“
True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness.
When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
The great are strongest when they stand alone,
A God-given might of being is their force.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri)
“
But few are those who tread the sunlit path;
Only the pure in soul can walk in light.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri)
“
By your stumbling, the world is perfected.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
By our stumbling the world is perfected
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,
”
”
Bhagavad Gita
“
All problems of existence are essentially problems of Harmony.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Divine Plan)
“
The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break a dead resistance in the mortal's heart
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
The Divine is what you adore in Sri Aurobindo.
”
”
The Mother
“
I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Transcendence transfigures; it does not reconcile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them that effaces their oppositions.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Life Divine)
“
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
Few are those from whom the Grace withdraws, but many are those who withdraw from the Grace.
Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga, p.613
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice)
“
All can be done if the god-touch is there
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
Is it true that existence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that energy is an output of Existence?
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The joy of service and the joy of inner growth through works is the sufficient recompense of the selfless worker.
Gems from Sri Aurobindo, First series, p.129
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
All sincere aspiration has its effect.
Gems from Sri Aurobindo, First series, p.7
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice)
“
The only necessity in this sadhana is to open yourself to the Divine Force; if one is open the necessary understanding or knowledge will come of itself through spiritual experience.
Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p.448
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
I spent quite sometime just watching enthralled, the gnarled hands of Mother Teresa in a portrait because those hands are associated with bringing comfort to the aged and abandoned in Kolkata’s streets. So they are beautiful.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Inspiration from Savitri: Beauty)
“
The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
If thou desirest Truth, then still thy mind.
[Savitri]
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellant, but I could no longer find them.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Courage and love are the only indispensable virtues; even if all the others are eclipsed or fall asleep, these two will save the soul alive.
Essays Divine and Human, p.455
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
In fact, if one reads attentively what Sri Aurobindo has written, all that he has written, one would have the answer to every question.
”
”
The Mother (Questions and Answers 1957-1958)
“
God within is leading us always aright even when we are in the bonds of the ignorance; but then, though the goal is sure, it is attained by circlings and deviations.
Sri Aurobindo
MCW, vol 10, On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p.258
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
One can have a psychic feeling of love for someone, a universal love for all creatures, but one has to give oneself only to the Divine.
Letters on Yoga, vol.24, p.815
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Secret of the Veda (Guidance from Sri Aurobindo))
“
... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Still the invisible Magnet drew his soul
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
If Mind is all, renounce the hope for bliss;
If Mind is all, renounce the hope for Truth.
[Savitri]
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Life Divine)
“
Remain faithful to the Light of your soul even when it is hidden by clouds. My help and the Mother's will be there working behind even in the moments when you cannot feel it.
Letters on Yoga, vol.24, p.1425
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The goal of yoga is always hard to reach, but this one is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress....
Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga, p.545
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The spiritual aspiration is innate in man; for he is, unlike the animal, aware of imperfection and limitation and feels that there is something to be attained beyond what he now is.
The Life Divine, Chapter XXIII - Man and the Evolution, p.875
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Be thyself immortal, and put not thy faith in death; for death is not of thyself, but of thy body. For the Spirit is immortality.
The Hour Of God, vol17, The Divine Superman, p.75
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
For what the Spirit sees becomes a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Anything else one may doubt but that he who desires only the Divine shall reach the Divine is a certitude and more certain than two and two make four.
Letters on Yoga, p.585
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
In our defeated hearts God's strength survives
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Remain fixed in the sunlight of the true consciousness - for only there is happiness and peace. They do not depend upon outside happenings, but on this alone.
Letters on Yoga, vol 2, p.1709
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
All true love and all sacrifice are
in their essence Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism and
its separative error; it is her attempt to turn from a necessary first
fragmentation towards a recovered oneness. All unity between
creatures is in its essence a self-finding, a fusion with that from
which we have separated, a discovery of one’s self in others.
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in
the darkness.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Synthesis of Yoga)
“
Your practice of psycho-analysis was a mistake. It has, for the time at least, made the work of purification more complicated, not easier. The psycho-analysis of Freud is the last thing that one should associate with yoga. It takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind—to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms—runs riot here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have a nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Bases of Yoga)
“
A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
The thought of the Gita is not pure Monism although it sees in one unchanging, pure, eternal Self the foundation of all cosmic existence, nor Mayavada although it speaks of the Maya of the three modes of Prakriti omnipresent in the created world; nor is it qualified Monism although it places in the One his eternal supreme Prakriti manifested in the form of the Jiva and lays most stress on dwelling in God rather than dissolution as the supreme state of spiritual consciousness; nor is it Sankhya although it explains the created world by the double principle of Purusha and Prakriti; nor is it Vaishnava Theism although it presents to us Krishna, who is the Avatara of Vishnu according to the Puranas, as the supreme Deity and allows no essential difference nor any actual superiority of the status of the indefinable relationless Brahman over that of this Lord of beings who is the Master of the universe and the Friend of all creatures. Like the earlier spiritual synthesis of the Upanishads this later synthesis at once spiritual and intellectual avoids naturally every such rigid determination as would injure its universal comprehensiveness. Its aim is precisely the opposite to that of the polemist commentators who found this Scripture established as one of the three highest Vedantic authorities and attempted to turn it into a weapon of offence and defence against other schools and systems. The Gita is not a weapon for dialectical warfare; it is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme region. It maps out, but it does not cut up or build walls or hedges to confine our vision.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Essays on the Gita)
“
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.
(Savitri, Book 11, Canto 1, pp. 710-711)
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri (German Edition))
“
Quarrels and clashes are a proof of the absence of the yogic poise and those who seriously wish to do yoga must learn to grow out of these things.
Letters on Yoga, vol.24, p.825
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Mother - US Edition)
“
But though hast come and all will surely change.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath
And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,
Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.
02.07_055:003
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
C'è un senso in ogni colpo di fortuna, vi è una libertà in ogni faccia del destino.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Synthesis of Yoga)
“
Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience.
”
”
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy)
“
The first step on this long path is to consecrate all our works as a sacrifice to the Divine in us and in the world.
The Synthesis of Yoga, Chapter XI - The Master of the Work, p.247
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes: He dreams of her beauty made for ever his, He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear, He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Inspiration from Savitri: Beauty)
“
For me the path of Yoga has always been a battle as well as a journey, a thing of ups and downs, of light followed by darkness followed by a greater light.
Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p.372
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
For it is because he acts ignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong will in these matters, that man is or seems to be bound by his works; otherwise works are no bondage to the free soul.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claimst to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief’s cure?
If far he walks above mortality’s head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
If one of theirs they see scale heaven’s peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
God must be born on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God.
He who would save the world must be one with the world,
All suffering things contain in his heart’s space
And bear the grief and joy of all that lives.
His soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.
If thou wouldst a little loosen the vast chain,
Draw back from the world that the Idea has made,
Thy mind’s selection from the Infinite,
Thy senses’ gloss on the Infinitesimal’s dance,
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.
Banish all thought from thee and be God’s void.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
receptiveness which promises a revolution both in philosophical and in religious thinking; here they are filtering in through many indirect influences, there slowly pouring through direct and open channels. There is hardly a
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Upanishads, 1st US Edition)
“
Cornellisen charged Jung for daring to take credit for discovering the 'collective unconscious' which is simply a misnomer and a poor conceptualisation of inner worlds known since millennia in India and even the mystical traditions of Europe
”
”
Rajiv Malhotra (Battle For Consciousness Theory: The Battle for Consciousness Theory: A Response to Ken Wilber’s Hijacking of Sri Aurobindo and Other Indian Thought on the right.)
“
A new consciousness is coming based upon inner silence and quietude. You must wait quietly for that to develop. True knowledge, true perceptions of people and things will come in that new silent consciousness.
Letters On Yoga, vol.24, p.1414
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.
Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness.
Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,
Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite,
And, sole in a still eternal rapture,
Gathers all things to his heart for ever.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Put stress always on the aspiration within; let that get depth and steadiness in the heart; the outer obstacles of mind and the vital will recede of themselves with the growth of the heart's love and aspiration.
Breath of Grace, editor: M.P. Pandit, p.205
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
An incense floated in the quivering air, A mystic happiness trembled in the breast As if the invisible Beloved had come Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet And the world change with the beauty of a smile.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Inspiration from Savitri: Beauty)
“
The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being. They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Life Divine)
“
I started reading the works of Pandurang Vaman Kane, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhakumud Mookerji, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, S.L. Bhyrappa, R. Nagaswamy, Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Kapil Kapoor, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant G. Talageri, Meenakshi Jain and Sandeep Balakrishna, apart from the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. This was, of course, in addition to the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and other civilisational icons.
”
”
J. Sai Deepak (India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)
“
Then there is the life-force, the Prana, that works in our vital being and nervous system. The Upanishad speaks of it as the first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya, asanya; it is that which carries in it the Word, the creative expression. In the body of man there are said to be five workings of the life-force called the five Pranas. One specially termed Prana moves in the upper part of the body and is pre-eminently the breath of life, because it brings the universal life-force into the physical system and gives it there to be distributed. A second in the lower part of the trunk, termed Apana, is the breath of death; for it gives away the vital force out of the body. A third, the Samana, regulates the interchange of these two forces at their meeting-place, equalises them and is the most important agent in maintaining the equilibrium of the vital forces and their functions. A fourth, the Vyana, pervasive, distributes the vital energies throughout the body. A fifth, the Udana, moves upward from the body to the crown of the head and is a regular channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the spirit. None of these are the first or supreme Breath, although the Prana most nearly represents it; the Breath to which so much importance is given in the Upanishads, is the pure life-force itself, - first, because all the others are secondary to it, born from it and only exist as its special functions. It is imaged in the Veda as the Horse; its various energies are the forces that draw the chariots of the Gods.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (The Upanishads, 1st US Edition)
“
A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
“
This universe an old enchantment guards; Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink: The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house; He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs: His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Inspiration from Savitri: Beauty)
“
God did not created the world. He himself became the world. This is the core of vedantism. Every object, every being, each conscious as well as inconcient being is the divine manifestation on planet earth. Since, each one is the god itself, we have learnt to love, respect and worship everything around us.
Therefore millions of beings, millions of gods.
”
”
Kunal Narayan Uniyal (Journey To The Next Level-The Forbidden World)
“
Even pain is joy to be more alive. . . . But don’t you think that so long as you wallow in pain you are bound by it? Pain can only be great if it is transcended, if it has made you aware of your depths, I feel sure of that . . .” Calmly, as a doctor speaks about an anonymous patient, Christina said that as a rule people take a drug to sharpen or widen their consciousness. But she took it only to forget her torment and this was a very limited experience. Then why was it that she took to it again and again after having been off it for months? “One day you will face your fear boldly: in it, through it, you will grasp your real being,” I replied. Then I read aloud this passage from Sri Aurobindo Ghose’s Thoughts and Glimpses: “Consciousness of being and Delight of being are the first parents. Also they are the last transcendences
”
”
Ella Maillart (The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939)
“
There are two Hinduisms; one which takes its stand on the kitchen and seeks its Paradise by cleaning the body; another which seeks God, not through the cooking pot and the social convention, but in the soul. The latter is also Hinduism and it is a good deal older and more enduring than the other; it is the Hinduism of Bhishma and Srikrishna, of Shankara and Chaitanya, the Hinduism which exceeds Hindusthan, was from of old and will be for ever, because it grows eternally through the aeons.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo and India's Rebirth)
“
It is not that education has never been accorded adequate importance in India.
The writings of the founding fathers—including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Maulana Azad, Ambedkar, and even the spiritual torchbearers of modern India such as Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo—stressed that education would form the core of India’s “tryst with destiny,” as Jawaharlal Nehru would have put it. Almost all of them suggested ways by which a new generation of Indians could be educated in a liberal and scientific environment where modern society was built on traditional strengths, one supplementing but not substituting for the other, and where education was deeply connected to the needs of people. But somehow, independent India could not build on the richness of this philosophical tradition, or on the depth of its populace’s respect for education.
This history seems to have been lost in the current debate, mired in the more mundane issues of access and quality defined in terms of enrollment
numbers and teacher-student ratios.
”
”
Bibek Debroy
“
A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo
“
Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul’s rapture-drink: The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house; He spilled his spirit into Matter’s signs: His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree.
”
”
Sri Aurobindo (Inspiration from Savitri: Beauty)
“
If there are always forces around which are concerned to depress and discourage, there are always forces above and around us which we can draw upon, - draw into ourselves to restore, to fill up again with strength and faith and joy and the power that perseveres and conquers. It is really a habit that one has to get of opening to these helpful forces and either passively receiving them or actively drawing upon them - for one can do either. It is easier if you have the conception of them above and around you and the faith and the will to receive them - for that brings the experience and concrete sense of them and the capacity to receive at need or at will. It is a question of habituating your consciousness to
get into touch and keep in touch with these helpful forces - and for that you must accustom yourself to reject the impressions forced on you by the others, depression, self-distrust, repining and all similar disturbances.
... it is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this power is greater than any other and more effective.
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 very strange. Who would be satisfied with such a meaningless hallucination and call it Power? If we had not had thousands of experiences showing that the Power within could alter the mind, develop its powers, add new ones, bring in new ranges of knowledge, master the vital movements, change the character, influence men and things, control
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Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice)
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In Indian social-cultural-political discourse there is a general tendency to ignore deeper, intellectual thought, and the sensationalist mass media has actually contributed to a great dumbing down of even the educated masses. In this climate where any and all intellectuality has been mostly confined to a few ivory towers of academy, it is difficult to get even the educated and socio-economically privileged section of the society interested in the idea of exploring any deeper intellectual thought. It seems as if the trinity of pop-sociology, pop-psychology and pop-culture has taken over the general mentality of the society leaving little room for any serious, intellectually rigorous discourse on social-cultural phenomena. If at all, there is any serious attempt to think through and understand the observed phenomena, it is almost always done using the intellectual theories and frameworks developed in the Western academic circles. But this habit of non-thinking or thinking only in terms of borrowed categories must change if we want India to awaken to her innate intellectual potential.
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Beloo Mehra (The Thinking Indian: Essays on Indian Socio-Cultural Matters in the Light of Sri Aurobindo)
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The psychic being is a portion of the Divine; it has a natural attraction for the truth and the Divine but that attraction is desireless, free from demands and lower cravings. The psychic emotion is pure and stainless.
Writings In Bengali, p.395
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Sri Aurobindo
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Keep faith in your spiritual destiny, draw back from error and open more the psychic being to the direct guidance of the Mother's light and power. If the central will is sincere, each recognition of a mistake can become a stepping-stone to a truer movement and a higher progress.
Letters on Yoga, vol.24, p.1509
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Sri Aurobindo
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There can be no immortality of the body without supramentalisation; the potentiality is there in the yogic force and yogis can live for 200 or 300 years or more, but there can be no real principle of it without the supramental.
Letters On Yoga, vol.24, The Triple Transformation, p.1229
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Sri Aurobindo
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The method is to quiet the mind and, in order to do so, to concentrate on an aspiration for faith in the Divine Power, peace and calm in the mind, single-minded sincerity in the heart, and a conscious opening to the Light and Truth and Power.
Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p.817
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Sri Aurobindo
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You have to put your inner will and the Mother's light on the vital so that it shall change, not leave it to do what it likes. The Mother's force or the psychic can act, but on condition that the assent of the being is there.
Letters on Yoga, vol.24, p.1343
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Sri Aurobindo
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The hymn was to the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress for himself and for others.
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Sri Aurobindo (Secret of the Veda (Guidance from Sri Aurobindo))
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Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner.
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Sri Aurobindo (Secret of the Veda (Guidance from Sri Aurobindo))
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A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.
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Sri Aurobindo (Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol)
Mangesh Nadkarni (Savitri – The Golden Bridge, the Wonderful Fire: An introduction to Sri Aurobindo's epic)
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Man’s mortality is constantly vexed with dreams of immortality, his transience is teased by hopes of infinity. The gods have given man hungers which no food can satisfy. He is indeed the dumb cattle driven by the gods. He is tied to the rope of his body, and for fodder they throw at him grief, hope and joy, and they have enclosed his pasture ground with the fence of ignorance. The gods have been playing a cruel game with man. They
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Mangesh Nadkarni (Savitri – The Golden Bridge, the Wonderful Fire: An introduction to Sri Aurobindo's epic)
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God did not create the world. He himself became the world. This is the core of vedantism. Every object, every being, each conscious as well as inconcient being is the divine manifestation on planet earth. Since, each one is the god itself, we have learnt to love, respect and worship everything around us.
Therefore millions of beings, millions of gods.
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Kunal Narayan Uniyal (Journey To The Next Level-The Forbidden World)
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Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Power is the strain, Knowledge is the performer, the infinite All is the composer and audience. We know only the preliminary discords which are as fierce as the harmony shall be great; but we shall arrive surely at the fugue of the divine Beatitudes.
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Sri Aurobindo (The True Aim Of Life)
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Royaume de Dieu est en train de se bâtir.
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Georges Van Vrekhem (Au delà de l’espèce humaine - La vie et l’oeuvre de Sri Aurobindo et de la Mère (French Edition))
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Cuestiones como el ser humano, su constitución, el papel del espíritu y del alma individual, del ego y de la personalidad, así como de la evolución del ser humano, de la conciencia, del ser anímico y de la realidad en su conjunto, pues ni que decir tiene, para terminar, que el último escalón de esa escalera de siete peldaños o ese “Acorde séptuple del ser”, es decir la Materia, es considerada no como lo opuesto irreconciliable del Espíritu y un estorbo del que liberarse, sino como el propio Espíritu cristalizado, densificado. Por tanto, no se trata de denigrar el cuerpo y la materia en general, como una cárcel-castigo o como desafortunada creación de un demiurgo maligno, sino como la forma del espíritu, la frecuencia vibratoria más baja, más lenta, más densa de la Conciencia-Energía no-dual. Así pues, “El nudo de la Materia” no hay que cortarlo y arrojarlo al cubo de la basura, sino desatarlo, desenredarlo. Se trata de transmutar la materia en una delicada operación alquímica que aquí lleva el nombre de supramentalización.
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Vicente Merlo (El Yoga Integral de Sri Aurobindo (Mindfulness, meditación, budismo, yoga y otras tradiciones contemplativas) (Spanish Edition))