Divine Delight

03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A mystery drama of Divine Delight,
A living poem of world-ecstasy,

05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Suffering, incapacity and death are, it is said, the wages of earthly life; but they are, in fact, reverse aspects of divine truths. Whatever is here below has its divine counterpart above. What appears as matter, inertia, static existence here below is the devolution of pure Existence, Being or Substance up there. Life-force, vital dynamism here is the energy of Consciousness there. The pleasure of the heart and emotions and enjoyment is Divine Delight. Finally, our mind with its half-lighted thinking power, its groping after knowledge has at its back the plenary light of the Supermind. So the aim is not to reject or withdraw from the material, vital and mental existence upon the earth and in this body, but house in them, make them concrete vehicles, expressions and embodiments of what they really are.
Pain and suffering, disease and incapacity, even age and death are fortuitous auxiliaries; they have come upon us simply because of the small and partial scale of our life to which we agreed. One can live here below, live a full life, upon a larger scale, upon the scale of infinity and eternity. That need not dissolve body and life and mind, the triple ranges that make up our earthly existence. In brief, man himself is not truly man, he is the reverse aspect of God; and when he becomes divine and remains not merely human, he but realises what he is truly and integrally himself.

10.28 - Love and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As a matter of fact, however, all the divine qualitiessupernals as they have been sometimes calledare of that nature, that is to say, all are universal; they are never non -existent, they are never and can never be negatived. Divine Consciousness, Divine Delight, Divine Power, indeed, Divine Beingthey each and all exist as absolute and unitary realities, that is to say, one without a second. Even like Divine Love, there is only one Divine Consciousness, one Divine Power, one Divine Bliss, one Divine Being, however various they may appear in outward name and form.
But the physical consciousness, the physical body, this very material frame have for us upon earth, a divine significance. They are not to be despised or thrown out. On the contrary, our object is to take special care of the body, to cleanse it of its outward dross, make it sound and free from disease, to immortalise it if possible. And it is possible notwithstanding the old teachings. In their nature as a matter of fact, the cells of the body are immortal. Science today has discovered that each living cell is potentially deathless (a corn-seed of the age of the Pharaohs, unearthed from pre-historic tombs, they have succeeded in sprouting today). It is their aggregate and their milieu that cause wear and tear in the cells, exposing them to decay and disintegration. But in itself, each cell has an infinite vitality. Thus the problem is, if one cell is essentially immortal, then how can they be made, in their collective life, to avoid conflict and decay, undergo rejuvenation and youthfulness.

1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But he is more than that; he is tuvijata, urukshaya. Uru, we shall find in other hymns, the Vast, is a word used as equivalent to Brihat to describe the ideal level of consciousness, the kingdom of ideal knowledge, in its aspect of joyous comprehensive wideness and capacity. It is clearly told us that men by overcoming & passing beyond the two firmaments of Mind-invitality, Bhuvar, & mind in intellectuality, Swar, arrive in the Vast, Uru, and make it their dwelling place. Therefore Uru must be taken as equivalent to Brihat; it must mean Mahas. Our Vedic Varuna, then, is a dweller in Mahas, in the vastness of ideal knowledge. But he is not born there; he is born or appears first in tuvi, that is, in strength or force. Since Uru definitely means the Vast, means Mahas, means a particular plane of consciousness, is, in short, a fixed term of Vedic psychology, it is inevitable that tuvi thus coupled with it and yet differentiated, must be another fixed term of Vedic psychology & must mean another plane of consciousness. We have found the meaning of Mahas by consulting Purana & Vedanta as well as the Veda itself. Have we any similar light on the significance of Tuvi? Yes. The Puranas describe to us three worlds above Maharloka,called, respectively, in the Puranic system, Jana, Tapas and Satya. By a comparison with Vedantic psychology we know that Jana must be the world of Ananda of which the Mahajana Atma is the sustaining Brahman as the Mahan Atma is the sustaining Brahman of the vijnana, and we get this light on the subject that, just as Bhur, Bhuvah, Swar are the lower or human half of existence, the aparardha of the Brahmanda, (the Brahma-circle or universe of manifest consciousness), and answer objectively to the subjective field covered by Annam, Prana & Manas, just as Mahas is the intermediate world, link between the divine & human hemispheres, and corresponds to the subjective region of Vijnana, so Jana, Tapas & Satya are the divine half of existence, & answer to the Ananda with its two companion principles Sat andChit, the three constituting the Trinity of those psychological states which are, to & in our consciousness, Sacchidananda,God sustaining from above His worlds. But why is the world of Chit called Tapoloka? According to our conceptions this universe has been created by & in divine Awareness by Force, Shakti, or Power which [is] inherent in Awareness, Force of Awareness or Chit Shakti that moves, forms & realises whatever it wills in Being. This force, this Chit-shakti in its application to its work, is termed in the ancient phraseology Tapas. Therefore, it is told us that when Brahma the Creator lay uncreative on the great Ocean, he listened & heard a voice crying over the waters OM Tapas! OM Tapas! and he became full of the energy of the mantra & arose & began creation. Tapas & Tu or Tuvi are equivalent terms. We can see at once the meaning. Varuna, existing no doubt in Sat, appears or is born to us in Tapas, in the sea of force put out in itself by the divine Awareness, & descending through Divine Delight which world is in Jana, in production or birth by Tapas, through Ananda, that is to say, into the manifest world, dwells in ideal knowledge & Truth and makes there Ritam or the Law of the Truth of Being his peculiar province. It is the very process of all creation, according to our Vedic&Vedantic Rishis. Descending into the actual universe we find Varuna master of the Akash or ether, matrix and continent of created things, in the Akash watching over the development of the created world & its peoples according to the line already fixed by ideal knowledge as suitable to their nature and purposeya thatathyato vihitam shashwatibhyah samabhyah and guiding the motion of things & souls in the line of theritam. It is in his act of guidance and bringing to perfection of the imperfect that he increases by the law and the truth, desires it and naturally attains to it, has the spriha & the sparsha of the ritam. It is from his fidelity to ideal Truth that he acquires the mighty power by which he maintains the heavens and orders its worlds in their appointed motion.
Such is his general nature and power. But there are also certain particular subjective functions to which he is called. He is rishadasa, he harries and slays the enemies of the soul, and with Mitra of pure discernment he works at the understanding till he brings it to a gracious pureness and brightness. He is like Agni, a kavih, one of those who has access to and commands ideal knowledge and with Mitra he supports and upholds Daksha when he is at his works; for so I take Daksham apasam. Mitra has already been described as having a pure daksha. The adjective daksha means in Sanscrit clever, intelligent, capable, like dakshina, like the Greek . We may also compare the Greek , meaning judgment, opinion etc & , I think or seem, and Latin doceo, I teach, doctrina etc. As these identities indicate, Daksha is originally he who divides, analyses, discerns; he is the intellectual faculty or in his person the master of the intellectual faculty which discerns and distinguishes. Therefore was Mitra able to help in making the understanding bright & pure,by virtue of his purified discernment.

1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the inner offering of the heart's adoration, the soul of it in the symbol, the spirit of it in the act, that is the very life of the sacrifice. If this offering is to be complete and universal, then a turning of all our emotions to the Divine is imperative. This is the intensest way of purification for the human heart, more powerful than any ethical or aesthetic catharsis could ever be by its half-power and superficial pressure. A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine perversions are burned away and the others discard their insufficiencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless Divine Delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terrestrial Nature.
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance. All the other members of our being, mind, life-force, physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if they follow the call, they yet tend - when not consciously, then by automatic habit - to bring into the spiritual action their own natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the power of obscuration and perversion of these lower Natureforces. Always they draw away towards pitfalls, pour into that higher intensity their diminishing elements, seek to capture the descending Power for themselves and their interests and degrade it into an aggrandised mental, vital or physical instrumentation for desire and ego. Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice. It is only the inmost psychic being unveiled and emerging in its full power that can lead the pilgrim sacrifice unscathed through these ambushes and pitfalls; at each moment it catches, exposes, repels the mind's and the life's falsehoods, seizes hold on the truth of the Divine Love and Ananda and separates it from the excitement of the mind's ardours and the blind enthusiasms of the misleading life-force. But all things that are true at their core in mind and life and the physical being it extricates and takes with it in the journey till they stand on the heights, new in spirit and sublime in figure.

1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In truth, a cultivated and illumined vital can be as noble and heroic and disinterested as it is now spontaneously vulgar, egoistic and perverted when it is left to itself without education. It is enough for each one to know how to transform in himself the search for pleasure into an aspiration for the supramental plenitude. If the education of the vital is carried far enough, with perseverance and sincerity, there comes a time when, convinced of the greatness and beauty of the goal, the vital gives up petty and illusory sensorial satisfactions in order to win the Divine Delight.
Bulletin, February 1953

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Brahmni therefore may mean either the soul-activities, as dhiyas means the mental activities, or it may mean the words of the mantra which express the soul. If we take it in the latter sense, we must refer it to the girah of the second rik, the mantras taken up by the Aswins into the understanding in order to prepare for action & creation. Indra is to come to these mantras and support them by the brilliant substance of a mental force richly varied in its effulgent manifestation, controlled by the understanding and driven forward to its task in various ways. But it seems to me that the rendering is not quite satisfactory. The main point in this hymn is not the mantras, but the Soma wine and the power that it generates. It is in the forces of the Soma that the Aswins are to rejoice, in that strength they are to take up the girah, in that strength they are to rise to their fiercest intensity of strength & delight. Indra, as mental power, arrives in his richly varied lustre; yhi chitrabhno. Here says the Rishi are these life-forces in the nectar-wine; they are purified in their minute parts & in their whole extent, for so I understand anwbhis tan ptsah; that is to say the distillings of Ananda or Divine Delight whether in the body as nectar, [or] in the subjective system as streams of life-giving delight are purified of all that impairs & weakens the life forces, purified both in their little several movements & in the whole extent of their stream. These are phenomena that can easily be experienced & understood in Yoga, and the whole hymn like many in the Veda reads to those who have experience like a practical account of a great Yogic internal movement accurate in its every detail. Streng thened, like the Aswins, by the nectar, Indra is to prepare the many-sided activity supported by the Visve devah; therefore he has to come not only controlled by the understanding, dhishnya, like the Aswins, but driven forward in various paths. For an energetic & many-sided activity is the object & for this there must be an energetic and many-sided but well-ordered action of the mental power. He has to come, thus manifold, thus controlled, to the spiritual activities generated by the Soma & the Aswins in the increasing soul (vghatah) full of the life-giving nectar, the immortalising Ananda, sutvatah. He has to come to those soul-activities, in this substance of mental brilliancy, yhi upa brahmni harivas. He has to come, ttujna, with a protective force, or else with a rapidly striving force & uphold by mind the joy of the Sacrificer in the nectar-offering, the offering of this Ananda to the gods of life & action & thought, sute dadhishwa na chanah. Protecting is, here, the best sense for ttujna. For Indra is not only to support swift & energetic action; that has already been provided for; he has also to uphold or bear in mind and by the power of mind the great & rapid delight which the Sacrificer is about to pour out into life & action, jvayja. The Divine Delight must not fail us in our activity; hostile shocks must not be allowed to disturb our established pleasure in the great offering. Therefore Indra must be there in his light & power to uphold and to protect.
We have gained, therefore, another great step in the understanding of the Veda. The figure of the mighty Indra, in his most essential quality & function, begins to appear to us as in a half-luminous silhouette full of suggestions. We have much yet to learn about him, especially his war with Vritra, his thunderbolt & his dealings with the seven rivers. But the central or root idea is fixed. The rest is the outgrowth, foliage & branchings.

1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
18:The Lord has veiled himself and his absolute wisdom and eternal consciousness in ignorant Nature-Force and suffers her to drive the individual being, with its complicity, as the ego; this lower action of Nature continues to prevail, often even in spite of man's half-lit imperfect efforts at a nobler motive and a purer self-knowledge. Our human effort at perfection fails, or progresses very incompletely, owing to the force of Nature's past actions in us, her past formations, her long-rooted associations; it turns towards a true and high-climbing success only when a greater Knowledge and Power than our own breaks through the lid of our ignorance and guides or takes up our personal will. For our human will is a misled and wandering ray that has parted from the supreme Puissance. The period of slow emergence out of this lower working into a higher light and purer force is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver after perfection; it is a dreadful passage full of trials, sufferings, sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge and alleviate this ordeal or to penetrate it with the Divine Delight faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, a true aspiration and a right and unfaltering and sincere practice. "Practise unfalteringly," says the Gita, "with a heart free from despondency," the Yoga; for even though in the earlier stage of the path we drink deep of the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality and the honey-wine of an eternal Ananda.

11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And hearts grow enamoured of Divine Delight
And human wills tune to the divine will,

1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For there is yet a third intensely close and personal aspect of the Master of Works which is a key to his sublimest hidden mystery and ecstasy; for he detaches from the secret of the hidden Transcendence and the ambiguous display of the cosmic Movement an, individual Power of the Divine that can mediate between the two and bridge our passage from the one to the other.. In this aspect the transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher, our Father and our Mother our Playmate in the great world-game who has disguised himself throughout as friend and enemy, helper and opponent and, in all relations and in all workings that affect us, has led our steps towards our perfection and our release. It is through this more personal manifestation that we are admitted to some possibility of the complete transcendental experience; for in him we meet the One not merely in a liberated calm and peace, not merely with a passive or active submission in our works or through the mystery of union with a universal Knowledge and Power filling and guiding us, but with an ecstasy of divine Love and Divine Delight that shoots up beyond silent Witness and active World-Power to some positive divination of a greater beatific secret. For it is riot so much knowledge leading to some ineffable Absolute, not so much works lifting us beyond world-process to the originating supreme Knower and Master, but rather this thing most intimate to us, yet at present most obscure, which keeps for us wrapt in its passionate yell the deep and rapturous secret of the transcendent Godhead and some absolute positiveness of its perfect Being, its all-concentrating Bliss, its mystic Ananda.
But the individual relation with the Divine does not always or from the beginning bring into force a widest enlargement or a highest self-exceeding. At first this Godhead close to our being or immanent within us can be felt fully only in the scope of our personal nature and experience, a Leader and Master, a Guide and Teacher, a Friend and Lover, or else a Spirit, Power or Presence, constituting and uplifting our upward and enlarging movement by the force of his intimate reality inhabiting the heart or presiding over our nature from above even our highest intelligence. It is our personal evolution that is his preoccupation, a personal relation that is our joy and fulfilment, the building of our nature into his divine image that is our self-finding and perfection. The outside world seems to exist only as a field for this growth and a provider of materials or of helping and opposing forces for its successive stages. Our works done in that world are his works, but even when they serve some temporary universal end, their main purpose for us is to make outwardly dynamic or give inward power to our relations with this immanent Divine. Many seekers ask for no more or see the continuation and fulfilment of this spiritual flowering only in heavens beyond; the union is consummated and made perpetual in an eternal dwelling-place of his perfection, joy and beauty. But this is not enough for the integral seeker; however intense and beautiful, a personal isolated achievement cannot be his whole aim or his entire existence. A time must come when the personal opens out to the universal; our very individuality, spiritual, mental, vital, physical even, becomes universalised: it is seen as a power of his universal force and cosmic spirit, or else it contains the universe m that ineffable wideness which comes to the individual consciousness when it breaks its bonds and flows upward towards the Transcendent and on every side into the Infinite.

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
words, he becomes a centre of the Divine Delight shedding it on
all the world and attracting all to it as to a fountain of joy and

1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But again this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason. The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the intellect for certain of its operations, but in proportion as it subjects itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and diminishes the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of creation and force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering is in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high and even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of intellectual construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason and works within the limits laid down by it, may be great, beautiful and powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles and refuses to put forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct well and with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the spirit, a success of technique and not the embodiment of the imperishable truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its Divine Delight, its appeal to a supreme source of ecstasy, Ananda.
There have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason, in which the rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art; there have even been nations which in their great formative periods of art and literature have set up reason and a meticulous taste as the sovereign powers of their aesthetic activity. At their best these periods have achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual greatness and perfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme inspired and revealing beauty; indeed their very aim has been not the discovery of the deeper truth of beauty, but truth of ideas and truth of reason, a critical rather than a true creative aim. Their leading object has been an intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate poetical rhythm and diction rather than a revelation of God and man and life and nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty. But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit. This it seizes and expresses by form and idea, but a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious reproduction of outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason and taste. Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,not, again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty of proportion and right process which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created.

1.17 - The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Dashagwas. Hymned by the Angiras Rishis Indra opens up the darkness by the Dawn and the Sun and the Cows, he spreads out the high plateau of the earthly hill into wideness and upholds the higher world of heaven. For the result of the opening up of the higher planes of consciousness is to increase the wideness of the physical, to raise the height of the mental. "This, indeed," says the Rishi Nodha, "is his mightiest work, the fairest achievement of the achiever," dasmasya carutamam asti damsah., "that the four upper rivers streaming honey nourish the two worlds of the crookedness," upahvare yad upara apinvan madhvarn.aso nadyas catasrah.. This is again the honey-streaming well pouring down its many streams together; the four higher rivers of the divine being, divine conscious force, Divine Delight, divine truth nourishing the two worlds of the mind and body into which they descend with their floods of sweetness. These two, the Rodasi, are normally worlds of crookedness, that is to say of the falsehood, - the r.tam or Truth being the straight, the anr.tam or Falsehood the crooked, - because they are exposed to the harms of the undivine powers, Vritras and Panis, sons of darkness and division. They now become forms of the truth, the knowledge, vayuna, agreeing with outer action and this is evidently Gritsamada's carato anyad anyad and his ya cakara vayuna brahman.aspatih.. The Rishi then proceeds to define the result of the work of Ayasya, which is to reveal the true eternal and unified form of earth and heaven. "In their twofold
(divine and human?) Ayasya uncovered by his hymns the two, eternal and in one nest; perfectly achieving he upheld earth and
--
(the seven rivers) like chariots to their sea, - that we desire that we may travel on the path of the truth," pantham r.tasya yatave tam mahe (VIII.12.2-3). It is in the power of the Soma that the hill is broken open, the sons of darkness overthrown. This Somawine is the sweetness that comes flowing from the streams of the upper hidden world, it is that which flows in the seven waters, it is that with which the ghr.ta, the clarified butter of the mystic sacrifice, is instinct; it is the honeyed wave which rises out of the ocean of life. Such images can have only one meaning; it is the Divine Delight hidden in all existence which, once manifest, supports all life's crowning activities and is the force that finally immortalises the mortal, the amr.tam, ambrosia of the gods.
But it is especially the Word that the Angirases possess; their seerhood is their most distinguishing characteristic. They are brahman.asah. pitarah. somyasah. . . . r.tavr.dhah. (VI.75.10), the fathers who are full of the Soma and have the word and are therefore increasers of the Truth. Indra in order to impel them on the path joins himself to the chanted expressions of their thought and gives fullness and force to the words of their soul, angirasam ucatha jujus.van brahma tutod gatum is.n.an (II.20.5).

12.03 - The Sorrows of God, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The higher or deeper the source of the descending or manifesting Consciousness for there are gradations or various statuses of it the wider and vaster and more radical is its effective power for redeeming and changing the ignorant common nature, and also strangely, perhaps inevitably, the more intimate and poignant its participation in the travail of that nature the participation extends not only to pain and suffering but to death also, for through death the path leads to resurrection and immortality. The Divine Himself in various forms comes down upon and into earth and pays by his pain and suffering for the sins and errors of humanity. That is the ransom he condescends to offer to the deity of ignorance, the reigning lord of the world for securing the freedom of man's soul. The divine emanations bear the burden of ignorance all the more so that the burden on others may be lightened, the pains less painful. Indeed, suffering humanity is also the suffering Godhead himself, suffering multifariously although ignorantly and unconsciously. There is an inner working of the secret godhead in order that the suffering may be gradually transmuted into something else, into the Divine Delight. The Godhead has taken up this task in order that the Divine may not remain Divine only in its essence and in the other, the transcendent status, but express itself also as the Divine in an earthly form, an earthly form cleared of all dross, made luminously beautiful.
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12.04 - Love and Death, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As I have said, love depicted here in these plays of Sri Aurobindo is of earth, earthly, even earthy: it is not, one might say, the Divine Loveembodiment of the Supreme Ananda or Sachchidananda. And yet Love is one and indivisible, it is always and everywhere the same, essentially the Divine Lovein various moulds. And the mould in which Sri Aurobindo has cast even earthly human love is divinely noble and beautiful. Love has been uttered, as it were, by a Divine tongue and it has been transmuted, irised and is full of the redolence of heaven's delight: if it cannot claim to be the very delight of Brahman (Brahmananda) yet it is as the ancients declared, brahmnandasahodaroconsanguineous, of one blood, with Divine Delight.
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1.23 - The Double Soul in Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:THE FIRST status of Life we found to be characterised by a dumb inconscient drive or urge, a force of some involved will in the material or atomic existence, not free and possessor of itself or its works or their results, but entirely possessed by the universal movement in which it arises as the obscure unformed seed of individuality. The root of the second status is desire, eager to possess but limited in capacity; the bud of the third is Love which seeks both to possess and be possessed, to receive and to give itself; the fine flower of the fourth, its sign of perfection, we conceive as the pure and full emergence of the original will, the illumined fulfilment of the intermediate desire, the high and deep satisfaction of the conscious interchange of Love by the unification of the state of the possessor and possessed in the divine unity of souls which is the foundation of the supramental existence. If we scrutinise these terms carefully we shall see that they are shapes and stages of the soul's seeking for the individual and universal delight of things; the ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the Divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter through vicissitudes and opposites to its luminous consummation in Spirit.
2:The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise. For the world is a masked form of Sachchidananda, and the nature of the consciousness of Sachchidananda and therefore the thing in which His force must always find and achieve itself is divine Bliss, an omnipresent self-delight. Since Life is an energy of His conscious-force, the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at once cause, motive and object of its activities; and if by reason of egoistic division that delight is missed, if it is held back behind a veil, if it is represented as its own opposite, even as being is masked in death, consciousness figures as the inconscient and force mocks itself with the guise of incapacity, then that which lives cannot be satisfied, cannot either rest from the movement or fulfil the movement except by laying hold on this universal delight which is at once the secret total delight of its own being and the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding delight of the transcendent and immanent Sachchidananda. To seek for delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life; to find and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive.

17.02 - Hymn to the Sun, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have eaten of the sweet corn, may you possess the Divine Delight, may we too possess the Divine Delight.
None can slay you through all eternity: may you eat of the grass and drink of the pure water and roam at ease. [40]

1916 12 24p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Lord, without allowing my mind to become aware of what was going to happen and how it was going to happen, Thou gavest me this evening a foretaste of what Thou expectest from me, only a foretaste, for it is a first, very timid step upon the marvellous road Thou hast partially opened before me. It was like a rising flood swelling, ever swelling the river until it overflows and covers everything with its beneficent waters. And this time it was the heart which thus overflowed under the pressure of the powers of love Thou didst pour into it; and the whole being began to love, to love ever more and more, without any definite aim, nothing and everything at the same time, what it knows and does not know, what it sees and has never seen; and gradually this potential love became an effective love, ready to pour itself out upon all and everything, in beneficent waves, in an active effulgence. This was a beginning, a very weak beginning. But I knew, O Lord, that this is what Thou willest. As always Thy Will is an infinite Grace which floods the being with Thy Divine Delight and transports it far above all petty contingencies to the Glory of Thy celestial dwelling-places.
To be what Thou willest is to be divine.

1956-10-17 - Delight, the highest state - Delight and detachment - To be calm - Quietude, mental and vital - Calm and strength - Experience and expression of experience, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One can experience, on the pathwhen one has made some progress, when there is a greater understanding, a more total opening, a more intimate union with the divine Consciousness, one can experience this Delight as something that passes by and colours life and gives it its true meaning, but as long as one is in the human consciousness, this Delight is very easily deformed and changes into something which no longer resembles it at all. Therefore, one could hardly say that if one loses the delight, ones consciousness is lowered, for the Delight I am speaking about is something which cannot ever be lost. If one has reached beyond the two states I spoke about a while ago, that is to say, the state of perfect detachment and close union, and the state of perfect love and compassion, if one has gone beyond these two states and found the Divine Delight, it is practically impossible to come down from there. But in practical life, that is, on the path of yoga, if you are touched, even in sing, by this Divine Delight, it is obvious that, should it leave you, you are bound to feel that you have come down from a peak into a rather dark valley.
But Delight without detachment would be a very dangerous gift which could very easily be perverted. So, to seek Delight before having acquired detachment does not seem to be very wise. One must first be above all possible opposites: indeed, above pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, enthusiasm and depression. If one is above all that, then one may safely aspire for Delight.

1957-01-09 - God is essentially Delight - God and Nature play at hide-and-seek - Why, and when, are you grave?, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All those who have had the inner experience have had this experience, that the moment one re-establishes the union with the divine source, all suffering disappears. But there has been a very persistent movement, about which I spoke to you last week, which put at the source of creation not this essential Divine Delight but desire. This delight of creation, self-manifestation, self-expression there is an entire line of seekers and sages who have considered it not as a delight but as a desire; the whole line of Buddhism is of this kind. And instead of seeing the solution in a Oneness which restores to us the essential Delight of the manifestation and the becoming, they consider that the goal and also the way are a total rejection of all desire to be and a return to annihilation.
This conception amounts to an essential misunderstanding. The methods recommended for self-liberation are methods of development which can be very useful, but this conception of a world thats essentially bad, for it is the result of desire, and from which one must escape at all costs and as quickly as possible, has been the greatest and most serious distortion of all spiritual life in the history of mankind.
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This new orientation I mean new in its terrestrial realisationmust replace all the former spiritual orientations and8@ open the way to the new realisation which will be a supramental realisation. That is why I told you last week that only Delight, the true Divine Delight can bring about the Victory.
Naturally, there must be no confusion about what this Delight is, and that is why from the beginning Sri Aurobindo puts us on our guard, telling us that it is only when one has passed beyond enjoyings that one can enter into Bliss. Bliss is precisely that state which comes from the manifestation of this Delight. But it is quite the opposite of all that is usually called joy and pleasure, and these must be completely given up in order to have the other.

1957-01-23 - How should we understand pure delight? - The drop of honey - Action of the Divine Will in the world, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Honey is something delicious, isnt it? So, these are the sweetnesses of Divine Delight.
And just now, when I was evoking this joy which is in things, spontaneous, simple, this joy which is at the heart of everything, well, for the physical body it has something truly oh! naturally, the taste of honey is very crude and gross in comparison but something like that, something extremely delicious. And very simple, very simple and very integral in its simplicity; very complete in its simplicity and yet very simple.

1957-02-13 - Suffering, pain and pleasure - Illness and its cure, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Quite naturally we ask ourselves what this secret is, towards which pain leads us. For a superficial and imperfect understanding, one could believe that it is pain which the soul is seeking. Nothing of the kind. The very nature of the soul is Divine Delight, constant, unvarying, unconditioned, ecstatic; but it is true that if one can face suffering with courage, endurance, an unshakable faith in the divine Grace, if one can, instead of shunning suffering when it comes, enter into it with this will, this aspiration to go through it and find the luminous truth, the unvarying delight which is at the core of all things, the door of pain is often more direct, more immediate than that of satisfaction or contentment.
I am not speaking of pleasure because pleasure turns its back constantly and almost completely on this profound Divine Delight.
Pleasure is a deceptive and perverse disguise which turns us away from our goal and we certainly should not seek it if we are eager to find the truth. Pleasure vaporises us; it deceives us, leads us astray. Pain brings us back to a deeper truth by obliging us to concentrate in order to be able to bear it, be able to face this thing that crushes us. It is in pain that one most easily finds the true strength again, when one is strong. It is in pain that one most easily finds the true faith again, the faith in something which is above and beyond all pain.

20.01 - Charyapada - Old Bengali Mystic Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Once you have the Divine Delight and enter into it you can no longer be satisfied with anything else less.
Truth is one and there is only one expression that of the straight and narrow path.

2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our fundamental cognition of the Absolute, our substantial spiritual experience of it is the intuition or the direct experience of an infinite and eternal Existence, an infinite and eternal Consciousness, an infinite and eternal Delight of Existence. In overmental and mental cognition it is possible to make discrete and even to separate this original unity into three self-existent aspects: for we can experience a pure causeless eternal Bliss so intense that we are that alone; existence, consciousness seem to be swallowed up in it, no longer ostensibly in presence; a similar experience of pure and absolute consciousness and a similar exclusive identity with it is possible, and there can be too a like identifying experience of pure and absolute existence. But to a supermind cognition these three are always an inseparable Trinity, even though one can stand in front of the others and manifest its own spiritual determinates; for each has its primal aspects or its inherent self-formations, but all of these together are original to the triune Absolute. Love, Joy and Beauty are the fundamental determinates of the Divine Delight of Existence, and we can see at once that these are of the very stuff and nature of that Delight: they are not alien impositions on the being of the Absolute or creations supported by it but outside it; they are truths of its being, native to its consciousness, powers of its force of existence. So too is it with the fundamental determinates of the absolute consciousness, - knowledge and will; they are truths and powers of the original Consciousness-Force and are inherent in its very nature. This au thenticity becomes still more evident when we regard the fundamental spiritual determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, necessary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation, - Self, the Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha.
If we pursue the process of self-manifestation farther, we shall see that each of these aspects or powers reposes in its first action on a triad or trinity; for Knowledge inevitably takes its stand in a trinity of the Knower, the Known and Knowledge; Love finds itself in a trinity of the Lover, the Beloved and Love; Will is self-fulfilled in a trinity of the Lord of the Will, the object of the Will and the executive Force; Joy has its original and utter gladness in a trinity of the Enjoyer, the Enjoyed and the Delight that unites them; Self as inevitably appears and founds its manifestation in a trinity of Self as subject, Self as object and self-awareness holding together Self as subject-object.

2.01 - The Two Natures, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Prakriti, but the Ananda of its own play and self-fulfilling; it is the desire of the Divine Delight of existence unrolling its own conscious force of action in accordance with the law of the swabhava.
But what again is meant by saying that the Divine is not in the becomings, the forms and affections of the lower nature, even the sattwic, though they all are in his being? In a sense he must evidently be in them, otherwise they could not exist. But

2.02 - Atomic Motions, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
To which Divine Delight, the guide of life,
Persuades mortality and leads it on,

2.02 - Indra, Giver of Light, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
in the universal Purusha and, when man is produced, expresses himself again as sense-mentality in the human being. For delight is the raison d'etre of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is an attempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the terms of physical consciousness. But in that consciousness, - often figured as adri, the hill, stone, or dense substance, - divine light and Divine Delight are both of them concealed and confined, and have to be released or extracted. Ananda is retained as rasa, the sap, the essence, in sense-objects and sense-experiences, in the plants and growths of the earth-nature, and among these growths the mystic Soma-plant symbolises that element behind all sense activities and their enjoyments which yields the divine essence. It has to be distilled and, once distilled, purified and intensified until it has grown luminous, full of radiance, full of swiftness, full of energy, gomat, asu, yuvaku. It becomes the chief food of the gods who, called to the Soma-oblation, take their share of the enjoyment and in the strength of that ecstasy increase in man, exalt him to his highest possibilities, make him capable of the supreme experiences. Those who do not give the delight in them as an offering to the divine Powers, preferring to reserve themselves for the sense and the lower life, are adorers not of the gods, but of the Panis, lords of the senseconsciousness, traffickers in its limited activities, they who press not the mystic wine, give not the purified offering, raise not the sacred chant. It is the Panis who steal from us the Rays of the illumined consciousness, those brilliant herds of the sun, and pen them up in the cavern of the subconscient, in the dense hill of matter, corrupting even Sarama, the hound of heaven, the luminous intuition, when she comes on their track to the cave of the Panis.
But the conception of this hymn belongs to a stage in our inner progress when the Panis have been exceeded and even the Vritras or Coverers who seclude from us our full powers and activities and Vala who holds back the Light, are already overpassed. But there are even then powers that stand in the way of our perfection. They are the powers of limitation, the

2.02 - The Status of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can do more than conceive intellectually of the Self or of God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realisation is. For, first, we see that he had the vision of something in the world which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious force and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms and manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only the vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which its presence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital, physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being but in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile rock; and, finally, that he even occasionally attained to that unity, that becoming the object of his dedication, one phase of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem "A slumber did my spirit seal," where he describes himself as become one in his being with earth, "rolled round in its diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees." Exalt this realisation to a profounder Self than physical Nature and we have the elements of the Yogic knowledge. But all this experience is only the vestibule to that suprasensuous, supramental realisation of the Transcendent who is beyond all His aspects, and the final summit of knowledge can only be attained by entering into the superconscient and there merging all other experience into a supernal unity with the Ineffable. That is the culmination of all divine knowing; that also is the source of all Divine Delight and divine living.
That status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart through love and by the senses through beauty and by the will through power and works and by the soul through peace and joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and infinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.

2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The human being is here on earth the highest power of the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at its critical turning-point that movement of self-manifestation which appears to us as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge. The power of the individual to possess in his consciousness by self-knowledge his unity with the Transcendent and the universal, with the One Being and all beings and to live in that knowledge and transform his life by it, is that which makes the working out of the divine self-manifestation through the individual possible; and the arrival of the individual - not in one but in all - at the divine life is the sole conceivable object of the movement. The existence of the individual is not an error in some self of the Absolute which that self afterwards discovers; for it is impossible that the absolute self-awareness or anything that is one with it should be ignorant of its own truth and its own capacities and betrayed by that ignorance either into a false idea of itself which it has to correct or an impracticable venture which it has to renounce. Neither is the individual existence a subordinate circumstance in a divine play or Lila, a play which consists in a continual revolution through unending cycles of pleasure and suffering without any higher hope in the Lila itself or any issue from it except the occasional escape of a few from time to time out of their bondage to this ignorance. We might be compelled to hold that ruthless and disastrous view of God's workings if man had no power of self-transcendence or no power of transforming by self-knowledge the conditions of the play nearer and nearer to the truth of the Divine Delight.
In that power lies the justification of individual existence; the individual and the universal unfolding in themselves the divine light, power, joy of transcendent Sachchidananda always manifest above them, always secret behind their surface appearances, this is the hidden intention, the ultimate significance of the divine play, the Lila. But it is in themselves, in their transformation but also their persistence and perfect relations, not in their selfannihilation that that must be unfolded. Otherwise there would be no reason for their ever having existed; the possibility of the Divine's unfolding in the individual is the secret of the enigma; his presence there and this intention of self-unfolding are the key to the world of Knowledge-Ignorance.

2.04 - Agni, the Illumined Will, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Strength, Love from both, by the Ignorance which divides. It is the Ignorance, the dominant cosmic Falsehood that has to be removed. Through the Truth, then, lies the road to the true harmony, the consummated felicity, the ultimate fulfilment of love in the Divine Delight. Therefore, only when the Will in man becomes divine and possessed of the Truth, amr.to r.tava, can the perfection towards which we move be realised in humanity.
Agni, then, is the god who has to become conscient in the mortal. Him the inspired Word has to express, to confirm in this gated mansion and on the altar-seat of this sacrifice.

2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There has been either a lapse of the inner spirit from a greater consciousness and knowledge, delight, love and beauty, power and capacity, harmony and good, or else there is a failure of our struggling nature, an impotence to achieve what we instinctively see to be divine and desirable. If we penetrate to the cause of the fall or the failure, we shall find that all proceeds from the one primal fact that our being, consciousness, force, experience of things represent - not in their very self, but in their surface pragmatic nature - a principle or an effective phenomenon of division or rupture in the unity of the Divine Existence. This division becomes in its inevitable practical effect a limitation of the divine consciousness and knowledge, the Divine Delight and beauty, the divine power and capacity, the divine harmony and good: there is a limitation of completeness and wholeness, a blindness in our vision of these things, a lameness in our following of them, in our experience of them a fragmentation, a diminution of power and intensity, a lowering of quality, - the mark of a descent from spiritual heights or else of a consciousness emerging from the insensible neutral monotone of the Inconscience; the intensities which are normal and natural on higher ranges are in us lost or toned down so as to harmonise with the blacks and greys of our material existence.
There arises too by a secondary ulterior effect a perversion of these highest things; in our limited mentality unconsciousness and wrong consciousness intervene, ignorance covers our whole nature and - by the misapplication or misdirection of an imperfect will and knowledge, by automatic reactions of our diminished consciousness-force and the inept poverty of our substance - contradictions of the divine elements are formed, incapacity, inertia, falsehood, error, pain and grief, wrong-doing, discord, evil. There is too, always, somewhere hidden in our selves, nursed in our recesses, even when not overtly felt in the
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Still our sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values. One side of the truth of these things we discover when we get into a deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. For without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the Divine Delight of which pain is in travail; all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge, every error is significant of the possibility and the effort of a
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2.05 - Renunciation, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Again our renunciation must obviously be an inward renunciation; especially and above all, a renunciation of attachment and the craving of desire in the senses and the heart, of self-will in the thought and action and of egoism in the centre of the consciousness. For these things are the three knots by which we are bound to our lower nature and if we can renounce these utterly, there is nothing else that can bind us. Therefore attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the Divine Delight in things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion; a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that does not adhere to their forms but to that which they conceal in themselves and that embraces the universe without being caught in its meshes315.
Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen, to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its past or present formations of thought and view and will because it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the delicate threads of "I-ness" and "my-ness" and lives in them like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted to fresh viewpoints and formations as a spider feels foreign in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely excised from the mind. Not only must we give up the ordinary attitude to the world and life to which the unawakened mind clings as its natural element; but we must not remain bound in any mental construction of our own or in any intellectual thought-system or arrangement of religious dogmas or logical conclusions; we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from Illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites.

2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Truth or a divine Possibility in which under certain conditions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a necessary factor, and if the arrangement of this universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ignorance to move towards Knowledge, of the imperfect manifestation to grow into perfection, of the frustration to serve as steps towards a final victory, of the suffering to prepare an emergence of the Divine Delight of Being. In that case the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion and the vanity of all things would not be valid; for the aspects that seem to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolution: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experience needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to bring in the fiat of an arbitrary
Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a phantasy of meaningless

2.08 - The Release from the Heart and the Mind, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the ascending soul has to separate itself not only from the life in the body but from the action of the life-energy in the mind; it has to make the mind say as the representative of the Purusha "I am not the Life; the Life is not the self of the Purusha, it is only a working and only one working of prakriti." The characteristics of Life are action and movement, a reaching out to absorb and assimilate what is external to the individual and a principle of satisfaction or dissatisfaction In what it seizes upon or what comes to it, which is associated with the all-pervading phenomenon of attraction and repulsion. These three things are everywhere in Nature because Life is everywhere in Nature. But in us mental beings they are all given a mental value according to the mind which perceives and accepts them. They take the form of action, of desire and of liking and disliking, pleasure and pain. The Prana is everywhere in us supporting not only the action of our body, but of our sense-mind, our emotional mind, our thought-mind; and bringing its own law or Dharma into all these, it confuses, it limits, it throws into discord their right action and creates that impurity of misplacement and that tangled confusion which is the whole evil of our psychological existence. In that confusion one law seems to reign, the law of desire. As the universal Divine Being, all-embracing and all-possessing, acts, moves, enjoys purely for the satisfaction of Divine Delight, so the individual life acts, moves, enjoys and suffers predominantly for the satisfaction of desire. Therefore the psychic life-energy presents itself to our experience as a sort of desire-mind, which we have to conquer if we mean to get back to our true self.
Desire is at once the motive of our actions, our lever of accomplishment and the bane of our existence. If our sense-mind, emotional mind, thought-mind could act free from the intrusions and importations of the life-energy, if that energy could be made to obey their right action instead of imposing its own yoke on our existence, all human problems would move harmoniously to their right solution. The proper function of the life-energy is to do what it is bidden by the divine principle in us, to reach to and enjoy what is given to it by that indwelling Divine and not to desire at all. The proper function of the sense-mind is to lie open passively, luminously to the contacts of Life and transmit their sensations and the rasa or right taste and principle of delight in them to the higher function; but interfered with by the attractions and repulsions, the acceptances and refusals, the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, the capacities and incapacities of the life-energy in the body it is, to begin with, limited in its scope and, secondly, forced in these limits to associate itself with all these discords of the life in Matter. It becomes an instrument for pleasure and pain instead of for delight of existence.

2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To rise into this greater consciousness above our mental level of humanity as man has risen above the level of the life-mind of the beast, to grow from mind into supermind, from twilight into light, from the mind's half-consciousness into what is now to us superconscient, from a narrow imprisoned ego into the transcendent and universalised individual, from a struggling half effective into a throned and master power, from little transient joys and sorrows into an unalloyed Divine Delight, this is the goal of our journey, the secret of our struggle.
This is our way of emergence from the now dark riddle of the earth and unsolved problem of human life. If there were not this secret sense in all we are and do, there would be no significance in the material world and no justification for our earth-existence.

2.13 - The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If then we seek mentally to realise Sachchidananda, there is likely to be this first difficulty that we shall see it as something above, beyond, around even in a sense, but with a gulf between that being and our being, an unbridged or even an unbridgeable chasm. There is this infinite existence; but it is quite other than the mental being who becomes aware of it, and we cannot either raise ourselves to it and become it or bring it down to ourselves so that our own experience of our being and world-being shall be that of its blissful infinity. There is this great, boundless, unconditioned consciousness and force; but our consciousness and force stands apart from it, even if within it, limited, petty, discouraged, disgusted with itself and the world, but unable to participate in that higher thing which it has seen. There is this immeasurable and unstained bliss; but our own being remains the sport of a lower Nature of pleasure and pain and dull neutral sensation incapable of its Divine Delight. There is this perfect Knowledge and Will; but our own remains always the mental deformed knowledge and limping will incapable of sharing in or even being in tune with that nature of Godhead. Or else so long as we live purely in an ecstatic contemplation of that vision, we are delivered from ourselves; but the moment we again turn our consciousness upon our own being we fall away from it and it disappears or becomes remote and intangible. The Divinity leaves us; the Vision vanishes; we are back again in the pettiness of our mortal existence.
Somehow this chasm has to be bridged. And here there are two possibilities for the mental being. One possibility is for it to rise by a great, prolonged, concentrated, all-forgetting effort out of itself into the Supreme. But in this effort the mind has to leave its own consciousness, to disappear into another and temporarily or permanently lose itself, if not quite abolish. It has to go into the trance of Samadhi. For this reason the Raja and other systems of Yoga give a supreme importance to the state of Samadhi or Yogic trance in which the mind withdraws not only from its ordinary interests and preoccupations, but first from all consciousness of outward act and sense and being and then from all consciousness of inward mental activities. In this its inward-gathered state the mental being may have different kinds of realisation of the Supreme in itself or in various aspects or on various levels, but the ideal is to get rid of mind altogether and, going beyond mental realisation, to enter into the absolute trance in which all sign of mind or lower existence ceases. But this is a state of consciousness to which few can attain and from which not all can return.

2.15 - The Cosmic Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By entering into the cosmic consciousness we participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particular action of divine knowledge, strength and weakness and incapacity into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force, joy and grief, pleasure and pain into a mastering and a suffering of Divine Delight, struggle into a balancing of forces and values in the divine harmony. We do not suffer by the limitations of our mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these but in the infinity of the Spirit, and these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the manifestation, as degrees of the supreme being, conscious-force and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself in the cosmos. We cease to judge men and things by their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see, the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature, and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force, and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite equality. It is this consummation of which the Upanishad speaks when it says "He in whom the self has become all existences, how shall he have delusion, whence shall he have grief who knows entirely397 and sees in all things oneness."
But this is only when there is perfection in the cosmic consciousness, and that is difficult for the mental being. The mentality when it arrives at the idea or the realisation of the Spirit, the Divine, tends to break existence into two opposite halves, the lower and the higher existence. It sees on one side the Infinite, the Formless, the One, the Peace and Bliss, the Calm and Silence, the Absolute, the Vast and Pure; on the other it sees the finite, the world of forms, the jarring multiplicity, the strife and suffering and imperfect, unreal good, the tormented activity and futile success, the relative, the limited and vain and vile. To those who make this division, this opposition, complete liberation is only attainable in the peace of the One, the featurelessness of the Infinite, the non-becoming of the Absolute which is to them the only real being; to be free all values must be destroyed, all limitations not only transcended but abolished. They have the liberation of the divine rest, but not the liberty of the divine action; they enjoy the peace of the Transcendent, but not the cosmic bliss of the Transcendent. Their liberty depends upon abstention from the cosmic movement, it cannot dominate and possess cosmic existence itself. But it is also possible for them to realise and participate in the immanent as well as the transcendent peace. Still the division is not cured. The liberty they enjoy is that of the silent unacting Witness, not the liberty of the divine Masterconsciousness which possesses all things, delights in all, casts itself into all forms of existence without fear of fall or loss or bondage or stain. All the rights of the spirit are not yet possessed; there is still a denial, a limitation, a holding back from the entire oneness of all existence. The workings of Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of the allmastering Spirit.

2.16 - Oneness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This transformation cannot be complete or really executed without the awakening of the truth-mind which corresponds in the mental being to the supermind and is capable of receiving mentally its illuminations. By the opposition of Spirit and Mind without the free opening of this intermediate power the two natures, higher and lower, stand divided, and though there may be communication and influence or the catching up of the lower into the higher in a sort of luminous or ecstatic trance, there cannot be a full and perfect transfiguration of the lower nature. We may feel imperfectly by the emotional mind, we may have a sense by the sense-mind or a conception and perception by the intelligent mind of the Spirit present in Matter and all its forms, the Divine Delight present in all emotion and sensation, the divine Force behind all life-activities; but the lower will still keep its own nature and limit and divide in its action and modify in its character the influence from above. Even when that influence assumes its highest, widest, intensest power, it will be irregular and disorderly in activity and perfectly realised only in calm and stillness; we shall be subject to reactions and periods of obscuration when it is withdrawn from us; we shall be apt to forget it in the stress of ordinary life and its outward touches and the siege of its dualities and to be fully possessed of it only when alone with ourselves and God or else only in moments or periods of a heightened exaltation and ecstasy. For our mentality, a restricted instrument moving in a limited field and seizing things by fragments and parcels, is necessarily shifting, restless and mutable; it can find steadiness only by limiting its field of action and fixity only by cessation and repose.
Our direct truth-perceptions on the other hand come from that supermind, -- a Will that knows and a Knowledge that effects, -- which creates universal order out of infinity. Its awakening into action brings down, says the Veda, the unrestricted downpour of the rain of heaven, -- the full flowing of the seven rivers from a superior sea of light and power and joy. It reveals Sachchidananda. It reveals the Truth behind the scattered and ill-combined suggestions of our mentality and makes each to fall into its place in the unity of the Truth behind; thus it can transform the half-light of our minds into a certain totality of light. It reveals the Will behind all the devious and imperfectly regulated striving of our mental will and emotional wishes and vital effort and makes each to fall into its place in the unity of the luminous Will behind; thus it can transform the half-obscure struggle of our life and mind into a certain totality of ordered force. It reveals the delight for which each of our sensations and emotions is groping and from which they fall back in movements of partially grasped satisfaction or of dissatisfaction, pain, grief or indifference, and makes each take its place in the unity of the universal delight behind; thus it can transform the conflict of our dualised emotions and sensations into a certain totality of serene, yet profound and powerful love and delight. Moreover, revealing the universal action, it shows the truth of being out of which each of its movements arises and to which each progresses, the force of effectuation which each carries with it and the delight of being for which and from which each is born, and it relates all to the universal being, consciousness, force and delight of Sachchidananda. Thus it harmonises for us all the oppositions, divisions, contrarieties of existence and shows us in them the One and the Infinite. Uplifted into this supramental light, pain and pleasure and indifference begin to be converted into joy of the one self-existent Delight, strength and weakness, success and failure into powers of the one self-effective Force and Will, truth and error, knowledge and ignorance into light of the one infinite self-awareness and universal knowledge, increase of being and diminution of being, limitation and the overcoming of limitation into waves of the one self-realising conscious existence. All our life as well as all our essential being is transformed into the possession of Sachchidananda.

2.16 - The 15th of August, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Then he glances at each one separately. The minutes are melting into the silence. There is again a wave of emotion in all; all bathe again into an ocean of some divine emotion. How wonderful if the whole of Eternity would flow in this experience! Time, poor Time, its flow is blamed by men. But where is the fault in the flow of Time? If so much Love and such Divine Delight can have its play let poor Time flow and have its Eternity! And let the world become Divine! Another powerful aspiration that comes to the surface is: "Expression is not needed let the whole of Eternity flow away in this silence!"
After remaining silent for about ten to fifteen minutes, Sri Aurobindo spoke for about thirty to thirty-five minutes. The following is the substance of what he spoke.

2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This Divine Being, Sachchidananda, is at once impersonal and personal: it is an Existence and the origin and foundation of all truths, forces, powers, existences, but it is also the one transcendent Conscious Being and the All-Person of whom all conscious beings are the selves and personalities; for He is their highest Self and the universal indwelling Presence. It is a necessity for the soul in the universe - and therefore the inner trend of the evolutionary Energy and its ultimate intention - to know and to grow into this truth of itself, to become one with the Divine Being, to raise its nature to the Divine Nature, its existence into the Divine Existence, its consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, its delight of being into the Divine Delight of Being, and to receive all this into its becoming, to make the becoming an expression of that highest Truth, to be possessed inwardly of the Divine Self and Master of its existence and to be at the same time wholly possessed by Him and moved by His Divine Energy and live and act in a complete self-giving and surrender. On this side the dualistic and theistic views of existence which affirm the eternal real existence of God and the Soul and the eternal real existence and cosmic action of the Divine Energy, express also a truth of the integral existence; but their formulation falls short of the whole truth if it denies the essential unity of God and Soul or their capacity for utter oneness or ignores what underlies the supreme experience of the merger of the soul in the Divine Unity through love, through union of consciousness, through fusion of existence in existence.
The manifestation of the Being in our universe takes the shape of an involution which is the starting-point of an evolution, - Matter the nethermost stage, Spirit the summit. In the descent into involution there can be distinguished seven principles of manifested being, seven gradations of the manifesting Consciousness of which we can get a perception or a concrete realisation of their presence and immanence here or a reflected experience. The first three are the original and fundamental principles and they form universal states of consciousness to which we can rise; when we do so, we can become aware of supreme planes or levels of fundamental manifestation or selfformulation of the spiritual reality in which is put in front the unity of the Divine Existence, the power of the Divine Consciousness, the bliss of the Divine Delight of existence, - not concealed or disguised as here, for we can possess them in their full independent reality. A fourth principle of supramental truth-consciousness is associated with them; manifesting unity in infinite multiplicity, it is the characteristic power of selfdetermination of the Infinite. This quadruple power of the supreme existence, consciousness and delight constitutes an upper hemisphere of manifestation based on the Spirit's eternal self-knowledge. If we enter into these principles or into any plane of being in which there is the pure presence of the Reality, we find in them a complete freedom and knowledge. The other three powers and planes of being, of which we are even at present aware, form a lower hemisphere of the manifestation, a hemisphere of Mind, Life and Matter. These are in themselves powers of the superior principles; but wherever they manifest in a separation from their spiritual sources, they undergo as a result a phenomenal lapse into a divided in place of the true undivided existence: this lapse, this separation creates a state of limited knowledge exclusively concentrated on its own limited worldorder and oblivious of all that is behind it and of the underlying unity, a state therefore of cosmic and individual Ignorance.
In the descent into the material plane of which our natural life is a product, the lapse culminates in a total Inconscience out of which an involved Being and Consciousness have to emerge by a gradual evolution. This inevitable evolution first develops, as it is bound to develop, Matter and a material universe; in Matter, Life appears and living physical beings; in Life, Mind manifests and embodied thinking and living beings; in Mind, ever increasing its powers and activities in forms of Matter, the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness must appear, inevitably, by the very force of what is contained in the Inconscience and the necessity in Nature to bring it into manifestation. Supermind appearing manifests the Spirit's self-knowledge and whole knowledge in a supramental living being and must bring about by the same law, by an inherent necessity and inevitability, the dynamic manifestation here of the divine Existence, Consciousness and Delight of existence. It is this that is the significance of the plan and order of the terrestrial evolution; it is this necessity that must determine all its steps and degrees, its principle and its process. Mind, Life and Matter are the realised powers of the evolution and well-known to us; Supermind and the triune aspects of Sachchidananda are the secret principles which are not yet put in front and have still to be realised in the forms of the manifestation, and we know them only by hints and a partial and fragmentary action still not disengaged from the lower movement and therefore not easily recognisable. But their evolution too is part of the destiny of the soul in the Becoming, - there must be a realisation and dynamisation in earth-life and in Matter not only of Mind but of all that is above it, all that has descended indeed but is still concealed in earth-life and Matter.

2.17 - The Soul and Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This it becomes when the soul accepts its complete function as the knower, lord and enjoyer of Nature. As the knower the soul possesses the knowledge of the force that acts and determines, it sees the values of being which are realising themselves in cosmos, it is in the secret of Fate. But the force is itself determined by the knowledge which is its origin and the source and standardiser of its valuations and effectuations of values. Therefore in proportion as the soul becomes again the knower, it becomes also the controller of the action. Nor can it do this without becoming the active enjoyer, bhokta. In the lower being the enjoyment is of a twofold kind, positive and negative, which in the electricity of sensation translates itself into joy and suffering; but in the higher it is an actively equal enjoyment of the Divine Delight in self-manifestation. There is no loss of freedom, no descent into an ignorant attachment. The man free in his soul is aware that the Divine is the lord of the action of Nature, that Maya is His Knowledge-Will determining and effecting all, that Force is the Will side of this double divine Power in which knowledge is always present and effectual; he is aware of himself also, even individually, as a centre of the divine existence, -- a portion of the Lord, the Gita expresses it, -- controlling so far the action of Nature which he views, upholds, sanctions, enjoys, knows and by the determinative power of knowledge controls; and when he universalises himself, his knowledge reflects only the divine knowledge, his will effectuates only the divine will, he enjoys only the Divine Delight and not an ignorant personal satisfaction. Thus the Purusha preserves its freedom in its possession, renunciation of limited personality even in its representative enjoyment and delight of cosmic being. It has taken up fully in the higher poise the true relations of the soul and Nature.
Purusha and prakriti in their union and duality arise from the being of Sachchidananda. Self-conscious existence is the essential nature of the Being; that is Sat or Purusha: the Power of self-aware existence, whether drawn into itself or acting in the works of its consciousness and force, its knowledge and its will, Chit and Tapas, Chit and its shakti, -- that is prakriti. Delight of being, Ananda, is the eternal truth of the union of this conscious being and its conscious force whether absorbed in itself or else deployed in the inseparable duality of its two aspects, unrolling the worlds and viewing them, acting in them and upholding the action, executing works and giving the sanction without which the force of Nature cannot act, executing and controlling the knowledge and the will and knowing and controlling the determinations of the knowledge-force and will-force, ministering to the enjoyment and enjoying, -- the Soul possessor, observer, knower, lord of Nature, Nature expressing the being, executing the will, satisfying the self-knowledge, ministering to the delight of being of the soul. There we have, founded on the very nature of being, the supreme and the universal relation of prakriti with Purusha. The absolute joy of the soul in itself and, based upon that, the absolute joy of the soul in Nature are the divine fulfilment of the relation.

2.22 - Vijnana or Gnosis, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If we would describe the gnosis as it is in its own awareness, not thus imperfectly as it is to us in contrast with our own reason and intelligence, it is hardly possible to speak of it except in figures and symbols. And first we must remember that the gnostic level, Mahat, Vijnana, is not the supreme plane of our consciousness but a middle or link plane. Interposed between the triune glory of the utter Spirit, the infinite existence, consciousness and bliss of the Eternal and our lower triple being and nature, it is as if it stood there as the mediating, formulated, organising and creative wisdom, power and joy of the Eternal. In the gnosis Sachchidananda gathers up the light of his unseizable existence and pours it out on the soul in the shape and power of a divine knowledge, a divine will and a divine bliss of existence. It is as if infinite light were gathered up into the compact orb of the sun and lavished on all that depends upon the sun in radiances that continue for ever. But the gnosis is not only light, it is force; it is creative knowledge, it is the self-effective truth of the divine Idea. This idea is not creative imagination, not something that constructs in void, but light and power of eternal substance, truth-light full of truth-force; and it brings out what is latent in being, it does not create a fiction that never was in being. The ideation of the gnosis is radiating light-stuff of the consciousness of the eternal Existence; each ray is a truth. The will in the gnosis is a conscious force of eternal knowledge; it throws the consciousness and substance of being into infallible forms of truth-power, forms that embody the idea and make it faultlessly effective, and it works out each truth-power and each truth-form spontaneously and rightly according to its nature. Because it carries this creative force of the divine Idea, the Sun, the lord arid symbol of the gnosis, is described in the Veda as the Light which is the father of all things, Surya Savitri, the Wisdom-Luminous who is the bringer-out into manifest existence. This creation is inspired by the Divine Delight, the eternal Ananda; it is full of the joy of its own truth and power, it creates in bliss, creates out of bliss, creates that which is blissful. Therefore the world of the gnosis, the supramental world is the true and the happy creation, rtam, bhadram, since all in it shares in the perfect joy that made it. A divine radiance of undeviating knowledge, a divine power of unfaltering will and a divine ease of unstumbling bliss are the nature or prakriti of the soul in supermind, in vijnana. The stuff of the gnostic or supramental plane is made of the perfect absolutes of all that is here imperfect and relative and its movement of the reconciled interlockings and happy fusions of all that here are opposites. For behind the appearance of these opposites are their truths and the truths of the eternal are not in conflict with each other; our mind's and life's opposites transformed in the supermind into their own true spirit link together and are seen as tones and colourings of an eternal Reality and everlasting Ananda. supermind or gnosis is the supreme Truth, the supreme Thought, the supreme Word, the supreme Light, the supreme Will-Idea; it is the inner and outer extension of the Infinite who is beyond Space, the unfettered Time of the Eternal who is timeless, the supernal harmony of all absolutes of the Absolute.
To the envisaging mind there are three powers of the Vijnana. Its supreme power knows and receives into it from above all the infinite existence, consciousness and bliss of the ' Ishwara; it is in its highest height the absolute knowledge and force of eternal Sachchidananda. Its second power concentrates the Infinite into a dense luminous consciousness, caitanyaghana or cidghana, the seed-state of the divine consciousness in which are contained living and concrete all the immutable principles of the divine being and all the inviolable truths of the divine conscious-idea and nature. Its third power brings or looses out these things by the effective ideation, vision, au thentic identities of the divine knowledge, movement of the divine will-force, vibration of the Divine Delight-intensities into a universal harmony, an illimitable diversity, a manifold rhythm of their powers, forms and interplay of living consequences. The mental Purusha rising into the vijnanamaya must ascend into these three powers. It must turn by conversion of its movements into the movements of the gnosis, its mental perception, ideation, will, pleasure into radiances of the divine knowledge, pulsations of the divine will-force, waves and floods of the Divine Delight-seas. It must convert its conscious stuff of mental nature into the cidghara or dense self-luminous consciousness. It must transform its conscious substance into a gnostic self or Truth-self of infinite Sachchidananda. These three movements are described in the lsha Upanishad, the first as vyuha, the marshalling of the rays of the Sun of gnosis in the order of the Truth-consciousness, the second as samuha, the gathering together of the rays into the body of the Sun of gnosis, the third as the vision of that Sun's fairest form of all in which the soul most intimately possesses its oneness with the infinite Purusha.467 The Supreme above, in him, around, everywhere and the soul dwelling in the Supreme and one with it, -- the infinite power and truth of the Divine concentrated in his own concentrated luminous soul nature, -- a radiant activity of the divine knowledge, will and joy perfect in the natural action of the prakriti, -- this is the fundamental experience of the mental being transformed and fulfilled and sublimated in the perfection of the gnosis.
author class:Sri Aurobindo

2.24 - The Message of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Godhead of which it is a portion; then it is one with all beings in the self and spirit, one with them both in God and in Nature; then it is not only free but complete, plunged in the supreme felicity, ready for its ultimate perfection. He still sees the self as an eternal and changeless Spirit silently supporting all things; but he sees also Nature no longer as a mere mechanical force that works out things according to the mechanism of the gunas, but as a power of the Spirit and the force of God in manifestation. He sees that the lower Nature is not the inmost truth of the spirit's action; he becomes aware of a highest spiritual nature of the Divine in which is contained the source and the yet to be realised greater truth of all that is imperfectly figured now in mind, life and body. Arisen from the lower mental to this supreme spiritual nature, he is delivered there from all ego. He knows himself as a spiritual being, in his essence one with all existences and in his active nature a power of the one Godhead and an eternal soul of the transcendent Infinite. He sees all in God and God in all; he sees all things as Vasudeva. He is delivered from the dualities of joy and grief, from the pleasant and the unpleasant, from desire and disappointment, from sin and virtue. All henceforth is to his conscious sight and sense the will and working of the Divine. He lives and acts as a soul and portion of the universal consciousness and power; he is filled with the transcendent Divine Delight, a spiritual Ananda. His action becomes the divine action and his status the highest spiritual status.
* *

2.25 - The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the Divine Delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
This is the goal; we have seen also what are the essentials of the method. But here we have first to consider briefly one side of the question of method which we have hitherto left untouched. In the system of an integral Yoga the principle must be that all life is a part of the Yoga; but the knowledge which we have been describing seems to be not the knowledge of what is ordinarily understood as life, but of something behind life. There are two kinds of knowledge, that which seeks to understand the apparent phenomenon of existence externally, by an approach from outside, through the intellect, -- this is the lower knowledge, the knowledge of the apparent world; secondly, the knowledge which seeks to know the truth of existence from within, in its source and reality, by spiritual realisation. Ordinarily, a sharp distinction is drawn between the two, and it is supposed that when we get to the higher knowledge, the God-knowledge, then the rest, tile world-knowledge, becomes of no concern to us: but in reality they are two sides of one seeking. All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through himself, through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first to seek this knowledge through the external life; for until its mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not really possible, and in proportion as it is developed, the possibilities of spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller.

29.09 - Some Dates, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
HAVE you noted today's date? My attention has been drawn to it. It is very remarkable: 7.7.77. Four sevens together. Has it any special significance? Yes, Mother herself once gave the meaning of these four sevens - "Manifestation and Realisation". Manifestation means the appearance of the truth, the truth that is hidden behind somewhere, when it comes forward and shows itself, that is manifestation. Realisation means we express this truth that has come forward in our consciousness, make it real on the physical plane, embody it in our external activity: in other words whatever you doyou do the truth, whatever you speak you speak the truth; the Truth first appears in your mind, in your mental consciousness, then it realises itself in your physical activity. Number seven has a special meaning. The number seven gives the scheme of creation; it is the number of the worlds that constitute creation. The creation is a globe, there are three worlds above, that is the higher hemisphere and three other below forming the lower hemisphere. The higher worlds are as you all know Sat-Chit-Ananda, - the Divine Existence, the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Delight. Below in the lower half there is the mind, the vital and the body, - manas, prana and anna.Three above, three below, in between there is another joining the two, another principle or world, it is the Supermind, Mahas.The three higher worlds are invisible, beyond the normal consciousness; they become visible mind concrete when they pass through the intermediary Supermind and become the principles of the lower hemisphere. Now these are the seven principles of creation. Manifestation means the expression of the higher worlds, the supreme triple principles of Sat-Chit-Ananda in the lower triple principle of mind, life, body through the intermediary Supermind. Mahas-Supermind is the manifestation, the beginning of the creation and realisatton comes when the higher trinity is realised here below and embodied in the lower trinity. That is the significance of 7. There are four sevens. Four is the number signifying a square, fullness, completeness.
Sri Aurobindo gave me this mantra of creation and explained it to me, as I have done to you today, on the very day perhaps of my arrival here in Pondicherry almost seventy years ago! Where were you then?

3.01 - Love and the Triple Path, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ''By Bhakti'' says the Lord in the Gita ''shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me.'' Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one's love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the Divine Delight of the All-Lover's being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.
Since then in the union of these three powers lies our base of perfection, the seeker of an integral self-fulfilment in the Divine must avoid or throw away, if he has them at all, the misunderstanding and mutual depreciation which we often find existent between the followers of the three paths. Those who have the cult of knowledge seem often, if not to despise, yet to look downward from their dizzy eminence on the path of the devotee as if it were a thing inferior, ignorant, good only for souls that are not yet ready for the heights of the Truth. It is true that devotion without knowledge is often a thing raw, crude, blind and dangerous, as the errors, crimes, follies of the religious have too often shown. But this is because devotion in them has not found its own path, its own real principle, has not therefore really entered on the path, but is fumbling and feeling after it, is on one of the bypaths that lead to it; and knowledge too at this stage is as imperfect as devotion, dogmatic, schismatic, intolerant, bound up in the narrowness of some single and exclusive principle, even that being usually very imperfectly seized. When the devotee has grasped the power that shall raise him, has really laid hold on love, that in the end purifies and enlarges him as effectively as knowledge can; they are equal powers, though their methods of arriving at the same goal are different. The pride of the philosopher looking down on the passion of the devotee arises, as does all pride, from a certain deficiency of his nature; for the intellect too exclusively developed misses what the heart has to offer. The intellect is not in every way superior to the heart; if it opens more readily doors at which the heart is apt to fumble in vain, it is, itself, apt to miss truths which to the heart are very near and easy to hold. And if when the way of thought deepens into spiritual experience, it arrives readily at the ethereal heights, pinnacles, skyey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine being and the divine Ananda.

3.01 - Proem, #Of The Nature Of Things, #Lucretius, #Poetry
Some new Divine Delight and trembling awe
Takes hold through me, that thus by power of thine

3.04 - The Way of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for a single object of the heart's desire, the intense impatience of all that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding. Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the Divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.

34.09 - Hymn to the Pillar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
[The ritualistic or the naturalistic symbolism. of the Veda is at its minimum in this hymn of the Atharvaveda, translated almost literally. The Pillar, it is explicitly said, is the Brahman, the Supreme Reality. It is sarvadhara,the container of all, the total or integral existence. It upholds the creation, it has entered into the creation and it has become the creation. It is the tree, the Aswattha tree as the Upanishad also describes, with its branches spreading out, i.e.all the multiple aspects of the creation. Even the gods, all of them, find shelter here in one form or other. All gods it is: Agni the Divine Force, Indra the Divine Mind, Soma the Divine Delight. It is Tapas, the upward urge in the Universe, it is Satyam the Truth and Ritam the Truth-action, Vak the Truth-word.
Day and Night also are its dual aspects, Light and Darkness - evolution and involution, expression and withdrawal, Being and Non-Being, Knowledge and Ignorance. The image of twin sisters (rivers) refers also to this double movement of consciousness, everywhere in Nature: ascent and descent, inward and outward, the two wings of the Cosmic Bird flying through eternity and infinity. To mark the progress of Time or in Time, cycles of duration (months, half months, seasons etc.) are also noted here as limbs of this Supreme total Reality. To this double movement there is to be added a third movement: if the double movement means thesis and antithesis, there is a movement of synthesis also. To the movement sideways there is to be a movement beyond. We know of this threefold movement in the mystery of the Kundalini Force: the two currents idaand pingalaon either side of the spinal cord and in between the mounts the susumnaheading towards the beyond, to the Crown of the head. The Beyond is of course the Transcendent, the supreme status of Brahman, the All Container.
--
1 Divine Delight.
Sat-Chit-Ananda, body-life-mind. are they in the Lord of Creation.

36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
Be that as it may, we are not so much concerned with the external forms of the Veda as with its inner significance. For long the Veda has been solely the subject of archaeological researches. To be sure, the Veda has a living spirit. The true significance of the Veda lies in the fact that it points out to man the true goal and the means to the attainment of a higher and nobler life. In spite of his ignorance, lack of power and want of bliss, the dream that man has dreamt, the ideal that he has pursued through all the vicissitudes of his life has been: "What shall I do with that which can not bring me Immortality?" This quest for Immortality of the human soul finds its absolute fulfilment in the Veda which is truly a vast ocean of boundless delight. The true purpose of one's studying the Veda is served only when its mantras arouse in oneself the aspiration for the Divine Delight.
Rigveda 111.62.10. It is clearly stated in the Upanishad: "Savitre satyaprasavaya (the Sun is the origin of truth). Further, the sun of knowledge and the light of knowledge are not expressions unfamiliar to us. We always make use of such comparisons and allegories. If ever the Vedic sages made use of such a comparison, then has it to be regarded as something describing mere natural phenomena? Finally we cannot resist the temptation of quoting another instance. This will serve as a typical example as to what extent quite a simple idea can be twisted. And it will enable us to appreciate what a terrible injustice the Veda has to suffer at the hands of the commentators. The phrase amrtasya vani that is found in the Veda should convey to all the essence of the Veda. But do you know what meaning Sayana has ascribed to it? He has translated amrtasya vani (the message of immortality) as the current of water. Can we be at one with him? In fact, what we want to say is that the Veda is the expression of Yogic realisations, spiritual experiences, the knowledge of the ultimate Truth; It is thus that we can discover the fundamental concept and the esoteric mystery of the Veda. If we follow this course we shall find how easily and consistently the meaning of the whole Veda unfolds itself and becomes crystal-clear. No doubt, at places if we want to delve into the minutest detail, there will be occasions for uncertainty and confusion. But it will not prove an obstacle to the apprehension of the fundamental truths of the Veda provided we can rightly focus the attention of our intelligence on it. Can we not have any access to the Mahabharata because of Vyasakutas[^73]

36.08 - A Commentary on the First Six Suktas of Rigveda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
The first three riks deal with the purification and transformation of life-energy. Vayu is the presiding Deity of life-energy. Vayuh pranah(Vayu is life), says the Mundaka Upanishad. In the Rigveda too there is a clear indication of it. It says, pratnat vayurajayata(Vayu came into existence from the Supreme as Life). This Vayu or life energy is the raison dtreof all the activities of the ordinary human life. Life abounds with desires and enjoyments of earthly objects. The ordinary life is blind and ignorant. It hankers after the satisfaction of desires. It gets satisfaction even in fleeting pleasures. But what an aspirant needs in life is to taste the pure and unalloyed nectar which is the perpetual Divine Delight inherent in each object.
The Somarasais the transcendental Delight, and this Delight is nothing rather than Immortality. It is also an immensely conscious and luminous exhilaration of the divine existence of the Gods. Truth must be revealed with the rhythm and words of direct knowledge, and the delight of the realised truth must be made manifest in life. Those who have done it are called "Aharvida". It means they have now the light of the day. No more do they crave for trivial enjoyments. All the parts of their being are vibrant, conscious and filled with the immortal delight.

3.7.1.05 - The Significance of Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The questions which surround our existence elucidate themselves at once with a certain satisfactory fullness. What we are is a soul of the transcendent Spirit and Self unfolding itself in the cosmos in a constant evolutionary embodiment of which the physical side is only a pedestal of form corresponding in its evolution to the ascending degrees of the spirit, but the spiritual growth is the real sense and motive. What is behind us is the past terms of the spiritual evolution, the upward gradations ofspirit already climbed, by which through constant rebirth we have developed what we are, and are still developing this present and middle human term of the ascension. What is around us is the constant process of the unfolding in its universal aspect: the past terms are there contained in it, fulfilled, overpassed by us, but in general and various type still repeated as a support and background; the present terms are there not as an unprofitable recurrence, but in active pregnant gestation of all that is yet to be unfolded by the spirit, no irrational decimal recurrence helplessly repeating for ever its figures, but an expanding series of powers of the Infinite. What is in front of us is the greater potentialities, the steps yet unclimbed, the intended mightier manifestations. Why we are here is to be this means of the spirits upward self-unfolding. What we have to do with ourselves and our significances is to grow and open them to greater significances of divine being, divine consciousness, divine power, Divine Delight and multiplied unity, and what we have to do with our environment is to use it consciously for increasing spiritual purposes and make it more and more a mould for the ideal unfolding of the perfect nature and self-conception of the Divine in the cosmos. This is surely the Will in things which moves, great and deliberate, unhasting, unresting, through whatever cycles, towards a greater and greater informing of its own finite figures with its own infinite Reality.
All this is to the mind that lives in the figures of the present, as it must be to the careful sceptical mind of positive inquiry, no more than a hypothesis; for if evolution is an acknowledged idea, rebirth itself is only a supposition. Take it so, but still it is a better hypothesis than the naive and childlike religious solutions which make the world an arbitrary caprice and man the breathing clay puppet of an almighty human-minded Creator, and at least as good a hypothesis as the idea of a material inconscient Force somehow stumbling into a precarious, ephemeral, yet always continued phenomenon of consciousness, or a creative Life labouring in the Bergsonian formula oppressed but constant in the midst of a universal death, as good too as the idea of a mechanical working of Prakriti, Maya, Shakti into which or in which a real or unreal individual stumbles and wanders, dandramyamo andhena nyamno yathndha,2 until he can get out of it by a spiritual liberation. To a large philosophical questioning it will not seem in disagreement with the known lines of existence or out of tune with the facts and necessities of being or the demands of reason and intuition, even though it admits a yet unrealised factor, things yet to be; for that is implied in the very idea of evolution. It may modify, but does not radically contradict any religious experience or aspiration,for it is not inconsistent either with a union with Superconscience or bliss in heavens beyond or any personal or impersonal relation with the Divine, since these may well be heights of the spiritual unfolding. Its truth will depend on spiritual experience and effectuation; but chiefly on this momentous issue, whether there is anything in the soul-powers of man which promises a greater term of being than his present mentality and whether that greater term can be made effective for his embodied existence. That is the question which remains over to be tested by psychological inquiry and the problem to be resolved in the course of the spiritual evolution of man.

3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
and disposes Ananda, the Divine Delight.
In order to look into the words of the inspired writing and
--
than any develops and arranges Ananda, the Divine Delight. This
is the signification of the verse.
--
& pleasure (Ey, y,) into the Divine Delight.
4. r@vA. S. rmZFyA or fNdy;?tA. It is difficult to understand why S.
--
come to take in all these equally the same pure & Divine Delight.
Because the Lord of Tapas brings to us this wonderful felicity,

4.09 - The Liberation of the Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The two sides of our being, conscious experiencing soul and executive Nature continuously and variously offering to the soul her experiences, determine in their meeting all the affections of our inner status and its responses. Nature contri butes the character of the happenings and the forms of the instruments of experience, the soul meets it by an assent to the natural determinations of the response to these happenings or by a will to other determination which it imposes upon the nature. The acceptance of the instrumental ego-consciousness and the will-to-desire are the initial consent of the self to the lapse into the lower ranges of experience in which it forgets its divine nature of being; the rejection of these things, the return to free self and the will of the Divine Delight in being is the liberation of the spirit. But on the other side stand the contri butions of Nature herself to the mixed tangle, which she imposes on the soul's experience of her doings and makings when once that first initial consent has been given and made the law of the whole outward transaction. Nature's essential contri butions are two, the gunas and the dualities. This inferior action of Nature in which we live has certain essential qualitative modes which constitute the whole basis of its inferiority. The constant effect of these modes on the soul in its natural powers of mind, life and body is a discordant and divided experience, a strife of opposites, dvandva, a motion in all its experience and an oscillation between or a mixture of constant pairs of contraries, of combining positives and negatives, dualities. A complete liberation from the ego and the will of desire must bring with it a superiority to the qualitative modes of the inferior Nature, traigunyatitya, a release from this mixed and discordant experience, a cessation or solution of the dual action of Nature. But on this side too there are two kinds of freedom. A liberation from Nature in a quiescent bliss of the spirit is the first form of release. A farther liberation of the Nature into a divine quality and spiritual power of world-experience fills the supreme calm with the supreme kinetic bliss of knowledge, power, joy and mastery. A divine unity of supreme spirit and its supreme nature is the integral liberation.
Nature, because she is a power of spirit, is essentially qualitative in her action. One may almost say that Nature is only the power in being and the development in action of the infinite qualities of the spirit, anantaguna. All else belongs to her outward and more mechanical aspects; but this play of quality is the essential thing, of which the rest is the result and mechanical combination. Once we have set right the working of the essential power and quality, all the rest becomes subject to the control of the experiencing Purusha. But in the inferior nature of things the play of infinite quality is subject to a limited measure, a divided and conflicting working, a system of opposites and discords between which some practical mobile system of concords has to be found and to be kept in action; this play of concorded discords, conflicting qualities, disparate powers and ways of experience compelled to some just manageable, partial, mostly precarious agreement, an unstable, mutable equilibrium, is managed by a fundamental working in three qualitative modes which conflict and combine together in all her creations. These three modes have been given in the Sankhya system, which is generally adopted for this purpose by all the schools of philosophic thought and of Yoga 'in India, the three names, sattva, rajas and tamas.656 Tarnas is the principle and power of inertia; Rajas is the principle of kinesis, passion, endeavour, struggle, initiation (arambha); Sattwa the principle of assimilation, equilibrium and harmony. The metaphysical bearing of this classification does not concern us; but in its psychological and spiritual bearing it is of immense practical importance, because these three principles enter into all things, combine to give them their turn of active nature, result, effectuation, and their unequal working in the soul-experience is the constituent force of our active personality, our temperament, type of nature and cast of psychological response to experience.

5.1.02 - Ahana, #Collected Poems, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1 The dance-round of Krishna with the cowherdesses in the moonlit groves of Brindavan, type of the dance of Divine Delight with the souls of men liberated in the world of
Bliss secret within us.

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