encounter beings whose forms and consciousness are more and more pure and beautiful and perfect. A third point: In these invisible worlds there are also regions which are the result of human mental ...
... sadhana for the Earth. It must have been a terrible battle that she fought, without anybody being aware of it. ‘The world unknowing for the world she stood.’ Satprem writes somewhere that Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is ‘the invisible yoga par excellence’, and it was most invisible in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is one of the seals of authenticity on their Work. The Supramental Manifestation... revelations. She made them see or experience what she spoke. From those talks alone one could distill a complete spiritual or occult system. 93 The Mother during one of the Entretiens at the Ashram Playground, 1951 Satprem has called those evenings ‘the greatest de-occultization’ ever undertaken. Had not Sri Aurobindo written: ‘To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life... becomes evident in the cells themselves, giving to the body the appearance of a multicoloured kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganised by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.’ 28 In that year — 1954 — the work of the Mother on the cells of her body clearly had reached a sort of climax, given the possibilities at that moment: 5 May ...
... source whence her agonies part And the inner reason of hell … 72 Here poetry is not an intricate art of expression but the simplest, most concise way of recording occult and spiritual truth and fact – ‘occult’ because invisible to common mortals, but real and concrete for the ones involved in its working. When one realizes this, one also understands Sri Aurobindo’s saying: ‘My life was not on... being aware of it, in this invisible, extended and very strong presence that enabled the ‘place of Realization’ to survive and develop. There are many stories in ancient Indian writings about attacks by Asuras , Rakshasas and Pishachas on the sacred fires and on the ashrams of Rishis and other holy men. Far from being nothing but imagination, they refer to an occult fact all spiritual endeavours... Ashram] of all possible [inner] attitudes.’ 26 And to the youth of the Ashram she said: ‘From the occult point of view [you are] a selection. From the external point of view you might tell me that there are people in the world who are much superior to you and I won’t contradict it. But from the occult point of view [you are] a selection. One can say without being mistaken that most of the young people ...
... always said that occult knowledge without spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, both for the one who uses it and for others, but so sure and strong were her own spiritual foundations that no harm could touch her during these years of study and experiment. I should also emphasise here that for the Mother occultism was a means of service to the Divine, never a mere play with invisible forces or a... against the best players she could find. 'I never won,' she said, 'but I learnt much.' Mirra had a natural disposition for occult experiences and by the time she was twelve she was practising occultism as a conscious discipline. She would go out of her body and enter strange worlds which were not always pleasant. But she was fearless. Talking about her experiences of this time she later said, 'But I must... Mother became seriously ill, her physical body reflecting the sufferings of the war-ravaged world. In April she left Paris and went to Lunel in the South of France where she spent the next six months. Her diary entries reveal that even during her illness she continued through her sadhana to exert an occult influence on men and events. There was some correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and her during ...
... dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge... self-confidence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride: I have seized the cosmic energies for my use. I have pored on her infinitesimal elements And her invisible atoms have unmasked. . If God is at work his secrets I have found. 1 This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance; for... gness cut off from Time. . "A stillness absolute, incommunicable. . 3 Here seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status . . occult, impenetrable,— Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone. 4 Ashwapati was perhaps about to be lured into that Bliss but 1 Ibid: Book II: Canto 7: p. 238. 2 Op. cit. Book ...
... dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his... overweening self-confidence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride: I have seized the cosmic energies for my use. I have pored on her infinitesimal elements And her invisible atoms have unmasked. . If God is at work his secrets I have found.¹ This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance; for with all his... An Everlastingness cut off from Time. . "A stillness absolute, incommunicable. .³ Here seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status . . occult, impenetrable,– Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.4 Ashwapati was perhaps about to be lured into that Bliss but 1 Ibid: Book II: Canto 7: p. 238. 2 Op. tit. Book II: Canto 8: ...
... narrowing hedge Defending his small life from the Invisible; His being's kinship to infinity He has shut away from him into inmost self, Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God. He is the crown of all that has been done: Thus is creations's labour justified; Page 245 This is the world's result, Nature's last poise! And if this were all and... nature rose. The soul must soar sovereign above the form And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep; Our hearts we must inform with heavenly strength, Surprise the animal with the occult god. Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice, Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere, We shall shed the discredit of our mortal state, Make the abysm a road for heaven's ... Page 243 And nothing shows the Glory that is here. A Wisdom governing the mystic world. A Silence listening to the cry of Life, It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream Towards the still greatness of a distant hour. Unseen here act dim huge world-energies And only trickles and currents are our share. Our mind lives far off from the authentic ...
... human story, the record of human history, the tale of striving and failure and partial victory, all these raise no serious problems of comprehension; it is the geography of the occult worlds and the drama enacted in the world of the Spirit that call for the special strain of "waiting and listening"; and the whole problem —which is at once a personal and a cosmic problem—is in a way summed up in the... lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane... 191 A vanishing vestige like a violet trace... 192 Or whirled in a dumb eddy of meeting winds... 193 A beast of prey that pauses in its prowl... 194 And the fire and mystery of forbidden delight Drunk from the world-libidos bottomless well... Savitri entitled 'The World-Soul' "a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss", 196 another critic, P. Lai, has singled out this very canto for particular denigration. After giving two extracts which describe the region of the World-Soul, the critic loftily ...
... stray rambles in the uncharted occult regions, involvement in music and painting, dream visions and musings - and she had grown into a young woman unparalleled silent and self-absorbed, conscious of both the world's burden of pain and its need for love, and peering into the Future with the eyes of hope and faith. She had presently won her way to the secrets of occultism, under M. Théon's guidance... tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his petty power, in his blind self-sufficiency. Furthermore, besides ignorance and arrogance there is an element of revolt in him, for in his half-wakefulness with his rudimentary consciousness, if he ever came in contact with something that is above and beyond him, if a shadow of another world happens... head cut off, in a military uniform ... approaching me and suddenly flinging himself upon my chest, with that half a head to suck my force ... " He was drawing all my life out .... Then I called on my occult power, I gave a big fight and I succeeded in turning him back .... And I woke Up. 2 The three clear gains of this pretty agonising experience were, firstly, she saw that microbes were produced ...
... stanza and continuation are exceedingly fine, full of magic suggestion. In the last two lines there is a mixture of the intuitive and the illumined, the rest is pure intuitive—but occult because it is from a province of the occult that the intuition of the substance comes. The last two lines have, I think, an equal poetic excellence with the rest, but it is not the same." * (How do you... globes of Beauty burn—a hush made fire: Their colours self-secluded one by one, Yet sisters in a joyful union— Rhythms of quiet, thrill on gemlike thrill Necklaced around a Threat invisible... When wearily I string word after word, I call your flame, O Ecstasies unheard. To guide my frailty with some touch of you! Grant me a worship-glow that reaches, through ... in rhythm and expression. The inspiration is from an inner centre." * EVANESCENCE Where lie the past noon-lilies And vesper-violets gone? Into what strange invisible deep Fall out of time the roses of each dawn? Page 133 They draw for us a dream-way To ecstasies unhoured, Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop, By some great ...
... On The Mother CHAPTER 50 Wings of Expansion I Of the Mother's invisible ministry for the earth and man from the occult and spiritual planes, we know nothing - or hardly anything - whatsoever. The playground classes were on a different footing: people could see her, hear her, meditate with her, receive her blessings and even feel the force of her... sessions had now to be discontinued for reasons of her health, still the memories were fresh, the transcripts of the earlier conversations of 1929' and 1931 were available, and there was still her invisible but potent influence in the classrooms, playgrounds and dormitories. Page 676 The Mother remained the major inspiration and sustenance of the Centre of Education. The general principle... tape-recorded playing of Sanskrit invocation or of the Mother's organ music or of her readings and talks. The scene was the same, the people were largely the same, except that the Mother was only invisibly present. But the atmosphere was as rich and vibrant as ever: The cascade of supramental descent cleansed and awakened the soul... An ambience inexpressible filled the arena's dimmed ...
... all and kept politely smiling, souls still in the bud. She got piles of letters, more than Sri Aurobindo at the time, for she had become known much more to the outside world. Whomever they thought she was, God or a lady with occult talents, it was always worthwhile (and it cost nothing) to ask her opinion about a purchase, an investment, a planned or childless marriage, a long journey, a risky undertaking... being transformed — a part of the billions, an ever increasing part of the billions. It was a chore without end, for each cell was connected with near or distantly related elements in the visible or invisible cosmos, on all planes of existence, in the Supramental as well as in the Subconscious and Inconscient where the merciless battle to bring the light had to be waged. The agglomerate of cells in the... was a task which would keep anyone occupied full-time. She was consulted about everything, took all decisions (and corrected the misunderstood decisions or the deliberately twisted ones with her invisibly acting Power), kept an eye on the finances, signed all documents and cheques (and India was a difficult country where documents and cheques are concerned), took upon her all legal responsibilities ...
... sources. It may be a vision by identity with circumstances and things, when you are used to extending your consciousness all around you. It may be an indication given by a talkative being from the invisible world who amuses himself by informing you of what is going to happen—this happens very often. Then everything depends on the moral character of your "informant"; if he is amusing himself at your expense... complete down to the smallest details, on an occult plane. Is that correct? What is this plane of knowledge? Is there one or several? What should one do to gain access to it consciously in the waking state? And how is it that people who are serious, who have a divine realisation, sometimes make such gross mistakes in their predictions? But it is a whole world in itself! It is not one question, but twenty... back, a tram went past—it was the tram that I had felt at a little more than arm's length. It had touched the aura, the aura of protection—it was very strong at that time, I was deeply immersed in occultism and I knew how to keep it—the aura of protection had been hit and that had literally thrown me backwards, as if I had received a physical shock. And what insults from the driver! I jumped back just ...
... great light was born within me: the transmutation of matter into spirit. Here was the great secret, the red ribbon followed by the Combatant.. .I now clearly saw the progress of the Invisible, and suddenly I knew what my duty was to be: to work in harmony together with that Combatant; to transmute, even I, in my own small capacity, matter into spirit, for only then might... down-to-the-earth realism, an uninhibited violence and downrightness, in Kazantzakis' poem which are in marked contrast to the zig-zag vagaries, exotic patterns and general obscurity of the Cantos or the occult distance and dreamy otherworldliness of large tracts of Savitri. But of any one of these three great poems (great, undoubtedly, though not all equally great) it may be said what one critic has said... of Homer's poetry that he attempted, as we saw in the previous chapter, a 'sequel' to the Iliad in English hexameters. Nikos Kazantzakis was a Cretan Greek who became a European and a man of the world and tried to cram into his life and work divers realms and modes of experience. He knew (like Sri Aurobindo) many languages, he wrote fiction and poetry, he translated the epics of Homer, the Commedia ...
... itself, of its instrumentation, capacity, capability for the manifestation of the soul in the world of Matter. The subtle senses now concealed in us might come forward into a free action and the material senses themselves become means or channels for the vision of what is Page 551 now invisible to us or the discovery of things surrounding us but at present unseizable and held back from our... kind were evolved and made available. A development of this kind must necessarily belong to what is now considered as the sphere of the occult and the use of concealed powers of action or creation not known or possessed by the common mind of the race. Occultism means rightly the use of the higher powers of our nature, soul, mind, life-force and the faculties of the subtle physical consciousness to... however unconsciously, draw constantly upon the universal energy, the force in Matter to replenish our material existence and the mental, vital and other potencies in the body: we do it directly in the invisible processes of interchange constantly kept up by Nature and by special means devised by her; breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the ...
... dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge... self-confidence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride: I have seized the cosmic energies for my use. I have pored on her infinitesimal elements And her invisible atoms have unmasked... If God is at work his secrets I have found. 29 This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance; for... Everlastingness cut off from Time... 5 A stillness absolute, incommunicable... 6 Here seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status ...occult, impenetrable, — Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone. 7 Aswapati was perhaps about to be lured into that Bliss but suddenly a doubt enters into him — there is a hesitation, a questioning; ...
... dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance, he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his Utile knowledge, his... ence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride: Page 114 "I have seized the cosmic energies for my use. I have pored on her infinitesimal elements And her invisible atoms have unmasked... If God is at work his secrets I have found." 1 This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance; for with all... seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status 1 Bk. II: Canto 8: P. 262. 2 Bk. III: Cantos 1-2: Pp. 349; 351. Page 97 "...occult, impenetrable,— Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone." 1 Ashwapati was perhaps about to be lured into that Bliss but suddenly a doubt enters into him—there is a hesitation, a questioning; ...
... dimensions he can seize and appreciate only small things, little specks of a material world. He refused, first of all, because of his ignorance; he does not know, nor is he capable of conceiving that there are such things as immortal life, divinity, unobscured light, griefless love, or a radiant, tranquil, invisible energy. He does not know and yet he is arrogant, arrogant in his little knowledge, his... self-confidence, of arrogant self-assertion. It declares in its formidable pride: I have seized the cosmic energies for my use. I have pored on her infinitesimal elements And her invisible atoms have unmasked... If God is at work, his secrets I have found. 27 This imperiousness in man seems however to be a sheer imperviousness: it is a mask, a hollow appearance;... cut off from Time... A stillness absolute, incommunicable ... 5 Here seems to be the end of the quest, and one would fain stay there ever and ever in that status ...occult, impenetrable, - Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone. 6 3.Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, SABCL, Vol. 28. p. 210. 4. Ibid., p. 231. 5. Ibid., pp. 308. 310. 6. Ibid ...
... kingdoms "twixt life's poles" through whose "organ scale of consciousness" souls move. Up this stairway of worlds he starts and enters into another space and time. With Aswapati we travel 7 and become acquainted with the nature of these spheres and their godheads. Here Sri Aurobindo unveils occult cosmogony in vibrant detail, in a clarity of language that only direct experience can utter. To read of... with life and to Nirvana. How she answers these and pushes them away is told. In the course of her seeking the occult fire within, three Soul-Forces appear: the Mother of Divine Pity, the Mother of Might, and the Mother of Wisdom. Each relates her various forms and works in the world. Finally the poet chants of Savitri's finding of her Secret Deity. But soon the portentous yet promising... shall be on earth and sends Savitri as his Power and Satyavan as his Soul back to earth to change this earthly life to a life divine. Savitri falls like a star to earth 18 and Satyavan invisibly drawn soars past her. They reunite on earth and the epic closes unveiling the age-long secret deep-guarded in the stillness — the Promise of a Greater Dawn. lti mayah śrutam — Thus have ...
... Superior Beings and Adverse Forces Words of the Mother - III Adverse Forces Each time that we have made a decisive step in our spiritual progress, the invisible enemies of the Divine always try to take their revenge, and when they cannot injure the soul they strike the body. But all their efforts are in vain and will finally be defeated, for the Divine Grace... seemed as if an emanation of X was at his side. How is it that after I had called you, Mother, I had this experience? This is the disadvantage of placing oneself under the influence of several occult forces. In the past, one was recommended, not without reason, to choose one spiritual master and to take great care not to see any others, to avoid a mixture of influences, which has serious di... to sentimentalise about flies. They are beings created by the adverse forces and they must disappear from the earth. In the terrestrial organisation, the world of insects is, so to say, the direct work of hostile creators in the vital world; they are the result of adverse and often diabolical thoughts and imaginations, directed not towards man but towards the divine work. Often an insect that looks ...
... Being. Gita. (vāsudevaḥ sarvamiti, VII. 19.) A consciousness-force, everywhere inherent in Existence, acting even when concealed, is the creator of the worlds, the occult secret of Nature. But in our material world and in our own being consciousness has a double aspect; Page 309 there is a force of Knowledge, there is a force of Ignorance. In the infinite consciousness... these different atoms,—how the differentiae in the constituent occasion or cause necessitate the differentiae in the constituted outcome or result. We know also that certain combinations of certain invisible atomic infinitesimals produce or occasion new and visible determinations quite different in nature, quality and power from the constituent infinitesimals; but we fail to discover, Page 312 ... discords, of combining and intermingling opposites, for the drama of consciousness struggling to exist and seeking to affirm itself in an inconscient universal order. The fact that this Divinity is invisible to us, undiscoverable by our mind Page 316 and senses, offers no difficulty, since self-evidence or direct sign of an extra-cosmic Creator could not be expected in a cosmos which is void ...
... microbes alone. "And to discover the disorder, you must have an extensive occult knowledge and also a deep knowledge of all the inner workings of each one." 36 Actually, an illness invades and takes root because the protective outer cover - the etheric body, the nervous envelope - has been pierced.. It is this subtle yet invisible body that must be made truly impregnable, and for this peace and equanimity... thought and a tone of intimate urgency that give them a special place in the Aurobindonian Yoga-literature. The Mother no doubt speaks out of her manifold experience of this and the divers occult worlds, but what gives the talks their stamp of authenticity and authority is the sanction from Above, for it is clear she speaks generally from an overhead level of direct understanding. Life, art... simply an image. It is the image of all that happens in what we call the invisible. It becomes visible to us because there is a screen which intervenes and stops the vibrations and that produces an image. If there were no such screen the vibrations would move on and nothing would be seen. And yet all the movements would exist .... ... So, our body represents a small fragment in this set of images ...
... new world and a new language. True, the philosophic strain is too pervasive to disappear at once or wholly but in the main it is vision rather than reflection that is the mark of the later yogic and mystical poetry. "Out of thought we must leap up to sight." Or, as he says elsewhere in Savitri: And with a silver cry of opening gates Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible. 20... wand of thought, He builds the secret uncreated worlds. Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye, His is the vision and the prophecy: Imagist casting the formless into shape, Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths, He is the carrier of the hidden fire, He is the voice of the Ineffable, He is the invisible hunter of the light, The Angel of mysterious ... Page 258 On sustenance from occult spiritual founts Climbed through white rays to meet an unseen Sun. 3 for the story or the legend, it is too simple to be missed. But one does not read Sri Aurobindo's Savitri for the story but for what lies behind, the symbol. And what may that be and its system of occult correspondence, "the reading of the text of without ...
... in the great Plan. The Mother wrote: ‘In the occult world, or rather if you look at the world from the occult point of view, those adverse forces are very real, their action is very real, completely concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realisation is positively hostile. But as soon as you pass beyond this domain and enter in the spiritual world where there is nothing other than the Divine... Darkness whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience,’ 9 wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. In his correspondence we find: ‘Behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men.’ 10 He cautioned an anonymous disciple: ‘The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days... other kinds of living beings invisibly. The yogic force is a real, concrete force. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother could not possibly do their work without acquiring that force and without the ability to use or apply it. For they had come to transform the Earth — a labour which would be successful only if they had at their disposal a greater force than that of the invisible masters of the ruling order ...
... consciousness itself, of its instrumentation, capacity, capability for the manifestation of the soul in the world of Matter. The subtle senses now concealed in us might come forward into a free action and the material senses themselves become means or channels for the vision of what is now invisible to us or the discovery of things surrounding us but at present unseizable Page 163 and... kind were evolved and made available. A development of this kind must necessarily belong to what is now considered as the sphere, of the occult and the use of concealed powers or action or creation not known or possessed by the common mind of the race. Occultism means rightly the use of the higher powers of our nature, soul, mind, life-force and the faculties of the subtle physical consciousness... unconsciously, draw constantly . upon the universal energy, the force in Matter to replenish our material existence and the mental, vital and other potencies in the body: we do it directly in the invisible processes of interchange constantly kept up by Nature and 'by special means devised by her, breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as her basic means for maintaining and renewing the ...
... another element in the Hitler-Hess connection which Hanfstängl did not perceive because there were no receptors for it in his awareness: the occult dimension. Hess was, after all, not only a Brother of Thule, he was also intensely interested in all kinds of occult phenomena, and so was Hitler. Toland describes how the Hitler court at Landsberg was distinctly divided into two levels corresponding to... the Blue Café with a living tableau, ‘Adolf Hitler in prison’. The curtain rose on a cell. Snowflakes were falling outside a small barred window. A man sat at a desk, face buried in hands, and an invisible male chorus was singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’. Then an angel placed an illuminated Christmas tree on the table. Slowly the man turned and revealed his face … A half-sob went through the hall”... emanating from the book’s pages. But behind all that there is a vision by which Adolf Hitler had been and would continue to be driven, which was unprecedented and revolutionary, and which aimed at a new world and a new man. “He who writes this sees himself in his prison cell like Johannes in his cave on Patmos and is in his solitude open for inspiration”, writes Karin Wilhelm. “While writing Hitler too follows ...
... no conscious assessment of whatever import it bore by the year 1947 in which the last British soldier left Indian soil. But behind the conscious thought of individuals there is the working of that invisible yet potent being which is the national soul or genius. Every country has such a soul and every true patriot feels directly or indirectly its presence. In terms of the wide yet demarcated body of land... man loveliness and on the supporting breath of its super-animation we move to the exertions and the heroisms that ordinarily lie far beyond our powers. When a country's collectivity is disposed to occult insight the national soul is most clearly grasped by the patriot heart: thus in Ireland and in India we find the intensest response to the superhuman presence constituting the nation. Especially in... more cosmopolitan Page 105 composition, Jana Gana Mana, the outleaping apostrophe to the Goddess that is India has not lost its appeal - still in a myriad bosoms the flame of occult recognition burns - through the officially secular mind itself of those in charge of the government the Mother, though often obstructed, works secretly her will. In the instance of a country like India ...
... the accepted soul for the good of the work itself. Of course, and more importantly, there is an occult dimension to it and whatever is to be done bears in it its connotation and its significance. In the interest of that work command to the chosen instrument to go into world action has to come from the world-active spirit itself. In fact, it will be a supreme command and the revelation of its absolute... are the Creator as Brahma and even beyond him, that Supreme, you are; you are yourself the begetter of the great Grandsire. O Master of the Universe, besides this existence, all that is visible or invisible, all that has taken shape or is without it, to you I offer my obeisances. Continues Jnaneshwar: In this way, and with a heart full of devotion, and with loving respect, did Arjuna bow and... the word tridhatu , the three elements constituting the bodily existence in the Ayurvedic sense of phlegm, wind and bile. Not that this is totally baseless; but it cannot be the whole spiritual or occult sense intended by the poet who is also a Yogi. Mere dissolution of the chemical substances of the body can never be sufficient for such a high attainment as oneness with the supreme Person. There are ...
... said to the children of the Ashram. After the complete development of their occult capacities, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had access to all manifested worlds. Sri Aurobindo has described the whole range of them in detail in his epic poem Savitri, a revelation with a lasting place in the occult and spiritual world literature. For him and for the Mother it was not difficult to visit in their subtle... attention must be fixed on the earth because our work is here. Besides, the earth is a concentration of all the other worlds and one can touch them by touching something corresponding in the earth-atmosphere.’ 9 By this he does not mean the physical atmosphere, but the extremely complex invisible body of Earth, the living entity, her physical body being to our senses the perceptible exteriorization of it... of an explanation of the improbable chain of coincidences that leads up to their own existence. The view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, referring to the great traditions and based on their own occult experience, differs radically from the generally accepted scientific model. ‘In the whole creation the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic ...
... Overhead Poetry Orison A godless temple is the dome of space: Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face, O lustrous flowering of invisible peace, 3 O glory breaking into curves of clay 4 From mute intangible dream-distances, 5 That like a wondrous yet familiar light Eternity may mingle with our day! Leave... spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing... that the greater romantic poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet'; he did not write T am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he ...
... deal of occultism. She came into contact with great artists and thinkers like Rouault, Rodin, Matisse, Anatole France. She had read a number of books,—in fact, libraries. But she had not yet done the 'mental' gymnastics of metaphysical philosophy, comparative studies, and systems of law and sociology. And if with Theon, Mother had touched death, with Paul Richard she would touch the world's Falsehood... Christian, but he dropped it all as soon as he began to study occultism. He had first specialised in theological philosophy in order to pass the pastoral examinations, studying all the modern philosophy of Europe (he had a rather remarkable metaphysical brain). Then I met him in connection with Theon and the Cosmic Review, and I led him into occult knowledge. Afterwards, there were all sorts of uninteresting... I had the feeling of becoming vast and all-powerful.... And it lasted for days. Of course, my mother was such an out-and-out materialist, thank God, that it was impossible to speak to her of invisible things—she took them as evidence of a deranged brain! Nothing counted for her but what could be touched and seen. But this was a divine grace—I had no opportunity to say anything. I kept my experience ...
... when necessary, or when invited. A thought, as Mirra had learned from Théon and as she taught to her audiences in Paris, may be invisible to us because it belongs to a subtle, mental world, but it is all the same a concrete entity. Every human being lives within an occult edifice that consists of ‘constructions’ of thoughts. In people who are incapable of clear thinking, such an edifice is shabbily... massive descent of hostile forces from the occult vital worlds corresponded to this awakening of the vital powers inside humanity. ‘Monstrous forces have swooped down upon the Earth like a hurricane,’ wrote Mirra in her diary on 8 August, when the nations were jockeying for positions in the ‘War Game.’ 39 And the Mother would say many years later: ‘The First World War was the result of an enormous descent... an act of spiritual occultism which she herself later would brand as ‘reckless,’ she had left her soul with Sri Aurobindo, thus leaving her adhara on its own among the world forces in upheaval. But however infernal the experiences she had to go through, what she had become was forever irreversible and gradually grew active again. Even when critically ill she took up her occult work, at Lunel and ...
... inhabitant, man. Occult science and spiritual discipline should henceforth purposefully go together "to complement each other for the perfection of self-development and integral action". It is only occult science that can concretely objectify the truths of the spirit in the world of forms, even as spiritual discipline alone can reach the ultimate psychological truths: Page 591 Occult knowledge... spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, for one who uses it as for others, if it falls into impure hands. Spiritual knowledge without the occult science lacks precision and certainty in its objective results; it is all-powerful only in the subjective world. 14 Again, it is characteristic of a time of change that one can experience two contraries (thesis and antithesis) simultaneously (or in... which will determine the course of the earth's future. 18 It may be there are blandishments and solicitations enough, it may be the Lord of Falsehood plays his seductive tunes and spreads his invisible nets to trap the unwary, it may be the giant evils of death, desire and incapacity are still prowling about in the earth-atmosphere, it may be that the ego's gorgeous self-projections and self-hy ...
... that the reader is at once provided with a certain desirable conceptual support making his movements aesthetically steady and definite. This certainly helps him grasp the sequence that runs invisibly through the literary stateliness of the narrative. In fact, when the main line of reasoning is thus established the story so formed that itself becomes an artistic creation. Can a similar u... the streaming joy in its tranquil enthusiasm, in its enchanting rush that creates the original would be missing. Sri Aurobindo himself says that Savitri renders into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual. In fact it has the essence of a universal consciousness which brings with it wide and luminous knowledge, power, charm, beauty in possession of the truth and truth in the lure... we cannot have the epic style for short compositions as are presented here. The technique I have adopted is mostly that of a short even narrative, though at times it may be lyric-sensitive or occult-symbolical. In the process there is likelihood of moving far away from the original's wholesome Hellenistic beauty and of falling into the trimmed expressive form that is profiled and geometric ...
... is capable of creating any other beings than those around us in the physical world, men, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, germs and animalculae. But if there are invisible cosmic forces physical in their nature that act upon the body of inanimate objects, there is no valid reason why there should not be invisible cosmic forces mental and vital in their nature that act upon his mind and his... there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and the government of the life of man;—this was the significance of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents,... and Life, impersonal forces, form conscious beings or use persons to embody them in physical forms and in a physical world and can act upon Matter and through Matter, it is not impossible that on their own planes they should form conscious beings whose subtler substance is invisible to us or that they should be able to act from those planes on beings in physical Nature. Whatever reality or mythical ...
... the Yoga. The Great Mother is known in all great spiritual and occult traditions, even though variously named and described. We find her in Isis, Cybele, Sophia, and the Virgin Mary. She is the One who became Two – the active Brahman from eternity divided into Ishwara and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti. On the Origin of the World , a gnostic text from around 200 CE, defines her in terms which, if... lumped together. … Matter is weird stuff …” (Freeman Dyson) 11 Or: “Quantum field theory paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction remains between material substance and apparently empty space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activity. … Quantum physics undermines ... simple armchair, on the first floor of the central Ashram building in Pondicherry, was no longer what the eyes perceived? Her back was bent and her visible body reduced to its elementary humanity; her invisible body within the visible one was glorious. On 24 March 1972 she said: “For the first time, early in the morning, I saw myself, my body. I don’t know whether it is a supramental body or – how to say ...
... Mother spoke as follows: “According to spiritual and occult knowledge, consciousness precedes form, consciousness by self-concentration produces its forms. Whereas, according to the materialist idea, it is form which precedes consciousness and makes it possible for consciousness to manifest. For those who have some knowledge of the invisible worlds and a direct perception of the play of forces, there... the inspiration of the knowledge at the base of the occult schemata of the world, e.g. the chakras, the chain of being, the astrological structure of the human being, and the sephiroth in the Kabbalah. Primordial Man The pure spiritual knowledge is the great treasure heedfully kept in India, and which she is now communicating to the world for its further evolution. Yet this knowledge, though... Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia and Africa ) have shown how frequent the exchanges around the eastern Mediterranean were in ancient times, and how deeply Egypt’s highly developed culture, occultism and spirituality had penetrated into pre-classical Greece. The spirit behind the Egyptian temples, the pyramids and the animal masks of the gods has surfaced around the beginning of the Common ...
... "These things should not be spoken of but kept under cover. Even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or subjective forces is open to doubt and discussion in which there could be no material certitude — while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of a spiritual force. Each... without touching fish once even though pressed hard to be convivial. But as the Yogic Force (which produces such indubitable results and brings about the changes in the aspirant's outer mixture) is invisible to most of us when it is actually working as a leaven Page 99 in our being and consciousness, we do often feel hard put to it to accept its functioning as "businesslike and practical"... Him." When he wrote this he knew of course that it was not so easy for impatient aspirants like us, with our eyes straining all the time for quick results, to have an unshakable faith in "an invisible force producing tangible results" as I phrased it. So he went on getting round my non-experience with all the weight of his ex- perience of which I must give one more instance before I draw this topic ...
... or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity. The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes... allegorical structure has been transfused into a living and burning symbolism of an inner world. But all that is left far behind, when we hear a new voice announcing an altogether new manner, revelatory of the truly and supremely spiritual consciousness, not simply mystic or religious but magically occult and carved out of the highest if recondite philosophia: A finite movement... turns nor right nor left; The waves break helplessly at the sides! His face looks familiar.... 1 it is mysticism, mysticism in excelsis. Even A.E.'s I turn To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: White for Thy whiteness all desires bum. Ah, with what longing once again I turn! 2 is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in leaving behind the mystic ...
... beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity. The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes... allegorical structure has been transfused into a living and burning symbolism of an inner world. But all that is left far behind, when we hear a new voice announcing an altogether new manner, revelatory of the truly and supremely spiritual consciousness, not simply mystic or religious but magically occult and carved out of the highest if recondite philosophia: A finite movement of the... nor right nor left; The waves break helplessly at the sides! His face looks familiar... ¹ it is mysticism, mysticism in excelsis. Even A.E.'s I turn To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: White for Thy whiteness all desires burn. Ah, with what longing once again I turn!² is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in leaving behind the mystic ...
... the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their native cosmorama opening to the sealed eyes of trance; but the master-passion is not a wanderlust of the mere occult, it is an amor dei athirst for an all-absorbing contact. Not for any gift of vision or inspired voice does... the philosopher in him often preponderates over the mystic. Even Shelley's wizard tunes float in an ether different from AE's. The world of AE is not the rarefied mental with its abstractions and idealities come to life under the stress of a lyrical feeling, but an occult atmosphere of mind out of reach for the normal poet and open only to those who follow a discipline of concentration, a yoga of insight... movement of mystical aspiration into a single-shining mood. The colour and change were not valuable to him for their own sake; they derived their intensity, their appeal, from something hidden and invisible, an essence of eternal beauty secretly one behind all its magic myriadness. And the presence of this sacred simplicity AE suggested not only by his words but also by a simple spontaneousness of metre; ...
... of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme... to regard it as void of awareness, a sort of luminous Inconscience. Just as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of Page 287 mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit. He has... occurrence in our mental activity: for what we call by the name is usually a point of direct knowledge which is immediately caught and coated over with mental stuff, so that it serves only as an invisible or a very tiny nucleus of a crystallisation which is in its mass intellectual or otherwise mental in character; or else the flash of intuition is quickly replaced or intercepted, before it has a chance ...
... call to reach the summits of existence. Aswapati moves through these worlds with the household ease. But he finds that here while beauty and greatness, sweetness and might, the Rose and the Flame, come together yet they stand apart. They would not find themselves in the single soul of the world. The spiritual path and the occult-psychic path run parallel but do not yet become one. Aswapati must... once obeys the directive and with that begins her occult inward journey. She witnesses the play of the subconscient forces and also the possibilities that can bring the gods down. If out of Matter and Life emerged Mind, so can a being with diviner faculties arrive here. To mould humanity in God's shape or discover a new world or create a new world are present as three alternatives and Savitri becomes... But she is also conscious of the fact that nothing can be achieved without finding her soul. She asks for the guidance and is told that she should take up the world's highway and go all the way to its source. There she will see the occult Fire burning on a stone and the deep cavern where resides her soul. She proceeds accordingly. VII: 4 The Triple Soul-Forces Savitri ...
... feel too that they have powers they have half lost and they are eager to win them back. So whenever they meet anyone who can give them some knowledge of the invisible world, they rush to him. But they mistake the vital for the spiritual world and in their seeking follow vital and not spiritual ends. Or perhaps they deliberately seek to corrupt spirituality and build up an imitation of it in the mould... incarnations of beings from the world that is just next to the physical, beings who live on the plane which we call the vital world. It is a world of all the desires and impulses and passions and of movements of violence and greed and cunning and every kind of ignorance; but all the dynamisms too are there, all the life-energies and all the powers. The beings of this world have by their nature a strange... forces and are liable to be influenced by them even from a far distance. The wisest way with these beings is to cut off all connection and have nothing to do with them—unless indeed you have great occult knowledge and power and have learned how to cover and protect yourself—but even then it is always a dangerous thing to move about with them. To hope to transform them, as some people do, is a vain ...
... similar associations and tried to harbour all groupings which became threatened by the political upheaval … The significance of the Society in this phase of turmoil cannot be overestimated … Many invisible threads met in the Vier Jahreszeiten .” 76 The Thule Society ran an active propaganda campaign against the Reds and printed tens of thousands of leaflets, one of the principal means of political... the summer and winter solstices, were celebrated – all this taking place in clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke en cheered up with sausages and beer. But there was another side to the Thule: the occult activities, covered up by the outward bustle. Thule was after all a secret society whose members were sworn to silence. 67 In the first place there were the sessions of the pseudo-masonic Germanen... routine meetings of instruction and proposal of activities extra muros , or the promotion of a member to a higher grade within the order. And there were the meetings of Thule members interested in occultism of various sorts. We know about Sebottendorff’s Middle Eastern background and he will have sought or been requested to share his knowledge. The readings of Walter Nauhaus, a close collaborator of ...
... a small part of our being and far the larger part of us is below the surface, the frontal consciousness. Or, more accurately, it is behind the frontal consciousness, behind the veil, occult and known only by an occult knowledge. Modern psychology and psychic science have begun to perceive this truth just a little. Materialistic psychology calls this hidden part the Inconscient, although practically... surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by going within. Equally, what we call our physical being is only a visible projection of a greater and subtler invisible physical consciousness which is much more complex, much more aware, much wider in its receptiveness, much more open and plastic and free. If you understand and experience this truth, then only... but if you want to know the watch you must open it and see the working inside. It is something like that—you see only the effect, here; there is a cause behind. It is somewhat like that. The world as we see it and our outer consciousness are the result of something which is behind, which Sri Aurobindo calls the subliminal. And this itself, as he says, is set in motion by impulses which come from ...
... passeth all understanding—is a common experience of the mystics all over the world—it is a fact but a spiritual fact, a fact of the invisible; when one enters it or it enters into one, one knows that it is a truth of existence and is there all the time behind life and visible things. But how am I to "prove" these invisible facts to Mr. Leonard Woolf? he will turn away saying that this is the usual decadent... tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionism, by spiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his highest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine. The tendency towards the search for spirituality began in Europe with a recoil from the nineteenth century's scientific... repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual—mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the ...
... air of nameless puissance is what she feeds on, and a suggestion of termless power seems to envelop her and give a new glow to her every movement. With utter freedom she travels in the occult regions of the world-stair, and is fascinated by all their richness, complexity and variety, their knotted contrasts and their transcendent unity. Securely stationed in what may be called the perfectly awakened... grades of consciousness, going right down to complete darkness, the veritable inconscience". 12 It is like Aswapathy's exploration of the world-stair described in Savitri: In this drop from consciousness to consciousness Each leaned on the occult Inconscient's power, The fountain of its needed Ignorance, Archmason of the limits by which it lives. In this soar from con... little of Thy Peace might live in their hearts and awaken in them the life of the spirit, the light that dispels ignorance. Then I thought of all the inhabitants of this vast sea, both visible and invisible, and I willed that Thy Peace might spread over them. Then I thought of those we had left far behind and whose affection goes with us, and with a great tenderness I wanted Thy conscious and lasting ...
... The Mother on Auroville New Consciousness The city will be built by what is invisible to you. The men who have to act as instruments will do so despite themselves. They are only puppets in the hands of larger Forces. Nothing depends on human beings—neither the planning nor the execution—nothing! That is why one can laugh. +Sep. 1969 * Q:... are ready. Q : That is to say that it is possible so long as they accept the guidance of a sage? Yes. The first thing that should be accepted and recognised by everyone is that the invisible and higher power—that is, the power which belongs to a plane of consciousness that is mostly veiled, but which is within each; a consciousness which can be called anything, Page 25 by... kind or in money. Those who have nothing but money will give money. But to tell the truth, 'work' can be inner work—but one cannot say that, because people are not honest enough. The work can be an occult, completely inner work,but for that, it must be absolutely sincere and true, and with the Page 23 capacity for it: no pretension. But not necessarily a physical work. "Sections ...
... Balcony darshan, the talks in the Playground, the occasional interviews, the vitaminised doses of correspondence, and above all by occult means that defied understanding. With every sadhak, with everyone of her tens of thousands of children, in the Ashram and the outside world, she had a particular and unique and intimate relationship which was there even when it seemed to lack visible expression. Some... them all; and above all, from the Mother's spoken words (instructive and enlightening as they were) to the intervening silences and the invisible vibrations from the Light and Force and Consciousness - one always wanted to be thus led from the visible to the invisible, from objective 'realities' to subjective 'essence', from the heard vibrations of speech intimating seer-wisdoms to the deeper silences... we try to look at the supramental world." 24 As if to reinforce her tentative conclusions, on the 3rd afternoon the Mother walked into the supramental world, "a world that exists in itself, and her action was like building a bridge between the two worlds. Although it was only a dream, it had a concreteness of its own, and she found that the supramental world was a permanent reality, and her ...
... from some invisible fire . This places the “singularity” squarely in dimensions which must remain forever foreign to materialistic science, but without which Reality, including material reality, will never be explainable. For the “invisible fire” in question is not what is commonly understood as “fire,” it is Agni, the mystic fire of the Vedas “which is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret... some invisible Fire, Of its dense rings were formed these million stars … 5 In these lines Sri Aurobindo describes the origin of the universe, with in the last two his evocation of what is now commonly called the “Big Bang.” It should be kept in mind that this was written before 1950. All peoples known in history – and most probably all others also – have wondered about how the world in... unsure . 9 This means that Sri Aurobindo wrote what he had seen as the truth at a time that science was still far from having converted to the Big Bang, namely that “a gas exploded from an invisible fire,” and that “of its dense rings were formed these million stars” – in other words, that the material universe had begun with an explosion. According to the current Big Bang theory, the universe ...
... the life forces, which may be of a higher or a lower order, and sometimes of a very low order. As every level of the human personality – and therefore of a complete education – opens us to the invisible worlds represented by that level, we are accessible to all kinds of forces and beings, mostly without realizing it. Indeed, most of our life is driven by those forces and beings. And humans being what... concentrated aspiration, an almost exclusive occupation of the consciousness.’ 25 Attention is, as it were, the basis of all sense perception, it is our conscious presence to the visible and invisible worlds. ‘Whatsoever you may want to do in life,’ the Mother said to the young people around her, ‘one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of everything: the capacity of concentrating the... went out into the world generally did very well and were often regarded as brilliant. A point worth underlining is that the students were encouraged to be fearless and brave in all circumstances. The reason for this is quite simply that anybody trying to realize his or her soul, or to advance spiritually, will be inevitably attacked by the hostile forces using visible and invisible means. If ordinary ...
... the occult ranges have their own snow-white peaks of achievements, but they may yet miss theutter ethereality of the seeing sound and the hearing sight. When it comes to the question of spiritual poetry aglow with the several suns of beauty, joy, power, truth in manifold combinations, or severally, one has to rise much above the human level, spend years of intense effort to enter into the world of the... could say that the first and the last line here are spiritual, the second mystic, and the third occult—all fusing in the splendour of the spirit’s vibrant greatnesses. If there are "still regions" and "calm immensities" that come to our sudden view in a spiritual blaze, we also have the mystic and the occult geographical, rather cosmographical, wonders of the "eagle-peaks" and "moon-flame oceans" unfolding... contents; Drunk with a wine of lightning in their cells— yogically transformative down to the physical; To live, to love are signs of infinite things— uttering a forceful mantra; or else The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force— bursting with the power of the original Word, the creative bang, sphota , by which and in the omniscient hush of which the expression was born at the moment of the conceptive ...
... we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,—that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or... the physical; to know it is part of a complete knowledge. The knowledge of the supraphysical has been associated with mysticism and occultism, and occultism has been banned as a superstition and a fantastic error. But the occult is a part of existence; a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not... humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic,—for there is and can ...
... have their own play and process and formulations of existence and experience, yet at the same time they penetrate and envelop the physical plane with their invisible presence and influences, and their powers seem to be here in the material world itself behind its action and objects. There are two main orders of experience in our contact with them; one is purely subjective, though in its subjectivity... Ascetic The physical is not the only world; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the soul‘s home; others above... beings of the vital world have a great influence on human beings. The vital world is on one side a world of beauty,—the poet, artist, musician are in close contact with it; it is also a world of powers and passions, lusts and desires,—our own lusts and desires, and passions and ambitions can put us into connection with the vital worlds and their forces and beings. It is again a world of things dark, dangerous ...
... of his work and struggle upon the earth amidst the phenomena of the cosmos. It has been affirmed that, in fact, life, mind and supermind are present in the atom, are at work there, but invisible, occult and latent in a subconscious or apparently unconscious action of energy. The electron and the atom are in this view eternal somnambulists. In the plant the outer form consciousness is still in... downward and around him, but also upward towards what is about him and inward towards what is occult within him. To climb to higher altitudes, to get a greater scope, to transform his lower nature, this is always a natural impulse of man as soon as he has made his place for himself in the physical and vital world of the earth and has a little leisure to consider his further possibilities. He is capable... himself. He has to enlarge his partial being into a complete being, his partial consciousness into an integral consciousness. He has to achieve mastery of his environment, but also world Page 14 union and world harmony. He has to realize his individuality, but also to enlarge into a cosmic self and a universal and process of a transformation, a chastening and correction of all that is obscure ...
... waters white Burst from a fountain hid in depths of night, And thro' a dark and stony cavern glide, A cave profound, invisible... In the mutable sea of material existence are reflected (accord-ing to the Platonic philosophers) the realities of the world of Ideas. The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves Page 118 is an image that must... touch on the inner psychic realms and on vivid occult "Visions of Eternity" as well as his huge mythological imaginings that spoke at times as from a thick shining cloud into which the rational intellect seemed caught up - Coleridge's supernaturalism, his seizure of a terrible haunting indefiniteness, his projection of weird influences from hidden worlds into the midst of primitive and symbolic or else... sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! The Abyssinian maid represents an occult denizen of the poet's soul-depths, dusky with its dream-distances - a won-drous creature of his being's mystical abyss, already hinted objectively by "that deep romantic chasm". And within the abyss ...
... al fancies the modern world has long discarded in order to bustle to the polling booth and the counting house. Numerous subtleties occurred repulsive to the rigid and definite solutions of an age which, masterful with knowledge in the positive and external, tries to extend its autocracy in the shape of a confident ignorance over the bounds of the occulter world within, occult—declared the author,—only... he could make no false turn. A surer guide than his senses and memory led him. He crossed the road, entered the gates of Hyde Park, traversed in a sure and straight line of advance the fogbound invisible open, passed through the Marble Arch, and in Oxford Street, for the first time, hesitated. There were two women who were dear to him, either of whom by her death could desolate half his existence... Stories Stories Occult Idylls Collected Plays and Stories The Phantom Hour Sturge Maynard rose from the fireside and looked out on the blackish yellow blinding fog that swathed London in the dense folds of its amplitude. In his hand he carried the old book he was reading, his finger was still in the page, his mind directed, not with entire satisfaction ...
... effects transformation in his soul and spirit. The initiation by the Guru can even be by putting his hand on the head of the disciple, as Ramakrishna did in the case of Vivekananda. It can be the invisible Presence which can touch the aspirant, Page 11 enter into his consciousness and lead him on the path. Even in his external activities, or in acquisition of skills, the Instructor... Guru. Such a miracle of high order was wrought in Jnaneshwar by the power of his Guru Nivritti, his elder brother, who belonged to the Tantrik Nath Sect or Sampradaya, the Practitioners of the Occult Method. One day Nivritti, when he was hardly a ten-year-old boy, lost his way in the Brahmagiri mountains around the Trimbakeshwara Temple. In that bewildered state he happened to enter a cave where... banquet, alone or in thy presence, I pray forgiveness from thee the immeasurable. Thou art the father of all this world of the moving and unmoving; thou art one to be worshipped and the most solemn object of veneration. None is equal to thee, how then another greater in all the three worlds, O incomparable in might? Therefore I bow down before thee and prostrate my body and I demand grace of thee the ...
... expression, to her, that Sharada, the enchantress of the World, I bow. The supplication of the poet to the Goddess is not just a formality or mannerism of the mediaeval age, nor a mere façon de parler ; in it there is a certain spiritual spontaneity that makes it truly meaningful as much as appealingly genuine. There is in it an occult element which puts us directly in contact with the source... Lost . The Celestial Patroness used to visit Milton in the night, or when “Morn purples the East”, and it is she who gave him the easy “unpremeditated Verse”; she made him see and tell “Of things invisible to mortal sight.” But after a while her visits started becoming infrequent and what greatly entered into his poetry was thought-stuff and thought-strain. On the other hand, we notice in Jnaneshwar... comes with the power of word-sense and sound-sense native to some high spiritual plane above the mental. There is in it thought; there is in it the image; but the soul of its melody belongs to another world giving new values to thought and image; it is that soul who has taken birth here to sing his exceptional song. Being a Yogi par excellence , Jnaneshwar was in Page 17 intimate contact ...
... not clear. Black Cat The black cat is usually the symbol of magic of an evil kind or of an evil influence of the vital world acting on the physical as magic does. It is effective so long as its nature and mode of action are not discovered, so long as it can act invisibly—when it is seen it can be dealt with. The others had not seen it and were not aware that it was taking the life of the sick... The Opening of the Inner Senses The Opening of the Inner Senses Symbols Letters on Yoga - III Chapter VIII The Animal World Cow The cow in the occult symbolism indicates Light or the consciousness—white indicates the purified or spiritual consciousness—the white Light. It is quite clear; it is the Vedic image. In the Veda the Cow is the Divine... the symbol of Light in the consciousness, something psychic or spiritual that you felt natural and intimate to you and inseparable. The vision of the cows must have taken place in the psychic world. It has also a symbolic significance. The sun is the symbol of the Divine Truth, the cows are its powers, rays of the sun, sources of true knowledge, true feeling, true experience. The descent you ...
... that was much better. So this world was created as a world of total freedom, freedom of choice. And it is in this way that at every moment everyone has the freedom of choice—but with all the consequences. If one chooses well, it is good, but if one chooses ill, ah well, what's to happen happens—that is what has happened! The story may be understood in a much more occult and spiritual sense. But it... made a decisive step in our spiritual progress, the invisible enemies of the the Divine always try to have their revenge and when they cannot injure the soul they strike the body, but all their efforts are in vain and will finally be defeated, for the Divine Grace is with us. " Words of the Mother, CWM Vol. 15, p. 22 What are these "invisible enemies of the Divine"? They are precisely those... through you with me." And it was thus that she created the gods, who were quite docile and not so proud, and who began the creation of the world. But as the others had come before them, at every step the gods met the others. And it was in this way that the world changed into a battlefield, a place of war, strife, suffering, darkness and all the rest, and for each new creation the gods had to fight with ...
... divine governance. There is an occult order which is behind the material and mental order known to man. And it is that unseen and unknown occult world which governs from behind this outer material, vital and mental life. Faculties of the inmost, i.e. subliminal mind disclose the knowledge of the world's mystery. An ascending and a descend- ing order of worlds from Eternity into Time and from Time... n of the Divine from above, for it cannot be done by unaided human effort. Though, outwardly this world looks like a material world and seems to be governed by mere chance, still from a' more occult and spiritual point of view it would appear that there is a divine governance of the world behind this apparent reign of chaos or chance. And it is really this mighty guidance that can be relied... spiritual experience. He could know the motives, ideas and wishes in other men and he felt also world thought-streams running into his own mind. He could hear secret voices and the "Word that knows". He came in contact with planes of consciousness other than the consciousness of the earth and contacted beings on occult planes. In fact, his consciousness ceased to be limited in the individual nature, and began ...
... and to have the sense of Page 199 another being than himself, an invisible presence in the room. The inner being is often felt as someone separate from or other than the ordinary self, but it is not usually felt outside. So it may be that in this state of withdrawal he comes into contact with another plane or world and attracts to himself one of its beings who wants to share in his sadhana... near to the physical world, all seems very material and concrete and the association of physical habits and physical Page 193 mental movements with the subtle events is closer. Vital Experiences The place where you were [ in a dream ] is as much a world of fact and reality as is the material world and its happenings have sometimes a great effect on this world. What an ignorant lot... course something that is fixed in you in the vital plane and has to come out hereafter in the physical consciousness. You are too physically matter of fact. Besides you are quite ignorant of occult things. The vital is part of what European psychologists sometimes call the subliminal and the subliminal, as everybody ought to know, can do things the physical cannot do—e.g. solve a problem in a ...
... dove descending from heaven; it is the eye of intuition which can open in him and show him the worlds otherwise lying hidden from sight. Since the third eye will give him whatever he asks for, it is important that the Yogin should possess a certain capacity, adhikāara, to hold the gifts ensuing from its occult power which if misused can prove to be disastrous. The gift is meant to further his spiritual... in history. It weighs 11 tons on earth, is 13.2 m in length and has a diameter of 4.2 m at its maximum. But the cold universe doesn't breathe life in its amazing peep. This eye cannot show us the "invisible day of our night",- to use Arjava's phrase. In that respect our eye spans sights beyond sights. It enables us to see objects at variable distances and under different conditions of light... Mother. Plato's eye views a wonderful world of forms of which things are just remote copies here. A technique, rather a faculty of vision that sees objects with another sensitivity, has been highly specialised in India. A seer's knowledge is a visioned truth and that is why it is called a Darshan. But sight does not stop simply at seeing the metaphysics of the world or in defining a shape for the abstract ...
... everything possible to avert that accomplishment, for it would have put an end to their sovereignty over the earth. Hitler was their choice instrument. War was inevitable because of the occult all-or-nothing situation in the world, but it was provisionally averted by the divine protagonists for reasons known only to them though certainly related to the massive descent of the Supermind at the time. Nirodbaran... Chapter Fifteen: A Night in November For us historical events sometimes have reasons which reason does not know, and the force lines of history may be as invisible but nonetheless as real as the force lines of a magnetic field. 1 — Louis Pauwels The three darshan days were the highlights of the year in the Ashram. All Ashramites looked forward... Presence who, with the blessing of the day, gave to all what they needed for their inner well-being and progress. On every occasion, the darshans were prepared by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the occult plane. ‘There is usually a descent, but there is also a great opposition to the descent at these times 2 … It is true that attacks are frequent at that time.’ 3 (Sri Aurobindo) The resistance ...
... from various sources. It may be a vision through identity with circumstances and things when you have learned to expand your consciousness. It may be an indication from some chatterbox of the invisible world, who has got it into his head to let you know what's going to happen—this is often the case. Then everything depends on your "harbinger's" morals: if he is having fun at your expense, he spins... already worked out down to the least detail on an occult plane. Is this correct? What is this plane of knowledge? Is there more than one? How can one gain conscious access to it in the waking state? And how is it that serious people, who have a divine realization, are sometimes so grossly mistaken in their predictions? Ooh, but it's a whole world! ( Mother laughs ) It's not one question, it's twenty... jumped back a streetcar rushed by. I had felt the streetcar at a little more than arm's length. It had touched my aura, the protective aura (that aura was very strong at the time—I was deep into occultism and knew how to maintain it). My protective aura was touched, and it literally threw me backwards, just like a physical shock. Accompanied by the driver's insults! I leapt back just in time, and ...
... we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations—this is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong... Page 10 individual is aware of himself as only a finite, mortal being engaged in an unequal struggle with the immense,. unpredictable forces that assail him from many invisible sources. But, paradoxical as it may seem, the very ego which accentuates division and discord, chooses, after its development is complete, to break down the wall and seek by its willed self-extinction the... all sorts of unusual feats and practices are often lumped together under the omnibus term. Yoga. From necromancy to levitation, from acid-swallowing to fire-walking, any extraordinary display of occult or magical powers is allowed to impress the mind and confuse its perception ¹ Letters of Sri Aurobindo. Page 7 of spiritual values. Yoga, as I have said above ...
... life-power; the material comes in last and embodies. How is one to meet adverse forces—forces that are invisible and yet quite living and tangible? Page 33 A great deal depends upon the stage of development of your consciousness. At the beginning, if you have no special occult knowledge and power, the best you can do is to keep as quiet and peaceful as possible. If the attack takes... possibly opened yourself to them and they have settled in you unnoticed. The true nature of things is one of harmony; but there is a distortion in certain worlds that brings in perversion and hostility. If you have a strong affinity for these worlds of distortion, you can become friends with the beings that are there and answer fully to them. That happens, but it is not a very happy condition. The c... even with a bit of hair or nail, fearing that they would lose thereby something of their personality. Those who are capable Page 35 of extending the consciousness as wide as the world, become the world; but those who are shut up in their little bodies and limited feelings stop at those limits; their bodies and their petty feelings are to them their whole self. Can mere faith create all ...
... senses, into an insuperable mental dogma. As such it restricts the field of its activities to what the general public still supposes to be the material world (but what has since about a century ago become an occult world of invisible forces and even invisible matter, and recently of an infinite number of universes). This doctrine will one day have to be overcome if the search for Truth is to continue. ... will labouring towards true force, a desire seeking for the delight of existence. To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves … is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the... play in the world economy. After his death, in 1977, another essay of his was published: A Guide for the Perplexed. It borrowed its title from a seminal medieval treatise by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. A Guide expounds the reflections of a thinker who, as in his other work, does not hesitate to disclose his original perceptions of the world. “Our task is to look at the world and see it ...
... around us. These thoughts may not be ours, may come upon us from others." The jottings in Sastriar's diary are a kind of shorthand, but now and then they suddenly leap to life. And one seeks the invisible links between the aspiration and the response, the flowers given by the Mother and the climate of Sastriar's receptivity. Also, behind the entries - many of them colourless - one sees Sastriar himself... her, receive her inspiring touch and drink in her words .12 he was obviously writing both for himself and other sadhaks and disciples. But always the emphasis had to be much more on the invisible undemonstrative inner than on the visible or outer relationship: in other words, on the psychic rapport and contact. Sri Aurobindo made this explicit in letter after letter: The relation... see. Nevertheless, they reveal to us some of the pointerreadings during the long years of his sadhana under the guidance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A word or two, and one is drawn into the occult regions regions. Once Sastriar notes: "There was a new twinkle - significant - at pranam from the Mother; so joyous." On one of his birthdays, after meditation, the Mother gives him the flowers ...
... On the subject of possession of a person by an invisible being, the Mother said: ‘There are cases in which people become very ill and come out of the illness totally different from what they were before.’ 10 These words immediately call to mind an event in Hitler’s life mentioned by all his biographers. After having been blinded in the First World War, during a gas attack near the Belgian town of... of his will / To push the demon back into his cell. / My father held the seal and broke it. / He did not sense the breath of evil / And out into the world he let the devil.’ 16 Everything Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, with their extensive occult knowledge, have said about Hitler being possessed by the Demon could be confirmed by many more historical facts. But the so-called ‘objective’ historians... committed by the Nazis could be inspired by nothing but a monstrous Power to which (or rather to whom) humans are dwarf-like, ant-like beings, though sometimes instruments temporarily inflated by the invisible powers they open themselves to in their ignorance — but afterwards Adolf Eichman again, functionary and civilian, in the dock of history. The Hitlerian Man-god Indeed, as Brissaud wrote: ‘Those ...
... the driving consciousness has chosen to conceal itself with the greatest thoroughness so that, " scientifically speaking ", it does not exist there. One can discover it there by occultism and yoga, but the methods of occult science and of yoga are not measurable or followable by the means of physical science, so the gulf remains in existence. It may be bridged one day, but the- physicist is not likely... is all we are, is only a small part of our being and by far the larger part of us is below the surface, or, more accurately, it is behind the frontal consciousness, behind the veil occult and known only by an occult knowledge. Modern psychology and psychic science have begun to perceive this truth just a little. Materialistic psychology calls this hidden fact the Inconscient, although practically... but in being, the Purusha. " ² " Consciousness is a reality inherent in existence. It is there even when it is not active on the surface, but silent and immobile; it is there even when it is invisible on the surface, not reacting on outward things or sensible to them, but withdrawn and either active or inactive within; it is there even when it seems to us to be quite absent and the being to our ...
... to him, ever present or significant to him, and these might comprise happenings in our world or in the occult worlds above and below, insights and inscapes and intensities undreamt of by the average human mentality; and unless the reader brings to the task of poetic appreciation a similar ardour for the Invisible and a total imaginative attention facilitating the opening of an inner door of understanding... shine is not the complex of outward actualities alone, but, more importantly, all - all the invisible worlds below and above - that may lie behind our apparent material life: What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his back look upon the past, his sweep of vision over the present, his... society and human polity, the past failures, the present confusions, the future possibilities, are also dramatised on the multi-tier stage of Savitri; the evolution and architecture of the occult worlds - the worlds of light above, the regions of darkness below, the twilight realm between - are presented in Savitri as compellingly living realities; and, finally, whatever was of universal relevance ...
... the central metaphor, the World-Stair. The second half of the extended simile of this world-pile disappearing in the hushed conscious Vast is As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven Built by the aspiring soul of man to live Near to his dream of the Invisible. Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs; Its spire touches the apex of the world; Mounting into great... objects." 10 So says K. D. Sethna. It is "a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable... he hidden and unexplored."" The poet of Savitri , a great mystic that he is, gives constantly rapturous expressions to things beyond, the things behind the apparent world through his symbols. They not only "bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind ...
... our faces towards the invisible Light and bring closer and closer the future to which the consummation of the body's supramental change has been postponed. Yes, more and more close—for, the postponement, the putting-off to a time-to-come, is not something fatalistically fixed. The Divine is never Time's slave. He can move farther and nearer as He wills, within the domain of world-circumstances He has... unworthiness of its objects: it knows very well the nature of the stuff it deals with and it gives itself ceaselessly and will carry out what it has set its heart upon. The Mother left her body for occult reasons which determined that the immediate present period was not the one in which her undertaking could best be fulfilled for the good of her follow- 1 Sri Aurobindo on Himself, SABCL,... constantly at work on her followers as well as, in a lesser degree, on the rest of mankind, and the new Power that has become a factor in evo-lution is also pressing on to produce an effect in the world's surface-life. The process is postponed only in the sense of being retarded, slowed down. Our previous article should have explicitly distinguished the complete achievement from the movement towards ...
... being familiar with all kinds of worlds, substances and bodies through her occult experience. She knew the gods intimately, as of course she knew her own bodies in the various worlds, one of which she described after the experience of the supramental ship. She knew also what the supramental body was like because she had seen it ‘at the limit of the manifested world’ when still at Tlemcen. Also, there... no doubt about that, but there will always be a proportion and a relation.’ 27 Even we 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... representing ‘the Bird of Peace descending upon earth.’ There were dozens of letters to answer. And always there was the ‘cloud’ of invisible presences around her, pulling for her attention. Thus will be the way she ‘withdrew’ till six months before the end. In the world the decade of the 1960s had begun, with its protests and upheavals among the youth and the young-hearted, with its ‘flower power ...
... for he knows it only through himself and that at which his being aims, through the world and that at which it seems to point and which it is either striving obscurely to reach and express by its imperfect figures or, at least, founds them without knowing it on their secret relation to that invisible Reality and occult Infinite. This third and unknown, this tertium quid , he names God; and by the... ourselves by exceeding ourselves,—so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind seer who knew not the self of which he spoke,—is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the... call it what he will, he must arrive at a Supreme, a Divine, a Cause, an Infinite and Eternal, a Permanent, a Perfection to which all tends and aspires, or an All to which everything perpetually and invisibly amounts and without which they could not be. Yet even this Absolute he cannot really affirm by itself and to the exclusion of the two other categories; for then he has only made a violent leap ...
... That means that their true justification for being there is gone." (Ibid., p. 1744) The existence and the adverse action of the hostile forces is an acknowledged fact of the occult dispensation of the world. These inimical forces and beings try to disturb the spiritual pursuit of the sadhakas. If through the Grace of the Divine or through some other propitious factors, a sadhaka can manage... that we, in our spiritual sadhana, have to confront not only the common weaknesses and obstacles of our lower Nature but also the more devious and subtle oppositions of Page 332 invisible hostile forces and evil-intentioned beings who try to frustrate our spiritual advancement? Yes, such is the experiential testimony given by the great Yogis of the past both in the East and in the... have mentioned at the outset of this essay that the existence and nature of these adverse forces has been known to the inquiring spirit of man since the earliest recorded history of the race. The occult traditions of ancient Egypt and Cabbala are full of their accounts. Zoroaster of ancient Persia specifically warned the aspirants of the spiritual path about the clever ploys of these hostile beings ...
... ideal perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas ; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the... that nothing endures. Obviously Ariel had an invisible shape—invisible to human eyes, but the point of the passage is that all shapes and substances and beings disappear into nothingness. We are concerned with Prospero's meaning, not with what actually happened to the spirits or for that matter to the pageant which we might conceive also of having an invisible source or material. He uses the total dis... before—namely, that "these our actors ... were all spirits". They melt into thin air but do not disappear from existence, from conscious being of some character however unearthly: they just become invisible and what disappears is the visible pageant produced by them, a seemingly material construction which yet was a mere phantom. From this seeming, Prospero catches the suggestion that all that looks ...
... feeling of the approach of the invisible Beloved and the possibility of changing the world with the beauty of a smile. Aswapathy found that this was Page 222 "An hour eternal in the heart of Time. The silent soul of all the world was there". It was "A single Person who was himself and all" and. he was "Trans- forming all experience to delight". This world-soul "led things evil... Made of the sands upon a bank of Time, Mid an occult eternity's shoreless sea." The knowledge that man has to acquire is not to be acquired from outside. It is already there within us "hid behind our minds". It has in fact fallen asleep and "To evoke, to give it form is Nature's task". This cannot be done hastily because the whole world-ignorance is to be liquidated and "Only a slow advance... They framed the cabbala of the cosmic Law". They permeate all the forces of nature and forge their ends under the mask of necessity and chance. From the chaotic moods of the Infinite and the Invisible, they derive the calculus of destiny. To the physical mind of man, this deeper and higher aspect of the working of gods is not known. All the living elements that enter into the constitution of the ...
... end of the dance she offered that ring of flowers at the Mother’s Feet. * One day a gentleman arrived at the Ashram and proudly declared: “I can materialise all kinds of things from the invisible world.” He said many other such things with great pride. After listening to him Pranab made all the arrangements in the Playground for him to show his skills. The Mother was present too. He began... sorts of things and doing all kinds of movements. Then suddenly Pranab roared out and approaching the gentleman told him: “I know this game of yours. You are not materialising anything from the invisible world, you are just making a fool of us all.” The gentleman simply shied away, quite baffled. The Mother suddenly got up from Her chair, went through the Guest-house door and began walking out. I... Her palm that went right from the wrist to the little finger. I had never seen such a line before. So I asked the Mother: “What does this line signify, Mother?” She replied: “Only those with occult power have this line.” The Mother’s palm was so soft as if made of cotton. We all felt Her hand one after the other while She smiled. After inaugurating the weight-lifting section, the Mother ...
... ourself. What we seem to be is a thinking human animal. What we are and have to become is God; the secret purpose of our existence here is to find the occult Reality of ourselves and the world, to become Divine. 92 Our existence in the world has a reality which is other than that which strikes our mind and senses on the surface. It contains a secret, a mystery which we have to discover, for... terms; it cannot identify itself with the other links and misses their significance and their purpose. It stands on the middle of the bridge looking all around it, but the bridgeheads are to its sight invisible. It cannot see what is there, but only speculate, infer or conjecture. Science questing with its measuring rod of empirical experiment begins to have a dark glimpse of the Inconscient; it knows... Consciousness-Energy, Bliss of being, Ananda. It would not materially affect the fundamental satisfactoriness of this explanation that the world we live in is not a world of bliss, not a world of consciousness,—though it is in its evident appearance, a world of being and of energy of being, that it is in Page 273 its phenomenal basis inconscient and works itself out through process and ...
... pragmatic, limited and insecure. Its defence against the invasion of the cosmic energy is equally insecure and partial: in spite of its notice of no entry without permission, it is subtly and invisibly invaded by the world, enveloped by the not-self and moulded by it; its thought, its will, its emotional and its life energy are penetrated by waves and currents of thought, will, passion, vital impacts, forces... our limited and restricted mental way of looking at our self, at our inner movements and at the world outside us and its objects and happenings, is so constituted that it derives in different degrees from a fourfold order of knowledge. The original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, Page 543 is a knowledge... impact of thoughts, feelings, forces. It is by these means that the inner being achieves an immediate, intimate and accurate spontaneous knowledge of persons, of objects, of the occult and to us intangible energies of world-Nature that surround us and impinge upon our own personality, physicality, mind-force and life-force. In our surface mentality we are sometimes aware of a consciousness that can ...
... of sleep. 31 The 'pang divine' cuts through the occult sky and stands like a crescent pointing to her the giant figure she has to meet or encounter in the night. The event of Satyavan's death thus became pretextual in taking Savitri to the world of eternal darkness where reigns Death. Eventually in those thick occult spaces a decisive battle was fought and victory for the Divine... suns of poetry can then freely pour their radiances in our creative expression. In it the "rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight of God and Nature and the world and the inner truth—occult to the outward eye—of all that peoples it, the secret of inner life and being" 41 gives value to our life and thought and to our aesthetic existence. In the completeness of its expression... have in it mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, metaphysics, art, science, literature, history of man and history of earth, all that is noble and living, that can impart to our perception the sense of infinity which can give meaning to our daily occupations. Any one of these can become our foundational engagement; in fact it has thus already opened out an altogether new world of creative action ...
... tinkle of bells and there was the rush of a mighty wind, both almost combined as if a tempest had set dancing an innumerable carillon. But the tempest itself, as it swept again and again round that invisible belfry, became a giant tune — so immense that Andre feared his piano might burst with that endless sonority. What puzzled him was that the ringing of bells persisted in spite of the large music and... a thin silver thread through the skylight. There was indeed the candle burning before him but its flicker could not have caused the faint tremble of white fire above his head. What blending of the occult and the natural was here — experienced by him as though through his Master's eyes? Anyway, it was no use keeping the candle burning now that the moon was gradually beautifying the room. Andre blew... gaze a long time into those eyes of deep fire and at that brow at once narrow and high which spoke the pure intensity of the soul of Rene de Bourneval. Surely that face had seen a glory beyond our world; and why should he, Andre, doubt It who had watched Page 170 the Master at work and marvelled at that religious passion of his which made the white hair look like a halo over his head ...
... manifest the new godhead in mind, life and body. There will be at once an inner revelation and an outer transformation. Something will be born that was not here or was latent and hidden in its own invisible radiances and at the same time there will be a metamorphosis and reversal in our existing structure. A creation by a consensus of superior and nether powers is the condition demanded by the Spirit... one or other of two great ends, either the abandonment of the world and departure into some reality of supracosmic existence or some form of limited perfection, knowledge, bliss or mastery in the world. But there is a third objective of Yoga in which there is a harmony between world existence & supracosmic freedom. God is possessed; the world is not renounced or rather renounced as an aim in itself, but... though that Page 367 attainment is its basis without which no transformation is possible. In this transformation there are four elements, the psychic opening, the transit through [the] occult, the spiritual release, the supramental perfection. If any of the four is unachieved, the Yoga remains incomplete. I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul nature. This is not the ...
... in the being, the Self or Purusha. Consciousness is a reality inherent in existence. It is there even when it is not active on the surface, but silent and immobile; it is there even when it is invisible on the surface, not reacting on outward things or sensible to them, but withdrawn and either active or inactive within; it is there even when it seems to us to be quite absent and the being to our... exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound—for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious,—supramental or overmental and submental... and with all things and beings. It is not an individual strength depending on certain personal capacities, but the Divine Power using the individual as an instrument. It has no special relation to occult siddhis. Force is the essential Shakti; Energy is the working drive of the Force, its active dynamism; Power is the capacity born of the Force; Strength is energy consolidated and stored in ...
... who desired to help suffering humanity turned to the outer world in search of external means whereas she alone looked for the eternal source of alleviation. She was in search of "the birth-place of the occult Fire," the deep mansion of her saviour soul. Only one from amongst the gathered gods answered her call. Follow the world's winding highway to its source. There in the silence few... seated on a golden height a figure of supreme Effulgence, a form of indefinable Splendour,—the fount and force of everything, A Power of which she was a straying Force, An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire, A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam, A Greatness without whom no life could be. 52 She realises everything receding into nameless silence of the pure formless... few have ever reached, Thou shalt see the Fire burning on the bare stone And the deep cavern of thy secret soul. 22 These were the occult powers, the messengers who helped men and brought solace and light into their lives. They knew that Savitri was the incarnation of the Divine Mother. O human copy and disguise of God Who seekst the deity thou keepest hid. 23 Following ...
... Impressionist artists of the time. She later became acquainted with Max Theon, an enigmatic character with extraordinary occult powers who, for the first time, gave her a coherent explanation of the spontaneous experiences occurring since her childhood, and who taught her occultism during two long visits to his estate in Algeria. In 1914 she visited the city of Pondicherry, which was at that... ---------------------------------------------------------The Realisation-------------------------------------------------------- A land of fairy light. ASPIRANT Here we are, borne upon invisible wings, by a miraculous power! SECOND ASPIRANT (Looking all around) What marvellous splendour! Now we have only to learn to live the new life. ----------------------------... completely cut off from the world and life. Nothing, nothing is left on which we can base our understanding. (He looks back towards the point where the path turns at right angles) And there! We can't even see where we are going! It is an absurdity or a delusion — Page 306 perhaps both! After all, there might not even be any Truth to discover. The world and life are only a dead end ...
... laboratory of the world. These were the "Wednesday classes," the time of Questions and Answers, which would last for eight years, until 1958. In the simplest language, a language for children, She brought flowing down, like crystal water, all the occult knowledge which used to be carefully guarded for initiatory schools. These simple classes would constitute the most formidable "de-occultization" ever to... composed incredible arpeggios, like Franz Liszt, for nothing other than a grand piano. And that is where the school of the new world, as we might call it, the school of the next evolution makes an imperceptible detour—imperceptible to everyone, Sri Aurobindo's yoga is the invisible yoga par excellence, like the air we breathe, perhaps like truth: ONE CAN DO WHAT ONE IS USED TO DOING, BUT ONE DOES IT... be a rather strange place in the world, like a sample of the next way of being on earth—but would the rest of the world have tolerated it? Oneness works both ways. The "rest of the world" was there, too, in the cells of those children. Something more radical than a few widened consciousnesses was needed; it was imperative to go down into the very cells of the world, in order to change things at the ...
... These expressions give a sort of body to the occult without taking from it its strangeness and do not leave it in mist or in shadowy image or luminous silhouette. That is what a fully successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or... TRANCE Closing your eyes, outstretch vague hands of prayer Beyond the prison-house of mortal air... Then, soul-awakened, watch the universe thrill With secrets drawn from the Invisible— A force of gloom that makes each flicker-stress Bare the full body of its goldenness And yield in that embrace of mystery A flaming focus of infinity, A fire-tongue nourished... or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the stark occult reality of Us vision is a good example; for the latter there are lines both in his poems and yours that I could instance, but I cannot recall them accurately just now—but have you not somewhere a line ...
... and there lay like a pall the even starker ignorance of the clash of the occult forces behind the visible façade. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, however, based their conclusions and actions on the certain knowledge of the movements in the occult world-stair and the light it threw on the actualities of the current world situation. Sri Aurobindo conned the news and reports in the papers, and listened... Thou dost appear, up above the base of black skies, Lo, our hearts are like the pure monstrance Where the divine touch comes softly ... In the silence the gong sounds, a flame Invisible descends...Joy, Sweetness, Benediction ... Thou art there now...All is Adoration! So beautiful and so mighty, Thy forehead crowned with a belt of stars, Towards us Thou leanest... Thy... retiring, she used to arrange flowers in her room much as a generalissimo deployed his forces on the battlefield. Individual flowers and the specific formations were presumably charged with a nameless occult force of action to counteract movements and possibilities in the distant theatres of the War. There were also chance spells of unexpected sunshine. On one occasion early in 1940, Champaklal ...
... activity to demolish Page 91 the barrier between the Untouchables and the rest of our population: even Hinduism itself, the whole grand structure of spiritual aspiration towards the invisible Divine, was a mockery to Gandhi so long as that barrier was not torn down. One of his often-quoted utterances is that he would far rather that Hinduism died than that Untouchability lived! Here is... compared, one such experience would not give a man the authentic mystical status. But in point of fact an experience like Gandhi's carries by itself no guarantee of a mandate from on high. Any distinctive occult phenomenon is not necessarily spiritual in origin any more than is an exceptionally willed abstinence or a keen urge towards philanthropy. The call received by Gandhi to fast has nothing in it similar... The Indian Spirit and the World's Future The Real Gandhi: An Impartial Estimate of His Greatness IN psycho-analytic practice there is a well-known method of testing our instinctive responses, plumbing our spontaneous idea-associations. A number of carefully chosen words are spoken to us and we have to blurt out without a moment's thought the words ...
... Kurus dwell, The ancients of the world, invisible, Among forgotten mists. Through mists he moved Feeling a sense of unseen cities, hearing No sound, nor seeing face, but conscious ever Of an immense traditionary life Throbbing round him and dreams historical... In the middle part of the poem there is a brief suggestion of the heaven from which Urvasie descends to cohabit... veiled quest of the Infinite. 1 1 The passage from which these 5 lines have been culled, as well as the Page 68 In a less veiled manner Urvasie creates an impression of occult realities or entities. There is not yet the Yogi's eye at work, embodying with intimate awareness the forces and beings behind the earth's complex search and march. But with a kindled imagination Sri... mysticism that has conceived the Apsaras, of whom Pururavus's beloved is the most perfect representative. The Apsaras of Indian mythology, said to have been churned out of the Ocean of Existence, are the occult personalised agencies through which Divine Beauty is at universal play in the phenomena of sense-experience, in the aspirations of the sensuous mind. The passage where Sri Aurobindo is absolutely explicit ...
... insubstantial, unreal and on the whole fictitious. We have been cheated too many times by the so-called representatives of the spirit vaunting their abilities to describe to us the intangible and invisible, and to formulate the inaudible. Their contact with the spirit was the only true contact, they claimed, and had to be accepted at face value under the penalty of eternal damnation of our soul. They... downwards by the weight of the past it carries in him, by the darkness, the ignorance and the burden of the subconscious, by the weight of matter and the irrationality of the lower vital — all the invisible but very real forces affecting his thinking, usually a bobbing cork on the restless inner waves. Sri Aurobindo called this ‘the downward gravitation’. Moreover, the mental consciousness of the human... spiritual worlds as an unreal fiction. And this is why, after centuries of contradictory accounts and descriptions by those who claimed to have access to these worlds, humankind has resolutely put both feet on the solid ground of matter and declared this to be its true domain. Still, humans know little of the spiritual worlds. They sometimes sense them so intensely that their familiar world is turned ...
... victories. And even after the conclusion of the Second World War, the struggle in the occult worlds between the forces of the Darkness and the Light, of Falsehood and Truth, of stagnation and progress, continued with an even greater ruthlessness. The words of the Mother were accordingly more than mere words; they were carriers of potent occult forces. Thus one could visualise a sustained struggle between... dedication ceremony itself was memorably distinctive in its grand simplicity and symbolic sufficiency. There were no speeches, there was no visible presiding dignitary. But many were conscious of an invisible Presence that brooded with outspread protective wings over the mass of humanity as if nurturing their hope for the future. At last, at 10.30, the words of the Mother's message of welcome came with... Sanskrit, then English, followed by thirteen languages of the world in their alphabetical order: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Tibetan. It was really the same song of human aspiration though coming in different notes, and the reiteration in the languages of the world was but the ringing peal of the coming global symphony. Here ...
... tones of ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere of these high lights - in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is... the sense; A few rare intimations come as guides, Immense divining flashes cleave her brain... Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, A Will expressive... expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose." And then he went on in another letter: "What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners) ...
... bliss even long before the sense of enjoyment is born out of it. It has no here and there, and no spot specific to it, and no event tells anything about it; it has no front and no back and, remaining invisible, it can yet see though it doesn’t seem to have an eye. By its attributes and qualities, its descriptive and discriminative faculties, with several names and several forms is it known to us, even as... 31 This is the great doctrine, the esoteric Shastra taught by the Teacher on the battlefield of life to his fond friend and dear disciple; he has been gradually prepared to receive this occult-spiritual knowledge which alone can unravel the mystery of this existence. It is a sure means to overcome the travails of this earthly life, a path that leads the seeker-soul away from all conflicts... inverted tree of the first shloka of the fifteenth chapter, he says: “It is a description of the Eternal Tree, Brahma Vriksha, which otherwise is known as the World Tree, Samsar Vriksha. Samsar here means the world as is visible to us, the phenomenal world or the creation we can perceive and cognise, and not just the trivial rounds of our daily life. Sankhya calls it the multifold wideness of the active ...
... transference from the physical and sensible to the invisible, into a pursuit of deceiving lights or at least to a misreception of things valid in themselves but marred by a wrong or imperfect interpretation of what is experienced or a confusion and disorder of the true spiritual values. If reason finds itself obliged to admit the dynamics of occultism, there too it will be most concerned with the truth... his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material front... front of the universe: that is the field of occultism, if we take the word in its widest significance. He must know also the hidden Power or Powers that control the world: if there is a Cosmic Self or Spirit or a Creator, he must be able to enter into relation with It or Him and be able to remain in whatever contact or communion is possible, get into 2. Social and Political Thought , SABCL ...
... Lightning, into thy invisible flame". Leave the limit Page 360 that divides you and Satyavan: "Receive him into boundless Savitri." "Lose thyself into infinite Satyavan." But Savitri answered: my soul and his are indissolubly linked to raise the world to God, to bring God down to the world,—to change earthly life to life divine. "I keep my will to save the world and man". "If thou... thou and I are true, the world is true". "Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God". If man cannot outgrow his present limitation then a greater race than man must appear from man. The God answered: "thou art the force by which I made the worlds. But you know the world-plan and the tardy process of Time. Do not lead the spirit in an ignorant world to dare too soon the adventure of the Light... ladder to greater worlds where no world can be. The summit of Mind, greater Life-plane, or subtle Matter are only mediating links—they are not originating planes. If you want to deliver man and earth then, on the spiritual height, "discover the truth of God and man and world", "ascend...into thy timeless self". "Choose destiny's curve and stamp thy will on Time." Then the heaven-worlds disappeared in ...
... route: I have studied the map of the invisible worlds; I am the battle's head, the journey's star.... A few I guide who pass me towards the Light; A few I save... 25 Savitri does not accept the decision of the Lord of Death to snatch Satyavan away from the life on earth and, finally, Satyavan is given back to her and to the world. Savitri descends from the higher regions... 82 and one sees Matrimandir as a place that ... lay like a closed soundless oratory Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor Lit by a single and untrembling ray And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer. 83 There The soul lit the conscious body with its ray, Matter and Spirit mingled and were one. 84 Behold 76 Ibid., p. 689. 77 Ibid.... bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny Where all is won or all is lost for man. 44 And this, as the poet told us earlier, is in the face of the fact that The world unknowing, for the world she stood. 45 She is doing it so. Later we are told: A day may come when she must stand unhelped... Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast. 46 The ...
... of the individual he has been able to develop a special mental capacity and aptitude such as the ability for creative writing or musical talent, these elements may move about for some time in the invisible realms of the earthly atmosphere after the physical death of the person concerned, and try to seek out appropriate vehicles of self-expression. And when they find out a living human being who has... spheres of existence, the earthly-physical world and the supraphysical worlds, bring their own separate significant contributions. Now, just as in the case of an individual human being there are planes of consciousness like the physical, the vital, the mental and others, so also in the cosmic field there exist beyond the physical-material world other worlds like the vital, mental, etc. And what is... the corresponding vital world of the supraphysical cosmos. And the same principle holds good for the other parts of the being and other planes of the world. It is because of this correspondence and interconnection that the "jivatma" feels an irresistible pull from the higher worlds after it has shed its earthly-physical body, and it makes it enter those other worlds successively one after another ...
... Psychologists today speak of 'depth' psychology. According to them, at the back of our mind, there lies another hidden and profounder mental world – the unconscious or subconscious. Spiritualists and yogis speak of still another unknown and invisible world, above and beyond the mind. Somewhat in the same way the Soviet gymnasts are telling us and, more than that, showing us, that there is no limit... ven-eight, the Mother's centenary, to go no further. These "dates in their sequence are significant in that they indicate or represent some occult phenomena, some happenings in the inner world, each marking a step forward in the manifestation of the New World of the Supramental. To come back. Among the characteristics of the Soviet Gymnasts, also the major lessons that one can learn from Page... spiritual disciplines we follow and their rationale. You know, officially and in the world's eye the Soviet Union is atheistic and follows a materialist philosophy of life. God, soul, the beyond, or the higher worlds, in these things the new Russians of today have no faith, none. Their entire stress or sraddha is on this world, this life, on the physical-vital-mental being whom they call Man. It was arranged ...
... succeeded for both her children. But she... She was down on her knees before my brother. My mother scorned all religious sentiments as weakness and superstition and she absolutely denied the invisible. 'It's all brain disease,' she would say! But she could say just as well, 'Oh, my Matteo is my God, he is my God.' The devil knows why, but in Alexandria she gave him the Italian name Matteo! And... rather capable young man). So there we were, and I remember I was observing something rather interesting in his atmosphere (mind you, although the faculties were already there, I knew nothing about occult things; if someone had spoken to me of 'auras' and all that.... I knew nothing). I was observing a kind of sensation I had felt in his atmosphere and then, just as I was putting the fork into my mouth... was a dream—'a stupid dream.' But he came to let her know he was dead and she saw him. 'It's nothing,' she said, 'a dream!' ( Mother laughs ) When my grandmother died.... My grandmother had the occult sense. She had made her own fortune (a sizeable fortune) and had had five children, each one more extravagant than the other. She considered me the only sensible person in the family and she shared ...
... Gayatri, Usnik, Anustup, Brihati, Pankti, Tristup, and Jagati, each having specific number of syllables, represent vast rhythms of rita, which contain the occult power of universal and particular forms of harmony that abound the world of names and forms. It is this understanding of rhythms and meters that seems to have guided meticulous scruple that was insisted upon by the Vedic tradition in... of the truth. The highest perception of truth climbs from the physical to the vital, emotional, intellectual, intuitive, inspired and comprehensive truth. The poet is the Rishi, when he sees the invisible and hears the inaudible; he is the drashtā when he sees the higher truth that lies beyond all narrowness in the wideness, in the brihat and in the highest ether of existence parame vyomani. ¹... speaks of the knowledge of the Self, which opens the door to the self which is bliss, and points out that he who knows the Bliss and the Eternal, he fears not anything in this Page 75 world or elsewhere. The poet who celebrates the bliss of the self is, therefore, fearless victor.² Beauty is but a form of bliss, and wherever there is depth of experience and of aesthesis which goes beyond ...
... of the becoming, appearing as "an executive Force or an energy of Process which is seen to constitute, drive and guide all conceivable activities and to create a myriad forms visible to us and invisible and use them as stable supports for its incessant flux of action and creation." 1 Apparently, Purusha and Prakriti seem to be two different and distinct Principles. Not only that: in the... an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite. 1 ...In the gnosis the dualism of Purusha and Prakriti, Soul and Nature,...disappears in their biune unity, the dynamic mystery of the occult Supreme. The Truth-being is the Hara-Gauri of the Indian iconological symbol (the biune body of the Lord and his Spouse, Ishwara and Shakti, the right half male, the left half female); it is the... are some who choose to remain in their world, as they are, if they do decide not to manifest themselves physically, their relation with the other beings of the supramental world on earth will be a relation of friends, of collaborators, of equal to equal, because the highest divine essence will have manifested in the beings of the new supramental world on earth. "When the physical ...
... all over the world, film actors and other celebrities. And this was only the human crowd. What Was to be Done, is Done At the beginning of April 1962, the situation became so critical that some thought the Mother had passed away. As in 1958 and during the following grave ordeals, she was attacked by black magic. Who were the attackers? Powerful beings from the invisible worlds who used human... Sri Aurobindo and the Mother herself had already pointed out on several occasions that the chief condition for the overman and the superman to come into being was an invincible occult protection against all the visible and occult influences which would try to make their presence impossible. Auroville was to be “the cradle of the superman”, wrote the Mother; this implied that, for the time being, it was... Supramental World’) that the supramental world was there, ready to permeate the gross material world and take its place. The more the Mother’s cells became supramentalised, the more she belonged physically to the supramental world too, which means that for years she belonged physically to two worlds, the gross material and the supramental! How does one do that? How does one live in two worlds at the same ...
... god of Death, comes with his noose to take him away, Savitri does not want to let him go. She follows them into the invisible worlds and wins from Yama, after a fierce occult and spiritual struggle with him, the exceptional boon of Satyavan’s return to his body and life in the world. Sri Aurobindo’s first draft was a relatively short narrative poem, comparable to his Love and Death , in which he... gives us the surprising answer to this question. ‘After having gone to a certain place [in the occult worlds], I said to Sri Aurobindo: “India is free.” I didn’t say: “She will be free,” I said: “She is free” … It was in 1915 … Even to a question Sri Aurobindo put to me, I answered from the same [occult] place: “There will be no violence of any kind. It will come about without a revolution. It will... was aware of at the time and which is scarcely remembered at present. As we have seen in the previous chapter, by far the greatest part of what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have done for the world on the occult and spiritual plane is not known; it was ‘not on the surface for men to see,’ and they have not spoken about it. Of the little that is known, a kind of habitual selective process in the existing ...
... sorrow as for the spirit's goads, The dubious Godhead with his torch of pain Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss. [p. 17] But in these lines there is a crescendo of the overhead seizing the occult and the last three are tremendous both in sight and vibration. They conjure up from royal heights of the overhead the scene... designated as direct. The language is of the poetic intelligence visited by the rapture and radiance of an occult sphere of mentality behind it: both vision and rhythm are, for all that occult visitation, indirect in their mystical import and impact: they are the outward mind thrilling to the occult yet rendering it in terms not altogether native to it. Nor does the attraction of the overhead, which is... dawns, A brilliant code penned with the sky for page. Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares; A lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts; Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm Parted the eternal lids that open heaven; ...
... syllables, indicating the triple occult formation with its enduring transcendental realities vis-à-vis this vast creation. These give rise to the triple world of Sat-Chit-Ananda. The Veda speaks of the three strides of Vishnu in the transcendent and we may as well conceive these to be the eight-syllabled three parts of this devatā. The virgin goddess of this supernal world is the one who, over there,... preparing the needed occult-spiritual support to bear the weight and majesty of her Grace. A "world's desire" has to rise to bring her birth amongst us. This is done, again, by the Supreme himself, coming here as the Son of Force. He comes here as eternal Aswapati, as the king of Madra in the Land of Tapasya. He does intense Yoga-Sadhana in the Earth-consciousness. He discerns the "wide world-failure's cause"... the issue of pain and suffering in the mortal world. It is the deep-rooted problem of death that is being tackled by the three protagonists, affirming the evolutionary future in the splendour of divinity. Aswapati invoking the divine grace, Savitri carrying out successfully the occult battle, and the soul of the earth called Satyavan stepping into the world of knowledge mark the unfoldment of the epic's ...
... Two lines of my poem that day were: "Each moment new histories are begun In the invisible spheres of the Infinite." × Two lines of my poem that day were: "Each moment new histories are begun In the invisible spheres of the Infinite." ... Do you imagine I am conducting a voluminous correspondence with people outside? Put that pathetic mistake out of your head. It would have been a marvel and a mystery and a new history begun in the invisible (upstairs) spheres of the Infinite 225 if I had answered him! I don't even remember what he wrote. In the letter to me, he challenges God to give him peace, force and faith in this life. Only... or surreal? It is precisely its unreality that makes the quality of the line; it is surreal, not in any depreciatory sense, but because of its supra-physical imaginativeness, its vivid suggestion of occult vision; one does not quite know what it means, but it suggests something that one can inwardly see. It is not flashing—gleaming or glinting would be nearer the mark—it penetrates the imagination and ...
... “Occultism means rightly the use of the higher powers of our nature, soul, mind, life-force and the faculties of the subtle physical consciousness to bring about results on their own or on the material plane by some pressure of their own secret law and its potentialities, for manifestation and results in human or earthly mind and life and body or in objects and events in the world of Matter... [i.e. the traditional world dominated by the gods] was another world, a world that had ceased to be real, alive, an outdated world that had lost its reality, its truth, that had been exceeded, surpassed by something that had taken birth [the supramental world] and was only beginning to take shape, but whose life was so intense , so true, so sublime that all this [the old world of the gods] became... knew from experience that the supramental world was already existing, that it was there, waiting to dock with the world we are living in, “a world that wants to incarnate in the world”. 43 Sri Aurobindo has often explained that within the Supermind itself there exist uncountable layers or worlds, hierarchically, each more concrete than our gross material world and with its own splendid beings – the ...
... Psychologists today speak of 'depth' psychology. According to them, at the back of our mind, there lies another hidden and profounder mental world—the unconscious or subconscious. Spiritualists and yogis speak of still another unknown and invisible world, above and beyond the mind. Somewhat in the same way the Soviet gymnasts are telling us and, more than that, showing us, that there is no limit... en-eight, the Mother's centenary, to go no further. These dates in their sequence are significant in that they indicate or represent some occult phenomena, some happenings in the inner world, each marking a step forward in the manifestation of the New World of the Supramental. To come back. Among the characteristics of the Soviet Gymnasts, also the major lessons that one can learn from them... disciplines we follow and their rationale. You know, officially and in the world's eye the Soviet Union is atheistic and follows a materialist philosophy of life. God, soul, the beyond or the higher worlds, in these things the new Russians of today have no faith, none. Their entire stress or śraddhā is on this world, this life, on the physical-vital-mental being whom they call Man. It was ...
... The appearance, needless to say, is deceptive. Even so the still life of a Yogin. Action does not consist merely in mechanical motion visible to the eye: intra-atomic movements that are subtle, invisible, hard to detect even by the most sensitive instruments, possess a tremendous potency, even to unimaginable degrees. Likewise in man, the extent of muscular flexions does not give the measure or potential... energies—mechanical, electrical, nervous, etc.— .—are all derivatives and lesser potentials of this fount and origin. The mastery of the inner vital energy is the whole secret of what is known as occultism, even magic, black or white, spell and other allied powers or miracles. The eight siddhis well known to the Yogis are the natural results of this mastery. With such a mastery the Yogi controls and... fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant world—even perhaps to the mineral world—out of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the ...
... The appearance, needless to say, is deceptive. Even so the still life of a Yogin. Action does not consist merely in mechanical motion visible to the eye: intra-atomic movements that are subtle, invisible, hard to detect even by the most sensitive instruments, possess a tremendous potency, even to unimaginable degrees. Likewise in man, the extent of muscular flexions does not give the measure or potential... energies – mechanical, electrical, nervous, etc. -are all derivatives and lesser potentials of this fount and origin. The mastery of the inner vital energy is the whole secret of what is known as occultism, even magic, black or white, spell and other allied powers or miracles. The eight siddhis well known to the Yogis are the natural results of this mastery. With such a mastery the Yogi controls and... fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant world – even perhaps to the mineral world – out of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved ...
... to regard it as void of awareness, a sort of luminous Inconscience. Just as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit.” “He has no sufficient... namely, the thought that we no longer live in the ‘modern’ world. The ‘modern’ world is now a thing of the past. Our own natural science today is no longer ‘modern’ science. Instead … it is rapidly engaged in becoming ‘postmodern’ science: the science to the ‘postmodern’ world, of ‘postnationalist’ politics and ‘postindustrial’ society – the world that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms... than formulations like these, condensing scores of volumes of learned writing, tells us about the void the contemporary thinking Western human is living in. All essences – the Divine, the soul, the occult existences – are declared unknowable; everything is accidental, unexplainable in its origins (which are nothing but “abstract systems and relationships”), and without meaning in its becoming and destiny ...
... From the rude love-lacking visage we may slide into a vision of occult abnormal life brought by an inspiration of the Inner Mind guided from above the mental plane to a clear discernment of dreadful details: A march of goddess figures dark and nude Alarmed the air with grandiose unease; Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near, Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light, And... which the verse concludes: "fair face." There are several prepositions or adjectives in English poetry which allow a change of accent as here. To mention a few: "among", "upon", "beyond", "between", "occult", "divine", "extreme", "supreme". Consider for an example the fifth line at the beginning of Savitri, where "the huge foreboding mind of Night" Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge. ... Future Poetry..., p. 1 2 1 2. Ibid., p. 369 . 3. Ibid., p. 363. Page 401 They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers In metres that reflect the moving worlds, Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps. The last line here is a veritable Mantra crystallising the nature of the true Mantric articulation. If we may apply Sri Aurobindo's ...
... the change of Matter made necessary to incorporate a new consciousness. All degrees of consciousness above the mental degree which denominates humankind exist somewhere in the invisible worlds, but the substance of those worlds is not the gross material substance. The Earth is a material field. Earthly Matter has already evolved sufficiently to allow for the elements of the vital and mental degrees of... white race,’ with Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno as its celebrities. Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Hungary were in the offing. The tension in the visible and in the invisible worlds could only indicate that something crucial was about to happen, for better or worse. Sometimes one senses this in the Entretiens. ‘It is quite evident that from the purely mental point of view... as it were, an invisible spring which suddenly projected her into a limitless golden immensity, almighty, of an infinite richness. She formulated the experience as follows: ‘At the very bottom of the Inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of the new world.’ A few days ...
... or the ingenious, pervades Sri Aurobindo's hexameters widens and deepens into a mystical seerhood when he speaks of the invisible hands pressing the balance of war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Gods of Hellas stand now in the full glory of their occult presences — occult but still concrete, held in a living poetic realisation. The passage about them equals the Dawn-prelude by an afflatus sustained... outer eye and the inner perception until we enter into his very self and discover the strange dynamic of him and at the same moment the unknown regions of our own psychology and of world-consciousness break open to our occult senses. The subliminal of Freud and Jung is lit up, the weird enormous potencies of the primitive and the elemental are touched, by a might and a majesty out of some supraliminal... women destined to sorrow. Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter, Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals, Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its morrows Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless and deathless, — Dealers of death though death they know not, who in the morning ...
... electrons; still when A.E. sounds his crystal note of the Undying Ones that are not clay, we feel caught up into a realm of crowned souls, a world of wizardry uncharted by Planck and Schroedinger. And paradoxical though it may seem, our firmest faith in A.E.'s occult "Candle of Vision" will not drive back the shadow that falls upon us from Housman's exquisite agnosticism: like a final truth the omnipotence... application of the luminous look not only to what is beyond the world and calls the soul thither but also to what the soul can call down from there to transform and fulfil earth-life. 2 Sri Aurobindo's mystical inspiration is a New Age of poetry. The New Age consists to some extent in a fuller emergence of the occult and the psychic, either pure or mingled with the mind's... Death, fall and sorrow for the spirit's goads, The dubious Godhead with his torch of pain Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss. But in these lines there is a crescendo of the overhead seizing the occult and the last three are tremendous both in sight and vibration. They conjure up from royal heights of the overhead the scene of the ...
... want to show to the world how the consciousness is developed. For each volumes the Mother gave a wonderful message, respectively: 13 Ibid., p. 724. Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 While teaching me occultism during out Savitri work, the Mother disclosed to me the mysteries of the higher luminous worlds, as well as the horrible... Further she added: For occultism one needs a Guru. But spirituality can be transferred (she made a gesture moving her index finger from the middle of her chest towards my heart), like this. On another occasion, the Mother said: Child, our work is a work of the Future—a work of tomorrow for younger generations who will be the builders of the New . World. She also revealed: ... Yes, at that time I had a very fair complexion. I remember the Mother always admired it. As the years passed, gradually the awful weather, constant psychological struggle, perpetual assaults of the invisible entities, setbacks, sufferings and difficulties spoiled my skin considerably. However the essential thing in life, I believe, is the charm and beauty of the soul. On 19th November the Mother ...
... is to believe, aspire and, with the true urge within, make the endeavour."* I need hardly comment further on the phenomena, the less so because being ignorant of the working of occult forces impinging on our world of senses, I prefer to keep my ignorance from speculating about things beyond my ken. So I shall attempt now what I know and understand a little better, namely, poetry and how he... attempt: Winged with¦dangerous¦deity, Passion) swift and im¦placable Arose¦and storm¦-footed In the dim¦heart of him Ran insatiate,¦conquering, Worlds de¦vouring and) hearts of men Then per¦ished brojken by The irre¦sistible Occult¦masters ofldestiny, They who¦sit in the¦ secrecy And watoh¦unmoved¦ever Unto the¦end of all." The last metre I sent him in Bengali I shall not quote... fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supra-physical experiences and powers, occult or Yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not be limited by the ordinary physical human-animal consciousness; it must have other ranges. Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is supernatural or incredible ...
... has a delicate beauty throughout and a sort of daintily fanciful suggestion of the occult world. I do not know if there is anything more. The weakness of it is that it reads like a thing imagined—the images and details are those that might be written of a haunted house on earth which has got possessed by some occult presences. Arjava must no doubt have taken his starting point from a reminiscence of... else in common with De la Mare—his poem is an extraordinarily energetic and powerful vision of an occult world and every phrase is intimately evocative of the beyond as a thing vividly seen and strongly lived—it is not on earth, this courtyard and this crescent moon, we are at once in an unearthly world and in a place somewhere in the soul of man and all the details, sparing, with a powerful economy... ar. These expressions give a sort of body to the occult without taking from it its strangeness and do not leave it in mist or in shadowy image or luminous silhouette. That is what a fully successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or ...
... to become more alive with the hidden power within it and to offer more readily the secret sense of things, the occult realities it covers, as for instance, the record of the past it always preserves even in its dumb inconscience or the working of its involved forces and invisible movements revealing veiled powers in material nature to a subtler generalised perception of the new human intelligence... self-conscious integer or in inanimate objects as the inconscient integer. It should be noted, however, that a world or plane of mind need not be a reign of ignorance where falsity, error or nescience must have a place; it may be only a voluntary self-limitation of knowledge. It could be a world where all possibilities capable of being determined by mind could manifest themselves in the successions of... would not be possible in a world where untransformed mind or human mind burdened with its hampering disabilities, as it now is, will still be the leader or the evolution's highest achievement, but with Supermind for the leading and dominant power this might well happen, and might even be regarded as one result and an almost inevitable result of its descent into the human world and its touch on the mind ...
... were to become more alive with the hidden power within it and to offer more readily the secret sense of things, the occult realities it covers, as for instance, the record of the past it always preserves even in its dumb inconscience or the working of its involved forces and invisible movements revealing veiled powers in material nature to a subtler generalised perception of the new human intelligence... self-conscious integer or in inanimate objects as the inconscient integer. It should be noted, however, that a world or plane of mind need not be a reign of ignorance where falsity, error or nescience must have a place; it may be only a voluntary self-limitation of knowledge. It could. be a world where all possibilities capable of being determined by mind could manifest themselves in the successions of... would not be possible in a world where untransformed mind or human mind burdened with its hampering disabilities, as it now is, will still "be the leader or the evolution's highest achievement, but with Supermind for the leading and dominant power this might well happen, and might even be regarded as one result and an almost inevitable result of its descent into the human world and its touch on the mind ...
... thirteen who had dreamt extraordinary dreams, the child who had felt the burden of the world's pain and would have annihilated it with her healing touch, the child who had suffered uncomplainingly the companionship of the Man of Sorrows, the child who could negotiate a passage across the mysterious occult worlds, the child who had been quarried out of the Divine and who offered herself to the Divine... of absolute rest and silence, and points out how it corroborates the Mother's own occult-spiritual knowledge and experience: According to the Mother's experience and knowledge one passes from waking through a succession of states of sleep consciousness which are in fact an entry and passage into so many worlds and arrives at a pure Sachchidananda state of complete rest, light and silence, -... at her house, first on Rue Lemercier, then, after she separated from Henri Morisset in 1908, on Rue de Levis, and finally from May 1911 on Rue du Val de Grâce. The members were intrigued by the Invisible. they freely exchanged their inmost thoughts, they posed problems of philosophy and ethics, and they explored the dynamics of purposive action. Mirra was the life and soul of the group, and It ...
... closing the gate — he actually had been a banker — did his job with a consciousness impossible to obtain in a world where a man listens to the sound of the 5 o’clock whistle. There were engineers among the disciples [Pavitra, Chandulal and Udar]: everyone lent a hand. ‘Under the invisible guidance of the leaders of the Ashram, whose presence was always felt, to whom daily all was reported, whose... required on Earth, especially in those whom she had accepted as her disciples and instruments. ‘Seen from the outside, you may say that there are people in the world who are much superior to you, and I will not contradict it. But from the occult point of view, this is a selection,’ she said one evening to the Ashram youth. ‘One can say without being mistaken that the majority of the young ones who are... very childhood, to look after the souls of the deceased and to guide them safely to the world of psychic rest and assimilation. ‘So many people come to her in the night for the passage to the other side,’ 60 wrote Sri Aurobindo. To make that passage safe for all of them, the Mother constructed with her occult powers paths of light which the vital beings would not venture to touch and where therefore ...
... — and to a New Era the old one is always the night. The Old Order is an established world, worked out in the greatest measure possible and — when the New Order presents itself — exhausted. Western Man realizes too little the degree to which the world is a complex structure, a balanced whole of forces, invisible but therefore not less real; Eastern Man still knows this, but he has let this authentic... of at least three things: the computer gets its instructions from somewhere, which means that its programmers or those who obtain command of the supernet acquire a formidable and for the most part invisible power over their fellow human beings; secondly, the computer is a very vulnerable apparatus, a compound of numerous vulnerable parts, which is a dubious omen for the society that bases its organization... role the hostile forces play in the world people consider their own. The hostile forces dominate and govern this world of Ignorance in which the human beings are as blind and powerless as marionettes. They have been permitted to do so by the Supreme Authority for whom everything exists and moves within the Unity-Consciousness, this evolutionary world included. Our world is a materialized, elaborated gradation ...
... perspicacity, a perfect readiness and eloquence to express powerfully the nature of externalities, while others have a free spirit of innermost adventure and communicate with ease the truths of invisible continents. The latter are pre-eminently chosen instruments for the literature of the intuitive spirit. But with a revolutionary quantum change in the creative spirit of our times language itself... Overmental in its grasp as well as in its expression of the Infinite. Ascent and Silver Grace surely belong to this group of his poems: A memory stirs the locked immensity - An occult creative Eye now yearns afar, Dreams upward through a gilded sky of mind, The hard deceiving door of a false heaven, To an infinite ether of apocalypt blue. Page 255 ... vision, a realising of the godhead in the world and in man, of his divine possibilities as well of the greatness of the power that manifests in what he is, a spiritualised uplifting of his thought and feeling and sense and action, a more developed psychic mind and heart, a truer and a deeper insight into his nature and the meaning of the world, a calling of diviner potentialities and more ...
... The appearance, needless to say, is deceptive. Even so the still life of a Yogin. Action does not consist merely in mechanical motion visible to the eye: intra-atomic movements that are subtle, invisible, hard to detect even by the most sensitive instruments, possess a tremendous potency, even to unimaginable degrees. Likewise in man, the extent of muscular flexions does not give the measure or potential... electrical, nervous, etc.—are all derivatives and lesser potentials of this Page 35 fount and origin. The mastery of the inner vital energy is the whole secret of what is known as occultism, even magic, black or white, spell and other allied powers or miracles. The eight siddhis well-known to the Yogis are the natural results of this mastery. With such a mastery the Yogi controls and... fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant world—even perhaps to the mineral world—out of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the ...
... contact with its miracles, he is conscious of plumbing some divine depth in himself or is borne on a burning breath of rapture or, with a hand stretched as if in sleep, plucks strange fruit from an invisible tree. The dim profound, the luminous wind, the magic wood are all unknown things — larger than the individual and existing beyond his day-to-day thoughts and desires. They are his symbolic experiences... Adventures in Criticism The Poet and His Daimon 1 It is a very ancient view that occult purposes act from behind the exterior psychology to produce works of poetic excellence. For, all great poets have believed in invoking what they called the Muse: no poet denies that in his perfect moments a rare superhuman force rushes through his ordinary co... the main to an expression of wilful personality straining, with magnificent disaster, against the universe and the Divine. Page 63 The first bodying forth of Marlowe's daimon, the occult greatness which seems to have tried his life-force as its vehicle, we find in that unwieldy colossus of his early twenties, Tamburlaine — a work meant to be a drama but destitute of all constructive ...
... flame That from the sky-roofed temple-soil of earth pilgrim hand lifts in an invisible shrine. There came the gift of a revealing hour: He saw through depths that reinterpret all, Limited not now by the dull body's eyes, New-found through an arch of clear discovery, This intimation of the world's delight, This wonder of the divine Artist's make Carved like a nectar-cup... "There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and ... touched it yet. There was no climbing of planes there in the first version —rather Savitri moved through the worlds of Night, of Twilight, of Day—all of course in a spiritual sense—and ended by calling down the power of the Highest Worlds of Sachchidananda. I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme...." (Letter 1936) II ...
... concreteness they require. It must have a tremendous repercussion on physics, biology, physiology and medicine. A Planck, a Julian Huxley, a Pavlov, a Steinbach will not feel they are groping for the invisible and the intangible when they deal with the final triumphs of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. At the heart of the Ashram in Pondicherry is the power of a super-spirituality that is super-science as much as... may be, it is not the full and whole man. Human fullness and wholeness come when the entire range of conscious being possible to the human creature is compassed. Behind our common experience are occult regions of abnormal gleams and shadows which Western psychologists vaguely call the "subliminal". Beyond these are regions still more marvellous, which the Yogis of the East especially search for—the... Page 76 —and to a lesser degree the secretarial service to the Gaekwar of Baroda and the educational enterprise for a short spell—Sri Aurobindo would not cut the figure of a world-leader. The world needs guidance by a man who can lay moulding hands on whole nations. Professor Iyengar shows vividly how Sri Aurobindo stirred Bengal and, through Bengal, India from end to end to a magnificent ...
... weak personality of Adolf Hitler got its strength and inspiration from an asuric power, the Lord of Falsehood who calls himself Lord of the Nations. It was at the inspiration of this occult personality that the Second World War took place, to counteract the avataric Work that would lead to the appearance of a divinized species on Earth. Even those who were aware of the interventions of Sri Aurobindo and... their previous lives, was finally justified. (Once, when asked what he had done in his previous lives, Sri Aurobindo answered simply: “Carrying on the evolution.”) Events in the material and the occult worlds always take place against a background where time and space are quite different from the dimensions we move in. The supramental manifestation, or the beginning of the new age, in 1956, should be... battle on the verge of life and death of which so much depended for humanity, including ourselves, may lead to reflections of the following kind. Firstly, the surroundings of the Mother, visible and invisible, were rather different from what most people who were present at the time knew or prefer to remember. She, who took everything into herself, had apparently to swallow more poison than nectar. Each ...
... knowledge of man is within his mind and belongs to the mind. The world is a flux and the flux takes place in the mind. He almost makes out that all knowledge is only a mode of the subject, Continuing the same line of feeling he says;— Page 83 "Our world is invisible Till vision Makes a finite reflection. Then the world is finite. Cast in the mould and measure of a finite i... coming out of the subliminal worlds into the world of poetry, with living, concrete and vivid experience which opens out a new realm of the subliminal and the occult to the present-day poetry. David Gascoyne brings in a symbolic sense of the natural phenomenon with great poetic success. In his 'Snow in Europe' the hush of death that fell on Europe during the last world-war is symbolised by snow and... Throughout the poem, there is a penetration into the occult worlds and an exchange between what is considered dead and the living and yet love affirms its eternity in the following words: "The waters love the moon, the sun the day, "Though all the lovers of the world Grow old, and fail and die— Yet how should you and I? For the world was only made that we should love— 0 heart ...
... a small part of our being and far the larger part of us is below the surface, the frontal consciousness. Or, more accurately, it is behind the frontal consciousness, behind the veil, occult and known only by an occult knowledge. Modern psychology and psychic science have begun to perceive this truth just a little. Materialistic psychology calls this hidden part the Inconscient, although practically... surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by going within. Equally, what we call our physical being is only a visible projection of a greater and subtler invisible physical consciousness which is much more complex, much more aware, much wider in its receptiveness, much more open and plastic and free. If you understand and experience this truth, then only... There is the universal physical consciousness of Nature and there is our own which is a part of it, moved by it, and used by the central being for the support of its expression in the physical world and for a direct dealing with all these external objects and movements and forces. This physical consciousness plane receives from the other planes their powers and influences and makes formations of ...
... been created-loosened -out-by a first Descent; but in the line of the first Descent the only level that stands in front at the outset is Matter all the other levels are created no doubt but remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life... from this sphere. Many of the gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspect-in their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the most part can be located... four lines of Descent in the evolution ¹The Heaven is my Father and this Earth my Mother. Page 52 and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly through emanations, projections, partial ...
... Supreme Self figured in cosmic existence. The vision of the universal Purusha offers the sadhaka a concrete living sight, in vivid images, of the visible greatness of the invisible Divine. The sadhaka can then see the whole world related and unified in the very Body of the Divine. The Soul admitted to this awe-inspiring vision beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial, and therefore... A plan in the occult eternal Mind Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight. 86 The long flow of its manifesting course Was held in spirit's single wide regard. 87 Bare in that Light Time toiled, his unseen works Detected, the broad-flung far-seeing schemes Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls Were mapped already in that world-wide look. 88 ... the Intuitive Mind is revelatory in character. Here are some verses from Savitri indicating how sight functions in this Intuitive Mind plane: Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible. 23 Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight. 24 Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs. 25 Its fiery edge of seeing ...
... what is invisible to you. The men who have to act as instruments will do so despite themselves. They are only puppets in the hands of larger Forces. Nothing depends on human beings – neither the planning nor the execution – nothing! That is why one can smile.’ 64 May 1968 Almost immediately after the foundation of Auroville a kind of shock wave went through the youth of the world, with its... Mother had supported them in their contribution to the advent of a New World. ‘The rapprochement between Russia and America is something I have been working on for years,’ 33 she said. She also said that Kennedy was receptive and that she had been counting on him. She called his assassination, in November of the same year, an occult murder executed by ‘the same black forces’ which try to gain a hold... from outside … If you could see that kind of dance, the dance of the vibrations which is there around you all the time …’ 16 This occult material reality discovered by science became a living reality to the Mother. The composition of a living cell was occultly shown to her in order to illustrate what was going on in her body. 17 She found that the cells ‘have a composition and an interior ...
... sadhana, no will for the Truth to conquer, then the samata of indifference will suffice. But here there is a work to be done, a Truth to be established against which immense forces are arrayed, invisible forces which can use visible things and persons and actions for their instruments. If one is among the disciples, the seekers of this Truth, one has to take sides for the Truth, to stand against the... repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian Religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual—mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the... tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionist, by spiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his highest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine----With the deeper minds the dissatisfaction with the ideals of the past or the present, with all mental ...
... and developed out of sheer boredom her occult faculties. One of her exercises consisted in extending her occult body in such a way that she could perceive what was going on in adjacent rooms. In this way she even managed to be invisibly present in the studio. Little André was fascinated by this studio, ‘which I considered the most wonderful place in the world,’ 15 with its glass roof, its colors... by ‘families of souls’ incarnated to that end. ‘There are large families of beings who work at the same task, who have gathered in a certain number and who come in groups as it were.’ 8 ‘From an occult point of view it is almost always the same forces and the same beings who incarnate during all the ages of artistic beauty upon earth … It is the same forces which are at work, and they are grouped... Industrial Revolution had been coal, steam and iron. The Eiffel Tower, erected for the World Exhibition of 1889, may be seen as its apotheosis and symbol. But in the meantime the second Industrial Revolution was under way, driven by electricity and petrol; its symbol was the spectacular ‘Palace of Electricity’ at the World Exhibition of 1900, which again took place in Paris. The industrial revolutions went ...
... been created—loosened out—by a first Descent; but in the line of the first. Descent the only level that stands in front at the outset is Matter, all the other levels are created no doubt but remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life... from this sphere. Many of the gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspect—in their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the most part can be located... lines of Descent in the evolution 1 The Heaven is my Father and this Earth my Mother. Page 51 and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly through emanations, projections ...
... are created—loosened out—by a first Descent; but in the line of the first Descent the only level that stands in front at the outset is Matter, all the other levels are created no doubt but remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life... this sphere. Many of the gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandhar-vas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspect—in their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the Page 47 own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the... a problem with which we are not immediately concerned. We have spoken of four lines of Descent in the evolution and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly through emanations, projections, ...
... their children to become the best in the world; the parents of both were atheists; both were atheists themselves in their youth; their first contact with yoga took place in 1905, the year Sri Aurobindo started practising pranayama and the Mother discovered La Revue cosmique ; both began their real yoga in 1908; both were instructed in an occult way by invisible teachers; the Bhagavad Gita played... necessary Vision and Knowledge of a future that seems totally utopian and unreal at the time the foundations of the new element in the evolution are realised. The Avatar remains present on Earth in an occult way at least till this Work is done and keeps intervening in the earthly circumstances to bring it about. The dimensions of his mission cannot be completed within the short span of a human life. The... till 1914, the beginning of the First World War) and “the short 20th century” (from 1914 till 1989, the collapse of the Communist Bloc). It might be much more appropriate to see the 20th century up to 1989 as a whole, intimately connected with the last decades of the 19th century. For there was doubtlessly a complex historical period preceding up to the First World War. It is therefore justifiable to ...
... our original field but not our only field of experience; but this is only at present. Our imperfect mental instrumentation is not the last word of our possibilities; for there are in us, dormant or invisibly and imperfectly active, other principles beyond mind and closer to the spiritual nature, there are more direct powers and luminous instruments, there is a higher status, there are greater ranges of... surface memory and a passive underlying consciousness in its flow from moment to moment of time, organised and interpreted by our reason and our witnessing and participating intelligence. Behind it is an occult existence and energy of our secret being without which the superficial consciousness and activity could not have existed or acted. In Matter only an activity is manifest,—inconscient in the outside... obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest ...
... you do not play it yourself you will never be a pianist, so too you may read everything that has been written on occultism, if you do not practise it yourself, you will never be an occultist. Nov. 1957 1958-02-15 Last night I had the vision of what this supramental world could become if men were not sufficiently prepared. The confusion existing at present upon earth is nothing in comparison... concentrate materially upon the work of transformation of the body. I can now leave them externally to do things according to their own ideas of execution, reducing my presence to a more or less invisible role of creative inspiration and consciousness. 10th May 1954 Spirit of service has gone away from this place. 16.5.54 1954-06-11 When I say that I have initiated someone, I mean... does something against it. Each one gains in his consciousness every time he acts according to this divine Consciousness. The world goes on as it is. When there is nothing you or I can do to change it, we can only keep quiet, silent witness like Brahman. As in the world so here also. So many things go on: each one tries to prove his superiority; there is politics of all kinds, propaganda. I only ...
... was disclosed Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares; Page 137 A lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance... occurs at the end of the first canto: This was the day when Satyavan must die. The dawn in question serves as a symbol. The symbolic content is stated in the verses picturing the occult power that has the natural daybreak as its suggestive front and communicative medium: A glamour from unreached transcendences Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen. A message from... more effective by the long quantities under them, particularly the stupendous opening spondee which seems to give a Presence extending right across the whole horizon that is "Silence' marge" at this occult hour with which Savitri breaks upon us. ("Stretched", I may remark, has a vowel which for all its intrinsic shortness is stretched out by the three consonantal sounds following it no less than preceding ...
... the epiphany was disclosed Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares... A lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. [p. 4] In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic... the end of the first canto: This was the day when Satyavan must die. [p. 10] The dawn in question serves as a symbol. The symbolic content is stated in the verses picturing the occult power that has the natural daybreak as its suggestive front and communicative medium: A glamour from the unreached transcendences Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen, A message... more effective by the long quantities under them, particularly the stupendous opening spondee which seems to give a Presence extending right across the whole horizon that is "Silence' marge" at this occult hour with which Savitri breaks upon us. ("Stretched", I may remark, has a vowel which for all its intrinsic shortness is stretched out by the three consonantal sounds following it no less than ...
... evolution with birth as its machinery, — for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as its machinery. As a result, there is a cosmic evolution and there is the process of individual evolution.... urge, and that urge can be discerned in Man as a conscious uplifting Will, which gradually becomes imperatively decisive. The upward urge at the lower levels of evolution seems to be working almost invisibly or very tardily, but still methodically and regulated by the evolutionary law of ascent and integration. But as that urge becomes more and more manifest as conscious will at the human level, there... from Matter is aided by the typal worlds of subtle Matter, of Life, Mind and still higher worlds between mind and supermind, as also by the supramental integral consciousness, which remains undiminished, even while involutionary process takes place in a Page 30 part movement of conscious force. The typal worlds are also called the involutionary worlds, since they came to be built up in ...
... has a delicate beauty throughout and a sort of daintily fanciful suggestion of the& occult world. I do not know if there is anything more. The weakness of it is that it reads like a thing imagined — the images and details are those that might be written of a haunted house (on earth which has got possessed by some (occult presences. Arjava must no doubt have taken his starting point from a reminiscence... else common with De 1a Mare — his poem is an extraordinarily (energetic and powerful vision of an occult world and every phrase is intimately evocative of the beyond as a thing vividly seem and strongly lived it is not on earth, this courtyard and this crescent moon, we are .at once in an unearthly world and in a place somewhere in the Soul of man and all the details, sparing, with a powerful economy... the low tones of ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere of these high lights — in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed ...
... appealing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had spent eight years and whose disciple I still was. With all my power of faith and aspiration I kept outstretching invisible hands to them, calling and calling. I pulled at the saving and healing light that is their Yogic consciousness and when I thought a blue sheen and a gold glow enveloped my heart I sensed a subtle... night. For, soon two new poems quite apart from what had been scribbled took shape. They were in a different tempo, so to speak—more lyrical— but still with what appeared to me a living touch on the occult. The next day, some of the remaining lines from the semi-trance pieced together. And the rest became connected soon after. All of them (as also many written later) have a vein of surrealism though... wonderful substance of Spirit, and every piece of matter tingled with a divine presence drawing my worship. I had an intense impulse to read that canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which is named The World-Soul. It is a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss ...
... that seems to him poor, as is natural since the outward meaning is only a part and a surface and the rest is to his eyes invisible. If there had been what he hoped or might have hoped to find in my poetry, a spiritual vision such as that of the Vedantin, arriving beyond the world towards the Ineffable, then he might have felt at home as he does with Thompson's poetry or might at least have found it... Savitri . There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a corner and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and... himself and he leaves his work for the world, and rather for posterity than for the contemporary world, to recognise or to ignore, to judge and value according to its perception or its pleasure. As for the contemporary world he might be said rather to throw his poem in its face and leave it to resent this treatment as an unpleasant slap, as a contemporary world treated the early poems of Wordsworth ...
... don't mean that there is no ignorance here! But still, the dose is different. Here, for all that, there is a sort of manipulation of the consciousness going on constantly, night and day, visibly, invisibly; and whether one wants it or not, in spite of everything one takes it in, and after some time it acts. When a few people come, something changes, but it is not so much as to give a painful feeling;... which is necessary. So, the more rapidly one goes individually, the more necessary it is to try to extend and strengthen the collective basis. Mother, has this day, the fifteenth of August, an occult or a simple significance? For, in history, important events occurred on this day. What exactly do you mean? The fifteenth of August is Sri Aurobindo's birthday. Therefore, it is a date which has... that state perpetually, which is not very easy. But still it is possible. But it draws you out of the world, prevents you from participating in the life of the world, and above all, if everything had to be changed in that way, I think an eternity would not suffice for all the elements of the world to be so transformed. And the problem presents itself again. In whatever manner, by whatever way you ...
... Men want to know the outer signs of the inner attainment—the way in which a spiritual person differs outwardly from other men. But all the tests which the Gita enumerates are inner and therefore invisible to the outer view. It is true also that the inner or the spiritual is the essential and the outer derives its value and form from the inner. But the transformation about which Sri Aurobindo writes... nature—which some call character—are two aspects of being, neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality." "Besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression; the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama... limited field of personal work, but afterwards, in a constant action upon the world forces." 1 Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his yoga. "The first was in relation to the second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when ...
... another development — that which comes by the spiritual and also the occult discipline. And you know, when I was small, very young, I was spontaneously guided towards this inner discovery, which projected me in a world of beauty, of serenity, of love and peace which I perceived as a dream in comparison to this external world. This world of pain, of misery, of suffering, blindly brutal, and its incomp... with Sri Aurobindo I entered an occult plane by a secret door, just the two of us. There we saw that one could resuscitate the dead with the help of a mantra. We repeated the mantra together. And then this great secret was with us. And Sri Aurobindo copied it for me in Sanskrit. Together we practised a lot of occultism and we found many beautiful secrets of the world. It was in that pocket book. Naturally... they change their consciousness. Anyway, it is the best way to be cured. Occultism You know, a long time ago, when I used to practise occultism and all that… I used to note down everything in a small pocket book, the conversations I used to have during the meditation, the voices that I used to hear, and the occult experiences I had, I used to note them down in this pocket book. And when I ...
... The meaning of death I grasp; Subtle senses in me have awoken The invisible presence to clasp. From the calm fields of dream Winds bring to me hopes of love; And hopes are ardencies of faith Born of soul in spirit to move. 17/07/98 10:10 AM Page 48 World of Poetry Sprinkle the colours, Scatter many notes; Morn and... Where to Burn? "Where to burn? How to burn?" Asked the tender flame. "Like a lamp? Like a forest fire Fiery rapture to claim?" "Is the night deep? occult enough?" Asked the little star. "Fathomless like space, fervescent, Where galaxies are?" "Where do I awake? Where sleep?" Asked the golden dream. "I can hold you, I can carry you," Answered... of its songs; A memory awoke of the past, And crumbled the embodied wrongs. From it an authentic voice surged, — Like a great wave on a shoreless sea; A new world is born, it proclaimed, A world of love which is death-free. Through the ages someone toiled, To claim the flames of the sky, There was the God's sacrifice Willing the Will of the High. He ...
... else reply to a corresponding cosmic action; for Nature takes us as we are and to some extent suits her movements to our need or our demands on her. If we accept the action of invisible Forces upon us, there may be also invisible Forces in Life-Nature that belong to the same plane of Consciousness Force as this part of our being, Forces that move according to the same plan or the same power-motive as... progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or sufficiently develop their implications against the resistance of an inconscient or inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though occult resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This resort, the action of this veiled alliance, takes place principally in our subliminal being and not on the surface: it is from there... normal work and she makes small or no provision for it: it is the shaping of the future evolution of the being with which she is concerned; the past is put back, kept behind the veil and used only as an occult source of materials for the present and the future. This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the soul; ...
... of hers we could feel with increasing strength her proximity to the earth-scene, one day in the near future the thin veil will be rent and her supreme sweetness and power, instead of guiding us invisibly, stand again intimate to our seeking gaze and eager touch. Page 222 The Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the Light of Numerology 1 February 21 is the Mother's... lisation. Up to almost the end she worked for it, just as Sri Aurobindo had done up to the eve of 5 December 1950. But even as he changed his course, so too did she — both of them for their own occult purposes. Let us repeat that the Supramental Avatar, the Incarnation from the Transcendence, is not forced by any cosmic law: an utter freedom goes hand in hand with the play of its action... shape. No doubt, she did not envisage a quick change in general world-conditions and said on 5 September of the same year: "Before the effects of the supramental manifestation become visible and tangible, perceptible to the whole world, thousands of years have perhaps to pass." However, she had a shorter view for the small world of sadhaks around her. On 10 October 1956 she declared: what Sri ...
... course if one is able to follow the various directions of the multitudinous yet accurately marshalled thought one will be aware of the inner restructuring with greater clarity, but even otherwise invisible hands will go on raising up in your depths a more Aurobindonian You. For here is not a Spinoza or Hegel challenging you to trace the edifice of his speculative system: here is God's grace seeking... since Savitri is in tenser literature than The Life Divine. Not only does it go into more vivid disclosures of spiritual reality: it also comes with what one may designate as the very life-throb of occult realms, it carries in its surge or sway of interrelated words and modulated metre the footprints and footfalls, as it were, of divinities in traffic with earth. You have referred to my comments... without letting the usual inhabitants of the thought-world interfere with the Higher Mind's large clarities of spiritually vibrant Ideas, the illumined Mind's passion and colour of revelatory images, the Intuition's sudden glowing stabs into the very heart of things, the Overmind's massive mighty movements bringing forth an eternal world-voice from even the smallest transience of Nature's process ...
... Page 76 application of notions of human justice to the invisible world, and so these are stupidities. For it is not at all like that truly; the notion of reward and punishment as man understands it is an absurdity. That does not apply at all, not at all to the inner realities. So once you enter the true spiritual world, all that becomes really stupidities. For things are not at all like... interiorisation and concentration one has to enter into conscious contact with one's psychic being. This psychic being always has an influence on the outer being, but that influence is almost always occult, neither seen nor perceived nor felt, save on truly exceptional occasions. In order to strengthen the contact and aid, if possible, the development of the conscious psychic personality, one... long as he remains in the world, so long as he chooses to work for the Divine, he will progress. Only if he withdraws into the psychic world and refuses to continue doing the Divine Work or renounces it, can he remain in a static condition outside all progress, because, as I have told you, only upon Page 64 earth is there progress, only in the physical world; it is not acquired everywhere ...
... into the heart of the Ineffable". At the very close the roles are reversed. We have mystery confronting us and breaking across the philosophical atmosphere with a sheer epiphany, as it were, of the Invisible made visible in its own direct right. But the challenging concepts and adventurous images of the preceding poetry are not effaced: they play their subsidiary roles and waft to us, like background... language should be when it attempts the revelation of spiritual reality. It can be simple but with a direct stroke and not with an easy-going fluency, or it can be rich but with a density of semi-occult semi-physical vision and not with a loose decorativeness of intellectual or emotional stuff" coupled with pleasing images. The spiritual style simple is in "outbreak of the Godhead in man". Just... expressive audacity. For, the Aurobindonian bird comes forth as a symbol antithetical to the Mallarméan. It is the Soul completely triumphant instead of being splendidly defeated. In the world-wandering yet world-exceeding Swan we get the all-consummating counterpart to the French poet's ice-bound Cygne flights unflown. 1 Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo by Nirodbaran, Second Series ( ...
... is the inmost entity of the inner world and the subtlest of all subtle forces. The first line is deemed by Mr. Lal an attempt at Miltonese which succeeds in being mere wind. He is mistaken in both respects. Miltonese is more grandiose in language and less direct in suggestion. This is a straightforward style and statement expressing the truth that on the occult "plane" where Soul is the determining... and mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult insight into the individual and the cosmos . Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff' and "sky of soul " and "deep soul-ground" acquire... supernal Powers That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze... Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods, Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time Page 68 What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: Well, if you go on dreaming like that! MYSELF: Please, Guru, try to percolate a little occultism through the thick sieve of your correspondence. I lost all hope, you know and was depressed, dejected and downcast. It is so very interesting—this occultism! SRI AUROBINDO: All right. I can flood you when I have time and season. MYSELF: I am preparing... Force and protection possible and available so that the name of the Guru and disciple may resound from one end of India to another and all flock in crowds—trains, aeroplanes to the door of the Invisible Guru! SRI AUROBINDO: Good God! MYSELF: Alas, where shall we be then? SRI AUROBINDO: And where shall we be? MYSELF: Another letter from C—family matters and... different man—morose, muttering etc. SRI AUROBINDO: That is because he is listening to "voices" and feeling "influences" A's and others, e.g. N's. Imagine N engaged in dark and sinister occult operations to take possession of somebody. MYSELF: Herewith C's letter. He wants to change his residence. But if he goes to a Mohamedan mess, it would be from frying pan into the fire ...
... inwardly appealing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had spent eight years and whose disciple I still was. With all my power of faith and aspiration I kept outstretching invisible hands to them, calling and calling. I pulled at the saving and healing light that is their Yogic consciousness and when I thought a blue sheen and a gold glow enveloped my heart I sensed a subtle... night. For, soon two new poems quite apart from what had been scribbled took shape. They were in a different tempo, so to speak--more lyrical—but still with what appeared to me a living touch on the occult. The not day, some of the remaining lines from the semi-trance pieced together. And the rest became connected soon after. All of them (as also many written later) have a vein of surrealism though without... worship: the very chairs and tables of my room were like gods and goddesses to whom I could have knelt down. I had an intense impulse to read that canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which is named The World-Soul. It is a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss ...
... are bound to have relationships with them and yet the-whole attitude to social living is worlds apart from the one which would be natural in a similar context. Here is a life of loneliness in the midst of company, restraint in the thick of opportunities, peace in the heart of traffic, consecration to an invisible Presence in a Page 57 milieu of crowding tangibilities, self-giving to... yogically consonant with the Zeitgeist today. Sri Aurobindo is an "evolutionary avatar" exercising a Super-science which will bear total fruit one day from the supramental seed he has sown in a clay occultly in love with it and ready to make it germinate by means of the Eternal hidden in the hours And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone. P.S. Thank you for wishing me to live long. I may... that there had been a great change." I was moved beyond measure. I think it was after this darshan I started writing poetry in Page 47 the new vein - from the in-world or the over-world. Of course, all genuine poetic stuff hails from these domains, but it is not always couched in the very tongue of them - the fire-tongue that has tasted paradise: it is translated into the ...
... humanity, but this is no solution. No solution at all. No, the only solution is occult power. But that.... Before anything at all can be done, it already demands a certain number of individuals who have reached a great perfection of realization. Granting this, a place is conceivable (set apart from the outside world—no actual contacts) where each thing is exactly in its place, setting an example.... within an infinitesimal space. If there is less than one atom per 400 liters of space, the quantity of matter and thus the gravitational effect will be insufficient to retain the galaxies within their invisible net, and everything will spin off endlessly—unless we discover, with Mother, a third position, that of a 'progressive equilibrium,' in which the quantity of matter in the universe proves in fact to... state of consciousness is habitually associated with the experience of the unreality of the world as we know it, Sri Aurobindo tells us that this perception of the world's unreality need not exist for the supramental consciousness: only Falsehood is unreal , not the world. And this is most interesting—the world has its own reality, independent of Falsehood. I suppose this will be the first effect ...
... medium of perception of the human senses being gross physical matter. (Physics has gradually advanced so far behind the wall of perceptible reality that it does not realize it is dealing with an occult world.) The ‘true physical’ is supramental; were it not so, Sri Aurobindo would not be able to dwell in it in his supramental body, for instance. It was also in the ‘true physical’ that the Mother saw... race of humanity, is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line [between the visible and invisible]. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront.’ This is a note by Nolini Kanta Gupta, who died in 1984, published above his signature in the Sri Aurobindo Mandir... age, it is neither young nor old … it is completely different. And tall, strong … A day will come that it will be visible concretely, one will see it … Of course, logically speaking I should remain invisible until I appear in my new form. But this does not seem to come about very quickly.’ 3 November 1962: ‘Now that I think of it, I have noticed last night that I was very young physically! It ...
... tale used to illustrate and establish truth-values in life, the legend and the myth taken on an occult-cosmic scale. A great luminous power of revelation is released by poetry when it becomes paradoxically the speech of sight and the image of sound seen and heard with subtle senses attuned to invisible and inaudible perceptions of things that are eager to take form of some flaming beauty in a body... masterpiece, carrying the vision of a bright tapasvin who, though may appear seated far, is yet amidst us to impart the knowledge of the occult-mysterious. The seer-poet, with the impersonality of the Purusha, yet participates dynamically in the actions of the world, remaining "steadfast and unshaken by even the heaviest of storms." The calm and sober manner of the original has to enter into any rendering... universal metaphysics put figuratively in the language of a myth, it is also a sufficiently elaborate symbol carrying in its living and expressive details the power of occult workings of the transcendental in the mortal world. The flame-charge of the symbol is too esoteric, too sacred to be profanised. About it Sri Aurobindo writes: "The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata ...
... illustrate how sly and invisible the phenomenon is, so perfectly natural that we live in a net without realizing it—quite naturally, of course, otherwise we would have left it long ago. What takes the most time, Mother said, is becoming conscious of what must be changed... 7 To break away from the old natural way. Well, one day, on a riverbank in a remote part of the world, I was alone, in rags... you go down to the most minute element (you know, don't you, that they have found innumerable, absolutely invisible things), if you take this element as the part and the material world as the whole, and you imagine a Consciousness [the great total Consciousness, which we are gingerly becoming, in small doses, so as not to explode], or a Will that would delight in making an infinite number of combinations... the same one as the old incorrigible spiritualists—that the world is an illusion. This is a great discovery, a very great one.... One more step and they will reach the Truth. 2 In Tlemcen, we have already seen another kind of Matter. Well, this time, it is not supermicroscopes that will tell us, nor the visions of psychics nor occult powers: Matter itself will tell us, will experience itself. It ...
... hours. From about the age of twelve, she began nurturing great aspirations, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Night after night she felt the World's burden of pain pressing upon her, but at her healing touch that burden was exorcised away. She studied occultism in Algeria under the guidance of a master, M. Théon, and her progress was rapid. Page 395 Back in Paris, her house on... No flight out of the world! The burden of its darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end.... I must remain in the bosom of the Night and walk on.... 41 Arrived at Lunel, she fell ill, seriously ill, and was narrowly saved from death, but she saw that the spiritual power was still fully active in her; from behind the scenes, she found it possible to exert an occult influence on men and... confidential nature. As if he had read her thought and had communicated it instantaneously to the young men, they "walked out of the room, stiff, silent, like four robots drawn out of sight, pulled by an invisible string". 2 M. Richard had in the meantime told Madame Mirra Richard about his own meetings and how Sri Aurobindo had explained the symbolism of the lotus as the mystic opening of the bud ...
... entirety. A beginning is made with the mastery of occult powers by the "conscious" (as against persons driven by blind desire to control Nature) Aswapati: Incalculable in their wizard modes, Immediate and invincible in the act, Her secret strengths native to greater worlds Lifted above our needy limited scope, The occult privilege of demigods And the sure power-pattern... willed to be. In the passion of its solitary dream It lay like a closed soundless oratory Where sleeps a consecrated argent floor Lit by a single and untrembling ray And an invisible Presence kneels in prayer. 36 For the moment we brush aside all the tomes of philosophical exegesis, the complications of metaphysical calculations and the whirring chaos of Nature's ... extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. 6 Though Sri Aurobindo said that Savitri is "only an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual," he was not going to give us broken images, constructs that need to be deconstructed and set in place again. That was never the Indian way. Indian aesthesis calls for a fullness in ...
... What moves us here is what moves us "over there”—in all its “purity,” we might say, or all its vastness, and without the little protective shell of the body or of decency. This is precisely the invisible (for us) source of all that moves us here and moves us along like little puppets. but also a whole field of study for those who do not like being moved like puppets. That is what Mirra constantly... And the most extraordinary part of this enterprise is that the very effort to know opens the doors of discovery, automatically, as if that intense little vibration that latches on things opened up invisible skylights within that "as if nothing” of habit, and everything starts speaking to us, telling its story and its unfoldings, as if our very footsteps—feeling their way without knowing anything, but... and whether this extraordinary mechanist had not also created the world. That may just be the case. In any event, a world that works upside down. You wouldn’t say that it's the phonograph that has created the sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you ! 8 In fact, She discovered these worlds, all these worlds and levels, in the most prosaic and unexpected way, just as one suddenly ...
... At this point the boy got up to help his friend. He realised that it was something that could not be seen but which could be felt, a lot like a human being, long and plump but completely invisible. The two friends pounced on this disembo-died something's body as if in a wrestling bout. Then with a nylon rope they tied it really tight and strong. He could feel that this something was tightly... the rope tied around it. After some time this something lost all its energy and fell into a drowse. So then nervously and with great caution they began feeling its arms and mouth. It was still invisible and they were scared that this something might bite. They made some sort of a mould and took an imprint of this something's mouth. When they saw the imprint they were horrified. There was an imprint... swimming pool in the Sports-ground. All of a sudden while he was sleeping something weighed down on him. It grappled vigorously with him. But when it was unable to wrestle with Batti's strong body that invisible thing disappeared.' Rani-di then remarked: 'I once saw a ghost in the day-time with open eyes. It was something like a vision. One can see but one cannot touch or feel it.' Rani-di ...
... high-curved world-pile.... As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base To a top as viewless, a curved sea of worlds Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme..." (Ibid.) Page 33 (3) "No term was fixed to the high-pitched attempt; World after world disclosed its guarded powers, Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes, But still the invisible Magnet... Let us elucidate. One of the axioms of occult science is that whatever you fear 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... of regers and risks, which pertains to the domain of occult science. In essece, this procedure consists in disconnecting the consciousness from its vehicle, the physical body, taking it out, leaving the body in a cataleptic state, and then entering the body again deliberately with full consciousness. Readers curious to know more about this occult procedure may consult pages 52 to 54 of the Mother's ...
... the first creator, I am the last. I have found the atoms from which he built the worlds: The first tremendous cosmic energy Missioned shall leap to slay my enemy kin, Expunge a nation or abolish a race, Death's silence leave where there was laughter and joy. Or the fissured invisible shall spend God's force To extend my comforts and expand my wealth, To speed... cry, Could write itself on the hearts of living things. 2 In the following lines we have a daring use of the particular words connected with the printing trade: Then in Illusion's occult factory And in the Inconscient's magic printing house Tom were the formats of the primal Night And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance. Alive, breathing a deep spiritual... see what the other three levels are like under this very head, the rhetorical poetic manner or the dynamically effective level can be illustrated by the following passage: In the Witness's occult rooms with mind-built walls On hidden interiors, lurking passages Opened the windows of the inner sight. He owned the house of undivided Time. Lifting the heavy curtain of the ...
... many ways. "The blind yogi recounted to me that his supraphysical occult vision had revealed to him that because of these misdeeds of the past, he has been born blind and poor this time in the present life. But he has no regrets for that, for this has done him immense good in this new embodiment. Because of his occult memory of the past, he has been really repentant for his old misdeeds and... anxiously sought for their satisfactory explanations and from this attempt have arisen many alternative theories and hypotheses. Thus, man has sometimes speculated that all this is due to an invisible but ineluctable "lalāṭa-lipi" ("writing on the forehead") which is totally arbitrary having no causative justifying reason behind. He has variously named this phenomenon as "Fate", "Kismet" and... our happy or Page 98 unhappy experiences. One has to suffer the consequences of one's own actions, today or tomorrow, in this very life or in lives to come, in this physical world or in the worlds beyond death. Every action is bound to produce its corresponding fruit, and there is no exception to this universally valid Law." Yes, that strange and unexpected events and accidents ...
... and nature and the outer aspects and processes of things, he does not care to inquire if there is anything within him which, defying defeat, death and destruction, leads him from behind a veil—an invisible pilot, a living fount of perennial hope and strength and inspiration. If ever a beam of light penetrates into his outer consciousness from behind the veil, or a still small voice breathes into his... presupposes a consciousness somewhere within us, however dim and inchoate it may be, of a potential existence of infinite freedom and immortal bliss. We chafe against our finiteness only because we have an occult apprehension of infinity. Our struggle against death and disintegration is induced by a subconscious feeling that we are heirs to an undying life. Science advances forward to conquer more and more... majority of those who call themselves Christians. "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?" These are no mere words of visionary idealism, but an impassioned exhortation to man, to every man in the world, to know his real self,¹ his real, eternal "I", and get beyond death and dissolution. What man knows and ...
... tale used to illustrate and establish truth-values in life, the legend and the myth taken on an occult-cosmic scale. A great luminous power of revelation is released by poetry when it becomes paradoxically the speech of sight and the image of sound seen and heard with subtle senses attuned to invisible and inaudible perceptions of things that are eager to take form of some flaming beauty in a body... new world-order was ushered in. Rishi Markandeya holds the same promise, perhaps even a more splendid promise, in the Savitri-example he prefers to give to Yudhishthira. The Princess of Madra King Aswapati's daughter, had suffered greatly for her husband's sake and had won noble satisfying boons, including the exceptional boon of Satyavan's life, from Yama the King-Father Lord himself. Occult-symbolically... masterpiece, carrying the vision of a bright tapasvin who, though may appear seated far, is yet amidst us to impart the knowledge of the occult mysterious. The seer-poet, with the impersonality of the Purusha, yet participates dynamically in the actions of the world, remaining "steadfast and unshaken by even the heaviest of storms". The calm and sober manner of the original has to enter into any rendering ...
... with his common average kind; Tomorrow’s hopes and his old rounds of thought, His old familiar interests and desires He has made a thick and narrowing hedge Defending his small life from the Invisible… Amal Kiran commented in 1954 on the fourth line: “Limping line—one foot missing. It is impossible to scan it as a pentameter as it stands: He has| made’ a| thick’ and| nar’row| ing hedge’|... now cosmic-transcendental powers and personalities, and they are going into the action in an explicit conduct. This could have happened in the persuasion by the Yogi himself. That might be the deeper occult reality behind such a change. But then the fact that Savitri went back and forth through so many stages of composition entails, inevitably, what we might call a few possible slips or mistakes, these... taken to withdraw for a sublime cause is indicated here in an unambiguous way. This, his withdrawal, “the dread mysterious sacrifice”, happened just three weeks later. The third line discloses the occult truth behind the decision. Then, there were seven lines in the second passage, with “Death is the spirit’s opportunity” added, and seventy-two in the third hinting the difficult work Savitri will have ...
... Men want to know the outer signs of the inner attainment—the way in which a spiritual person differs outwardly from other men. But all the tests which the Gita enumerates are inner and therefore invisible to the outer view. It is true also that the inner or the spiritual is the essential and the outer derives its value and form from the inner. But the transformation about which Sri Aurobindo writes... nature—which some call character—are two aspects of being, neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality." "Besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the Page 4 personality is a self-expression; the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of... limited field of personal work, but afterwards, in a constant action upon the world forces." 1 Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his yoga. "The first was in relation to the second World War. At the beginning he did not actively concern himself with it, but when ...
... degrees of physical substance which are less dense with the atomic nescience and it is easier for Life and Mind to enter into them and operate. If finer invisible physical layers or couches did not exist supporting this gross visible physical world, that world could not abide; for then the fine operations of transmission between Spirit and Matter [could not] be executed at all and it is these that render... sub-vegetal world all movements, all stimulus, all reaction are of a material and if dynamic, of a mechanically dynamic character. Even the life movements that exist there, as in the mineral, are of the most rigidly automatic, unindividualised and mechanical and external nature, birth, formation, fatigue, sleep, death. Mental or psychic powers and significances there are, as an occult knowledge discovers... somehow, being radically inconscient, succeeded without intending it to produce consciousness and started writing poems, painting pictures, producing civilisations, conceiving an inexistent God and invisible Creator. There is surely more in it than that; there was [an] Idea somewhere [and if it] has emerged it is because it was [. . .] and had to emerge. If there is an intelligence which has appeared ...
... perceived how the creation of Auroville has an action in the invisible, and what action. It's not a material, outward action: it's an action in the invisible. And since then, I have been trying to make countries understand it, of course not outwardly because they all think they're much too clever to be taught anything, but inwardly, in the invisible. It's fairly recent, it dates from two or three days... money. Those who have nothing other than money will give money. But to tell the truth, the "work" may be an inner work (but that can't be said, because people aren't honest enough). The work may be an occult work, a completely inner work, but of course, for it to be so, it must be absolutely sincere and true, and with the capacity: no pretense. But it's not necessarily a material work. "Sections like... standpoint, and the understanding that inner knowledge and inner technique can change the world and master it without crushing it. "Auroville is the place where this new way of living is being worked out, it is a center of accelerated evolution where man must begin to change his world through the power of the inner spirit." (Then Mother goes into a long contemplation) It ...
... of the months and years, trying to hew pathways across the disconcerting jungles of illusive Appearance to the sanctuary of the Real, the Absolute, the Perfect, the splendorous Divine: An invisible sunlight ran within her veins And flooded her brain with heavenly brilliancies That woke a wider sight than earth could know. ... Page 8 All objects were to her shapes of living... ground as though nothing had happened, as though she had but leisurely walked down the hill. 21 From the age of twelve, Mirra started doing what we might term Yoga, and her deep interest in occultism also sprouted at about the same time. Doing Yoga meant aspiring steadily for union with the Divine, and this led to the recurrence of certain dreams, visions, and even realisations. She read, and... welled out of her eyes. When Mathilde asked the reason, Mirra calmly replied that her tears were because of the world's miseries, for she indeed felt their weight pressing upon her. A world distressed and crying, crying, as if seeking her protection. In this context of the world's pain, the child Mirra couldn't accept the popular notion of an omnipotent God, "one and all alone". As she was ...
... when the Divine spoke through them, as also a seasoned occasional talk like the one to the women of Japan, these were but one aspect - the visible outer aspect - of Mirra's life. The other - the invisible inner - aspect of her life was rather like the underground river, flowing steadily, flowing richly, flowing ambrosially, without being in trammels to the urban eruptions, the marshy stretches,... of the divers descriptive Names, the Reality is the same; Lord, Master, Mother, Friend, Agni, Indra, Eternal Teacher, Sublime Presence, Supreme Dispenser, Sovereign Force, Marvellous Unknowable, Invisible and Sovereign Witness, Mitra, Shakyamuni are but the many verbal approximations to the one only Infinite, the Real, the Perfect. The Divine alone is Mirra's daily diet of meditation, the daily... is that it brings about a subtle and quick vibration in the affected part, thereby restoring normal circulation ... this is a method of curing diseases by pure, subtle force. Something from the occult plane comes down and removes the obstacle from the physical plane. 2 This was for curing existing ailments, but Dr. Okhata and the Kobayashis used their still-sitting meditation more widely ...
... what you are afraid of … [Fear] is like a dissolvent, like an acid.’ 7 Fear was not in her dictionary. Her former occult training had already taught her how dangerous and even deadly fear and apprehension might be. And was she not, as Kali and Durga, the intrepid warrior of the worlds? ‘Intrepid’ is indeed the word that is most applicable to her. She said somewhat ironically that for an adventure of... physical plane, as it were, (but still hidden behind an invisible screen) and completely worked out. The Mother stayed there two days, two full days of absolute bliss. Sri Aurobindo was together with her all the time: ‘When I walked, he walked with me; when I sat down, he sat near me.’ It must have been at that time, or shortly afterwards, that she unlocked the door of her psychic being, ‘very cautiously... fever and a feeling as if her body was literally going to burst. All at once she found herself in another world, ‘nearly as substantial as the physical world,’ where Sri Aurobindo had a permanent dwelling. One should not misunderstand this: the Mother had access to the supramental world or worlds in many ways through her mental and vital. We have seen an example of this in her story of the supramental ...
... lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier. We see already that advance in its obscure beginnings.” 44 Science is moving more and more into the realm of the invisible which by definition is the occult – a mathematical formula does not make a neutron or a quark visible. And does the crisis of science – perhaps leading to a new and surprising scientific “paradigm” as predicted by... and that its eventual realisation was assured. Mirra’s life was not less radical. She had to break with her bourgeois background to enter the “bohemian” life of the artists’ world in Paris. The risks she took in her occult explorations were considerable, and once she actually died for a short time because her own teacher, in a fit of anger, cut the silver cord connecting the subtle sheaths with the... French evening classes to the youth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram School, which had been founded by her during the Second World War. There the children could ask her any question that popped up in their head, and the Mother answered, drawing on her erudition, experience and vast occult and spiritual knowledge. She talked several times about high civilisations that had disappeared long ago. The progress ...
... Men want to know the outer signs of the inner attainment – the way in which a spiritual person differs outwardly from other men. But all the tests which the Gita enumerates are inner and therefore invisible to the outer view. It is true also that the inner or the spiritual is the essential and the outer derives its value and form from the inner. But the transformation about which Sri Aurobindo writes... – which some call character – are two aspects of being, neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality." Besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression; the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested... afterwards, in a constant action upon the world forces.¹ ________________ ¹ Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram Page 2 Twice he found it necessary to go out of his way to make public pronouncements on important world-issues, which shows distinctly that renunciation of life is not a part of his yoga. "The first was in relation to the second world-war. At the beginning he did not actively ...
... the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham.... That invisible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India.10 Such is the slow decline and fall into poisonous decrepitude of the inspiring Vedic symbols of the Purusha, the whole Community viewed as the projection of the Divine in the world. With the total obscuration of the 'soul' of the symbol, with the complete... chain-reactions of fission or fusion. When we fasten on the externals of a situation, things seem easy enough to record - to tabulate - to draw inferences from. But what is visible has its source in the invisible, and human actions are generally the outer expression of certain inner movements - sundry instinctive cravings, intellectual formulations, or spiritual aspirations. With the arrival of Man or Homo... of industry, the tycoon, the financial wizard and the mammoth capitalist; and the men with political power both control and are controlled by the plutocrats Page 476 and the other occult rulers of the society. If such a state of affairs should persist too long, "Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion. Like the two massive ...
... well as a possibility for the powers of the vital world to come and take possession. If a man has not got the perfect balance, it becomes easier for these powers to take possession of him. Sometimes the man who has no faith in things invisible is much better off than the man who has faith in them, or the man who has a tendency towards occultism. He is generally free – comparatively free – from attacks... diseases by pure, subtle force. Something from the occult plane comes down and removes the obstacle from the physical plane. Disciple : It seems like the method of "auto-suggestion" given by Dr. Coué Sri Aurobindo : No, it is not Coué's method. Coué gives the suggestion which works out in the patient; while this is a direct, occult method. Disciple : Is his theory correct? ... when we advocate an ethical solution as final. Page 195 Then there was a turn in the conversation. A disciple asked about occult phenomena. Disciple : There are cases of removal of flower-vases and movements of tables during occult séances. Are the things done by the power of suggestion? Sri Aurobindo : No. The power of suggestion is not the explanation Disciple ...
... can a small face fill the widening heart Where in the ice-pure lonelihood of hush 13 A vast virginity devours all time! 14 O masquerader of the Measureless, O beauty claiming the Invisible's crown, The empire of the uncrying Mystery 11 Has burned across you like an infinite sun 8 Withering for me your body's puny veil! Yet all this fire is but the dwarf soul's death:... The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind. Across both night and day her secrets run. For even through our deepest slumberings we hearken to an embassy of the sun And stir invisible of rapturous wings. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "A very fine poem. The second stanza is the finest; in the two others the first line strikes very deep. The lines that reach the highest... come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?) "I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different from imagination and its work with which the intellect is familiar. It was in this sense that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can ...
... to the arms of the Divine, and leave all the accumulated past behind. Borne by invisible wings, their feet presently touch "a land of fairy light". The second Aspirant looks round and says: "What marvellous splendour! Now we have only to learn to live the new life." In other words, the Life Divine in the transfigured world of the Next Future. As Sri Aurobindo puts it in Savitri: A divine force... Napoleons of commerce, and all the rest of the pillars of society. The situation of extreme limit, with which the play opens, may not have visibly developed already, but the Mother with her precise occult vision could see the unfolding situation even in 1954. The Great Secret is thus no exercise in fancy, but a terribly earnest appraisal of Page 581 current pointers and a formulation... 583 lay "a long, white, very dense cloud". It seemed they were completely isolated from the world! But all pass on, still in more or less high spirits, except the Pessimist who "sinks down... by the roadside". He had begun the quest with a lot of reservations and now, cut off from the world below, felt "nothing is left on which we can base our understanding"; the upward path too was blocked ...
... this soft English woman from the Isle of Wight—by what inscrutably circuitous route? Truly, the meetings of beings through time and space make up a strange geography; we are still unaware of the invisible little beacons that guide our skiffs and hail one another in the night across trans-natal distances, while we go haphazardly, carried along by the southerly wind, and land at the antipodes of our... new man greater than all the Atlanteans, but without their weight of "I”—for ultimately, that is the only thing that weighs down. He knew Egypt ; he had lived there several years and had founded an occult society before taking refuge in Zarif, after being expelled from Egypt for some mysterious reason perhaps not unrelated to his excessive indulgence in thunderbolts. How did he happen to meet Alma,... the body Mirra and Sri Aurobindo stood at the opposite pole of the supermen and superdemiurges who interested Theon so much. They wanted a new and natural evolution of terrestrial Nature and not an occult and "supernatural’’ revolution, which, besides, would not have lasted longer than a staggering display of fireworks, for the “rubber band" would have snapped back to what it was before. They were ...
... with negative consequences for them. And in spite of all their ideas and occult experiences, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have always considered those ideas and experiences as hypothetical, as they had to go on marching forward into the unknown. For the supramental world as a typal world is very different from a supramental world being inserted by a process of transformation in an evolutionary manifestation... kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganized by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.’ 26 In 1957 she said at the Playground, as ever speaking from her own experience: ‘It seems — it is even sure — that the very substance of that intermediary world which is being elaborated will consist of, will be a substance that is richer, more powerful, more... direct although invisible intervention. Some had seen her in another shape, in one of her other shapes; some fostered the burning Flame of Love for her in their breast. But who had an idea of the process of transformation the Mother was undergoing? Who saw, behind or beyond the theory of what Sri Aurobindo’s yoga was supposed to be, the fantastic event of the unfolding of a New World, through her, in ...
... with their soul-scapes, their denizens, their creative potencies such as you come across nowhere else in the world's literature of religious, occult, spiritual realisation. Where except in Sri Aurobindo does one find precise and extended accounts not only of the in-worlds but also of the worlds above the mental level - the "overhead" planes which Sri Aurobindo distinguishes and describes as Higher Mind... most sensitive ear, but who was, like his friend Auden, devoid of the kind of imaginative resonance you look for in poetry - or if I may say so in all humility, I also. They were Marxists and the invisible worlds play no part in Marxist theories of the arts. The resonances of the imagination are absent from C. Day Lewis's translations. He was however I believe the first translator of 'Le Cimetiere Marin'... inspired language. It is not that he has anything of the music which is peculiar to Tagorian Bengali - a gift as of a "Gandharva" incarnate, a transmission to our world of a celestial strain proper to a specific non-human plane known to Indian occult lore, a plane of super-euphony beyond the verbal traffic of the earth at even its most harmonious. 1 am certain our friend Sisir Kumar Ghose would tell us of ...
... violence of the Middle Ages, but by a higher spiritual living for which the clarities of the reason are a necessary preparation and into which they too will be taken up, transformed, brought to their invisible source. These stages or periods are much more inevitable in the psychological evolution of mankind than the Stone and other Ages marked out by Science in his instrumental culture, for they depend... beginnings of Greek civilisation, or rather the beginnings of its mobile and progressive period. Or if spirituality predominates, there will be great mystics capable of delving into the profound and still occult psychological possibilities of our nature who will divine and realise the truth of the self and spirit in man and, even though they keep these things secret and imparted only to a small number of initiates... and social development need not be without its elements, its strong elements of reason and of spirituality. Even the savage, whether he be primitive or degenerate man, has some coherent idea of this world and the beyond, a theory of life and a religion. To us with our more advanced rationality his theory of life may seem incoherent, because we have lost its point of view and its principle of mental ...
... external but occult part of him in which his being mixes with the being of the outside world and through which the outside world invades his consciousness remains a field of imperfection. There is necessarily a commerce here between disparate influences: the inner spiritual influence is met by quite opposite influences Page 994 strong in their control of the present world-order; the new... power must purify, refine and uplift their motions and suffuse them with a higher consciousness that does not belong to their own normal capacity and character. This can be done from within by an invisible action through the psychic entity and the psychic personality; a consciously felt descent from above is not indispensable. The presence of the spirit is there in every living Page 967 ... refuses or minimises commerce with the world or is content to witness its action and throw back or throw out its invading influences with out allowing any reaction to them or admitting their intrusion: but if the inner spirituality is to be objectivised in a free world action, if the individual has to project himself into the world and in a sense take the world into himself, this cannot be dynamically ...
... who has become everywhere". The Mundaka Upanishad has this to say about this "Luminous One who is at once smaller than the minutest particle and in whom are set all the worlds and their peoples" 60 : "That [is] the invisible, that the unseizable,... that which is...eternal, pervading, which is in all things and impalpable, that which is Imperishable, that which is the womb of creatures..." 61... 80. Mundaka Upanishad, III.1.3. 81.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 803. Page 113 power of knowledge'. "The original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, is a knowledge by direct contact associated at its roots with a secret knowledge by identity or starting from it, but actually separated... truths out of their lairs, Its fiery edge of seeing absolute Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self, Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain, Page 118 Lights up the occult chambers of the heart; Its spear-point ictus of discovery Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form, Strips bare the secret soul of all that is. Thought there has revelation's ...
... intensities are not all of the same mode of revelation. Let me give you an example Evanescence Where lie the past noon-lilies And vesper-violets gone? Into what strange invisible deep Fall out of time the roses of each dawn? They draw for us a dream-way To ecstasies unhoured, Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop, By some great wind of mystery... last two lines bring a different turn of sight - a vision less vivid and direct, a more spread-out thought-touched though still light-swept eye is at play. It is as if the poet could not sustain the "occult" or "magic" vein, so enchantingly profound, and opened himself to a region more familiar to him: the Illumined Mind of Sri Aurobindo's overhead series. The inspiration from the Intuition got latched... and brought forth a pure intuitivised snatch from it, no less fine as sheer spiritual poetry than the charmed outbreak from the in-world he had tapped earlier, but constituting a poetic pre-existence different from the one Page 135 which that in-world had yielded in the six opening lines. I am sure your sensitive aesthetic ear will understand why, while granting poetic pr ...
... profound quiet as if nothing had been left to worry over. "All shall be taken care of" — this was the sense of the peace. I went to the Samadhi, knelt before the Supreme Presence and took his invisible blessing and got wrapped in his love. Then I went to the Balcony Darshan. Only a few people were there, scattered in small knots. Suddenly the Mother appeared. She was in a pink-gold dress. She... me. The Mother .expecting that all would come right, had sent him out to keep everything ready for us. Amrita sadly reported: "Nothing is available." Well, this was to be expected in the occult dispensation of things. On the 5th of May I started for Bombay. I was wondering how my meeting with Sehra would turn out. She came to the station to receive me. We exchange smiles. During... had explained to the Mother her inner willingness. I then told her what the Mother had said about coming at the call of the Divine Grace and coming at one's convenience and how the two things were worlds apart. This went straight to her soul. She said she would come. The whole problem was immediately solved. Page 35 She said: "I thought Mother wrote to me only because of that ...
... Divine and whose life is a manifestation of this oneness. Thirdly, transmission by invisible influence and occult action. This last is the most important of the three; it is a tangible and constant reality for the advanced disciple. 18 If the disciple is lucky, his lot will be cast in the hallowed company of a World-Teacher, but ordinarily it is enough for the disciple if in his eyes the Guru... guidance and Grace, for the Guru could verily be the channel for the transmission of transforming vibrations from the Divine. Even if the Guru is not physically present before the sadhak, his invisible occult influence will not be hedged in by place and time and outer circumstances. Sadhaks had pranām and darśan almost daily before 24 November 1926, but afterwards Sri Aurobindo gave... most ordinary men found in themselves an out flowering of the poetic power, a wonderful talent for painting, a capacity for meditation, occult vision and skillfulness of work. Day by day the Pondicherry Ashram grew into a Yogic place of pilgrimage for the entire world. An aspirant had a vision: the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were inside a golden tabernacle on the top of a luminous hill, and men from different ...
... returns to the creative artist his ancient kinship with the world of Divine Ideas and frees him from the tyranny of the natural world. No longer is the artist an imitator of heaven's imitations; he has discovered now the right to receive directly from the Inner or Higher worlds creations not yet bom on earth or hidden from sight in its occult folds, a prerogative exercised in its fullness only since... from the world of Divine Ideas to its secondary and tertiary projections respectively in the world of Nature and in Nature's product, Man. Thus, to Plato, human creation, which is based on sensory reception and response to the world of Nature is "twiceremoved" from the world of Divine Ideas. Nature's expressions are copies from the world of Ideas, while human expression copies from the world of N... Page 246 A joyful anguish trembles in our limbs; A dream of beauty dances through the heart, A thought from the eternal Mind draws near, Intimations cast from the Invisible Awaking from Infinity's sleep come down, Symbols of That which never yet was made. But soon the inert flesh responds no more, Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight, The blaze ...
... ultra; it based itself on the immediate given, Matter, and never investigated life and the supra-rational levels and worlds from which, after all, its seminal inspirations came. The idea of the soul, which generally had remained very misty, was discarded by science, as were all matters occult and religious – but only up to a certain point. For it is touching when studying the history of Marxism, Fascism... the mouse is to the cat, for everything that to us is occult is their domain. Western man hardly believes in the devil any more, and evil has become a metaphor. Disbelief in the devil is understandable because, as is the case with all things occult, Christianity had presented him in a too ridiculous form. The East has a much more thorough occult knowledge of “the devil”, of the anti-divine beings in... allow the race to develop and the supramental being to be born.” 6 Like every kind of birth in our universe the birth of a new era in the development of the manifestation is a dramatic event, invisibly prepared and in its consequences unforeseeable. The pain of a mother’s labour cannot be expressed in words. It is that cosmic moment when two lives are at stake and Destiny holds both in its hand ...
... Koro jodi chalaki, Phor phor korey. Chanti debo mathatey, Khanti kautha bolL (51) Mother started teaching me occultism in 1947-48. When Mother had finished all her work round one-thirty or two at night, my occultism class would begin. Page 237 First Mother taught me to concentrate with her on the heart-centre. Then with her help I learnt to go out... frightened at all at any moment. This sort of occult education went on for some time. During this period I used to do physical exercises for over two-and-a-half to three hours in the morning. And then in addition I had other strenuous jobs as well. At night I used to feel very sleepy indeed. One day I told Mother: "Can't you just pass on your occult power into me without going through all this trouble... concentrate materially upon the work of transformation of the body. I can now leave them externally to do things according to their own ideas of execution, reducing my presence to a more or less invisible role of creative inspiration and consciousness. I noticed Mother was a little indrawn for a few days. But then everything returned to as before. Mother did not withdraw and I heaved ...
... totally unconscious. In the ordinary life there’s not one person in a million who has a conscious contact with his psychic being, even momentarily. The psychic being may work from within, but so invisibly and unconsciously for the outer being that it is as though it did not exist. And in most cases, the immense majority, almost the totality of cases, it’s as though it were asleep, not at all active... of all and quite distinct from these. The word psychic is indeed used in English to indicate anything that is other or deeper than the external mind, life and body or it indicates sometimes anything occult or supraphysical; but that is a use which brings confusion and error and we have almost entirely to discard it… The psychic being is veiled by the surface movements and expresses itself as best... lack this divine presence, which is altogether exceptional and exists only on the earth and nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, the Higher Mind, Overmind and other regions have no psychic being. Of course, the beings of the vital worlds don’t have it either. But these latter don’t regret it they don’t want it. There are only those very rare ones, quite exceptional, who want to ...
... streams, the streams which in the manner of the Ganges, the Jamuna and the subterranean Saraswati join at Prayag. The three rivers in the Song of the Lord are Shanta Rasa, Adbhuta Rasa and the third invisible which we may call as the Gita Rasa. By them other Rasas also find their happy fulfilment. The Tranquil, the Wondrous and the hidden Meritorious of the celestial Song come at this triple holiness and... secrets, guhyatma guhyam , the secret of life in the great Spirit’s freedom. Arjuna had fallen into the Slough of Despond, as some unmanly and awkward clumsy weakness had overtaken him. But by the occult power of the words of the Teacher all this ineptness and all this ignorance got dispelled; that unnatural infirmity which had crept in and kept him under its influence got completely eliminated. Now... protective charm? There is no doubt that this stream of immortality or amritadhara irrigates the well-prepared field for a golden harvest in the abundance of life and therefore it cannot be any inferior occult-vitalistic talisman, or a thick and dark sedative to make one dull-witted; but it has to have the very quality of the Spirit itself, luminous and ennobling that can breathe happiness in the glory of ...
... kind of limitation in that immensity, a sudden inadequacy—it was full, as full as a jar could be, but it was a jar all the same, something which was closed at a point. And there, also, I touched an invisible frontier of dissatisfaction. There was still something to be demolished. × Björn: pronounced Bēēurn ... explored a domain, arrived at a dead end: a series of perfectionings without any outcome. Then it breaks down and one begins again on another line. There has been the spiritual knowledge of India, the occult knowledge of Egypt, Greek knowledge and scientific knowledge... And our epoch is not more knowledgeable than the others, that is the illusion I It is not nearer to the goal; it has only perfected ... away from all that noise of the world, that confusion of the world, that separation in a body. Oh! who can understand the miracle of that royalty in the midst of everything: one is a prisoner in one's own skin, and then, one second of remembrance and one soars above; one looks, one laughs!... I emptied a bucket of water over my body, and all the waters of the world could not have been as soothing as ...
... splendour in this world. Or they may lead to enjoyment after death in Paradise; but Paradise is not salvation; it is a temporary joyous condition of the soul, the pleasure of which ceases when the cause is exhausted. Or these rites may lead to the conscious possession and use of occult powers, latent in ordinary men, by which you may help or harm others; but the possession of occult powers cannot be... The Asuric or godless worlds to which the suicide is condemned, are the worlds of deep darkness & suffering at the other pole from the worlds of the gods, the world of light and joy which is the reward of virtuous deeds. Patala under the earth, Hell under Patala, these are Asuric worlds: Swarga on Page 212 the mountaintops of existence in the bright sunshine is a world of the gods. All this... Dhanunjoy, for I sit as one unconcerned and I have no attachment to these My works." Actions performed after renunciation, actions devoted to God, these only do not cling to a man nor bind him in their invisible chains, but rather fall from him as water from the wings of a swan. They cannot bind him because he is free from the woven net of causality. Cause and effect exist only in the idea of duality which ...
... Swetaswatara Upanishad. (IV. 10.) It is the might of the Godhead in the world that turns the wheel of Brahman. Him one must know, the supreme Lord of all lords, the supreme Godhead above all godheads. Supreme too is his Shakti and manifold the natural working of her knowledge and her force. One Godhead, occult in all beings, the inner Self of all beings, the all-pervading, absolute without... most external constituents, circumstances or causes; but each happening is the outcome of a complex nexus of forces which we do not and cannot observe, because all forces are to us invisible,—but they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the Infinite: some of them are actualities working to produce or occasion a new actuality, some are possibles that are near to the pre-existent actuals and... built and supports and directs the finite it has made as its self-figure; so that even the being and law and process of the finite cannot be totally understood without a knowledge of that which is occult within or Page 342 behind it: our finite knowledge, conceptions, standards may be valid within their limits, but they are incomplete and relative. A law founded upon an observation of what ...
... from Time, name and form. It was like an Omnipresent point. "Pure of dimensions, unfixed, invisible Accentuating its sole. eternity." It was "an endless No to all that seems to be". "An endless Yes to things ever unconceived. "An eternal zero or untotalled Aught "The world is but a spark-burst from its light" and "All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless That... others was to find her soul and save herself. She then cried out to the powers that had assembled asking them to reveal "the birthplace of the occult Fire". Only-one of them answered: "0 Savitri!, from thy hidden soul, we come". "Follow the world's winding highway to its source." "There in the silence" "thou shall see Fire burning" and "the deep cavern of they secret soul." Savitri moved... create new and magical things which Nature could never do. "What God imperfect left, I will complete." I have mastered the world of Matter, I am its King now. I am also mastering the secrets of Life and "Soon I shall know the secrets of the Mind". I shall even acquire occult powers. "When earth is mastered, I shall conquer heaven". Savitri did not reply to this voice but turned to Mother of ...
... is very important for them . Has C. given anything? It would do him so much good — people don't know what invisible forces they trigger with a simple little gift. The Monster has all the millions of dollars — and how much for the fragile little light of the new world? But the deep, occult truth is that Micheline must not be the only one to finance everything once again. A bit of American money... you must have realized the vastness of Mother's plan for Auroville as an occult means to avoid another world war and divert the forces of destruction. Then we understand what is at stake there and the real forces behind Navajata & Co. This handful of people simply block and thwart Mother's effort to avoid another world war, this is that. For this very reason, I recently wrote to Sir C.P.N. Singh... the future. You don't know what battle, really.... Today it is in India that the battle of the World is taking place. It is absolutely essential that the Agenda spreads in India and wakes its sleeping soul. This is what can save India and Auroville. You don't know all the material and invisible obstacles. But your gesture is very important in this battle. So, I want this money to go to the ...
... Unguessed domains she made her native field. All-vision gathered into a single ray, As when the eyes stare at an invisible point Till through the intensity of one luminous spot An apocalypse of a world of images Enters into the kingdom of the seer. A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose; It rent the gauze opaque... said to have seen "subtle forms and spiritual visions" - including three goddesses whom he later recognised as the Vedic Ila, Mahi (Bharati) and Saraswati - his sadhana must have taken him to the occult worlds above and below and the inner countries of the mind, heart and soul. Motilal Roy has recorded that he found Sri Aurobindo "a completely surrendered individual - one felt when he spoke as if somebody... of Kali. 12 Very likely what now happened was not unlike Aswapathy's early realisations when he had resolutely withdrawn from the pressures and pains of the world, - withdrawn from outer sovereignty so as to be able to explore the divers occult conditions and wrest the ultimate secret: The intense creatrix in his stillness wrought; Her power fallen speeches grew more intimate; ...
... an impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these outward signs and characters but is more than any formation or manifesting figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly aware,—a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less and less impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and... evolve. The soul gathers the essence of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it for Page 925 the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action is occult and not obtruded on the surface. In the early material and vital stages of the evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness of soul; there are psychic activities, but the instrumentation, the... presence, we are not normally conscious of its distinct reality nor do we feel clearly its direct action in our nature. As the evolution proceeds, Nature begins slowly and tentatively to manifest our occult parts; she leads us to look more and more within ourselves or sets out to initiate more clearly recognisable intimations and formations of them on the surface. The soul in us, the psychic principle ...
... a fraction of a second. An endless movement containing infinite restless whirls, Pictures, visions, hallucinations, dreams and fancies Incessant dramas visible, invisible, minute and gigantic Day and night without respite, terror and splendor, A free for all, inconceivable liberty, holiday for imagination, Every fancy becomes real, a... bosom. No power on earth or elsewhere Can hamper and even less stop Your constant work of transformation Of this world of misery, suffering and violence Into a divine world of peace, harmony and unity, A world of love and beauty, a world where The awakened souls are ever engaged in adoration Of the Divine in all their acts, thoughts and emotions. May we... psychic lines of rapture, Gathers the consecrated petals yearning And unites them into a mystic gesture, a symbol of close-linked harmony, Pink meditation of a dedicated Rose. Occult powers, riches and artistic faculties, Though precious gifts, we lay them at Thy feet. Only one boon we ask Thee to hasten Thy manifestation: Transmute these earthen vessels into ...
... of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too Page 1056 in a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital growth, to make our world too something... hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising coherence. Life-Force also in the material world seems to be more dynamic and effective than Mind; our Mind is free... ignorant preconceptions founded on a limited experience, they seem to belong to the supernatural, to the miraculous and occult; for they surpass the known action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force. A human working of marvels, by the conscious being discovering and developing an instrumentation of material ...
... Mother. I mean that Mother in that room who is there in flesh and blood. If you refer your prayer to some unknown or unknowable or invisible god, I do deride it as mere philosophy. I find your answer quite good. But X is quite free to expect more help from an invisible and silent Mother (who never contradicts you openly) if he likes. 15 August 1932 Why do I do something in dream which I... don't understand the phrase "diverted Page 34 by Saint Genevieve". Did Saint Genevieve divert Attila from Lutetia, which he spared? Attila was compelled to spare Lutetia because of the occult action of Saint Genevieve who, by the ardour of her prayers, obtained the intervention of the Divine Grace. This prompted Attila to alter the route of his troops, and so he gave the city a wide berth... with Mr. Z, a local French official. The conversation ends: ) Mr. Z: I have heard that Sri Aurobindo can communicate at a distance. Is it true? Sadhak: That is nothing. He isn't interested in occult powers; it isn't His aim. Mr. Z: But even so, can He communicate with someone in Calcutta? Sadhak: Yes, if the other person is receptive. Suppose I have difficulties in my work. There is ...
... illuminations to artists in their moments of doubt and defeat. This occult influence could, on crucial occasions, sway the course of events from behind the scenes, or get involved in our affairs without our being even aware of it - an invisible but alchemic participation, a power for change and transmutation and transfiguration. That occult Power is there still, and it is more active than ever, and is a... beckoning heights of the Life Divine. Thus the Master's power (through his writings and by means of his occult presence), the Mother's Grace and the readiness and extent of the sadhaks' response, these together conditioned the quality of life in the Ashram and determined its effectivity for world-action. Such spectacular expansion of activities notwithstanding, the first impression of many... Power that ignited numberless clods of earth into burning braziers of aspiration and realisation. There was, above all, Sri Aurobindo's OCCULT INFLUENCE - unseen, unknown, but potent still, an immaculate Power that sent out its beneficent beams to the ends of the world, imparting sudden hope and courage to soldiers on the battlefield, prophetic gleams of understanding to statesmen overcome by perplexity ...
... the caterpillar. The body of the butterfly is an (invisible and scientifically inexplicable) transformation of the body of the caterpillar. The caterpillar exists in the dimension of the crawling-world of the caterpillars; the butterfly exists in the dimension of the flying-world of the butterflies. The human body of the Mother existed in the world of the humans, who are mental beings. Unseen by human... complete supramental transformation was a realization still in the making for something like another three hundred years, according to his estimation. It was in the body of the Mother, the occult battlefield of the world, the interface between the Supermind and gross matter, that the process of transformation was taking place. She was supramentalized in all her layers of existence except in the lowest,... existing in a supramental world. The world of mental man is a world of darkness and ignorance, comparable to the crawling-world of the caterpillar; the supramental world is the flying-world of the colourful, winged and light butterfly, imperceptible to beings of the crawling-world and beyond the horizon of their interests. The human being is seldom aware of the fact that his world is the result of his ...
... ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result by the invisible Omniscience; we discover a greater working behind our ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure... measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to its own nature; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility... boundaries to a particular operation of knowledge, a particular mode of conscious working, and keeps back all the rest of its knowledge in waiting as a force behind it. All that is thus hidden is an occult store of light and power for the All-Consciousness to draw upon for the evolution of our being in Nature; there is a secret working which fills up all the deficiencies of the frontal Ignorance, acts ...
... ceaseless march Against invisible opponent Powers … All who would raise the fallen world must come Under the dangerous arches of their power; For even the radiant children of the gods To darken their privilege is and dreadful right. None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. 23 6. Kurukshetra in the Twentieth Century The Second World War is long past and is... Consciousness manifested in the earth atmosphere (1956). 33 Coda Years before he performed the yogic Master Act of consciously descending into death to purify and change the occult foundations of the world, Sri Aurobindo had written: And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be A pathway towards Immortality. 34 It is good for those who follow in his footprints to remember that... From a clash of material or other forces everything in this world, if not the world itself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, ever destroying the old …” 5 Words like these are rarely found in books on spirituality and yoga. Still the truth is that the world can only be changed by confronting it without excluding ...
... 13.7.1967 A divine face, the eyes radiating two rays of light, the rays being white, vertical and immobile—what is its significance, sweet Mother? When the beings or forces of invisible worlds manifest themselves before an individual consciousness, they put on Page 15 forms suitable to the symbolism of each one—that is what makes it difficult to explain the visions of someone... probably means many years for us!... 12.4.1967 Although there is a certain charm and poetry in the fact that there is no formal date for the creation of our Ashram, could it be said from the occult point of view that the Ashram was born with the Mother's arrival? The Ashram was born a few years after my return from Japan, in 1926. 17.4.1967 Page 8 The Lord told You:... consciousness becomes all-powerful, shadow will no longer be necessary and will disappear. 4.9.1967 To come down from Your room is to fall into another world, and to go from the Ashram to other towns is to fall into yet another world. How to construct a bridge between the three? It is you (like all those who are conscious and consecrated) who are the bridge. 17.9.1967 ...
... myriad elements; if it is She who, invisible to our mortal sight and unacknowledged by our mental ignorance the Soul of our soul (parāprakṛtirjīvabhūutā) and the Life of our life (prāṇasyedam vaśe sarvam or prāṇaḥ prajānām), then a glad and loving self-surrender to He Power is the best way to realise our unity with the Divine and fulfil our destiny in the world. It is not merely the faith and... vital desires, it seeks an Absolute of Light or an Absolute of Peace or an Absolute Bliss, it is invariably the soul that has inspired the seeking. But our egoistic personality is not aware of this occult influence and inspiration. It feels that it is itself thinking of the Eternal or the Absolute, or that there is naturally developing a love of God and devotion and an attitude of self-offering in... Being, or rather the Being Himself as Consciousness-Force or Shakti, the Magna Mater, or the Megale Dunamis of the Gnostics, that has woven out of Himself this immense and intricate web of the worlds; and that it is the omniscient Will of the Shakti, and not any Chance or caprice of an inconscient Force or Energy, that moves the entire universe of its own creation and acts in and through all ...
... itself; he chaffs as he looks grave and smiles as he pores over the world's misery; for he listens to invisible calls and works ceaselessly to pour the Rhythm over the earth's wounds. He does not perform miracles that flare up like a flash in the pan, then leave the earth to its unrepentant darkness; he does not play with occult siddhis 36 that upset the laws of matter for a time, then let it... call the world as it is. Is it conceivable that a handful of more advanced beings, of pioneers of the new world, will live in that true way, that true body (invisible to others), while others will continue living and seeing in the old shadow, stumbling along and suffering and dying with it, until they too become capable of effecting the ultimate conversion and entering the new world – which will... touching this point of the universe or that one, this soul or that one, answering thousands of invisible calls, continuously emitting its high, clear note which will brighten the world and lighten hearts, unbeknownst to all. For such is Truth, so simple no one sees it, so light it travels around the world in a second, unties knots, crosses boundaries and pours out its marvelous possibility in the ...
... defied Jupiter, grows wiser through suffering, gains knowledge of the visible as well as of the "ideal" invisible world. But deliverance would not come until he was united with his love, Asia the child of Ocean who alone could break the rest of the Voice sleeping in the unknown world. On the other hand Savitri, the child of Eternity, alone could reveal the mystery sleeping in the heart... transcend the Original Sin before the Doom's Day. Yeats may be mystically deeper, but he too for all his attraction for the occult and his meddling with the Vision continues to be torn between Maud Gonne and Byzantium. A.E. rises higher — his soul venturing through the twilight world of mystic-shadowism takes flight into clearer and sunny skies where it communes with the Divine. But he fails when he... possessed of a vision as wide as the world of his day, a sympathy as deep as the heart itself and a vast interpretative sense created, like a demiurge, in his Iliad and Odyssey, a world of his own: a whole human world of terror and pity and passion; the battlefield's blood-thirstiness, the tenderness of the heart, and the all-ruling majesty of calm, — a human world which yet included the gods above ...
... the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind- Page 312 waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion – for example, anger, sorrow etc. – which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or... "So you see," he said, at the end of his narration, "the Mother who had studied occultism in North Africa could understand it all because of her deep occult knowledge." "And you?" He smiled but deliberated for a split second before he answered: "I too have had hundreds of personal experiences about occult forces." "What about the question of levitation?" "I take levitation as... do her work; but this is quite different from the outside practical working on the material plane where the methods must, necessarily, be different, although the occult working and the material working can and do join and the occult power gives to the material working its utmost efficacy . ... " ¹. Condensed from Dilip Kumar Roy, Among the Great (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1950), pp ...
... that seems to him poor, as is natural since the outward meaning is only a part and a surface and the rest is to his eyes invisible. If there had been what he hoped or might have hoped to find in my poetry, a spiritual vision such as that of the Vedantin, arriving beyond the world towards the Ineffable, then he might have felt at home as he does with Thompson's poetry or might at least have found it... There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world's being, not a comer and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and... constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the ...
... country wedded to totalitarianism, or that a China gone Red and furiously working for world-communism would have no aggressive intentions against India. In regard to Pakistan there was the same attempt on our part to look into the heart of the matter and judge issues from insight into the psychological and occult forces at work behind the scene of the immediate physical event: India, however varied... Master, Mother India is your concern after all. Will you not save it from failure, from frustration?" Slowly through the empty days and the hopeless nights a mass of light was felt invisibly moving towards expression. I had the urge to write. But something told me to control it. Not till I felt absolutely surcharged with that mass should I put pen to paper. I waited. Then at last... the right, acting as if in tune with grandfather's own will, were much needed by me in managing his estate to everyone's satisfaction. And the Mother's remark showed clearly that she had been occultly watchful over all the results of the working of her Grace. ٭ February 21, the birthday of the Mother, is also the day on which Mother India was born, seventy-one years later ...
... else close to her. We find here one of the reasons of the Mother’s extensive occult training in the beginning of the century: she had to be able to confront her opponents at least on an equal footing on this plane too. Life and work of the Avatar form a whole, preordained in time(s) and space(s), connected by a web of invisible threads spun by Providence or by the Unity-Consciousness, without which the... now that what is lacking for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relation is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is. It is this zone which remains to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and which is being built. When formerly I used to talk of the new world that is being created, it was this i... contact with the supramental world, whereas on 3 February [^1958] I walked in it concretely — as concretely as I once walked in Paris — in a world that exists in itself, outside all subjectivity. It is as if a bridge is being built between the two worlds. This is the experience as I have dictated it immediately afterwards. [The Mother reads:] ‘The supramental world exists permanently and I am there ...
... and the invisible. "Interestingly there was nothing mental about it: I didn't know the existence of these things, I didn't know what meditation was —I meditated without having the least idea of what it was. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, my mother had kept it all completely taboo: these subjects are not to be broached, they drive you crazy." When we say "the visible and the invisible," we of... asymptote, "But she was in adoration before my brother," Mother laughed mockingly. "My mother scorned all religious sentiment as a weakness and superstition, and she absolutely repudiated the invisible. 'It's all brain disease,' she would say. But she could just as well say, 'Oh, my Matteo is my God, it is he who is my God.' And she truly treated him like a god. She left Page 31 ... 12 Mira and Mirra "Thank God, my mother was an out-and-out materialist," Mother exclaimed one day to Satprem, "so much so that naturally one could not speak to her about invisible things." But all the same. "But then, what is interesting, for instance, is that when her father died (my mother's father), she knew it: she saw him. She thought it to be a dream — 'a silly ...
... that there is a whole world of thought, knowledge packed in the single line. The Nature we see around us, is made of material elements, compounds and objects. It extends from the earth to the stars, and the farthest solar systems and to the groups of nebula; but Nature is not only material, it is also living. It contains the whole world of life from the insects and invisible germs to the largest animals... many philosophers and poets. Here is one which gives the integral vision of the final fulfilment in which the earth,— "Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, A Will expressive of soul's deity,... arises to our view the gross material world, but this world seems to bring out into her gross forms the beauty and delight of the subtle material world. The spirit that gradually approached the creation of form in the subtle material kingdom is able to overcome the resistance of gross matter and bring out into expression some of its beauty in this gross material world. Above this subtle material plane ...
... connection with Blake, though I could see that both he and Blake had equally sensitive entries into the "middle worlds'', the occult planes which are "behind" our physical-vital-mental cosmos rather than "beyond", where the true spiritual supernature is. The vistas the two poets "insight" of those worlds are different. Blake, apart from his "innocent" lyrics, seems to have found reflections of the truths of... scientific thought and experiment have not been missed. Sri Aurobindo has referred to The rare-point sparse substratum universe On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face as well as to The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. Though this last line affects my ear as being no less inspired, both verbally and rhythmically, than any that deals with the spiritual... this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides, all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime." Now you should have some inkling of what Savitri brings to the world of English poetry. Although it differs markedly from the Miltonic mentality ...
... "In the ordinary life there's not one person in a million who has a conscious contact with his psychic being, even momentarily. The psychic being may work from within, but so invisibly and unconsciously for the outer being that it is as though it did not exist. And in most cases, the immense majority, almost the totality of cases, it's as though it were asleep, not... and evolve. The soul gathers 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... Emergence of the Psychic Introduction One of the most inspiring and ennobling concepts in the spiritual lore of the world is that of the psychic being. It provides a major key for understanding the significance and process of the evolution of consciousness, and offers a potent tool for the transformation of consciousness. The concept of the psychic thus ...
... it is one of its oldest occult truths. “The inconscience of Matter is itself a hooded consciousness.” (EDH 165) “Matter is a blind form of the Spirit.” (EPY 571) If material energy is that powerful, how powerful is the power of consciousness which it contains? Powerful enough to create quasars, galaxies and multiple universes, and to perform the wonders of the subatomic world which can be represented... A void, a cipher of some secret Whole, Where zero held infinity in its sum And All and Nothing were a single term … A slow reversal’s movement then took place: A gas belched out from some invisible Fire, Of its dense rings were formed these million stars … (Sav 100-01) Decades before he had already noted, interpreting the old scriptures: “As in the immobile ether arises, first sign of the... different forms and powers and degrees of itself.” (LD 120) There are countless worlds on every level of the manifestation, from the highest to the lowest, from sat , chit , ananda and the brilliances of the Supermind to the worlds of mind and life, higher and lower. There is “this world that we see and those other worlds that we do not see.” (LD 42) “You speak as if the evolution were the sole creation ...
... accurate spontaneous knowledge of persons, of objects, of the occult and to us intangible energies of world-Nature that surround us and impinge upon our own personality, physicality, mind-force and life-force.¹ A still farther power of the subliminal is seen in the changes which take effect in our dealings with the impersonal forces of the world that surrounds us. In the words of Sri Aurobindo: ... their ordinary limitations. By this power one can get free of physical strain or pain or even make the body as light as one chooses. It is by this power that Yogis were supposed to make themselves invisible [and] invulnerable or [to] free the body from decay and death. (From an explanatory Note by Sri Aurobindo, published in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 10-12.)... Page 232 APPENDIX 1.5 The Golden Light Thy golden Light came down into my brain And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane, A calm illumination and a flame. Thy golden Light came down into my throat, And all my speech is now a tune divine, A paean-song of thee my single note; My words are ...
... energy there is a whole sea of consciousness which is aware of the stream, but of which the stream is unaware; for this sum of surface energy is a selection, an outcome from all the rest that is invisible. That sea is the subliminal self, the superconscient, the subconscient, the intraconscient and circumconscient being, and holding it all together the soul, the psychic entity. The stream is the natural... forms and actions, in a limited field of its working, this does not imply any real division of its integrality. The putting of the rest of itself behind it has only the effect of making all that rest occult to the frontal immediately active energy in the limited field of movement, but not of shutting it out of the field; in fact the integral Force is there though veiled by the Inconscience, and it is... to ravel and unravel with the world about him, or would have to do it in a radically different fashion. Living in the universal self and not in the egoistic separative consciousness, he could not evolve that separate action, personality, outlook from himself as the sole or the initial centre and point of reference which is the contribution of the ego sense to the world-workings. He has to put on the ...
... this could go on for hours. 5 Such was Mirra's special feeling for cats and understanding of them. Indeed, she seems to have once claimed that the King of Cats - the Super-Cat - who ruled the occult world of cats had established a special relationship with her. This partly explains why Mirra had a cover made for a well to prevent her cats from falling into it, and also made special arrangements... Mirra herself seems to have participated in the talks but seldom, and indeed only on sundry occasions to have been present; but her unpredictable entrances and exits had their impact too. And here invisible Presence had also a significance of its own. Once Sri Aurobindo referred to the cures effected through the still sitting meditation by Dr. Kobayashi whom Mirra had known in Kyoto. On another occasion... morally sure that the material will yield. 44 The world of the Gods is the Overmind world just below the supermind, and Sri Aurobindo seemed to say that if the link could first be established with this overmental world of the Gods, the supramental descent would become a near certainty. As he said on 6 November 1926: I spoke about the world of the Gods because not to speak of it would be dangerous ...
... Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours... side he is aware at the same time of an executive Force or an energy of Process which is seen to constitute, drive and guide all conceivable activities and to create a myriad forms visible to us and invisible and use them as stable supports for its incessant flux of action and creation. Entering exclusively into the witness consciousness he becomes silent, untouched, immobile; he sees that he has till... may inform and illuminate them, is the seed of redemption of this world of Inconscience and Ignorance. "For with sacrifice as their companion," says the Gita, "the All-Father created these peoples." The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence ...
... constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths... of Dante's concen-raled force of expression into his lines." * FROM BEATRICE IN HEAVEN Bach time your eyes of longing rose above All transient colour to the Invisible, Their viewless worship mingled with my love. So, like the sun upon a blinded gaze You found a warmth of secret splendour spill And, though unvisioning felt my rapturous face... that feel + Each form a shining gate to depths beyond Knows through the magic measures of his tune + Our world is the overflow of an infinite wine + Self-tasted in the myster) -drunken heart. WORLD-POET With song on radiant song I clasp the world, + Weaving its wonder and wideness into my heart— But ever the music misses some huge star Or else some ...
... all we are, is only a small part of our being and by far the larger part of us is below the surface. Or, more accurately, it is behind the frontal consciousness, behind the veil, occult and known only by an occult knowledge.... What we call our mind is only an outer mind, a surface mental action, instrumental for the partial expression of a larger mind behind of which we are not ordinarily... surface activity partially expressing a larger secret vital which we can only know by going within. Equally, what we call our physical being is only a visible projection of a greater and subtler invisible physical consciousness which is much more complex, much more aware, much wider in its receptiveness, much more open and plastic and free. 14 Whereas the outer being "receives consciously... The subliminal has a formation of consciousness which projects itself beyond the body "and forms a circumconscient, an environing part of itself, through which it receives the contacts of the world and can become aware of them and deal with them before they enter." 18 This environmental consciousness surrounding the body is that part of the individual being through which the individual is ...
... a deliberate action, because human forces are not at all natural). Who would ever imagine that Matter, through its own radiation, without any extrahuman or occult powers like those of Theon and all yogis, could by itself erect such an invisible barrier that a human mob is suddenly stopped without knowing why? Though in truth people always do things without knowing why. The more reasons they put on... effort. 38 There comes a moment when it is no longer one body or one bit of matter: it is the body of the world and universal Matter. It is the Subconscient of the world, the Inconscient of the world. As if the problem could not be solved for one individual but for the whole world, or not at all. This is where the sampling of the evolutionary laboratory plays a considerable ... and saddening... an intensive individual sadhana by withdrawing from the world and having no contact with others, or to let a group form in a natural and spontaneous way without preventing it from forming, and then setting out all together on the path. 7 This is the very question of the world. For after all, we have a certain conception of the world. We have seen or think we have seen what the next stage ...
... importance because it has no grandiose effects. 26 Completely invisible miracles because they are completely natural. They have to stop being natural for us to notice them. Actually, mental man became aware of the world as he began upsetting everything. And this is the whole key, the total key. If we want the miracle of the world, we must look closely at those little microscopic miracles... and... nothing miraculous about it . 19 In the beginning, I did not understand what She meant, until the day it struck me as a veritable revelation. First, I asked Mother why She did not use very material occult powers, like those of Theon, for example. No, no use at all—absolutely no use, 20 she answered. And She told me that both Sri Aurobindo and She had always refused to perform what are called miracles... of everything, when nothing is left, there remains only that: Love... pure love. As if the world were really made of love, once you have stripped it of all its coverings. The supra-mental vibration is really the vibration of pure love. It is the natural foundation of the world, the true state of the world. And that is what happened to Mother when She suddenly found herself before, or inside, that ...
... his dream-sight. Kubla Khan is an unmixed glimpse of the beyond-earth. All the reminiscences from Coleridge's reading, with which it is full, have only triggered off a peep into the occult - or, rather, the occult has itself caught hold of those reminiscences and organised them in its own light. That is why Sri Aurobindo 30 has pronounced about Kubla Khan: "it is a genuine supra-physical... Celestial Light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. 8 Might not the final statement be more than figurative? No doubt, Milton was not properly a mystic and in fact his mind was on the whole more powerful than subtle, too... "movie" - just as we speak of a direct audition, the "harmonious numbers" flowing unforced. During sleep the poet would be cut off from the spur to memory's sight by the goings-on of the day-to-day world around: his dream-vision would be rapt, whereas the poetic wakefulness would be partly open to the suggestions of those goings-on. But owing to the abnormal absorption, what the eye would experience ...
... honour". 12 There is "the still surviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture" that laves in the Infinite, sees the Divine behind the phenomenal play, dares the great adventure of invading the Invisible and makes a mighty science of the experiences of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo concedes that Western culture, although "narrow at the top, shut in under a heavy lid, poor in its horizons, too much... positive achievements and the promise it holds for the future. What, then, was the image of Indian civilisation and culture in is heyday, an image tarnished indeed in later times, but not wholly invisible, nor wholly without its power of inspiration: ...a thing rich, splendid and unique. While it filled the view with the last mountain prospect of a supreme spiritual elevation, it did not... meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material life". 29 Man and Nature and God are then inseparable to our understanding, and the One and the Many, the visible and the invisible, seem lost in the ineffable experience of harmony and peace. And as for the great architectural wonders of the Moghul period, isn't the Taj - when seen with an intuition matching the intuition in ...
... refuse to interpret without data. Here is another dream: we were all sitting in the Pranam Hall, in the morning, when the Mother came down smiling and began to look around. There seemed to be many invisible presences—I felt Christ was there too. Then she sat down and a blazing ray of blue light was focussed on her from somewhere. Her appearance became marvellous. This gave me immense joy. Well, you... write more. Now, what is this? Result of my groaning complaint? Effectuation in dreamland what couldn't be in the world of fact and reality? The place where you were is as much a world of fact and reality as is the material world and its happenings have sometimes a great effect on this world. What an ignorant lot of disciples you all are! Too much modernisation and Europeanisation by half! These... effect on this world"? I have a personal interest too. The physical world is only a last field in which not only the physical forces but those of other worlds also throw themselves for realisation. Whatever happens here has already been prepared or foreshadowed in the vital; it does not happen exactly as represented in the vital, but with a change suitable for the material world. But this is a ...
... mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult Page 134 insight into the individual and the cosmos. Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff" and "sky of soul" and "deep soul-ground"... lived immune from earthly hopes, A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts Under its arches dim with infinity And heavenward brooding of invisible wings, [p. 79] or, A greater force than the earthly held his limbs, Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths, Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands... supernal Powers That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze.... Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, A Will expressive of soul's ...
... touch with the currents of world-movements and their reflections in outward events. And, whenever called for, he applied his Yogic Force so as to change the drift of events or circumstances. He told us that he was constantly working on India's movement for freedom. And he once explained to me in a letter: '...behind events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the... entirely control him.' These are realities of the occult world and may not be very easy to understand but as Sri Aurobindo explains: 'The reality of the Hostiles and the nature of their role and trend of their endeavour cannot be doubted by any one who has had his inner vision unsealed and made their unpleasant acquaintance.' We must remember that world conditions at the time were particularly favourable... even in small things, for helping, guiding and sustaining me through all my difficulties and failings in sadhana, and for sharing his divine laughter with me. We come now to an event with deep and occult implications, the full significance of which may not be easy to understand. The outward occurrence is clear enough, grim and completely un expected though it was. In the early hours of November 24 ...
... duties, to be a good man, a perfect citizen, patriot, worker for the community, to serve mankind are the real things far more spiritual than to sit in idle meditation seeking for some remote and invisible transcendental Reality—or unreality. Philanthropy, altruism, service, selfless labour for humankind, these are the spiritual summits. True selflessness lies there, to sacrifice or offer one's life... is still more today because of the present domination of the Western ideal. On one side or another mental idealism, ethical development, altruistic character and action, religious piety and fervour, occult powers, feats of ascetic en durance have been put forward as the essence of spirituality or the test or proof of achievement or the signposts of the journey to spiritual perfection. It is ignored that... sometimes violence may be the right thing. I consider dharma as relative; unity with the Divine and action from the Divine Will the highest way. Buddha did not aim at action in the world, but at cessation from the world-existence. For that he found the eightfold Path a necessary preparatory discipline and so proclaimed it. It [ Ahimsa ] had nothing to do with the Yuga [ at the time of Buddha ], ...
... of their common "work", and they believe in the unity of knowledge. This explains why the Muslim Rumi had disciples with Christian, Zoroastrian and various other backgrounds. The v great Sufi "invisible teacher" Khidr is said to be a Jew. The Moghul Prince Dora Shikoh identified Sufi teachings in the Vedas and Upanishads. Even Pythagoras and Solomon are sometimes referred to as Sufi teachers.... of mankind than the knowledge and power of reason. In Western history, Plato's philosophy marks a great transition between the age of supra-rational knowledge, represented by the mysteries, occultism and mysticism, and the age of reason. Plato made a distinction between perception and reason and argued that the true source of knowledge is reason. Reason, he taught, is made up of mate ideas analogous... their time wondering whether they should be disciples— or otherwise. Since their assumption (that they could be a disciple if they wished it) is incorrect, they are living in a false world, an intellectualist world. Such people have not learned the first lesson. 8 Page 165 Teachers, Teachings, Taught Teachers talk about teachings. Real teachers study their pupils ...
... result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves, etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion, for example, anger, sorrow, etc. which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can... if not reverently at least amiably, as a nice and friendly being who removes the darkness. That is just what Krishnaprem is jocosely damning, your parlous state of ignorance about the occult world and what lies behind things here. If Krishnaprem were asking you to concentrate on Surya instead of Krishna, you could very obviously retort on him with the sloka from the Gita, ... e happenings stopping because Mother put her force to counteract them. You told me about her moving into the house, was it? I gave this as one instance of actual occult experience and action in accordance with occult law and practice, showing that these things are not imaginations or delusions or humbug, but can be true phenomena. The stone-throwing began unobtrusively with a ...
... taking hold even of your tail, can't I? So there is nothing funny about it—perfectly rational, coherent and clear. 15 September 1935 You know we are hanging our hopes and aspirations on the invisible tail of the supramental. But do tell us how this Page 352 omnipotent Mr. S will make us great sadhaks overnight. Is he going to burn up all our impurities by his blazing flame as Hanuman... January 1933 When shall the victory of Supermind manifest on Earth? One can only say that it advances, but to fix—or at least to proclaim—a time is not permitted—for which there are many good occult reasons. 23 March 1933 What are the conditions for the descent of the Higher Consciousness in the Asram atmosphere? Or is it already there? Is it good to call it down for all? The Higher... need not. To be on guard and admit no violent and irrational movements, to be calm and insistent in faith and self-opening to us is all that is needed. 15 November 1933 1934 Is there any occult significance of yesterday's date—the succession 1-2-34? The next date in this series will come in 11 years: 2-3-45. 1.2.34. It is supposed to be always a year of manifestation. 2.3.45 is the year ...
... "abussos" meaning "bottomless". Or take: Thee Father first they sung omnipotent, Immutable, immortal, infinite, Eternal King; thee Author of all being, Fountain of Light, thyself invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st Throned inaccessible — or else: a globe far off It seemed, now seems a boundless continent Dark, waste and wide... Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Page 243 Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy... Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss, Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives, or The dubious godhead with his torch of pain Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss. This tone of voice can come even into less momentous utterances: there is a breadth, there is a controlled power, there is an harmonious ...
... meaning "bottomless". Or take: Thee Father first they sung omnipotent, Immutable, immortal, infinite, Eternal King; thee Author of all being, Fountain of Light, thyself invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st Throned inaccessible - or else: a globe far off It seemed, now seems a boundless continent Dark, waste and wide... Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation: ..... shalt find at last thy road to bliss, Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives, [p. 453] or The dubious godhead with his torch of pain Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss, [p. 17] This tone of voice can come even into less momentous utterances: there is a breadth, there is a controlled power, there ...
... such an evolution. 50 Likewise with regard to the role of "worlds" other than ours in this adventure - worlds occult or non-material -, Sri Aurobindo concludes that these other worlds have their reality too, and powers, influences and phenomena do descend from them to this earth and other earths similarly sustained. Worlds that are "supernatural" to us may be "natural" in their own domain and... a supramental manifesto that holds out the clear promise of an Age of Knowledge and Puissance and Felicity in place of our world of ignorance and division and frustration. And so much of The Life Divine is the recordation of his own adventures and realisations in the invisible realms of consciousness that a direct description of the book becomes, in effect, a portrait as well of his inner life. ... and the lower hemispheres divided by a wall of obscuration: The central idea of the double world-order of both Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo is that the higher world sets the standard for the lower.... But however poor an imitation (of the higher world) it may be, the lower world is not a world of shadows but has a real status. 73 Whereas the Hegelian dialectic with its emphasis on ...
... slave. One must undo all that, undo it, undo it. There only remains the mechanism of habit. But it holds on, it clings, oh!... 67.267 We could call our world, “the world of bad habits.” 67.28 & 1910 The slow underground labour, invisible, almost imperceptible.... The sordid battlefield. 65.259 That's what I call sincerity: if one can catch oneself at each minute belonging to the old stupidity... fairy tale. Years after this 1959, Mother thus attempted to explain to me that passage from one state to the other or from one “world” to the other. 66.263 I don't know what comparison I should use, but I am certain there are some things that are invisible this way (Mother turns her wrist in one direction) , and visible that way (gesture in the other direction) . Perhaps it's only an internal... crossed the different layers and finally reached the body consciousness: it was the body, its consciousness, that saw what none of the higher, yogic or occult eyes had seen — Sri Aurobindo's abode. It is the body's eyes that have access to the “other” world. Death does not exist for the body's eyes, it is something else. As the web grew thinner and thinner with the years, the body, such as it is emerged ...
... succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the Page 18 true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some luminous cave of the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few are... and have experience and evolve. The soul gathers 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. In the early material and vital stages of the evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness of soul; there are psychic activities, but the instrumentation, the... of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, Page 8 for the embrace of the World-Mother ...
... hub of the Ashram's life and exerted an incommensurable influence on the inner and outer life of the sadhaks. Sri Aurobindo's central direction was really a fruitful benevolence and an invisible infusion of occult force, and each individual sadhak and the aggregate too were the happier and the securer for this direction. There was no dull or dead uniformity or standardisation, for each sadhak was... Krishna at Alipur; a Vyasa doing a neo-Mahabharata in the Arya, a neo-Vishvamitra giving us a new Gayatri in The Mother; a Yogishwara Krishna doubled with a Yogishwara Shiva playing an invisible hand in world happenings; and on 5 December 1950, "The Last Great Act of drawing off the 'halahala' that his own Mahakala action had precipitated out of the cosmic ferment". 82 Or one tried... persuade earth-nature's change; Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch.. , 77 But the world-redeemer must redeem the world even in spite of the world, in spite of recalcitrant humanity: The poison of the world has stained his throat.... He dies that the world may be new-born and live. 78 On the 9th morning, after over 100 hours of Supramental sustenance ...
... magic" and mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult insight into the individual and the cosmos. Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff" and"sky of soul" and "deep soul-ground" acquire a... lived, immune from earthly hopes, A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts Under its arches dim with infinity And heavenward brooding of invisible wings, or, A greater force than the earthly held his limbs, Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths, Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands Unwound... of supernal Powers That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze... Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void, Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope, A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams, A Will expressive of soul's deity ...
... observed one law: a mortal could take a heavenly nymph to himself provided he let a profound secrecy lie for ever between the two differing natures during their love-moments: Either a rapture she invisible Or he a mystic body and mystic soul. Reveal not then thy being naked to hers, Page 17 O virgin Ila's son, nor suffer ever Light round thy body naked to her eyes, ... life-force of the Elizabethans and a half-mystical half-mythological plane: it-does not sound the conceptual depths proper to the intellect but catches in terms and tones of thought a breath of semi-occult vistas from which the mind is visited by myths and which seem to open upwards into a first inkling of spiritual vision. In this respect Sri Aurobindo's blank verse hints the Indian in him and affines... go with flesh-impulses. This super-love is set in an atmosphere in contact with some Super-Nature: spirits and entities, both good and evil, pervade Sri Aurobindo's outer world, wearing shape and moulding movement. The outer world itself is seen as part of a gradation of planes that rise higher or sink lower than the material. The authentic mystical or spiritual vision shines out only on very rare occasions ...
... do that, well, other considerations have to take a back seat or seek their satisfaction elsewhere. 31 October 1936 A lonely splendour from the invisible goal Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. [ p. 4 ] No word will do except "invisible". I don't think there are too many "l's"—in fact such multiplications of a vowel or consonant assonance or several together as well as syllabic assonances... now labouring in the mental worlds and trying to negotiate a passage through the psychic regions—beyond that things are more easy. 22 December 1936 Since I wrote to you I have been once more overwhelmed with correspondence, no time for poetry—so the Mind Worlds are still in a crude embryonic form and the Psychic World not yet begun. The remainder of the vital worlds is finished but only in a ... into "would be". Don't make prophecies. And how do you know that Savitri is or is going to be supramental poetry? It is not, in fact—it is only an attempt to render into poetry a symbol of things occult and spiritual. 1933 Page 271 You wrote to me the other day that Savitri is not supramental poetry, but I suppose there are lines in it which can be considered supramental. And why have ...
... discipline of plasticity and enrichment. Do not worry about anything: power comes with the need .... I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou weft created to be, thou wilt be. 24 IX "Thou wert made for this role .... I have appointed thee from all... personal and communal life. With her own composite and integral culture fusing the finest in the East and the West, the old and the new, she could be in rapport with the genuine anywhere; and with her occult vision, she could always enter into the behind-the-surface truth of things. Outwardly she learnt to live the Japanese way of life, wore the kimono, mastered their art of flower-arrangement, and... Japan. And I had seen these landscapes without human beings, nothing but the landscape, quite pure, like that, and it had seemed to me they were visions of a world other than the physical; they seemed to me too beautiful for the physical world, too perfectly beautiful. Particularly I used to see very often those stairs rising straight up into the sky; in my vision there was the impression of climbing ...
... he was pulling. I thought: “This is the end.” Then I called on my occult power, I fought a big fight and I succeeded in pushing him off so that he could not stay any longer. And I woke up … ‘I understood that the illness originated from beings who had been thrown violently out of their bodies. I had seen this during the First World War, towards the end, when people were staying in trenches and were... night in all Thy radiant splendour …’ 26 And once more the confirmation was given to her: ‘I have appointed thee from all eternity to be my exceptional representative upon the Earth, not only invisibly, in a hidden way, but also openly before the eyes of all men. And what thou wert created to be, thou wilt be.’ 27 The entries in her spiritual diary become sparse – or did she tear most of them... Among the other people the Richards met in Tokyo was ‘a son of Tolstoy,’ on a world tour to propagate his bizarre ideas about redeeming the world. As the world was obviously in a deep crisis, the proposals for an ideal solution were legion and often quite eccentric. ‘In Japan I met Tolstoy’s son who was on a world tour for “the good of mankind’s great unity.” His solution was very simple: everybody ...
... here in the material world, a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 5-14 The Self of man is a thing hidden and occult; it is not his body... violence of the Middle Ages, but by a higher spiritual living for which the clarities of the reason are a necessary preparation and into which they too will be taken up, transformed, brought to their invisible source. These stages or periods are much more inevitable in the psychological evolution of mankind than the Stone and other Ages marked out by Science in his instrumental culture, for they... of Greek civilisation, or rather the beginnings of its mobile and progressive period. Or if spirituality predominates, there will be great mystics capable of delving into the profound and still occult psychological possibilities of our nature who will divine and realise the truth of the self and spirit in man and, even though they keep these things secret and imparted only to a small number of ...
... control or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some luminous cave of the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few are... and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless... them and therefore in their inner significance. The extreme solution insisted on by the world-shunning ascetic or the inward-turned ecstatical and self-oblivious mystic is evidently foreign to the purpose of an integral Yoga; for if we are to realise the Divine in the world, it cannot be done by leaving aside the world-action and action itself altogether. At a less high pitch it was laid down by the religious ...
... "voices" and feeling "influences", Anilbaran's and others', e.g. Nolini's. Imagine Nolini engaged in dark and sinister occult operations to take possession of somebody. You said something about the intermediate zone. I thought it was sex-trouble. Sex-trouble, ego-trouble, occult-power trouble. I had an idea that the intermediate zone is something that one is likely to tumble into after making... failed; then went to Pranam, there found Jatin's letter which I enclose, waiting, read it and as soon as I sat in the Hall, lo, everything fell off my shoulders or soul, as if by the breath of an invisible wave. Yes, of course, it was the old man of the Sea, I mean of Sorrows, who dropped off because he can't stand anything cheerful and hopeful. The main credit goes to the letter, because it has... for you? The diffculty is that if I draw him out, he runs back into it. These people feel a tremendous attraction to the wrong Influences and call them back. It is because in the absence of the occult experiences they feel ordinary and dull—and they are people who like to be-extraordinary. I did pull out G; but he became as flat as a pancake and would do nothing more in the sadhana, because naturally ...
... and process and formulations of existence and experience, yet at the same time they penetrate and envelop the Page 804 physical plane with their invisible presence and influences, and their powers seem to be here in the material world itself behind its action and objects. There are two main orders of experience in our contact with them; one is purely subjective, though in its subjectivity... the Inconscient below, with the material world created out of it, and the issue, the return back would then be a similar abrupt or precipitous transit from a material embodied world-being into the transcendent Silence. There would be no intermediate powers or realities other than Matter and Spirit, no other planes than the material, no other worlds than the world of Matter. But this idea is too trenchant... of the manifestation of spirit; the idea of a sole material world becomes immediately untenable. Spirit must be capable of basing its manifestation on the Mind principle or on the Life principle and not only on the principle of Matter; there can then be and logically there should be worlds of Mind and worlds of Life; there may even be worlds founded on a subtler and more plastic, more conscious principle ...
... force was acting on my body — a force the like of which I had never experienced so vividly before! Also, obviously, it had nothing to do with auto-suggestion since I had never even imagined that an invisible Force could so convincingly twist the live, material muscles of a strong sceptic — healthy, wide-awake and normal to his fingertips! So I did not know what to make of it all: what came to pass was... Mother as superior to all of us put together, even though my highbrow reason wanted to dismiss such powers rather summarily. Besides, was she not primarily responsible for my heightened respect for the occult powers of Yoga which in its turn helped me weather the storm of opposition I had to pass through before I could come to port at her feet for good? I say 'for good' because I mean it. Not that I... Divine has attested it by accepting you? Let the whole world misunderstand you, how can it make the least difference now — so far as you are concerned?" "But you need not look so frightfully abashed," she added, twinkling at me and patting me on the hand, "few are the artists who are not avid of praise, who don't doubt but that the world has been created to revolve around them, and if far more ...
... ly than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane." ( 18-8-1932 )10 (2) " When I concentrate, I work upon others, upon the world, upon the play of forces." (19-12-1934).11 (3) " The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the yogic consciousness. Who would be satisfied with such meaningless hallucination... Life Divine, P. 234. Page 18 are called Koshas or sheaths. Though we are normally co, nscious of only physical body, it is possible to open oneself to other bodies; the psychic and occult phenomena we come across in life are due to them. Six nervous centres of life in the physical body, corresponding to six centres of vital and mental faculties in the subtle, have been discovered by... that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interests in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the spirit and ...
... Charles Darwin shortly before the publication of the Origin . Whether to Christian, atheist or agnostic, a theory of evolution, advancing that human beings descended from monkeys and ultimately from invisibly small life-forms, microbes, seemed at the time utterly unbelievable – even to naturalists who spend their days studying living beings, and trying to find explanations for their fantastic diversity... readers of this “fact,” rubbing them with their noses into their animality, so to speak. Finally, Darwinism is so often used as an argument against anything related to God, religion, spirituality, occultism or the paranormal, that it has become synonymous with godlessness. As mentioned before, some neo-Darwinians have gone on an all-out attack on creationism and “intelligent design,” a movement that... but they do not make the world completely different at once. A religious doctrine, a strong bulwark of the mind constructed and reinforced over centuries, does not crumble from the first bolt of lightning or the impact of a new idea, in this case Darwinism. The remnants of the bulwark of Christianity, built up during the Middle Ages, are still standing in the Western world. Darwinism was one of the ...
... within us but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast concealed ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is an occult oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled awareness focused for poetic purposes in a luminous vision which is at the same time a subtle vibration... liquid glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a thing like a pool which is a small mass of still water in which light goes diminishing as it is drawn deeper and deeper towards an invisible bottom. And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing". "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of wings... of life" where a World-Soul toils at evolution within man's physical mould and Nature's matter. Charged with the drive of this evolutionary Dreamer, it aims to infuse his idealistic dynamism into the stuff of outward existence, so that novel- modes of thought and desire and perception may be realised, expressing openly through the activities of this stuff the fulfilment of the World-Soul's venture across ...
... us but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast concealed ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is an occult oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled awareness focused for poetic purposes in a luminous vision which is at the same time a subtle vibration... glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a thing like a pool which is a small mass of still water in which light goes diminishing as it is drawn deeper and deeper towards an invisible bottom. And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing". "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of... life" where a World-Soul toils at evolution within man's physical mould and Nature's matter. Charged with the drive of this evolutionary Dreamer, it aims to infuse his idealistic dynamism into the stuff of outward existence, so that novel modes of thought and desire and perception may be realised, expressing openly through the activities of this stuff the fulfilment of the World-Soul's venture ...
... Sri Aurobindo : The scientific method is fruitless as applied to these occult subjects or even to life. Dr. J. C. Bose has shown that there is a nervous response in the plants. But nervous response is not vital force. It does not prove the existence of vital force. Vital force is like a pianist who is invisible. You can only see the mechanism of the piano and the playing but not the player... sensitive but generally they do not control these occult forces. The Jews, having a long-standing tradition about these powers, seem to know the way of mastering them. Théon, the Mother's first teacher, had great powers and knew bow to use them. Sometimes these powers are gifts. When one leaves the physical being and goes into the vital world he must know how to protect himself or someone must... non-existence it becomes non-existence. If you enter non-existence you cease to be. A ray can arrive only at nowhere through nothing. Disciple : That may be occult knowledge. Sri Aurobindo : It is not merely occult knowledge but occult knowledge and common sense. Disciple : What is space ? Sri Aurobindo : The question remains : either it is a conception Page 92 ...
... action and plays with imagined or inwardly constructed forms of them; it chooses others for objectivisation and attempts to realise them. But it receives inspirations also from above and within, from invisible sources and not only from the impacts of the visible cosmic phenomenon; it sees truths other than those suggested by the actual physicality around it, and here too it plays subjectively with transmitted... this transient and unhappy world, turn to Me. Gita. (IX. 33.) This Self is a self of Knowledge, an inner light in the heart; he is the conscious being common to all the states of being and moves in both worlds. He becomes a dream-self and passes beyond this world and its forms of death.... There are two planes of this conscious being, this and the other worlds; a third state is their... original creative Illusion, an all-inventing and all-constructing Maya. Our mind stands between a superconscience and an inconscience and receives from both these opposite powers: it stands between an occult subliminal existence and an outward cosmic phenomenon; it receives inspirations, intuitions, imaginations, impulsions to knowledge and action, figures of subjective realities or possibilities from ...
... the Mother's face you saw in your vision, but probably in one of her supraphysical, not her physical form and face—that is also indicated by the great light that came from the form and rendered it invisible. I am glad to hear of the development you speak of in your dealing with others. It is a power proper to the Yoga consciousness that is developing in you, because the Mother's force is at work... silence and resist all outward pulls. As much avoidance of outer pulls—contact does not matter, if there is no pull outward—as will help that, can be very helpful. It is only an entire seclusion that for occult rather than mental reasons is not altogether desirable unless one has already a great inner strength and poise. Living Within and the External Being It is the past habit of the vital that makes... has to be removed, it is only then that a real Yogic consciousness begins. The outer has to be merely an instrument or channel for the inner to express itself and communicate with the outer physical world. The inner again has to have free communication with the universal on all the planes—it has to enter into the cosmic consciousness. The outer consciousness has to be remoulded and reshaped through the ...
... whether people are ready. That is to say that it is possible so long as they accept the guidance of a sage? Yes. The first thing that should be accepted and recognised by everyone is that the invisible and higher power that is, the power―which belongs to a plane of consciousness that is mostly veiled, but which is within each; a consciousness which can be called anything, by any name, it does not... kind or in money. Those who have nothing but money will give money. But to tell the truth, "work" can be inner work―but one cannot say that, because people are not honest enough. The work can be an occult, completely inner work; but for that, it must be absolutely sincere and true, and with the capacity for it: no pretension. But not necessarily a physical work. "Sections like industries which ... felt. The world lives in falsehood, all relations between men have until now been based on falsehood and deceit. Diplomatic relations between nations are based on falsehood. They claim to want peace, and meanwhile they are arming themselves. Only a transparent sincerity in man and among nations can usher in a transformed world. Auroville is the first attempt in this experiment. A new world will be ...
... has included it in her movements. But as always, the movements of Nature take place on a scale infinitely surpassing the human scale and invisible to the ordinary human consciousness. It is more of an inner, psychological possibility that has been born in the world than a spectacular change in earthly events. I mention this because you might be tempted to believe that fairytales are going to be... afternoon. I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built. When formerly I used to speak of the new world that is being created, I was speaking... kept getting narrower, narrower and narrower, narrower and narrower, like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no more room—not even for the consciousness—to pass through. And the bottom was invisible, a black hole. And it went down, down, down, like that, without air, without light, except for a sort of glimmer that enabled me to make out the rock edges. They seemed to be cut so steeply, so ...
... beauty, they search deeper into the white-hot core of things and in their cyclic orbit of thought curve downward round the most hidden foundations of existence and upward over the highest, almost invisible arches of ideal possibility." 14 In this statement we can discern, in the words "deeper", "downward" and "upward", Sri Aurobindo's lifelong search of integrality in poetry, philosophy and yoga... flourished, who gave the most magnificent expression to the beauty and grandeur of the physical world, shows also "a keen appreciation of high ideal and lofty thought." 43 i) Valmiki and Sri Aurobindo The moral world of Valmiki is the world of passions and emotions, world of the vital forces. Morality implies the governance of the natural impulses in man and a transformation of that... The main story has not undergone much change. But within the ancient framework he has given form to a vast and eternal vision encompassing many planes of individual and universal life, physical, occult and spiritual. In the study of influence we could analyse how the original tale has grown, what the additions and modifications are. 74 Although it would be an interesting study yet it would not ...
... nothing could be directly tested there and the physicist had to send out some long-range antenna in Page 43 order to collect and then codify information pertaining to this invisible impalpable world. These antenna were nothing but different forms of analogies among which may be mentioned: (a) Metaphor (e.g., planetary model of the Bohr atom); (b) Metonymy (e.g., the presence of electrons... conditions favourable for the Descent are already there. But this in itself is a necessary but by no means sufficient factor. For the supramental Descent to occur there must be someone to cooperate occultly with the process and accelerate the march of evolution. What would have normally taken thousands of years should be encompassed in a couple of centuries or so, and this has precisely been the mission... which completely escaped the grasp of immediate palpability and thus a world of "constructs" (Margenau) was built up. And so long as classical physics moved on its one-rail track - we mean, so long as a single accepted theory dominated the field - this world of "constructs" was believed to be of a deeper order of reality than the world of sense-data. In fact, physicists were convinced that they had thus ...
... God-adoration. Rather I should say that the occult Force at work through him made his ambition a tool for its own purpose. You must be aware that Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater had trained him to be the vehicle of "the World-Teacher" and indeed those who heard him at a certain grand gathering were struck by the mediumistic way he addressed them. I believe that "the World-Teacher" and he became fused, as it were... instinct in the poet that made the choice, for here the passage is from splendour into mystery, the bright visible is the guide to the fathomless invisible which is to Wordsworth the trance-goal of all conscious seeking for the divinity interfused with the world. Mention of Wordsworth of the "Tintern-Abbey" period brings me to your question whether I would ascribe to you dalliance with eternity or... during my search for God I was disappointed by his followers and was convinced that some occult power was using him with the gift of a certain semi-Buddhist experience on the mental plane to fix down to an ambiguous imitation of the Witness self (sakshi purusha) the many-sighted far-venturing soul of the world, particularly plastic and versatile in its Indian mood. Through him this power attempts ...
... technique. Page 283 To anyone familiar with occult phenomena and their analysis, these things will seem perfectly normal and intelligible. The vision-mind in us is part of the inner being, and the inner mind, vital, physical are not bound by the dull and narrow limitations of our outer physical personality and the small scope of the world it lives in. Its scope is vast, extraordinary, full... was perfectly serious, the intention being to point out that even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or of subjective forces was open to doubt and discussion in which there would be no material certitude—while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of spiritual force. Each... in an occult way with the occult may be called esoteric—e.g., the "Bird of Fire," "Trance," etc. "The Two Moons" 108 is, it is obvious, desperately esoteric. But I don't know whether an intimate spiritual experience simply and limpidly told without veil or recondite image can be called esoteric—for the word usually brings the sense of something kept back from the ordinary eye, hidden, occult. Is "Nirvana" ...
... 44 The modern synthesis will accept nothing but “a purely materialistic chemical process”. And so it has been ever since. The problem of course is: how does one measure life, omnipresent but invisible and ungraspable? How does one even define life? If science is materialistic, it is because to us, beings incarnated in matter, only matter is directly perceptible, and only experiments with material... hereditary process began now to be seen as a ‘mechanism’, and life would soon dry up among the lifeless components of the mechanism. We are approaching the year 1900, the turn of the century when occultism had a heyday, but in academic science “mysticism” became a funny word. Mutations and Saltations The third pillar of ‘Darwinism’, sometimes called neo-Darwinism, was, after Mendel and Weismann... and Mind (or Consciousness) are equally essential elements. This is the reason that vitalism and the countless unorthodox mental interpretations of our world keep cropping up again and again. Our knowledge is incomplete. The knowledge of our world and ourselves is incomplete. “Perhaps the problem is that for some scientists reductionism [i.e. the method of scientific materialism] functions as a ...
... intensively and extensively. This cultivation has come to be explored and practiced systematically in various cultures of the world, and in India, this systematic exploration and practice have been recognized as Yoga, and it has come to be clearly distinguished from religion, occultism and philosophy. Yoga i is a systematic and methodized pursuit of spirituality and direct spiritual experience... human language. Cottingham refers to the Christian reader and points out that the central concept of the Incarnation makes visible to him, in the person of one human being, the icon of the invisible God. He argues that if the Transcendence of God is not to be lost in silence, we need a transition, a way of understanding God in human terms. At this stage, Cottingham proposes that liturgy provides... experiences have been worked out, and valid means of clarifications have been greatly standardized so that barren scepticism is no more defensible in regard to physical experiences, even so, in the occult sciences or in the yogic sciences, true standards and valid means of verification have been developed. Supraphysical experiences, when rightly interrogated and tested by their own characteristic a ...
... million “human” Negations: the Gestapo was charming and visible compared to those countless, perfidious, hypocritical and invisible cruelties — “cosmic,” as it were, as if it were the very world that was called into question, and so too the hideous Forces that rule this world. Then, yes, you see everything laid bare, without seeing anything except through the wounds of your body and your soul. ... asking questions helps it walk toward the next world of the shrew. We must walk out of the cage, the answer is to get out of the cage. In the meantime ... well, we can nibble mentally. So we are right in that supramental Boeing. There is a veil to draw open, which turns it all into a Boeing — after all, for the shrew the Boeing is completely invisible, even if it scurries along between the seats... rest thanks to its purity. Of course, the invisible Enemy, he who manipulates all the human little puppets, rushed on that — he knew very well that this little purity was his death. First of all, you have been blacklisted, you were the “French group,” the fanatics, the militants — they tried to isolate you, you were the cause of all the evils of the world and of Auroville, you were an obstacle to ...
... effected in D by your Force, X says that it might have been due to a combination of unseen factors—not due to your Force. How does' he know? Why can't my poor force be there among the invisibles, since invisibles there are? If only visibles were admitted, then of course. In that case all the trouble I took for D was sheer waste of energy, hallucination and chimera. Hallucination also the fact... that he has played great parts in the Divine Lila, in former births, had beautiful experiences! Hallo! How often have I intimated that G was no great clergy. As for experiences, anybody with an occult bent can have experiences. The thing is to know what to do with them. Am I to say alas, human nature! Or alas, Divine Power! Excuse me. It was not the Divine Power that told G to be a Teacher... spiritual & supraphysical force acting on the physical world directly. One has to train the instrument to be a channel of this force; it works also according to a certain law and under certain conditions. The Divine does not work arbitrarily or as a thaumaturge; He acts upon the world along the lines that have been fixed by the nature and purpose of the world we live in—by an increasing action of the thing ...
... the desire to be a big yogi with occult powers. To try to bring down occult powers into an unpurified mind, heart and body—well, you can do it if you want to dance on the edge of a precipice. Or you can do it if your aim is not to be spiritual but to be an occultist, for then you can follow the necessary methods and get the help of the occult powers. But the occult spiritual forces and masteries can... emergence of a new consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth becoming from the true being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said... intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible—reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible, suppress as much of the form as may be and you get nearer that behind, which is invisible. It is the same impulse, as I have said, as pervaded recent endeavours in Art. Form hides, not expresses the ...
... it is the basis of utthāpana. Animā is the power of freeing the atoms of subtle or gross matter from their ordinary limitations. It is by this power that yogins are supposed to make themselves invisible and invulnerable or to free the body from decay and death. Apart from these three powers of being, there are three Page 91 siddhis of power. These three are: aishwarya, ishita and... seeker through the process of the burning of aspiration itself, — and, therefore, in need of no indispensable external agencies of guidance, — teacher, book, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, science, occultism or religion, — even though they may be utilised as and when indicated or offered on the way, but in the end transcended by the inward force of the constant need to burn and burn luminously and immortally... but that one's action is a part of the totality of world action. At this stage, therefore, the method consists in the withdrawal or renunciation of the sense of egoistic doership of action. The practice of the method of Karma yoga at this stage can be greatly strengthened if the knowledge of the world movement, of the place of ego in the world and of the real originator of action is sought to be ...
... sonnet of Sri Aurobindo's? - The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal energy spilt, It is the Infinite's blind minute abode. In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably to be; His oneness in invisible forms he hides, Time's tiny temples of eternity. I shall... three worlds. In the world of Sat, the beings are not separately individualised but have a divine universality. There Consciousness-force and Ananda are held back and subordinated in the manifestation. In the world of Chit, Consciousness-force becomes prominent and determines everything. In the world of Ananda, Bliss is the determinant. Then there is the Supramental world, with the... are in conscious and active relation with the new world of supramental realisation."² What the Mother calls "the new world of supramental realisation" is something unique in evolutionary history. Perhaps it is not correct to speak of evolution at all in this connection. When the life-world manifested, even when the more subtle and potent mind-world found its expression and that special superior ...
... rub X the wrong way just now as his nerves are in a rather raw state and if he gets upset it means a lot of unnecessary work for me. I think that anyone who has had some insight into these occult worlds, can no longer stand on absolute rationalism... Qu'en dites-vous? Stars can be humble? I have answered that. I hear Mother has vetoed J's poem being dedicated to her. X says it has already... the Force, whereas my constant concentration, prayer and appeal failed? Yes, it is the success in establishing the contact that is important. It is a sort of hitching on or getting hold of the invisible button or whatever you like to call it. Sometimes the Force "that is always operating" is not enough for me. You have to leave all relaxed repose and sit up and regain curvilinear proportions... pudding. Is it that the path to the Divine can't be made easy on account of the danger of a democratic aspiration which will thunder at God in his own citadel? Perhaps it is to prevent the world from coming to a sudden end by a universal rush into beatitude. Or is it for the preservation of the species? The sex started as a preservation of species. Man has made a hotch potch of what ...
... method of action recognizes a secret relationship between the manifest and occult energies and actions that lie behind all that we physically see and experience. This relationship, it is held, is that of an interchange and, which is characteristically described as yajna, sacrifice. The Veda holds that the entire world is, in fact, a massive Energy flowing according to rhythm, which is that of... to the devas and ultimately to the Supreme Being itself. The world is thus not conceived as an illusion, although it grants that there is in this world an ignorance through which illusions are created in the world, and as a result of which our own view of the world is illusory. But the world itself, the movement of the world itself is not, according to the Veda, an illusion. Action of man... with God Agni can be established. For, according to the Vedic poets, a sound or a certain secret set of vibrations tunes exactly with the vibrations which are appropriate to the vibrations of invisible psychological forces and entities. The Veda provides these secret sets of vibrations. The very hymns, their sounds, their specific measures are themselves these secret sets of vibrations. They are ...
... Or, worse, they would use them to eliminate everything that seems evil in this world. But what do they really know about that evil? What do they know? Human beings know nothing. A great vision is necessary in order to handle power. Towarnicki: But what happened after she experimented with those occult powers? Well, she saw that it was in fact a dead end. It was NOT the solution... also gifted in mathematics. And then she knocked on a very interesting, and very dangerous door – the door of occult powers. Because, if there was to be another being, a step beyond the human, HOW was it going to... come into being? A rather natural answer is to say: maybe there are occult powers in man that will give the solution and open the door to another state? Obviously, few people are capable... who had a lot of occult knowledge. We only know the laws of matter, you see. There are other laws behind, that's quite obvious. Other laws that are very powerful and very effective. And it's a blessing that humans know nothing about them because they would use them in the most dreadful ways. But at any rate, Mother also experimented with that to see if those so-called occult methods could in ...
... with swords and wings, Or transitory raiment made on looms, Or bodies visible to mortal eyes. Far otherwise they come, with unseen steps And stroke invisible,—if gods indeed There are. I doubt it, who can find no room For powers unseen: the world's alive and moves By natural law without their intervention. POLYDAON King Phineus, doubt not the immortal gods. They love not doubters. If thou... forth to tear thy limbs. ANDROMEDA Beyond too Shall I be hated, in that other world? ATHENE Perhaps. ANDROMEDA Wilt thou love me? ATHENE Thou art my child. ANDROMEDA O mother, O Athene, let me go. They linger in anticipated pangs. ATHENE Go, child. I shall be near invisibly. Page 406 She disappears. Andromeda stands with clasped hands straining... bad'st me? Ah, he has gone into invisible Vast silences!... Whose, whose is this bright glory? One stands now in his place and looks at me. Imperious is his calm Olympian brow, The sea's blue unfathomed depths gaze from his eyes, Wide sea-blue locks crown his majestic shape: A mystic trident arms his tranquil might. As one new-born to himself and to the world He turns from me with the surges ...
... because it is a blow the world of your mental formation has sustained. Such a world often becomes a part of our being. The result is that a blow dealt to it gives almost physical pain. The great compensation is that it makes you live more and more in the real world in contradistinction to the world of your imagination which is what you would like the real world to be. But the real world is not all that could... reconciliation I am seeking. Your quotation from Ramprasad 1 does not assist me in the least—and it does not support your thesis either. Ramprasad is not speaking of an embodied, but of a bodiless and invisible Divine—or visible only in a subtle form to the inner experience. When he speaks of maintaining his claim or case against the Mother until she lifts him into her lap, he is not speaking of any outer... on it. Page 231 August 2, 1932 Yes, if you wish, you can include the letter on Doubt and the repartee in your book—but I am afraid it will make it very miscellaneous! The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the yogic consciousness. Your question about Yoga bringing merely a feeling of Power without any result was really ...
... (September 1914), "On Meditation" (October 1914), "On Universal Consciousness" (January 1915). Part Two (Reviews): "Hymns to the Goddess" (May 1915), "South Indian Bronzes" (October 1915)-, "God the Invisible King" (July 1917), "Rupam" (April 1920), "About Astrology" (November 1917). - In SABCL all the articles of Part One are included in Section VII of Volume 16, except "The Significance of 'Arya'"... SABCL: Collected Plays, Vol. 6 66. THE PHANTOM HOUR Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1951 One of the short stories written under the general title "Idylls of the Occult", during the early years of Sri Aurobindo's stay at Pondicherry, probably between 1910 and 1912. SABCL: Collected Plays, Vol. 7 67 . POEMS Government Central Press, Hyderabad... Viziers of Bassora; Prince of Edur; The Maid in the Mill; The House of Brut; The Prince of Mathura; The Birth of Sin; Vikramorvasie (The Hero and the Nymph): Short Stories: Idylls of the Occult: The Phantom Hour; The Door at Abelard; The Devil's Mastiff; The Golden Bird. Juvenilia. Volume 8 Translations , FROM SANSKRIT AND OTHER LANGUAGES: From Sanskrit: ...
... because of its newness on the whole they had to go through tremendous difficulties and perils, they are talking fundamentally from the occult and spiritual standpoint. What they read serves also to provide them with an in-look and it is finally by the marks left in the world's subtle history that they judge whether their Yoga was ever essayed previously. Your suggestions strike me as lacking in a proper... physical but an invisible one with a capacity to materialise for a while, and the divinisation as a fulfilment of terrestrial history loses its point by being complete only after death so that a divinised physicality in the true sense is absent. By the way, I wonder what would be meant by the physical cosmos getting transformed along with the sons of God if everything becomes invisible in accord with... with the invisibility of the bodies of God's sons. And what significance remains in the description "glorified body" if this entity is really discontinuous with the "crucified body" inasmuch as it is no longer visibly physical and an inalienable part of earth's career through the ages? The entire sense of evolutionary development and consummation is missing. Unless that is there, we cannot speak of the ...
... the psychic experiences and knowledge of the invisible worlds as of other Yogic experiences is not to be measured by our narrow human notions of what may be useful for the present physical life of man. In the first place, these things are necessary for the fullness of the consciousness and the completeness of the being. In the second place, these other worlds are actually working upon us and if you know... above, that is, to the Supermental level, it is hardly possible to know that last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to... separate psychic vital and physical being to the illumination and change. The second by itself is rapid, sensitive, full of extraordinary and striking experiences but apt in the absence of psychic or occult powers to be chaotic, uneven and open to many dangers. It is when both are present and act upon each other in the being that the Sadhana is likely to be perfect. I think you should insist in your ...
... the Vital), but in its content. When the seeker awakens with an overwhelming sensation, as if he had bathed in a world replete with signs having more than one meaning at a time (the events of our physical world rarely mean more than one thing at a time), which are so filled with invisible ramifications and depths that he could contemplate them for a long time and not exhaust their meaning, or when he... many spiritual, occult, or chivalrous groups in the past to select a secret place far away from the rest of the world, sheltered from the contamination of collective vibrations, to do their work.) But they soon realized that this was an illusion and that afterward the gap or the atmospheric gulf, 373 as Sri Aurobindo would put it, between the new accomplishment and the old world would be too great... her own wisdom. The vast invisible that pervades this country was to extract from it a double ransom, both human and spiritual; human, because these people, saturated with the Beyond, conscious of the Great Cosmic Game and the inner dimensions in which our little surface lives are just points, periodically flowering and soon re-engulfed, came to neglect the material world – inertia, indifference to ...
... God functions as the creator of Beulah. Again, when Urizen's natural world - "wondrous 216.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 115, 11.9-10, 12-14 (Songs of Innocence). 217. Ibid., p. 266 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.94-95, 97). Page 207 work" - is seen to "flow forth like visible out of the invisible", Blake comments: For the Divine Lamb, Even Jesus who is... d from the Son but also the Deity differing from Christ by being hidden away from sight, such as we have put in the "distant deeps or skies" of our lyric. The phrase is: "Jesus, the image of the Invisible God." 306 A similar phrase about Jesus is in Jerusalem: "the Divine Similitude" 307 - an echo from the traditional nomenclature in Paradise Lost: Begotten son. Divine Similitude...... 1 . 6 ) . 306. Ibid . , p. 481 ( Milton 1. 2 .1. 12 ) . 307. Ibid . , p. 664 ( Jerusalem 2 . 38, 1 . II ) . 308. Paradise Lost . Bk . II . 1 . 383. Page 230 the invisible God" 309 - as well as from the saying in The Gospel of St. John: "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." 310 So, taking ...
... which I shall never forget. "They say, these impeccable oracles of wisdom," he said with a flushed face, "that since the World-maker is invisible and unknowable, therefore the wisest thing is to make the most of our world we can know and rely on as real. But the world minus its Maker, I say can be made the most of only in one way and that is bloody." And so he gave up his lecturership... Krishna must keep his eyes on His feet, irrevocably, though the triple world fell into ruin." Upon this Gurudev finally commented: "Krishnaprem's letter is admirable from start to finish and every sentence hits the truth with great point and force. He has evidently an accurate knowledge both of the psychological and the occult forces that act in Yoga; all that he says is in agreement Page 361... _____ *Cf. (Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, II, 9) : Mental doubt alias sceptic thought he assimilates to: A watch-dog of the spirit's sense-railed house Against intruders of the Invisible, Nourished on scraps of life and Matter's bones, It keeps close guard in front of custom's wall, And barks at every unfamiliar light As at a foe who would break up its home. ...
... there was no third person in the room - unless the 'Invisible Man' of H. G. Wells was present! "Until then we had been watching the incident, making our own observations. But when we found that things were going too far, were becoming dangerous even, we decided that something had to be done. The Mother knew a great deal of occultism and the world of spirits. She understood that there was somehow a... whatever happens here has already taken place in an invisible world, sometimes much earlier. It only takes time to materialise on our earth, that's all. Those who can contact this invisible world do not find it difficult to know about its events and activities. But that does not mean that everything they see there will be realised here in our physical world, or even that they should be able to predict when... understand that there is no such thing as chance. An invisible Hand is guiding you from behind the veil of external incidents, particularly those who are born with a great mission.... However, to pick up the thread of my story - I left England on board the Carthage. Though it was a storm-tossed journey, the ship didn't sink. "This life and this world of ours are very complex realities. So many forces ...
... of psychic experiences and knowledge of the invisible worlds as of other yogic experiences is not to be measured by our narrow human notions of what may be useful for the present physical life of man. In the first place these things are necessary for the fulness of the consciousness and the completeness of the being. In the second place these other worlds are actually working upon us. And if you know... and physical being to the illumination and change. Page 340 The second by itself is rapid, sensitive, full of extraordinary and striking experiences but apt in the absence of psychic or occult powers to be chaotic, uneven and open to many dangers. It is when both are present and act upon each other in the being that the Sadhana is likely to be most perfect. I think you should insist in... towards these vital cases. What you say about the different vital worlds is no doubt interesting and has a certain truth, but you must remember that these worlds, which are different from the true or divine vital, are full of enchantments and illusions and they present appearances of beauty which allure only to mislead or destroy. They are worlds of "Rakshashimaya" and their heavens are more dangerous than ...
... intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him." (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Barnes & Noble Classics, NY, 2004, pp. 69-70) ______... mental energy enter into it from outside: these take form in it or appear already formed from some universal Mind or from other minds and are accepted by us as our own thinking. We can perceive also an occult or subliminal mind in ourselves from which thoughts and perceptions and will-impulses and mental feelings arise; we can perceive too higher planes of consciousness from which a superior mind energy... truth, an imperative behind them which capacitates the possibilities, decides the actualities. Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that necessitate the movements and forms of a creation: for in the front of universal existence there are only forces determining results by some balance of the meeting of their powers; ...
... thing of which one knows nothing. I know that the "scientists" are continually doing it with supraphysical phenomena outside their province—those who never had a spiritual or occult experience laying down the law about occult phenomena and Yoga; but that does not make it any more reasonable or excusable. Any Yogi who knows something about pranayama or japa can tell you that the running of the name... overjoyed me (that even Krishna took some notice of the poor fellow). I saw I was praying fervently with tears in my eyes for Krishna; asking him to show himself for once and not remain unconvincingly invisible (through grace or not) when my eyes were concentrated on the sky (I think) and first a spot of light appeared, next lo! the silhouette of a fine figure on a horse flashing past the sky. I remember... This is necessary as a respite at this period from the enormous mass of work which after August 15th has exceeded what I complained of before that date, and also that I may have time to carry on the invisible work which has been sadly hampered by the weight of the visible. But this need not interfere. November 18, 1934 You ask me whether you have to give up your predilection for testing ...
... only when there is either secret indulgence of a perverse kind replacing the normal sexual activity or else an indulgence of it in a kind of subtle vital way by imagination or by an invisible vital interchange of an occult kind,—I do not think harm ever occurs when there is a true spiritual effort at mastery and abstinence. It is now held by many medical men in Europe that sexual abstinence, if it is... so, why should it be forbidden in the sadhana? The injunction would then be not to stop sex-intercourse, but to copulate freely and sublimely and divinely. Subtle Forms of Sex-Indulgence Sex (occult) stands on a fair level of equality with ambition etc. from the point of view of danger, only its action is usually less ostensible—i.e. the Hostiles don't put it forward so openly as a thing to be... not be depressed by these ordeals in the subtle worlds; they come to all in one form or another; only you have to learn vigilance and find your way through these lesser planes to the highest, so that it may be the highest that will come down into you. When these trials come, it is a sign that you are advancing, for otherwise the Powers of these worlds, whether lesser gods or Daityas, would not take ...
... fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise super-physical experiences and powers, occult or Yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not be limited by the ordinary physical human-animal consciousness, it must have the other ranges. Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is supernatural or incredible... once enlivening and exalting. His power sprang from his unshakable peace, and the secret of his hold on men lay in his utter self-effacement. His greatness was like the gentle breath of spring - invisible but irresistible, it touched all that was bare and bleak around him to a splendour of renewed life and creative energy. In regard to his work at the Baroda College, he once remarked to some... affecting our life and thought; what changes take place in us when we rise into them in consciousness, or receive their influences in us; what are the sources of subtle sight, subtle hearing, and other occult powers, which it is too late in the day to laugh away; above all, what are those domains of immortal light and bliss and blessedness of which the very greatest of our historical personalities speak ...
... the psychic experiences and knowledge of the invisible worlds as of other Yogic experiences is not to be measured by our narrow human notions of what may be useful for the present physical life of man. In the first place, these things are necessary for the fullness of the consciousness and the completeness of the being. In the second place, these other worlds are actually working upon us and if you know... above, that is, to the Supramental level, it is hardly possible to know the last secret of the world. The problem of the world does not get solved. There, the ignorance of duality between spirit and matter, the spiritual truths and life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Lila of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. There it becomes possible to... separate psychic vital and physical being to the illumination and change. The second by itself is rapid, sensitive, full of extraordinary and striking experiences but apt in the absence of psychic or occult powers to be chaotic, uneven and open to many dangers. It is when both are present and act upon each other in the being that the Sadhana is likely to be most perfect. I think you should insist in ...
... exceptionally gifted and powerful poet to surmount altogether the need of knowing the metrical technique by sheer force of his inborn and intimate sense of the spirit of rhythm and subtle word-music; the invisible Spirit of Word-Beauty with which he is in direct contact would itself provide him with its intrinsic body-forms, its shapes and structures of visible embodiment. But what made Nishikanto write... [the dark iron-pitcher] must represent a formation in the subconscient. The poem is fine and the form a great improvement on your previous attempt at free verse.” Mā [The Mother]: “Very fine. Occult vision—very powerful—each word and symbol expresses the truth. [Addressed to Nishikanto] About your vision. It came as an answer to your call for the removal of ugly things in your own nature and you... could catch glimpses of the subtle world.” Years later the Mother would remark about Nishikanto: “He has the eyes of a visionary.” Nishikanto observed during his stay in the Guru’s Ashram that in spite of being an ascetic his Guru wasn’t oblivious of the world. Revolutionaries and activists used to visit the Ashram and discuss with the Guru the condition of the world around. During one such discussion ...
... work as well as a possibility for the powers of the vital world to come and take possession. If a man has not got the perfect balance, it becomes easier for these powers to take possession. Sometimes the man who has no faith in things invisible is much better off than the man who has faith in them or the man who has a tendency towards occultism. He is generally free – comparatively – from attacks... 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 world. It teaches the abandonment of the world and nature. Sri Aurobindo : Yes, but that does not seem to be the whole of Datta-marga – the yoga of Dattatraya. It seems only one side of it. There is the other side... they are and what is behind them. For instance, I can laugh at Shankara's Mayavad or Mahatma's views; but I can see the truth that ii behind them both. I know the place they occupy ii the play of world-forces; for, it really comes to that Disciple : Can want of balance be overcome ? Sri Aurobindo : Everything can be done. You can do it within your limits; you can correct the exaggerations ...
... fall on the boy: Bijoy and he were sitting side by side and the stone was thrown at them in front but there was no one visible to throw it – the two were alone in the room. So unless it was Well's Invisible Man ! "So far we had only been watching or scouting around, but this was a little too much, it was becoming dangerous and something had to be done about it. The Mother, from her knowledge of the... peace reigned." ¹ The phenomenon was witnessed by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, Bijoy, Amrita, Satyen, Hrishikesh Kanjilal and Upendranath Bannerji. Upen, who did not believe in the existence of occult forces or in the possibility of materialisation, went out on the terrace with a lantern and a lathi looking for the persons responsible for the stone-throwing. He found no one and the stones went on... was destined to form a new order of life in the world. He had always seen it, though less clearly and dynamically at first, that a higher spiritual power was necessary to solve the moral, material, social and even political problems of the world. Just as Gandhiji believed in an inner, moral power or soul-force as essential for the redemption of the world, similarly Sri Aurobindo believed that a higher ...
... write—or, (if they are outside), when the letter reaches the atmosphere. Yes, it is the success in establishing the contact that is important. It is a sort of hitching on or getting hold of the invisible button or whatever you like to call it. When you send the Force, is there a time limit for its functioning or does it work itself out in the long run or get washed off after a while, finding the... that gives you words and rhythms, you ought to know or at least your inner being knows very well that all divine powers are the powers of the Mother. But the way in which these things work is the occult and not the physical (not the crudely mediumistic) way, and it works in each according to his nature and the material and capacities, actual or latent, it finds there. 8 September 1931 Please... —so long as a veil exists at all. Of course with genius too in its moments of inspiration—surer than the layman imagines; but genius also is a kind of accidental Yoga, a contact, an opening into an occult Power. 25 November 1933 Page 605 This liability to be read as an iambic pentameter is the pitfall of this metre [ quantitative trimeter ]—everything else is easy, this is the critical ...
... "principalities and powers" and "the rulers of this world". 68 The distinction is between human beings and subtle occult agencies. The Corinthian reference, however, is not just a generality signifying man as a bodily entity. It is counterpoised to "the kingdom of God" consequent on the resurrection, a life of perfection at the end of the world, and yet, by that counterpoising, it does not become... saying 'Listen... I am Jesus Christ, who is with you forever.'" The Wisdom of Jesus Christ tells a similar story: "then there appeared to them the Redeemer, not in his original form but in the invisible spirit. But his appearance was the appearance of a great angel of light." 179 The Apocryphon of John speaks of John seeing "an image with multiple forms in the light". 180 The Corinthians... 226 The reference is specifically to what both the Jews and the pagans (the non-Jews as a group, the Gentiles, the Graeco-Roman world in which Paul preached) would think of a proclaimed Saviour nailed to the cross. William Barclay 227 reminds us of the Graeco-Roman world's view of crucifixion: "The most cruel and the vilest punishment, Cicero called it (Verrines 5.66); the ultimate penalty, Apullius ...
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