TERMS STARTING WITH
Mental Being ::: The soul when it dwells in the principle of mind, not yet subject to but user of life and body, knows itself as a mental being working out its mental life and forces and images, bodies of the subtle mental substance, according to its individual knowledge, will and dynamis modified by its relation to other similar beings and powers in the universal mind.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 630
Mental body: The “body” in which, according to occult philosophy, the conscious personality of man lives on the mental plane of existence, after “death” on the astral plane. Marc Edmund Jones calls it “the agency by which an individual functions in transcendental realms of idea, or through self-sufficient consciousness.”
Mental call (in difficulty): there is only one way if you cannot. exert your will: it is lo call the Force; csen the call
Mental Chemistry: Psychological procedure, analogous to chemical analysis and synthesis, consisting in the attempted explanation of mental states as the products of the combination and fusion of psychic elements. See Associationism. -- L.W.
Mental chemistry: Psychological procedure, analogous to chemical analysis and synthesis, consisting in the attempted explanation of mental states as the products of the combination and fusion of psychic elements.
Mentalism: Metaphysical theory of the exclusive reality of individual minds and their subjective states.
Mentalism: Metaphysical theory of the exclusive reality of individual minds and their subjective states. The term is applied to the individualistic idealism of Berkeley and Leibniz rather than to the absolutistic Idealism of Hegel and his followers. -- L.W.
Mental: (Lat. mens, mind) Pertaining to the mind either in its functional aspect (perceiving, imagining, remembering, feeling, willing, etc.) or in its contential aspects (sense data, images and other contents existing "in" the mind). See Mind. -- L.W.
Mental Plane ::: Also Briah. One of the Four Worlds as part of the Kabbalistic map of reality. A realm of reality between the Astral Plane and the Causal that serves as the abode of the roots of dualistic expression and the foundation upon which individual forms and archetypes can start to be created: those seeds of intent that drive reality through the lower two worlds. See also Mental Projection.
Mental plane; mental world: The plane of existence after the astral plane; the plane where man is believed by occultists to live in the mental body after “death” on the astral plane.
Mental Projection ::: The ability to firmly focus one's awareness at the level of the Mental Plane and to slip between and amongst the forms that characterize this level. Through practice this allows for exploring the realm of symbolic archetypes and raw information to the extent that the human mind can lucidly and persistently form structures around such ideas. See also Mental Plane.
Mental retardation is a term used when a person has certain limitations in mental functioning and in skills such as communicating, taking care of him or herself, and social skills.
Mental surrender ::: A surrender by the mind and the W’ill in the mind.
Mental tests: Measurement of independent variables in a person to specific situations controlled by the medium of the instrument, expressing measurable differences in individuals. Chief form: intelligence test. -- J.E.B.
Mental transformation ::: All the works of the mind and intellect must first be heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domains of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again trans- formed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis.
Mental visions arc meant to bring in the mind the influences of the things they represent.
Mental word: In Latin, verbum mentis; the concept; the intra-mental product of the act of intellection.
Mental World ::: the powers of Mind, its ideas and principles that influence our earth-being, are found to have in the greater Mind-world their own field of fullness of self-nature, while here in human existence they throw out only partial formations which have much difficulty in establishing themselves because of their meeting and mixture with other powers and principles; this meeting, this mixture curbs their completeness, alloys their purity, disputes and defeats their influence
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 814
mental age: the level of intellectual functioning which is suitable for children of a particular age. Typically, mental age is equivalent to chronological age, but if a child is of lower/higher intelligence the mental age will be accordingly lower/higher than chronological age.
mental ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the chin; genian; as, the mental nerve; the mental region.
Of or pertaining to the mind; intellectual; as, mental faculties; mental operations, conditions, or exercise. ::: n. --> A plate or scale covering the mentum or chin of a fish or
MENTAL BEING. ::: The true mental being is not the same as the inner mental ; true mental, true vital, true physical being means the Purusha of that level freed from the error and ignorant thought and will of the lower Prakriti and directly open to the knowledge and guidance above.
mental bhoga ::: mental or subjective ananda, or any of its forms, in the state of bhoga which is the second stage of bhukti.
MENTAL-CAUSAL CONSCIOUSNESS Mental-causal consciousness is the monad&
mental cognition of things would see. the one Truth everj-where.
MENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS Mental consciousness is the monad&
MENTAL CULTURE The prerequisite of the stage of intellectual culture is a rational and non-contradictory world view and life view, which is free of dogmas and has been made available for all. This presupposes a system of education that develops the power of judgement. P 1.1.13
Mental culture presupposes mental self-reliance and mental self-determination.
Intellectual independence implies the ability critically to sift the material which culture has afforded us, to judge the kind of certainty and degree of probability accruing to the ideas we find. P 1.1.15
mental disorders: anxiety disorders, conduct disorder, depressive disorders,oppositional defiant disorder, pervasive development disorder or Tourette's syndrome.
MENTAL ENVELOPE The monad&
mental health: a state of psychological and emotional well-being that enables an individual to work, love, relate to others effectively, and resolve conflicts.
mental (intelligence)
mental intuition ::: intuition acting in the buddhi, in contrast to ideal intuition.
mentalism ::: The view, in philosophy of mind, that the mind and mental states exist as causally efficacious inner states of persons. The view should be distinguished from substance dualism, which is the view that the mind and the body (or brain) are two distinct kinds of things, which nevertheless interact (somehow) with one another. Although this dualistic view of the mind-body connection entails mentalism, mentalism does not entail dualism. Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky have been two of mentalism's most ardent recent defenders.
MENTALIST Man at the mental stage (the stage of humanity).
mentality ::: n. --> Quality or state of mind.
MENTAL LIBERATION FROM EMOTIONALITY During incarnation the emotional and mental envelopes coalesce so as to form, as it were, one single envelope from the functional point of view. Since the emotional is incomparably more developed, it completely dominates the mental. A prerequisite of liberating the mental from the dependence on the emotional is that the coalescence be discontinued. This also results in mental objective consciousness. The method will remain esoteric until mankind has become humanized. Until then, the lowest mental (47:7) can at best dominate the two lowest emotional ones (48:6,7) and the two lowest mental ones (47:6,7) the four lower emotional
(48:4-7). K 6.8.8
From this it follows that only 47:5, perspective thinking, can control the higher emotionality (48:2,3). This explains why the great majority of people have difficulty in discovering the untenability of fictions that appeal to wishful thinking.
MENTAL LIFE BETWEEN INCARNATIONS Upon the dissolution of the emotional envelope, the individual in his mental envelope leads a life of thought that is absolutely subjective, not suspecting the impossibility of apprehending objective reality in this world. But apprehension of reality, bliss, and perfection, omniscience and omnipotence are absolute.
The independent life of the mental envelope can vary from a minute or so (in the case of the barbarian) to thousands of years. It all depends on the number of ideas the individual has collected during physical life and how vital they are. K 1.34.32f
It is significant that it is precisely those who have had a long sojourn in the mental world in between incarnations who are easy prey to the philosophy of illusion
(which says that all matter is illusion). K 5.33.16
mentally ::: adv. --> In the mind; in thought or meditation; intellectually; in idea.
mental ::: of or relating to the mind; done in the mind, esp. In the mind alone.
mental overmind ::: the plane of the overmind system that is "directly creative of all the formations that manifest below in the mental world". mental sama
mental physical ::: mechanical mind.
mental plane ::: a world of mental existence in which neither life, nor matter, but mind is the first determinant; mind there is not determined by material conditions or by the life-force, but itself determines and uses them for its own satisfaction.
mental: refers to the mind, the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness.
mental retardation: individuals who have significantly below average intellectualfunctioning, with IQ scores of 70-75 or below, combined with inability to use adaptive skills.
MENTAL SELF Monad having its most important kind of self-consciousness in molecular world 47:4-7 within the solar system. Mental selves belonging to the human kingdom are at the stage of humanity.
mental set: in Gestalt theory , the schema used to organise perception of a new problem.
MENTAL STAGE The mental stage is divided into the stages of humanity and ideality (or the causal stage). The humanist activates consciousness in the four lowest mental molecular kinds (47:4-7), the idealist in all six (47:2-7). The humanist is a mental self, the idealist a causal self. K 1.34.18
mental tapas ::: mental will-power, whose working takes the form of "perceptions realising themselves if vijnanamaya, acting as forces, if pranamaya"; same as intellectual tapas.
mental vital ::: that part of the higher vital being which gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being.
MENTAL WORLD Molecular world 47:4-7 in the solar system. The mental world can be said to be the particular world of men where consciousness is concerned.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Agitated; restless; turbulent. 2. Mentally or emotionally uneasy, perturbed, anxious, or vexed. 3. Not still or silent.
1. A physical likeness or representation of a person, animal, or thing, photographed, painted, sculptured, or otherwise made visible. 2. A mental representation; idea; conception. 3. Form; appearance; semblance. 4. A type; embodiment. 5. An idol or representation of a deity. 6. A person or thing that resembles another closely; counterpart, double or copy. 7. A concrete representation, as in art, literature, or music, that is expressive or evocative of something else. images, image-face.
1. A visible scene, esp. one extended to a distance; vista. 2. The appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer. 3. A mental view or outlook. perspectives.
1. Imagination, caprice, whim, esp. when extravagant and unrestrained. 2. The forming of mental images, esp. wondrous, extravagant or visionary fancy. 3. A mental image, esp. when unreal or fantastic; vision. fantasies.
1. Imagination or fantasy, esp. as exercised in a capricious manner. 2. A mental image or conception. 3. An idea or opinion with little foundation; illusion. 4. A caprice; whim. 5. A sudden or irrational liking for a person or thing. fancy"s, Fancy"s, fancies.
1. Made or produced a likeness of; mirrored or reflected; mentally pictured; imagined. 2. Decorated with an image or images. many-imaged.
1. The active opposition or mutual hostility of two opposing forces, physical or mental. 2. An opposing force, principle, or tendency.
1. The faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses. 2. Mental creative ability. 3. The product of imagining; a conception or mental creation. imagination"s, Imagination"s, imaginations, Imaginations.
“About the subconscient—it is the sub-mental base of the being and is made up of impressions, instincts, habitual movements that are stored there. Whatever movement is impressed in it, it keeps. If one impresses the right movement in it, it will keep and send up that. That is why it has to be cleared of old movements before there can be a permanent and total change in the nature. When the higher consciousness is once established in the waking parts, it goes down into the subconscient and changes that also, makes a bedrock of itself there also.” Letters on Yoga
absolute reality ::: Sri Aurobindo: "I would myself say that bliss and oneness are the essential condition of the absolute reality, and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities; . . . .” Letters on Yoga
ache ::: a continuous or abiding pain, in contrast to a sudden or sharp one. Used of both physical and mental sensations.
adj.** **Mentally pictured or conceived.
aesthesis ::: “By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which, passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit’s delight of existence, Ananda.” Letters on Savitri
afflicted ::: distressed with mental or bodily pain; troubled greatly; grievously depressed, oppressed, cast down; tormented.
afflicting ::: 1. Grievously painful, distressing. 2. Distressing with bodily or mental suffering; troubling grievously, tormenting. self-afflicting.
“Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” The Secret of the Veda
*[Agni]. Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” *The Secret of the Veda
“A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.” The Life Divine
“All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite’s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit’s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being,—an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves,—but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” The Life Divine
“All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it.”
"All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it.” ::: "The question was: ‘In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with ‘gold-white wings" or your Hippogriff with ‘face lustred, pale-blue-lined"? And why do you write: ‘What to say about him? One can only see"?” Letters on Savitri
"All change must come from within with the felt or the secret support of the Divine Power; it is only by one"s own inner opening to that that one can receive help, not by mental, vital or physical contact with others.” Letters on Yoga
“All change must come from within with the felt or the secret support of the Divine Power; it is only by one’s own inner opening to that that one can receive help, not by mental, vital or physical contact with others.” Letters on Yoga
"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.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“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.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"All life, spiritual, mental or material, is the play of the soul with the possibilities of its nature; . . . .” The Synthesis of Yoga
“All life, spiritual, mental or material, is the play of the soul with the possibilities of its nature; …” The Synthesis of Yoga
"All supramental gnosis is a twofold Truth-Consciousness, a consciousness of inherent self-knowledge and, by identity of self and world, of intimate world-knowledge; this knowledge is the criterion, the characteristic power of the gnosis.” The Life Divine*
“All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement.
A mental formation stamped by the thoughts and feelings of a departed human being on the atmosphere of a place or locality, wandering about there or repeating itself, till that formation either exhausts itself or is dissolved by one means or another. This is the explanation of such phenomena as the haunted house in which the scenes attending or surrounding or preceding a murder are repeated over and over again and many other similar phenomena.
"A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance; it is likely that even those parts of humanity which cannot reach it will yet be aware of its possibility and consciously tend towards it; not only so, but the life of humanity will be enlightened, uplifted, governed, harmonised by this luminous principle and even the body become something much less powerless, obscure and animal in its propensities and capable instead of a new and harmonised perfection. It is this possibility that we have to look at and that would mean a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth-consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance; it is likely that even those parts of humanity which cannot reach it will yet be aware of its possibility and consciously tend towards it; not only so, but the life of humanity will be enlightened, uplifted, governed, harmonised by this luminous principle and even the body become something much less powerless, obscure and animal in its propensities and capable instead of a new and harmonised perfection. It is this possibility that we have to look at and that would mean a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth-consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
amusements ::: pleasurable pastimes of the mind or attention; mental diversions and enjoyments in lieu of more serious matters.
"A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature. Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of Light would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a part of it or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into the superhumanity of the supramental principle. Above all, its possession would enable the human being to rise beyond the normalities of his present thinking, feeling and being into those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedings which intervene between our mentality and supermind and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greater and more luminous principle. This advance like others in the evolution might not be reached and would naturally not be reached at one bound, but from the very beginning it would be inevitable: the pressure of the supermind creating from above out of itself the mind of Light would compel this certainty of the eventual outcome.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge. Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature. Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of Light would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a part of it or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into the superhumanity of the supramental principle. Above all, its possession would enable the human being to rise beyond the normalities of his present thinking, feeling and being into those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedings which intervene between our mentality and supermind and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greater and more luminous principle. This advance like others in the evolution might not be reached and would naturally not be reached at one bound, but from the very beginning it would be inevitable: the pressure of the supermind creating from above out of itself the mind of Light would compel this certainty of the eventual outcome.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
::: "An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga —**cosmic forces.**
“An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.” The Synthesis of Yoga
anklet ::: an ornamental circlet worn around the ankle; an ankle-ring. anklet-bells.
anxious ::: full of mental distress or uneasiness because of fear of danger or misfortune; greatly worried.
A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface and you will feel your true being within separate from them, observing but not carried away, able to watch and judge them and reject all that has to be rejected and to accept and keep to all that is true consciousness and true experience.” Letters on Yoga
arabesques ::: 1. Any ornaments or ornamental objects such as rugs or mosaics, in which flowers, foliage, fruits, vases, animals, and figures are represented in a fancifully combined pattern. 2. *Fine Arts.* A sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif.
arch ::: 1. An upwardly curved construction, for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening, either capable of bearing weight or merely ornamental; 2. Something bowed or curved; any bowlike part: the arch of the foot. 3. An arched roof, door; gateway; vault; fig. the heavens. arches.
ascent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ascent or the upward movement takes place when there is a sufficient aspiration from the being, i.e., from the various mental, vital and physical planes.” *Letters on Yoga
ascent ::: “The ascent or the upward movement takes place when there is a sufficient aspiration from the being, i.e., from the various mental, vital and physical planes.” Letters on Yoga
::: "As for prophecy, I have never met or known of a prophet, however reputed, who was infallible. Some of their predictions come true to the letter, others do not, — they half-fulfil or misfire entirely. It does not follow that the power of prophecy is unreal or the accurate predictions can be all explained by probability, chance, coincidence. The nature and number of those that cannot is too great. The variability of fulfilment may be explained either by an imperfect power in the prophet sometimes active, sometimes failing or by the fact that things are predictable in part only, they are determined in part only or else by different factors or lines of power, different series of potentials and actuals. So long as one is in touch with one line, one predicts accurately, otherwise not — or if the lines of power change, one"s prophecy also goes off the rails. All the same, one may say, there must be, if things are predictable at all, some power or plane through which or on which all is foreseeable; if there is a divine Omniscience and Omnipotence, it must be so. Even then what is foreseen has to be worked out, actually is worked out by a play of forces, — spiritual, mental, vital and physical forces — and in that plane of forces there is no absolute rigidity discoverable. Personal will or endeavour is one of those forces.” Letters on Yoga
“As for prophecy, I have never met or known of a prophet, however reputed, who was infallible. Some of their predictions come true to the letter, others do not,—they half-fulfil or misfire entirely. It does not follow that the power of prophecy is unreal or the accurate predictions can be all explained by probability, chance, coincidence. The nature and number of those that cannot is too great. The variability of fulfilment may be explained either by an imperfect power in the prophet sometimes active, sometimes failing or by the fact that things are predictable in part only, they are determined in part only or else by different factors or lines of power, different series of potentials and actuals. So long as one is in touch with one line, one predicts accurately, otherwise not—or if the lines of power change, one’s prophecy also goes off the rails. All the same, one may say, there must be, if things are predictable at all, some power or plane through which or on which all is foreseeable; if there is a divine Omniscience and Omnipotence, it must be so. Even then what is foreseen has to be worked out, actually is worked out by a play of forces,—spiritual, mental, vital and physical forces—and in that plane of forces there is no absolute rigidity discoverable. Personal will or endeavour is one of those forces.” Letters on Yoga
assuage ::: to mitigate, alleviate, soothe, relieve (physical or mental pain).
"As supramental Truth is not merely a sublimation of our mental ideas, so Divine Love is not merely a sublimation of human emotions; it is a different consciousness, with a different quality, movement and substance.” Letters on Yoga
“As supramental Truth is not merely a sublimation of our mental ideas, so Divine Love is not merely a sublimation of human emotions; it is a different consciousness, with a different quality, movement and substance.” Letters on Yoga
"A supramental Truth-Consciousness is at once the self-awareness of the Infinite and Eternal and a power of self-determination inherent in that self-awareness;” *The Life Divine
"A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.” The Life Divine
“A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.” The Life Divine
::: ". . . a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
“… a true occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies,—all that Nature has not put into visible operation on the surface; it pursues also the application of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind, the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical existence. In the spiritual domain which is occult to the surface mind in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experience, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowledge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic,—for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.” The Life Divine
At times he calls himself the ‘Lord of Nations." It is he who sets all wars in motion and only by thwarting his plans could the last war be won . . . This one does not want to be converted, not at all. He wants neither the physical transformation not the supramental world, for that would spell his end. The Mother"s talk of 26 March 1959.
At times he calls himself the ‘Lord of Nations.’ It is he who sets all wars in motion and only by thwarting his plans could the last war be won . . . This one does not want to be converted, not at all. He wants neither the physical transformation not the supramental world, for that would spell his end. The Mother’s talk of 26 March 1959.
aura ::: “Yet all the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside. But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an environmental consciousness (called by the Theosophists the Aura) into which they first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of yours, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things in you are thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to get in again. Or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or even perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.” Letters on Yoga
“Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development—Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.” Letters on Yoga
balance ::: n. **1. A state of equilibrium or equipoise; mental, psychological or emotional. 2. A weighing device, especially one consisting of a rigid beam horizontally suspended by a low-friction support at its center, with identical weighing pans hung at either end, one of which holds an unknown weight while the effective weight in the other is increased by known amounts until the beam is level and motionless. 3. An undecided or uncertain state in which issues are unresolved. v. 4. To have an equality or equivalence in weight, parts, etc.; be in equilibrium. adj. 5. Being in harmonious or proper arrangement or adjustment, proportion. 6. Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behaviour, judgement. balanced, balancing.**
bale ::: 1. Evil. 2. Woe, suffering, pain; 3. Mental suffering, anguish.
based ::: 1. Formed or established as a base. 2. Supported as a base. 3. Conceived as the fundamental principle or underlying concept.
base ::: n. 1. The fundamental principle or underlying concept of a system or theory; a basis, foundation. 2. A fundamental ingredient; a chief constituent. adj. 3. Having or showing a contemptible, mean-spirited, or selfish lack of human decency; morally low. base"s. baser.
"Behind this petty instrumental action of the human will there is something vast and powerful and eternal that oversees the trend of the inclination and presses on the turn of the will. There is a total Truth in Nature greater than our individual choice. And in this total Truth, or even beyond and behind it, there is something that determines all results; its presence and secret knowledge keep up steadily in the process of Nature a dynamic, almost automatic perception of the right relations, the varying or persistent necessities, the inevitable steps of the movement. There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
being ::: 1. The state or quality of having existence. 2. The totality of all things that exist. 3. One"s basic or essential nature; self. 4. All the qualities constituting one that exists; the essence. 5. A person; human being. 6. The Divine, the Supreme; God. Being, being"s, Being"s, beings, Beings, beings", earth-being"s, earth-beings, fragment-being, non-being, non-being"s, Non-Being, Non-Being"s, world-being"s.
Sri Aurobindo: "Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” *The Life Divine :::
"The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” *The Life Divine
"What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming.” Letters on Yoga
"Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness.” The Upanishads :::
"Our whole apparent life has only a symbolic value & is good & necessary as a becoming; but all becoming has being for its goal & fulfilment & God is the only being.” *Essays Divine and Human
"Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
belief ::: 1. Confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof. 2. Trust or confidence, faith. 3. Something believed; an opinion or conviction. beliefs.
Question: "Sweet Mother, l don"t understand very clearly the difference between faith, belief and confidence.”
Mother: "But Sri Aurobindo has given the full explanation here. If you don"t understand, then. . . He has written ‘Faith is a feeling in the whole being." The whole being, yes. Faith, that"s the whole being at once. He says that belief is something that occurs in the head, that is purely mental; and confidence is quite different. Confidence, one can have confidence in life, trust in the Divine, trust in others, trust in one"s own destiny, that is, one has the feeling that everything is going to help him, to do what he wants to do. Faith is a certitude without any proof. Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 6.
“Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” Essays Divine and Human
beyond ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads *
Beyond ::: “The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads
bliss ::: “For from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; eternal and beautiful, he enters into these sheaths of substance for the integral transformation of the being and nature.” The Life Divine
blue lotus of the Idea. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "It can be taken as the (Avatar) incarnation on the mental plane.” Visions of Champaklal
“Mental intelligence thinks out because it is merely a reflecting force of consciousness which does not know, but seeks to know; it follows in Time step by step the working of a knowledge higher than itself, a knowledge that exists always, one and whole, that holds Time in its grasp, that sees past, present and future in a single regard.: The Life Divine
bodily ::: 1. Physical as opposed to mental or spiritual. 2. Of, relating to, or belonging to the body or the physical nature of man.
"Buddhi . . . means, properly speaking, the mental power of understanding” Essays on the Gita
"But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"But it is not a mental Intelligence that informs and governs all things; it is a self-aware Truth of being in which self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence: it is this Truth-Consciousness which has not to think out things but works them out with knowledge according to the impeccable self-vision and the inevitable force of a sole and self-fulfilling Existence.” The Life Divine
“But it is not a mental Intelligence that informs and governs all things; it is a self-aware Truth of being in which self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence: it is this Truth-Consciousness which has not to think out things but works them out with knowledge according to the impeccable self-vision and the inevitable force of a sole and self-fulfilling Existence.” The Life Divine
"But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure.” *The Life Divine
“But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instrument of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possibilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and enjoy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only, but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction and pleasure.” The Life Divine
"But the timeless self-knowledge of this Eternal is beyond mind; it is a supramental knowledge superconscient to us and only to be acquired by the stilling or transcending of the temporal activity of our conscious mind, by an entry into Silence or a passage through Silence into the consciousness of eternity.” The Life Divine*
“But the timeless self-knowledge of this Eternal is beyond mind; it is a supramental knowledge superconscient to us and only to be acquired by the stilling or transcending of the temporal activity of our conscious mind, by an entry into Silence or a passage through Silence into the consciousness of eternity.” The Life Divine
"By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above — as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action of Force. The Force I speak of is a Force for illumination, transformation, purification, all that has to be done in the yoga, for removal of hostile forces and the wrong movements — it is also of course for external work, whether great or small in appearance does not matter — if that is part of the Divine Will. I do not mean any personal force egoistic or rajasic.” Letters on Yoga
“By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above—as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action of Force. The Force I speak of is a Force for illumination, transformation, purification, all that has to be done in the yoga, for removal of hostile forces and the wrong movements—it is also of course for external work, whether great or small in appearance does not matter—if that is part of the Divine Will. I do not mean any personal force egoistic or rajasic.” Letters on Yoga
“By Force I mean not mental or vital energy but the Divine Force from above—as peace comes from above and wideness also, so does this Force (Shakti). Nothing, not even thinking or meditating can be done without some action
"By individual we mean normally something that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty is that the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to others which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when we speak of an individual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the true individual we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.” The Life Divine
“By individual we mean normally something that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty is that the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to others which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when we speak of an individual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an individualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and inclusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sympathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the true individual we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.” The Life Divine
"By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement.” Letters on Yoga
“By the supermind is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature in which there can be no place for the principle of division and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior to all mental substance or mental movement.” Letters on Yoga
call ::: “All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence. The soul that is called to this deep and vast inward change, may arrive in different ways to the initial departure. It may come to it by its own natural development which has been leading it unconsciously towards the awakening; it may reach it through the influence of a religion or the attraction of a philosophy; it may approach it by a slow illumination or leap to it by a sudden touch or shock; it may be pushed or led to it by the pressure of outward circumstances or by an inward necessity, by a single word that breaks the seals of the mind or by long reflection, by the distant example of one who has trod the path or by contact and daily influence. According to the nature and the circumstances the call will come.” The Synthesis of Yoga
call ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man into a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being. No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence. The soul that is called to this deep and vast inward change, may arrive in different ways to the initial departure. It may come to it by its own natural development which has been leading it unconsciously towards the awakening; it may reach it through the influence of a religion or the attraction of a philosophy; it may approach it by a slow illumination or leap to it by a sudden touch or shock; it may be pushed or led to it by the pressure of outward circumstances or by an inward necessity, by a single word that breaks the seals of the mind or by long reflection, by the distant example of one who has trod the path or by contact and daily influence. According to the nature and the circumstances the call will come.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
capacity ::: 1. The ability to receive, hold, or absorb. 2. The power to learn or retain knowledge; mental ability.
Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection. Reflections themselves of the Real, they again are reflected in the more concrete workings of our existence. The Supramental Manifestation
conceive ::: 1. To form or hold an idea. 2. To begin, originate, or found (something) in a particular way (usually used in the passive). 3. To apprehend mentally; understand. 4. To be created or formed in the womb; to be engendered; begotten. conceives, conceived, self-conceived.
concentration ("s) ::: exclusive attention to one object; close mental application.
concept ::: 1. An idea, esp. an abstract idea or notion. 2. An idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct. 3. A directly conceived or intuited object of thought. concept"s, concept-maps.
conceptual ::: of or relating to concepts or mental conception.
conquer ::: 1. To defeat or subdue by force, especially by force of arms. 2. To overcome (an enemy, army, etc.); defeat. 3. To overcome or surmount by physical, mental, or moral force. conquers, conquered, conquering.
*consciousforce. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "In actual fact Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter; but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension, — no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
consciousness ::: “Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence—it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it—not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.” Letters on Yoga
“Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence—it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it—not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.” Letters on Yoga
::: "Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound — for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious, — supramental or overmental and submental ranges.” *Letters on Yoga
“Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound—for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious,—supramental or overmental and submental ranges.” Letters on Yoga
"Consequently, the triple world that we live in, the world of Mind-Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished evolution. Life involved in Matter has emerged in the form of thinking and mentally conscious life. But with Mind, involved in it and therefore in Life and Matter, is the Supermind, which is the origin and ruler of the other three, and this also must emerge.” The Life Divine*
cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine
"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*
cross ::: 1. A structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, upon which persons were formerly put to a cruel and ignominious death by being nailed or otherwise fastened to it by their extremities. 2. A representation or delineation of a cross on any surface, varying in elaborateness from two lines crossing each other to an ornamental design painted, embroidered, carved, etc.; used as a sacred mark, symbol, badge, or the like. 3. A trouble, vexation, annoyance; misfortune, adversity; sometimes anything that thwarts or crosses. v. 4. To go or extend across; pass from one side of to the other: pass over. 5. To extend or pass through or over; intersect. 6. To encounter in passing. crosses, crossed, crossing.
cure ::: n. 1. A means of correcting or relieving anything that is troublesome or detrimental. v. 2. To remove or remedy (something harmful or disturbing). curing.
customs-line ::: an area (or line) where a governmental agency checks baggage or merchandise for contraband and goods subject to duty.
“Day and Night,—the latter the state of Ignorance that belongs to our material Nature, the former the state of illumined Knowledge that belongs to the divine Mind of which our mentality is a pale and dulled reflection.” The Secret of the Veda
decorated ::: furnished or adorned with something ornamental or becoming; embellished.
decorative ::: serving to decorate or embellish; ornamental.
delight ::: “… the divine Ananda, the principle of Bliss [is that] from which, in the Vedic conception, the existence of Man, this mental being, is drawn. A secret Delight is the base of existence, its sustaining atmosphere and almost its substance. This Ananda is spoken of in the Taittiriya Upanishad as the ethereal atmosphere of bliss without which nothing could remain in being. In the Aitareya Upanishad Soma, as the lunar deity, is born from the sense-mind 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’être of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is an attempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the terms of physical consciousness.” The Secret of the Veda
delirium ::: 1. A more or less temporary disorder of the mental faculties, as in fevers, disturbances of consciousness, or intoxication, characterised by restlessness, excitement, delusions, hallucinations, etc. 2. A state of violent excitement or emotion.
disciplined ::: 1. Trained mentally or physically by instruction or exercise. 2. Having or exhibiting discipline, i.e. activity, exercise or a regimen that develops or improves a skill; training.
disparate ::: fundamentally distinct or different in kind; entirely dissimilar.
divine life ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.” *The Life Divine ::: "The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man"s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.” The Life Divine
“ . . . 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. The Synthesis of Yoga
divinise ::: “Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle.” Essays Divine and Human
dole ::: grief, sorrow, mental distress.
dragon of the dark foundation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, — Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.” The Secret of the Veda
duality ::: “The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.” The Life Divine
dullard ::: a person regarded as mentally dull; a dolt.
Earth ::: “The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness; but only Matter is at first organized; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organization and activity to the life principle in Matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man. Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.” Letters on Yoga
effort ::: the use of physical or mental energy to do something; exertion. effort"s, efforts.
ego ::: “Ego is only a faculty put forward by the discriminative mind to centralise round itself the experiences of the sense-mind and to serve as a sort of lynch-pin in the wheel which keeps together the movement. It is no more than an instrument, although it is true that so long as we are limited by our normal mentality, we are compelled by the nature of that mentality and the purpose of the instrument to mistake our ego-function for our very self.” The Upanishads
elemental ::: 1. Starkly simple, primitive, or basic. 2. Motivated by or symbolic of primitive and powerful natural forces or passions.
elusive ::: 1. Eluding clear perception or complete mental grasp; hard to express or define. 2. Cleverly or skilfully evasive.
embryo ::: 1. Any organism in a developmental stage preceding birth. 2. The beginning or rudimentary stage of anything.
emotion ::: 1. An affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness. Also abstract ‘feeling" as distinguished from the other classes of mental phenomena. 2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance. **emotion"s, emotions.
::: "Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
“Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound. There is no reason why the supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that there is no reason why they should not last.” Letters on Yoga
::: **"Faith is a certitude in the soul which does not depend on reasoning, on this or that mental idea, on circumstances, on this or that passing condition of the mind or the vital or the body. It may be hidden, eclipsed, may even seem to be quenched, but it reappears again after the storm or the eclipse; it is seen burning still in the soul when one has thought that it was extinguished for ever. The mind may be a shifting sea of doubts and yet that faith may be there within and, if so, it will keep even the doubt-racked mind in the way so that it goes on in spite of itself towards its destined goal. Faith is a spiritual certitude of the spiritual, the divine, the soul"s ideal, something that clings to that even when it is not fulfilled in life, even when the immediate facts or the persistent circumstances seem to deny it.” Letters on Yoga
“Faith is a certitude in the soul which does not depend on reasoning, on this or that mental idea, on circumstances, on this or that passing condition of the mind or the vital or the body. It may be hidden, eclipsed, may even seem to be quenched, but it reappears again after the storm or the eclipse; it is seen burning still in the soul when one has thought that it was extinguished for ever. The mind may be a shifting sea of doubts and yet that faith may be there within and, if so, it will keep even the doubt-racked mind in the way so that it goes on in spite of itself towards its destined goal. Faith is a spiritual certitude of the spiritual, the divine, the soul’s ideal, something that clings to that even when it is not fulfilled in life, even when the immediate facts or the persistent circumstances seem to deny it.” Letters on Yoga
fibre ::: 1. A filamentous substance; a web of thread-like tissue such as composes living tissue generally. 2. That which fundamentally constitutes the strength of a thing; sinew; stuff; character. fibres, fibred.
"First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it.” The Life Divine
“First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it.” The Life Divine
::: Footnote: "E.g. the Russellian fear of emptiness which is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the Silence, that my whole yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy — all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the yogin, the sadhak ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence.” Letters on Yoga
Footnote: “E.g. the Russellian fear of emptiness which is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the Silence, that my whole yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy—all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the yogin, the sadhak ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence.” Letters on Yoga
force, divine ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine Force can act on any plane — it is not limited to the supramental Force. The supramental is only one aspect of the power of the Divine.” *Letters on Yoga
::: " . . . for Dawn is the illumination of the Truth rising upon the mentality to bring the day of full consciousness into the darkness or half-lit night of our being.” The Secret of the Veda
"For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge.” The Life Divine*
“For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge.” The Life Divine
“For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations,—as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
::: "For the inner knowledge comes from within and above (whether from the Divine in the heart or from the Self above) and for it to come, the pride of the mind and vital in the surface mental ideas and their insistence on them must go. One must know that one is ignorant before one can begin to know.” Letters on Yoga
“For the inner knowledge comes from within and above (whether from the Divine in the heart or from the Self above) and for it to come, the pride of the mind and vital in the surface mental ideas and their insistence on them must go. One must know that one is ignorant before one can begin to know.” Letters on Yoga
"For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.” The Supramental Manifestation
“For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements.” The Supramental Manifestation
“For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“From our ascending point of view we may say that the Real is behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfectibility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental.” The Life Divine
gleam ::: “That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
hallucination ::: 1. A sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders. 2. A false notion, belief, or impression; illusion; delusion.
harm ::: n. 1. Physical or psychological injury or damage. harms. v. 2. To injure physically, morally, or mentally.
heart ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality, nearest to the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence.” *The Secret of the Veda
heart ::: “The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of spontaneous mentality, nearest to the subconscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence.” The Secret of the Veda
heart-throb ::: 1. A rapid beat or pulsation of the heart. **2. **Fig. Passionate or sentimental emotion.
“He [man] has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Hostile Forces. The purpose they serve in the world is to give a full chance to the possibilities of the Inconscience and Ignorance — for this world was meant to be a working out of these possibilities with the supramental harmonisation as its eventual outcome.” *Letters on Yoga
“Hostile Forces. The purpose they serve in the world is to give a full chance to the possibilities of the Inconscience and Ignorance—for this world was meant to be a working out of these possibilities with the supramental harmonisation as its eventual outcome.” Letters on Yoga
"Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the flux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their flood but is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the subject and instrument of the world-force but can reflect something of that Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses. The Supramental Manifestation*
“Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the ever-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the flux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their flood but is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the subject and instrument of the world-force but can reflect something of that Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses. The Supramental Manifestation
idea ::: “The idea is the realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power.” The Supramental Manifestation
“If one stands back from the mind and its activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement of which one is the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes possible eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and pure mental being, the Purusha; …” The Life Divine
“If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
“If we suppose a supreme consciousness, master of the world, which really conducts behind the veil all the operations the mental gods attribute to themselves, it will be obvious that that consciousness will be the entire Knower and Lord. The Upanishads
ignorance ::: “Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception which gives us the sight of the supramental Truth; it is the non-perceiving principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving conscious vision and knowledge.” The Life Divine
ignorance ::: the state or fact of being ignorant; lack of knowledge, learning, information. Ignorance, ignorance"s, Ignorance"s, ignorance", world-ignorance, World-Ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo: "Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception which gives us the sight of the supramental Truth; it is the non-perceiving principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving conscious vision and knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the transcendent or the universal reality.” The Life Divine
"Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, — truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result, instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half-truth, half-error. . . . All in the consciousness of this creation is either limited or else perverted by separation from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives is only a half-knowledge. Therefore it is called the Ignorance.” The Mother
". . . all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge . . . .”The Life Divine
"This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
"Knowledge is no doubt the knowledge of the One, the realisation of the Being; Ignorance is a self-oblivion of Being, the experience of separateness in the multiplicity and a dwelling or circling in the ill-understood maze of becomings: . . . .” The Life Divine*
imagination ::: “… our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: . . . . Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind’s way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
imaginations, mental images.
immortality ::: “By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature.” The Upanishads
::: ". . . immortality in its fundamental sense does not mean merely some kind of personal survival of the bodily death; we are immortal by the eternity of our self-existence without beginning or end, beyond the whole succession of physical births and deaths through which we pass, beyond the alternations of our existence in this and other worlds: the spirit"s timeless existence is the true immortality.” *The Life Divine
“… immortality in its fundamental sense does not mean merely some kind of personal survival of the bodily death; we are immortal by the eternity of our self-existence without beginning or end, beyond the whole succession of physical births and deaths through which we pass, beyond the alternations of our existence in this and other worlds: the spirit’s timeless existence is the true immortality.” The Life Divine
"Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn & deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.” Essays Divine and Human
“Immortality is not the survival of the mental personality after death, though that also is true, but the waking possession of the unborn & deathless self of which body is only an instrument and a shadow.” Essays Divine and Human
"Immortality is one of the possible results of supramentalisation, but it is not an obligatory result and it does not mean that there will be an eternal or indefinite prolongation of life as it is. That is what many think it will be, that they will remain what they are with all their human desires and the only difference will be that they will satisfy them endlessly; but such an immortality would not be worth having and it would not be long before people are tired of it. To live in the Divine and have the divine Consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body also and make it a fit instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only.” *Letters on Yoga
“Immortality is one of the possible results of supramentalisation, but it is not an obligatory result and it does not mean that there will be an eternal or indefinite prolongation of life as it is. That is what many think it will be, that they will remain what they are with all their human desires and the only difference will be that they will satisfy them endlessly; but such an immortality would not be worth having and it would not be long before people are tired of it. To live in the Divine and have the divine Consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body also and make it a fit instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only.” Letters on Yoga
impunity ::: immunity from detrimental effects, as of an action.
“In actual fact Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter; but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension,—no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
inconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action, but in a vast involved trance; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own abyss of infinity.” *The Life Divine
"All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite"s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit"s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being, — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” *The Life Divine
"Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience.” Letters on Yoga
*inconscience.
"In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
“In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
inner ::: 1. Of or pertaining to the mind or spirit; mental; spiritual. 2. Situated within or farther within; interior. 3. Not obvious; hidden or obscure.
::: "Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” *Letters on Yoga
"Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” Letters on Yoga
“Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can only be directly experienced (apart from its vrttis in the surface mind such as philosophy, poetry, idealism, etc.) by sadhana, by breaking down the habit of being on the surface and by going deeper within.” Letters on Yoga
insight ::: penetrating mental vision or discernment; faculty of seeing into the inner character or underlying truth of things.
::: ". . . in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds.” *The Life Divine
“… in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds.” The Life Divine
"In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea.” The Life Divine
“In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea.” The Life Divine
". . . intellectual expression of the Truth . . . a means of expressing this greater discovery and as much of its contents as can at all be expressed in mental terms to those who still live in the mental intelligence.” Letters on Yoga
“… intellectual expression of the Truth . . . a means of expressing this greater discovery and as much of its contents as can at all be expressed in mental terms to those who still live in the mental intelligence.” Letters on Yoga
intelligence ::: 1. A capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 2. Superior understanding. 3. An intelligent being, esp. one that is not embodied. Intelligence, Arch-Intelligence.
interior ::: adj. 1. Of or relating to one"s mental or spiritual being. 2. Of or pertaining to that which is within; inside. n. 3. The internal portion or area of anything. interiors.
internal ::: 1. Of or relating to man"s mental or spiritual nature. 2. Of, relating to, or located within the limits or surface; interior; inner.
intoxicated ::: 1. Affected by a substance that intoxicates. 2. Mentally or emotionally exhilarated.
intoxicating ::: affecting temporarily with diminished physical and mental control by means of alcoholic liquor, a drug, or another substance.
intuition ::: direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process. intuition"s, intuitions, half-intuition.
Sri Aurobindo: "Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.” *The Life Divine
"Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ``stable lightnings"". When this original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"I use the word ‘intuition" for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word ‘consciousness" and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.” *The Life Divine - Sri Aurobindo"s footnote.
"For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret Supermind. . . .” The Life Divine
". . . intuition is born of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and indications and gathered data.” The Life Divine
"Intuition is above illumined Mind which is simply higher Mind raised to a great luminosity and more open to modified forms of intuition and inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
"Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses etc. But the limitation of the Intuition as compared with the supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. Also in coming into the mind it gets mixed with the mental movement and forms a kind of intuitive mind activity which is not the pure truth, but something in between the higher Truth and the mental seeking. It can lead the consciousness through a sort of transitional stage and that is practically its function.” Letters on Yoga
“Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses etc. But the limitation of the Intuition as compared with the supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. Also in coming into the mind it gets mixed with the mental movement and forms a kind of intuitive mind activity which is not the pure truth, but something in between the higher Truth and the mental seeking. It can lead the consciousness through a sort of transitional stage and that is practically its function.” Letters on Yoga
inward ::: 1. Located inside; within; inner. 2. Mental or spiritual; inner. 3. Directed or moving toward the interior. Also fig. inward-musing.
inwardly ::: within the self; mentally or spiritually.
“It could be affirmed as a consequence that there is one all-pervading Life or dynamic energy—the material aspect being only its outermost movement—that creates all these forms of the physical universe, Life imperishable and eternal which, even if the whole figure of the universe were quite abolished, would itself still go on existing and be capable of producing a new universe in its place, must indeed, unless it be held back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back, inevitably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by devouring the life-force of the plant or of each other. All existence here is a universal Life that takes form of Matter. It might for that purpose hide life-process in physical process before it emerges as submental sensitivity and mentalised vitality, but still it would be throughout the same creative Life-principle.” The Life Divine
“It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all. Into that truth we shall be freed and it will transform mind and life and body. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit. The obscurations of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit conquer. All may not open to the fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence,—even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
"It is true that metaphors, symbols, images are constant auxiliaries summoned by the mystic for the expression of his experiences: that is inevitable because he has to express, in a language made or at least developed and manipulated by the mind, the phenomena of a consciousness other than the mental and at once more complex and more subtly concrete.” Letters on Yoga*
“It is true that metaphors, symbols, images are constant auxiliaries summoned by the mystic for the expression of his experiences: that is inevitable because he has to express, in a language made or at least developed and manipulated by the mind, the phenomena of a consciousness other than the mental and at once more complex and more subtly concrete.” Letters on Yoga
"It is when the true soul (psyche) comes forward and begins first to influence and then govern the actions of the instrumental nature that man begins to overcome vital desire and grow towards a divine nature.” *Letters on Yoga
“It is when the true soul (psyche) comes forward and begins first to influence and then govern the actions of the instrumental nature that man begins to overcome vital desire and grow towards a divine nature.” Letters on Yoga
I would myself say that bliss and oneness are the essential condition of the absolute reality, and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities; …” Letters on Yoga
jealousy ::: mental uneasiness from suspicion or fear of rivalry, unfaithfulness, etc., as in love or aims.
::: "Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence — it cannot be, for when the soul first entered this existence, it had no Karma.” *Letters on Yoga
“Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence—it cannot be, for when the soul first entered this existence, it had no Karma.” Letters on Yoga
". . . knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and reasonings, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“… knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and reasonings, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Life [is] not only a play of forces or a mental experience, but a field for the evolution of the concealed spirit.” Letters on Yoga
“Life [is] not only a play of forces or a mental experience, but a field for the evolution of the concealed spirit.” Letters on Yoga
"Life is universal Force working so as to create, energise, maintain and modify, even to the extent of dissolving and reconstructing, substantial forms with mutual play and interchange of an overtly or secretly conscious energy as its fundamental character.” The Life Divine
“Life is universal Force working so as to create, energise, maintain and modify, even to the extent of dissolving and reconstructing, substantial forms with mutual play and interchange of an overtly or secretly conscious energy as its fundamental character.” The Life Divine
"Life then is the dynamic play of a universal Force, a Force in which mental consciousness and nervous vitality are in some form or at least in their principle always inherent and therefore they appear and organise themselves in our world in the forms of Matter.” The Life Divine
“Life then is the dynamic play of a universal Force, a Force in which mental consciousness and nervous vitality are in some form or at least in their principle always inherent and therefore they appear and organise themselves in our world in the forms of Matter.” The Life Divine
man ::: “Man is pre-eminently the mental being.” Social and Political Thought
man ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Man is pre-eminently the mental being.” *Social and Political Thought
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” *The Future Poetry
mantra ::: : “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
master of the worlds ::: Sri Aurobindo: " If we suppose a supreme consciousness, master of the world, which really conducts behind the veil all the operations the mental gods attribute to themselves, it will be obvious that that consciousness will be the entire Knower and Lord. *The Upanishads
matter ::: “Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy.” The Life Divine
matter ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy.” *The Life Divine
"Matter, — substance itself, subtle or dense, mental or material, — is form and body of Spirit and would never have been created if it could not be made a basis for the self-expression of the Spirit.” The Life Divine
“Matter,—substance itself, subtle or dense, mental or material,—is form and body of Spirit and would never have been created if it could not be made a basis for the self-expression of the Spirit.” The Life Divine
meditation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of dhyana , ‘meditation" and ‘contemplation". Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana , for the principle of dhyana is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. *Letters on Yoga
meditation ::: “There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of dhyana , ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’. Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana , for the principle of dhyana is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. Letters on Yoga
memory ::: 1. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience. 2. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection. 3. The cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered. Memory, memory"s, memories.
mental (intelligence)
mental ::: of or relating to the mind; done in the mind, esp. In the mind alone.
metamorphosis ::: 1. Any complete change in appearance, character, circumstances, etc. 2. A change or succession of changes in form during the life cycle of an animal, allowing it to adapt to different environmental conditions, as a caterpillar into a butterfly.
mind, inner ::: Sri Aurobindo: "This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience:” *The Life Divine
“Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” The Life Divine
mind, Self of ::: Sri Aurobindo: "If one stands back from the mind and its activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement of which one is the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes possible eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and pure mental being, the Purusha; . . . .” The Life Divine
mind, silent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The first thing to do in the sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in the silent mind that the true consciousness can be built. ::: A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface and you will feel your true being within separate from them, observing but not carried away, able to watch and judge them and reject all that has to be rejected and to accept and keep to all that is true consciousness and true experience.” *Letters on Yoga
mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ‘Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind" and ‘mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer.” The Life Divine
"Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” The Life Divine
"The mind proper is divided into three parts — thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind — the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).” Letters on Yoga
"The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first, sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its own constructions.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"He [man] has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that necessitate the movements and forms of a creation. . . .” *The Life Divine
"The human mind is an instrument not of truth but of ignorance and error.” Letters on Yoga
"For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations, — as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
The Mother: "The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations — whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul — and simply formulating the plan of action — in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations — it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.*
mind ::: “The ‘Mind’ in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.” Letters on Yoga
misery ::: 1. Severe mental or emotional unhappiness or distress. 2. The state of suffering and want as a result of physical circumstances or extreme poverty. 3. A cause or source of suffering. misery"s, miseries.
monumental ::: 1. Exceptionally great, as in quantity, quality, extent or degree. 2. Impressively large, sturdy and enduring.
mother ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates.” The Mother ::: "The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine.
"That which we call Nature or Prakriti is only her [the Mother"s] most outward executive aspect; she marshals and arranges the harmony of her forces and processes, impels the operations of Nature and moves among them secret or manifest in all that can be seen or experienced or put into motion of life.” *The Mother
: "The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes her full manifestation here possible.” *Letters on the Mother
"When one does sadhana, the inner consciousness begins to open and one is able to go inside and have all kinds of experiences there. As the sadhana progresses, one begins to live more and more in this inner being and the outer becomes more and more superficial. At first the inner consciousness seems to be the dream and the outer the waking reality. Afterwards the inner consciousness becomes the reality and the outer is felt by many as a dream or delusion, or else as something superficial and external. The inner consciousness begins to be a place of deep peace, light, happiness, love, closeness to the Divine or the presence of the Divine, the Mother.” Letters on Yoga ::: **mighty Mother, World-Mother, World-Mother"s.**
n. 1. A fashioned ornament for personal adornment, especially of a precious metal set with gems. 2. Something resembling a jewel in appearance, ornamental effect, or the like, as a star. jewels, jewel-faces", jewel-lamp, jewel-lamps, jewel-rhythm. *v. 3. Fig. To adorn, as with jewels. *jewelled.
“Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes,—towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” The Life Divine
Nirvana ::: “[Nirvana means] extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.” The Life Divine
nirvana ::: Sri Aurobindo: "[Nirvana means] extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.” *The Life Divine
"Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the distinction between spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual element in our nature be of any use to us; for ethics is a mental control, and the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and ever-luminous spirit.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the distinction between spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual element in our nature be of any use to us; for ethics is a mental control, and the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and ever-luminous spirit.” The Synthesis of Yoga
notion ::: a mental image or representation; an idea or conception.
noxious ::: injurious to physical or mental health.
occult ::: “The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of occultism,—we do not use any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner.” The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.” On Himself
“… One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection.” On Himself
"One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one"s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
“One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one’s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater Knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great, calm, tranquil, luminous Will and Force, our little, restless, tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome.” Letters on Yoga
oppressed ::: v. 1. Overwhelmed or crushed, esp. in battle. 2. To lie heavy on; burdened (the mind, imagination, etc.). oppresses, oppressed, oppressing.* *n. oppressed. 3. Those who are subjugated by cruelty, force, etc.; trampled down. adj. oppressed. 4.** Afflicted or tormented; burdened psychologically or mentally; caused to suffer.
"Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
“Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
“Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,—but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,—as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge.” The Life Divine
"Our thoughts are not really created within ourselves independently in the small narrow thinking machine we call our mind; in fact, they come to us from a vast mental space or ether either as mind-waves or waves of mind-force that carry a significance which takes shape in our personal mind or as thought-formations ready-made which we adopt and call ours. Our outer mind is blind to this process of Nature; but by the awakening of the inner mind we can become aware of it.” Letters on Yoga
“Our thoughts are not really created within ourselves independently in the small narrow thinking machine we call our mind; in fact, they come to us from a vast mental space or ether either as mind-waves or waves of mind-force that carry a significance which takes shape in our personal mind or as thought-formations ready-made which we adopt and call ours. Our outer mind is blind to this process of Nature; but by the awakening of the inner mind we can become aware of it.” Letters on Yoga
outlook ::: 1. A mental attitude or view; point of view. 2. The view or prospect from a particular place.
outward ::: n. 1. Relating to physical reality rather than with thoughts or the mind; the material or external world. outward"s, outwardness. adj. 2. Relating to the physical self. 3. Purely external; superficial. 4. Belonging or pertaining to external actions or appearances, as opposed to inner feelings, mental states, etc. 5. Pertaining to or being what is seen or apparent, as distinguished from the underlying nature, facts, etc.; pertaining to surface qualities only; superficial.
"Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops within us.” The Life Divine
“Over each grade of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being or soul-personality grows and develops within us.” The Life Divine
overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga
"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine
"The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.” The Life Divine
"The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri
"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga
*Overmind"s.
Overmind ::: “The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental)—the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” Letters on Yoga
Oversoul ::: “But with the extension of our knowledge we discover what this Spirit or Oversoul is: it is ultimately our own highest deepest vastest Self, it is apparent on its summits or by reflection in ourselves as Sachchidananda creating us and the world by the power of His divine Knowledge-Will, spiritual, supramental, truth-conscious, infinite.” The Life Divine.
oversoul ::: Sri Aurobindo: "But with the extension of our knowledge we discover what this Spirit or Oversoul is: it is ultimately our own highest deepest vastest Self, it is apparent on its summits or by reflection in ourselves as Sachchidananda creating us and the world by the power of His divine Knowledge-Will, spiritual, supramental, truth-conscious, infinite.” *The Life Divine.
percept ::: 1. A mental impression of something perceived by the senses, viewed as the basic component in the formation of concepts; a sense datum. 2. The act of perceiving; an impression or sensation of something perceived.
"Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type, its delight will no longer be perishable but an eternally recurrent possession of mental beings in matter manifest in their periods & often in their moments of felicity.” Essays Divine and Human*
“Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type, its delight will no longer be perishable but an eternally recurrent possession of mental beings in matter manifest in their periods & often in their moments of felicity.” Essays Divine and Human
personality ::: “Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface,—it is not the self in its abiding reality.” The Life Divine
philosophy ::: “All philosophy is concerned with the relations between two things, the fundamental truth of existence and the forms in which existence presents itself to our experience.” The Hour of God
power ::: “Power means strength and force, Shakti, which enables one to face all that can happen and to stand and overcome, also to carry out what the Divine Will proposes. It can include many things, power over men, events, circumstances, means etc. But all this not of the mental or vital kind, but by an action through unity of consciousness with the Divine and with all things and beings. It is not an individual strength depending on certain personal capacities, but the Divine Power using the individual as an instrument.” Letters on Yoga
power ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Power means strength and force, Shakti, which enables one to face all that can happen and to stand and overcome, also to carry out what the Divine Will proposes. It can include many things, power over men, events, circumstances, means etc. But all this not of the mental or vital kind, but by an action through unity of consciousness with the Divine and with all things and beings. It is not an individual strength depending on certain personal capacities, but the Divine Power using the individual as an instrument.” *Letters on Yoga
powers ::: Sri Aurobindo: "These are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pishachas (beings respectively of the mentalised vital, middle vital and lower vital planes) who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, purve devah , as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos.” Letters on Yoga
powers ::: “These are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pishachas (beings respectively of the mentalised vital, middle vital and lower vital planes) who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, purve devah , as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos.” Letters on Yoga
presence ::: 1. The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence. 2. A divine, spiritual, or supernatural spirit or influence felt or conceived as present. 3. The immediate proximity of someone or something.
Sri Aurobindo: "It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one"s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the ‘ineffable Presence" it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” Essays Divine and Human
"But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within.” *The Life Divine
"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” *The Life Divine
"If we need any personal and inner witness to this indivisible All-Consciousness behind the ignorance, — all Nature is its external proof, — we can get it with any completeness only in our deeper inner being or larger and higher spiritual state when we draw back behind the veil of our own surface ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result by the invisible Omniscience; we discover a greater working behind our ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure and universal Presence, meet the Lord of all being and all Nature.” *The Life Divine
"The presence of the Spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being.” *The Life Divine
"There is a secret divine Will, eternal and infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, that expresses itself in the universality and in each particular of all these apparently temporal and finite inconscient or half-conscient things. This is the Power or Presence meant by the Gita when it speaks of the Lord within the heart of all existences who turns all creatures as if mounted on a machine by the illusion of Nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"One must have faith in the Master of our life and works, even if for a long time He conceals Himself, and then in His own right time He will reveal His Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"They [the psychic being and the Divine Presence in the heart] are quite different things. The psychic being is one"s own individual soul-being. It is not the Divine, though it has come from the Divine and develops towards the Divine.” *Letters on Yoga
"For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Beyond mind on spiritual and supramental levels dwells the Presence, the Truth, the Power, the Bliss that can alone deliver us from these illusions, display the Light of which our ideals are tarnished disguises and impose the harmony that shall at once transfigure and reconcile all the parts of our nature.” *Essays Divine and Human
The Mother: "For, in human beings, here is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not in the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings. And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of his Presence.” Words of the Mother, MCW, Vol. 15.
presence ::: “It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one›s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any further qualification or description. Thus, of the ‘ineffable Presence’ it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance,—the essential perception of the essential Presence supporting everything else.” Letters on Yoga
proton ::: a positively charged elementary particle that is a fundamental constituent of all atomic nuclei.
pylons ::: monumental gateways in the form of a pair of truncated pyramids serving as entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.
quiet ::: n. 1. An untroubled state; free from disturbances. 2. The absence of sound. 3. adj. Free of noise or uproar; or making little if any sound. 4. Free of mental or emotional turmoil and agitation; untroubled. 5. Tranquil; serene. quieted, quietly.
realm ::: “Mind has its own realms and life has its own realms just as matter has. In the mental realms life and substance are entirely subordinated to Mind and obey its dictates. Here on earth there is the evolution with matter as the starting-point, life as the medium, mind emerging from it. There are many grades, realms, combinations in the cosmos—there are even many universes. Ours is only one of many.” Letters on Yoga
real, the ::: Sri Aurobindo: " From our ascending point of view we may say that the Real is behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfectibility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental.” *The Life Divine
reflection ::: 1. Mental concentration; careful and deep consideration. 2. An image; representation. reflections.
"Religion is the first attempt of man to get beyond himself and beyond the obvious and material facts of his existence. Its first essential work is to confirm and make real to him his subjective sense of an Infinite on which his material and mental being depends and the aspiration of his soul to come into its presence and live in contact with it. Its function is to assure him too of that possibility of which he has always dreamed, but of which his ordinary life gives him no assurance, the possibility of transcending himself and growing out of bodily life and mortality into the joy of immortal life and spiritual existence. It also confirms in him the sense that there are worlds or planes of existence other than that in which his lot is now cast, worlds in which this mortality and this subjection to evil and suffering are not the natural state, but rather bliss of immortality is the eternal condition. Incidentally, it gives him a rule of mortal life by which he shall prepare himself for immortality. He is a soul and not a body and his earthly life is a means by which he determines the future conditions of his spiritual being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Religion is the first attempt of man to get beyond himself and beyond the obvious and material facts of his existence. Its first essential work is to confirm and make real to him his subjective sense of an Infinite on which his material and mental being depends and the aspiration of his soul to come into its presence and live in contact with it. Its function is to assure him too of that possibility of which he has always dreamed, but of which his ordinary life gives him no assurance, the possibility of transcending himself and growing out of bodily life and mortality into the joy of immortal life and spiritual existence. It also confirms in him the sense that there are worlds or planes of existence other than that in which his lot is now cast, worlds in which this mortality and this subjection to evil and suffering are not the natural state, but rather bliss of immortality is the eternal condition. Incidentally, it gives him a rule of mortal life by which he shall prepare himself for immortality. He is a soul and not a body and his earthly life is a means by which he determines the future conditions of his spiritual being.” The Synthesis of Yoga
remembrance ::: a retained mental impression; memory; recollection.
reredos ::: ornamental screens or wall decorations at the back of an altar, in the form of a hanging, tapestry, painting, or piece of metalwork or sculpture.
rest ::: n. 1. A state of repose, quiescence, or inactivity. 2. Relief or freedom, esp. from anything that wearies, troubles, or disturbs. 3. Mental or emotional or spiritual tranquillity. 4. Termination or absence of motion. 5. The repose of death. v. 6. To cease motion, work, or activity. 7. To be, become, or remain temporarily still, quiet, or inactive. 8. To be present; dwell; linger (usually followed by on or upon). 9. To depend or rely on. rests, rested, resting.
right ::: n. 1. Something that is due to a person or governmental body by law, tradition, or nature. 2. That which is morally, legally, or ethically proper. 3. A moral, ethical, or legal principle considered as an underlying cause of truth, justice, morality, or ethics. 4. That which is in accord with fact, reason, propriety, the correct way of thinking, etc. 5. A just or legal claim or title. 6. The side that is normally opposite to that where the heart is; the direction towards that side. 7. in (one"s, it"s) own right. By reason of one"s own ability, ownership, etc.; in or of oneself, as independent of others. Right, right"s. *adj. *8. In accordance with what is good, proper, or just.
rishi ("s) ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth.” *Social and Political Thought
Rishi ::: The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it.” The Human Cycle
sacramental wine
sceptre ::: a ceremonial ornamental staff carried by a monarch on important occasions as a sign of power.
seer ::: “The seer does not need the aid of thought in its process as a means of knowledge, but only as a means of representation and expression,—thought is to him a lesser power and used for a secondary purpose. If a further extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search and its feeling out for truth,—even as we scrutinise with the eye to find what escaped our first observation” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings. This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they, and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting agency.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings. This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they, and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting agency.” The Synthesis of Yoga
sense ::: n. 1. Any of the faculties, as sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch, by which humans and animals perceive stimuli originating from outside or inside the body. 2. Meaning, signification. 3. A more or less vague perception or impression. 4. Any special capacity or perception, estimation, appreciation, etc. 5. A mental or spiritual discernment, realization, or recognition of a dream, or of anything cryptic or symbolical. sense"s, senses, senses", sense-appeal, sense-formed, sense-life"s, sense-pangs, sense-pleasures, sense-railed, sense-shackled, soul-sense. v. 6. To apprehend, detect, or perceive, without or in advance of the evidence of the senses; to perceive instinctively. 7. To be inwardly aware; conscious of. sensed, sensing. *adj. *sensed.
sensibility ::: 1. Capacity for sensation or feeling; responsiveness or susceptibility to sensory stimuli. 2. Mental or emotional responsiveness toward something; such as the feelings of another; discernment; awareness. sensibilities.
Shiva ::: “The One is Four for ever in his supramental quaternary of Being, Consciousness, Force and Ananda.
shock ::: 1. A violent collision or impact; a heavy blow. 2. Something that jars the mind or emotions as if with a violent, unexpected blow. 3. A sudden disturbance of function, equilibrium or mental faculties caused by such a blow; violent agitation. shocks.
something, such as a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity. Idea, idea"s, Idea"s, ideas, Ideas, world-idea.
sorrow ::: 1. Mental suffering or pain caused by injury, loss, or despair. 2. Expression of sorrow; grieving; poet., tears. sorrow"s, Sorrow"s, sorrows, Man of Sorrows (see Man)
soul ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The word ‘soul", as also the word ‘psychic", is used very vaguely and in many different senses in the English language. More often than not, in ordinary parlance, no clear distinction is made between mind and soul and often there is an even more serious confusion, for the vital being of desire — the false soul or desire-soul — is intended by the words ‘soul" and ‘psychic" and not the true soul, the psychic being.” *Letters on Yoga
"The word soul is very vaguely used in English — as it often refers to the whole non-physical consciousness including even the vital with all its desires and passions. That was why the word psychic being has to be used so as to distinguish this divine portion from the instrumental parts of the nature.” *Letters on Yoga
"The word soul has various meanings according to the context; it may mean the Purusha supporting the formation of Prakriti, which we call a being, though the proper word would be rather a becoming; it may mean, on the other hand, specifically the psychic being in an evolutionary creature like man; it may mean the spark of the Divine which has been put into Matter by the descent of the Divine into the material world and which upholds all evolving formations here.” *Letters on Yoga
"A distinction has to be made between the soul in its essence and the psychic being. Behind each and all there is the soul which is the spark of the Divine — none could exist without that. But it is quite possible to have a vital and physical being supported by such a soul essence but without a clearly evolved psychic being behind it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The soul and the psychic being are practically the same, except that even in things which have not developed a psychic being, there is still a spark of the Divine which can be called the soul. The psychic being is called in Sanskrit the Purusha in the heart or the Chaitya Purusha. (The psychic being is the soul developing in the evolution.)” *Letters on Yoga
"The soul or spark is there before the development of an organised vital and mind. The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light. It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments. It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from life to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.” *Letters on Yoga
". . . for the soul is seated within and impervious to the shocks of external events. . . .” *Essays on the Gita
". . . the soul is at first but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when there is a formed psychic being able to express itself with some directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller portion of the being — ‘no bigger in the mass of the body than the thumb of a man" was the image used by the ancient seers — and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity or ignorant smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
". . . the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and not a fraction of Nature.” The Life Divine
"The true soul secret in us, — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine.” The Life Divine
*Soul, soul"s, Soul"s, souls, soulless, soul-bridals, soul-change, soul-force, Soul-Forces, soul-ground, soul-joy, soul-nature, soul-range, soul-ray, soul-scapes, soul-scene, soul-sense, soul-severance, soul-sight, soul-slaying, soul-space,, soul-spaces, soul-strength, soul-stuff, soul-truth, soul-vision, soul-wings, world-soul, World-Soul.
Space ::: “It is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension,—no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
Space. Sri Aurobindo: "It is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Conscious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension, — no less subjective than Time.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "All philosophy is concerned with the relations between two things, the fundamental truth of existence and the forms in which existence presents itself to our experience.” *The Hour of God
*(Sri Aurobindo: "And finally all is lifted up and taken into the supermind and made a part of the infinitely luminous consciousness, knowledge and experience of the supramental being, the Vijnana Purusha.” The Synthesis of Yoga*) ::: Angel of the House. The guardian spirit of the home.
Sri Aurobindo: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4.* Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development — Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: " Mental intelligence thinks out because it is merely a reflecting force of consciousness which does not know, but seeks to know; it follows in Time step by step the working of a knowledge higher than itself, a knowledge that exists always, one and whole, that holds Time in its grasp, that sees past, present and future in a single regard.: The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which, passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit"s delight of existence, Ananda.” *Letters on Savitri
Sri Aurobindo: "By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature.” *The Upanishads
Sri Aurobindo: "Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence — it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it — not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Day and Night, – the latter the state of Ignorance that belongs to our material Nature, the former the state of illumined Knowledge that belongs to the divine Mind of which our mentality is a pale and dulled reflection.” The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo: " . . . 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. The Synthesis of Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "Ego is only a faculty put forward by the discriminative mind to centralise round itself the experiences of the sense-mind and to serve as a sort of lynch-pin in the wheel which keeps together the movement. It is no more than an instrument, although it is true that so long as we are limited by our normal mentality, we are compelled by the nature of that mentality and the purpose of the instrument to mistake our ego-function for our very self.” The Upanishads
*Sri Aurobindo: "For from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence, the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; eternal and beautiful, he enters into these sheaths of substance for the integral transformation of the being and nature.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: “It can be taken as the (Avatar) incarnation on the mental plane.” Visions of Champaklal
Sri Aurobindo: "It could be affirmed as a consequence that there is one all-pervading Life or dynamic energy — the material aspect being only its outermost movement — that creates all these forms of the physical universe, Life imperishable and eternal which, even if the whole figure of the universe were quite abolished, would itself still go on existing and be capable of producing a new universe in its place, must indeed, unless it be held back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back, inevitably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by devouring the life-force of the plant or of each other. All existence here is a universal Life that takes form of Matter. It might for that purpose hide life-process in physical process before it emerges as submental sensitivity and mentalised vitality, but still it would be throughout the same creative Life-principle.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man; the mental being cannot by his own unaided force change himself into a supramental spirit. A descent of the Divine Nature can alone divinise the human receptacle.” Essays Divine and Human
*Sri Aurobindo: "Mind has its own realms and life has its own realms just as matter has. In the mental realms life and substance are entirely subordinated to Mind and obey its dictates. Here on earth there is the evolution with matter as the starting-point, life as the medium, mind emerging from it. There are many grades, realms, combinations in the cosmos — there are even many universes. Ours is only one of many.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: . . . . Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind"s way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface, — it is not the self in its abiding reality.” *The Life Divine
::: Sri Aurobindo: "Spiritual force has its own concreteness; it can take a form (like a stream, for instance) of which one is aware and can send it quite concretely on whatever object one chooses. This is a statement of fact about the power inherent in spiritual consciousness. But there is also such a thing as a willed use of any subtle force — it may be spiritual, mental or vital — to secure a particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion, — for example, anger, sorrow, etc., — which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them coming and invading him.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies"] might be all right for mental poetry — it won"t do for what I am trying to create — in that, one word won"t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam" and ‘glow" are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri *
Sri Aurobindo: "The Absolute cannot indeed be bound in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness; for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute, — our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it: it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the permanent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to our or the world"s existence.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The ancient knowledge in all countries was full of the search after the hidden truths of our being and it created that large field of practice and inquiry which goes in Europe by the name of occultism, — we do not use any corresponding word in the East, because these things do not seem to us so remote, mysterious and abnormal as to the occidental mentality; they are nearer to us and the veil between our normal material life and this larger life is much thinner.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the divine Ananda, the principle of Bliss [is that] from which, in the Vedic conception, the existence of Man, this mental being, is drawn. A secret Delight is the base of existence, its sustaining atmosphere and almost its substance. This Ananda is spoken of in the Taittiriya Upanishad as the ethereal atmosphere of bliss without which nothing could remain in being. In the Aitareya Upanishad Soma, as the lunar deity, is born from the sense-mind 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"être of sensation, or, we may say, sensation is an attempt to translate the secret delight of existence into the terms of physical consciousness.” The Secret of the Veda
Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine and no other is the flame of life that sustains the physical body of living creatures and turns its food into sustenance of their vital force. He is lodged in the heart of every breathing thing; from him are memory and knowledge and the debates of the reason. He is that which is known by all the Vedas and by all forms of knowing; he is the knower of Veda and the maker of Vedanta. In other words, the Divine is at once the Soul of matter and the Soul of life and the Soul of mind as well as the Soul of the supramental light that is beyond mind and its limited reasoning intelligence.” *Essays on the Gita
Sri Aurobindo: "The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.” *The Life Divine
*Sri Aurobindo: "The earth is a material field of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth-consciousness; but only Matter is at first organized; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organization and activity to the life principle in Matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man. Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.” Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The idea is the realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power.” *The Supramental Manifestation
Sri Aurobindo: "The One is Four for ever in his supramental quaternary of Being, Consciousness, Force and Ananda.
Sri Aurobindo: "There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life"s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: “There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life’s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleological; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material universe which intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object, establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious-Force and creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial, dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: *"The seer does not need the aid of thought in its process as a means of knowledge, but only as a means of representation and expression, — thought is to him a lesser power and used for a secondary purpose. If a further extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search and its feeling out for truth, — even as we scrutinise with the eye to find what escaped our first observation” The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "The supramental Knowledge-Will is Consciousness-Force rendered operative for the creation of forms of united being in an ordered harmony to which we give the name of world or universe; . . .” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience: . . . .” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "Unity is the eternal and fundamental fact, without which all multiplicity would be an unreal and an impossible illusion. The consciousness of Unity is therefore called Vidya, the Knowledge.” *The Upanishads
Sri Aurobindo: "What we call unconsciousness is simply other-consciousness; it is the going in of this surface wave of our mental awareness of outer objects into our subliminal self-awareness and into our awareness too of other planes of existence. We are really no more unconscious when we are asleep or stunned or drugged or ``dead"" or in any other state, than when we are plunged in inner thought oblivious of our physical selves and our surroundings. For anyone who has advanced even a little way in Yoga, this is a most elementary proposition and one which offers no difficulty whatever to the thought because it is proved at every point by experience.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Who is the superman? He who can rise above this matter-regarding broken mental human unit and possess himself universalised and deified in a divine force, a divine love and joy and a divine knowledge.” *The Hour of God
Sri Aurobindo: "Yet all the time the universal forces are pouring into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc., which take particular form in him and rise to the surface after they have got inside. But they do not get into his body at once. He carries about with him an environmental consciousness (called by the Theosophists the Aura) into which they first enter. If you can become conscious of this environmental self of yours, then you can catch the thought, passion, suggestion or force of illness and prevent it from entering into you. If things in you are thrown out, they often do not go altogether but take refuge in this environmental atmosphere and from there they try to get in again. Or they go to a distance outside but linger on the outskirts or even perhaps far off, waiting till they get an opportunity to attempt entrance.” *Letters on Yoga
sterile ::: lacking imagination, creativity, or vitality, mentally and spiritually; unproductive; fruitless.
::: "Still the One is the fundamental Truth of existence, the Many exist by the One and there is therefore an entire dependence of the manifested being on the Ishwara.” *The Life Divine
“Still the One is the fundamental Truth of existence, the Many exist by the One and there is therefore an entire dependence of the manifested being on the Ishwara.” The Life Divine
sting ::: 1. Pain or irritation resulting from a wound inflicted by an venomous insect, reptile, poisonous plant, etc. 2. Fig. A mental or emotional pain or suffering inflicted on someone, or a stimulus, goad or spur.
stolidity ::: the quality of being not easily stirred or moved mentally; or revealing little emotion; impassiveness.
stress ::: 1. Physical, mental or emotional strain or tension; a situation, occurrence, condition or factor causing strain. 2. Stimulus or pressure of the influence of an adverse force. 3. Special or exceptional emphasis or significance attached to something. stress-vision.
subconscient ::: “In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organised reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. No, subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.” The Synthesis of Yoga.
subconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organised reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. No, subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.” *The Synthesis of Yoga.
"The subconscient is a concealed and unexpressed inarticulate consciousness which works below all our conscious physical activities. Just as what we call the superconscient is really a higher consciousness above from which things descend into the being, so the subconscient is below the body-consciousness and things come up into the physical, the vital and the mind-nature from there.
Just as the higher consciousness is superconscient to us and supports all our spiritual possibilities and nature, so the subconscient is the basis of our material being and supports all that comes up in the physical nature.” Letters on Yoga
"That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.” *The Life Divine
"The subconscient is a thing of habits and memories and repeats persistently or whenever it can old suppressed reactions, reflexes, mental, vital or physical responses. It must be trained by a still more persistent insistence of the higher parts of the being to give up its old responses and take on the new and true ones.” Letters on Yoga
"About the subconscient — it is the sub-mental base of the being and is made up of impressions, instincts, habitual movements that are stored there. Whatever movement is impressed in it, it keeps. If one impresses the right movement in it, it will keep and send up that. That is why it has to be cleared of old movements before there can be a permanent and total change in the nature. When the higher consciousness is once established in the waking parts, it goes down into the subconscient and changes that also, makes a bedrock of itself there also.” Letters on Yoga
"The sub-conscious is the evolutionary basis in us, it is not the whole of our hidden nature, nor is it the whole origin of what we are. But things can rise from the subconscient and take shape in the conscious parts and much of our smaller vital and physical instincts, movements, habits, character-forms has this source.” Letters on Yoga
"The subconscient is the support of habitual action — it can support good habits as well as bad.” Letters on Yoga
"For the subconscient is the Inconscient in the process of becoming conscious; it is a support and even a root of our inferior parts of being and their movements.” The Life Divine *subconscient"s.
subdue ::: 1. To overpower; overcome; conquer; prevail over. 2. To bring under mental or emotional control or subjection; render submissive. subdued.
"Subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.” Letters on Yoga
“Subliminal is a general term used for all parts of the being which are not on the waking surface. Subconscient is very often used in the same sense by European psychologists because they do not know the difference. But when I use the word, I mean always what is below the ordinary physical consciousness, not what is behind it. The inner mental, vital, physical, the psychic are not subconscious in this sense, but they can be spoken of as subliminal.” Letters on Yoga
subtle body ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle, a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle which are described as those of knowledge and bliss.” The Synthesis of Yoga
subtle images ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Subtle images can be images of all things in all worlds.” *Letters on Yoga
"These are not mental images. There is an inner vision that opens when one does sadhana and all sorts of images rise before it or pass. Their coming does not depend upon your thought or will; it is real and automatic. Just as your physical eyes see things in the physical world, so the inner eyes see things and images that belong to the other worlds and subtle images of things of this physical world also.” Letters on Yoga
subtle vision ("s) ::: Sri Aurobindo: " This power of vision is sometimes inborn and habitual even without any effort of development, sometimes it wakes up of itself and becomes abundant or needs only a little practice to develop; it is not necessarily a sign of spiritual attainment, but usually when by practice of yoga one begins to go inside or live within, the power of subtle vision awakes to a greater or less extent; . . . .”*Letters on Yoga
"It is not necessary to have the mind quiet in order to see the lights — that depends only on the opening of the subtle vision in the centre which is in the forehead between the eyebrows. Many people get that as soon as they start sadhana. It can even be developed by effort and concentration without sadhana by some who have it to a small extent as an inborn faculty.” Letters on Yoga
"When the centres begin to open, inner experiences such as the seeing of light or images through the subtle vision in the forehead centre or psychic experiences and perceptions in the heart, become frequent — gradually one becomes aware of one"s inner being as separate from the outer, and what can be called a yogic consciousness with all its deeper movements develops in the place of the ordinary superficial mental and vital movements.” Letters on Yoga
suggestion ::: 1. The act of proposing an idea or a course of action. 2. A hint or indication of the existence of something. 3. The sequential process by which one thought or mental image leads to another. suggestions.
superman ::: “Who is the superman? He who can rise above this matter-regarding broken mental human unit and possess himself universalised and deified in a divine force, a divine love and joy and a divine knowledge.” The Hour of God
"Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
support ::: v. **1. To bear, hold, or prop up; sustain; serve as a foundation for. 2. To bear; withstand; endure. supports, supported, supporting, all-supporting.* *n. 3. A person or thing that furnishes aid. 4. An act or instance of supporting or sustaining. 5.** Spiritual or mental aid.
symbol ::: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4. Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
technique ::: 1. Technical skill; ability to apply procedures or methods so as to effect a desired result. 2. The way in which the fundamentals, as of an artistic work, are handled and the skill or command in handling them.
tension ::: 1. The act or process of stretching something tight. 2. Mental, emotional, or nervous strain.
"That is the way things come, only one does not notice. Thoughts, ideas, happy inventions etc., etc., are always wandering about (in thought-waves or otherwise), seeking a mind that may embody them. One mind takes, looks, rejects — another takes, looks, accepts. Two different minds catch the same thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different, make different results out of them. Or it comes to one and he does nothing, then it walks off saying, ‘O this unready animal!" and goes to another who promptly welcomes it and it settles into expression with a joyous bubble of inspiration, illumination or enthusiasm of original discovery or creation and the recipient cries proudly, ‘I, I have done this". Ego, sir! ego! You are the recipient, the conditioning medium, if you like — nothing more.” Letters on Yoga
“That is the way things come, only one does not notice. Thoughts, ideas, happy inventions etc., etc., are always wandering about (in thought-waves or otherwise), seeking a mind that may embody them. One mind takes, looks, rejects—another takes, looks, accepts. Two different minds catch the same thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different, make different results out of them. Or it comes to one and he does nothing, then it walks off saying, ‘O this unready animal!’ and goes to another who promptly welcomes it and it settles into expression with a joyous bubble of inspiration, illumination or enthusiasm of original discovery or creation and the recipient cries proudly, ‘I, I have done this’. Ego, sir! ego! You are the recipient, the conditioning medium, if you like—nothing more.” Letters on Yoga
“That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.” The Life Divine
“That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
“The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” The Life Divine
"The centre of vision is between the eyebrows in the centre of the forehead. When it opens one gets the inner vision, sees the inner forms and images of things and people and begins to understand things and people from within and not only from outside, develops a power of will which also acts in the inner (yogic) way on things and people etc. Its opening is often the beginning of the yogic as opposed to the ordinary mental consciousness.” Letters on Yoga
“The centre of vision is between the eyebrows in the centre of the forehead. When it opens one gets the inner vision, sees the inner forms and images of things and people and begins to understand things and people from within and not only from outside, develops a power of will which also acts in the inner (yogic) way on things and people etc. Its opening is often the beginning of the yogic as opposed to the ordinary mental consciousness.” Letters on Yoga
"The colours of the lotuses and the numbers of petals are respectively, from bottom to top: — (1) the Muladhara or physical consciousness centre, four petals, red; (2) the abdominal centre, six petals, deep purple red; (3) the navel centre, ten petals, violet; (4) the heart centre, twelve petals, golden pink; (5) the throat centre, sixteen petals, grey; (6) the forehead centre between the eye-brows, two petals, white; (7) the thousand-petalled lotus above the head, blue with gold light around. The functions are, according to our yoga, — (1) commanding the physical consciousness and the subconscient; (2) commanding the small vital movements, the little greeds, lusts, desires, the small sense-movements; (3) commanding the larger life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements; (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error — the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, sunya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.” Letters on Yoga*
“The colours of the lotuses and the numbers of petals are respectively, from bottom to top:—(1) the Muladhara or physical consciousness centre, four petals, red; (2) the abdominal centre, six petals, deep purple red; (3) the navel centre, ten petals, violet; (4) the heart centre, twelve petals, golden pink; (5) the throat centre, sixteen petals, grey; (6) the forehead centre between the eye-brows, two petals, white; (7) the thousand-petalled lotus above the head, blue with gold light around. The functions are, according to our yoga,—(1) commanding the physical consciousness and the subconscient; (2) commanding the small vital movements, the little greeds, lusts, desires, the small sense-movements; (3) commanding the larger life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements; (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error—the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, sunya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.” Letters on Yoga
“The cosmic consciousness has many levels—the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*
“The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one’s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one’s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one’s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces—for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness—and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in—the nature.” Letters on Yoga
"The Divine Force can act on any plane — it is not limited to the supramental Force. The supramental is only one aspect of the power of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
“The Divine Force can act on any plane—it is not limited to the supramental Force. The supramental is only one aspect of the power of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"The first word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender. It is by a will to give oneself to the eternal Divine, for lifting into the divine consciousness, for perfection, for transformation, that the Yoga begins; it is in the entire giving that it culminates; for it is only when the self-giving is complete that there comes the finality of the Yoga, the entire taking up into the supramental Divine, the perfection of the being, the transformation of the nature.” Essays Divine and Human
“The first word of the supramental Yoga is surrender; its last word also is surrender. It is by a will to give oneself to the eternal Divine, for lifting into the divine consciousness, for perfection, for transformation, that the Yoga begins; it is in the entire giving that it culminates; for it is only when the self-giving is complete that there comes the finality of the Yoga, the entire taking up into the supramental Divine, the perfection of the being, the transformation of the nature.” Essays Divine and Human
"The gospel of the Gita reposes upon this fundamental Vedantic truth that all being is the one Brahman and all existence the wheel of Brahman, a divine movement opening out from God and returning to God. All is the expressive activity of Nature and Nature a power of the Divine which works out the consciousness and will of the divine Soul master of her works and inhabitant of her forms.” Essays on the Gita
"The gospel of true supermanhood gives us a generous ideal for the progressive human race and should not be turned into an arrogant claim for a class or individuals. It is a call to man to do what no species has yet done or aspired to do in terrestrial history, evolve itself consciously into the next superior type already half foreseen by the continual cyclic development of the world-idea in Nature"s fruitful musings . . . .” The Supramental Manifestation*
“The gospel of true supermanhood gives us a generous ideal for the progressive human race and should not be turned into an arrogant claim for a class or individuals. It is a call to man to do what no species has yet done or aspired to do in terrestrial history, evolve itself consciously into the next superior type already half foreseen by the continual cyclic development of the world-idea in Nature’s fruitful musings ….” The Supramental Manifestation
"The Idea is not a reflection of the external fact which it so much exceeds; rather the fact is only a partial reflection of the Idea which has created it.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The Idea is not a reflection of the external fact which it so much exceeds; rather the fact is only a partial reflection of the Idea which has created it.” The Supramental Manifestation
The Ineffable: *Sri Aurobindo: "It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence, — even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
"The intermediate link exists. We call it the Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness, because it is a principle superior to mentality and exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions.” The Life Divine
"The ‘I" or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear — the true being is felt in its place.” Letters on Yoga
“The ‘I’ or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralising and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear—the true being is felt in its place.” Letters on Yoga
"The mental or vital demigod, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha, — Titan, vital giant and demon, — are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind power or life power only, but they do not live in the supreme Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine. Only those who live in a supreme Truth consciousness and embody it are inwardly made or else remade in the Divine image.” Essays Divine and Human
“The mental or vital demigod, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pishacha,—Titan, vital giant and demon,—are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and those not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind power or life power only, but they do not live in the supreme Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine. Only those who live in a supreme Truth consciousness and embody it are inwardly made or else remade in the Divine image.” Essays Divine and Human
"The mind is ignorance seeking for the Truth, the supramental by its very definition is the Truth-Consciousness, Truth in possession of itself and fulfilling itself by its own power.” Letters on Yoga
“The mind proper is divided into three parts—thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind—the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).” Letters on Yoga
“The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the descent which makes her full manifestation here possible.” Letters on the Mother
"The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.” *The Life Divine
“The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame.” The Life Divine
“The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” Letters on Yoga
"The physical is not the only world; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital worlds; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds; psychic worlds which are the soul"s home; others above with which we have little contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as well as the gross physical and material plane. The same planes are repeated in the consciousness of general Nature. It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into connection with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the proper function of the thought-mind is to observe, understand, judge with a dispassionate delight in knowledge and open itself to messages and illuminations playing upon all that it observes and upon all that is yet hidden from it but must progressively be revealed, messages and illuminations that secretly flash down to us from the divine Oracle concealed in light above our mentality whether they seem to descend through the intuitive mind or arise from the seeing heart.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“… the proper function of the thought-mind is to observe, understand, judge with a dispassionate delight in knowledge and open itself to messages and illuminations playing upon all that it observes and upon all that is yet hidden from it but must progressively be revealed, messages and illuminations that secretly flash down to us from the divine Oracle concealed in light above our mentality whether they seem to descend through the intuitive mind or arise from the seeing heart.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "The psycho-analysis of Freud is the last thing that one should associate with yoga. It takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind — to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms — runs riot here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have a nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before.
“The psycho-analysis of Freud is the last thing that one should associate with yoga. It takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind—to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms—runs riot here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have a nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before.
"There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between kavi, the seer and manîshî, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter, the labouring mentality, which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.” The Upanishads*
“There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between kavi, the seer and manîshî, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter, the labouring mentality, which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.” The Upanishads
“[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one’s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one’s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
“These are not mental images. There is an inner vision that opens when one does sadhana and all sorts of images rise before it or pass. Their coming does not depend upon your thought or will; it is real and automatic. Just as your physical eyes see things in the physical world, so the inner eyes see things and images that belong to the other worlds and subtle images of things of this physical world also.” Letters on Yoga
". . . the Self is a fundamental aspect of Brahman, but with a certain stress on its impersonality;. . . .” The Life Divine
“… the Self is a fundamental aspect of Brahman, but with a certain stress on its impersonality;….” The Life Divine
::: "The silent mind is a result of yoga; the ordinary mind is never silent. . . . The thinkers and philosophers do not have the silent mind. It is the active mind they have; only, of course, they concentrate, so the common incoherent mentalising stops and the thoughts that rise or enter and shape themselves are coherently restricted to the subject or activity in hand. But that is quite a different matter from the whole mind falling silent.” Letters on Yoga
“The silent mind is a result of yoga; the ordinary mind is never silent. . . . The thinkers and philosophers do not have the silent mind. It is the active mind they have; only, of course, they concentrate, so the common incoherent mentalising stops and the thoughts that rise or enter and shape themselves are coherently restricted to the subject or activity in hand. But that is quite a different matter from the whole mind falling silent.” Letters on Yoga
"The spirit is an essential entity or consciousness which does not need to think or perceive either in the mental or the sensory way, because whatever knowledge it has is direct or essential knowledge.” Letters on Yoga
“The spirit is an essential entity or consciousness which does not need to think or perceive either in the mental or the sensory way, because whatever knowledge it has is direct or essential knowledge.” Letters on Yoga
The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian idea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual truth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their effort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge. Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it.” The Human Cycle*
“The subconscient is a thing of habits and memories and repeats persistently or whenever it can old suppressed reactions, reflexes, mental, vital or physical responses. It must be trained by a still more persistent insistence of the higher parts of the being to give up its old responses and take on the new and true ones.” Letters on Yoga
"The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness.” The Supramental Manifestation
"The supramental is simply the Truth-Consciousness and what it brings in its descent is the full truth of life, the full truth of consciousness in Matter. One has indeed to rise to high summits to reach it, but the more one rises, the more one can bring down below.” Letters on Yoga
"The surface mental individuality is, in consequence, always ego-centric; even its altruism is an enlargement of its ego: the ego is the lynch-pin invented to hold together the motion of our wheel of nature. The necessity of centralisation around the ego continues until there is no longer need of any such device or contrivance because there has emerged the true self, the spiritual being, which is at once wheel and motion and that which holds all together, the centre and the circumference.” *The Life Divine
"The surface mental individuality is, in consequence, always ego-centric; even its altruism is an enlargement of its ego: . . . . ” The Life Divine*
“The surface mental individuality is, in consequence, always ego-centric; even its altruism is an enlargement of its ego: …” The Life Divine
“The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle, a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle which are described as those of knowledge and bliss.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"The theory of the Mantra is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally — the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the spoken — precisely for the work of creation. The Mantra can not only create new subjective states in ourselves, alter our psychical being, reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess, can not only produce similar results in other minds than that of the user, but can produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects, in actions and even in the production of material forms on the physical plane.” The Upanishads
“The theory of the Mantra is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally—the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the spoken—precisely for the work of creation. The Mantra can not only create new subjective states in ourselves, alter our psychical being, reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess, can not only produce similar results in other minds than that of the user, but can produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects, in actions and even in the production of material forms on the physical plane.” The Upanishads
“The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga
::: "The true physical mind is the receiving and externalising intelligence which has two functions — first, to work upon external things and give them a mental order with a way of practically dealing with them and, secondly, to be the channel of materialising and putting into effect whatever the thinking and dynamic mind sends down to it for the purpose.” Letters on Yoga
“The true physical mind is the receiving and externalising intelligence which has two functions—first, to work upon external things and give them a mental order with a way of practically dealing with them and, secondly, to be the channel of materialising and putting into effect whatever the thinking and dynamic mind sends down to it for the purpose.” Letters on Yoga
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
"The Unknowable, — not absolutely unknowable, but beyond mental knowledge, — can only be a higher degree in the intensity of being of that Something, a degree beyond the loftiest summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given us by our supreme possible knowledge but rather carry it to a higher fulfilment and larger truth of what it has already gained by self-vision and self-experience.” The Life Divine
"The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
“The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
"The word ‘physical mind" is rather ambiguous, because it can mean this externalising Mind and the mental in the physical taken together.” Letters on Yoga*
“The word ‘physical mind’ is rather ambiguous, because it can mean this externalising Mind and the mental in the physical taken together.” Letters on Yoga
“The word soul is very vaguely used in English—as it often refers to the whole non-physical consciousness including even the vital with all its desires and passions. That was why the word psychic being has to be used so as to distinguish this divine portion from the instrumental parts of the nature.” Letters on Yoga
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her—the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
“This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience: “ The Life Divine
“This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience: …” The Life Divine
::: **"This sraddhâ — the English word faith is inadequate to express it — is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from our supramental being which is calling the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming and self-exceeding.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“This sraddhâ—the English word faith is inadequate to express it—is in reality an influence from the supreme Spirit and its light a message from our supramental being which is calling the lower nature to rise out of its petty present to a great self-becoming and self-exceeding.” The Synthesis of Yoga
thought-Mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, — but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin, — as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. " *The Life Divine
"To have the true intuition one must get rid of the mind"s self-will, and the vital"s also, their preferences, fancies, fantasies, strong insistences and eliminate the mental and vital ego"s pressure which sets the consciousness to work in the service of its own claims and desires.” Letters on Yoga*
"To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote "His anger climbed against me in a stream", it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
“To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote ’His anger climbed against me in a stream’, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the Guest-House, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.” Letters on Savitri
torment ::: n. 1. An action that causes great pain, suffering, or anguish; torture. 2. A state of great physical pain or mental torture; anguish. v. 3. To annoy, pester, or harass. tormented, tormenting, torment-craft.
torpor ::: 1. A state of mental or physical inactivity or insensibility. 2. A state of lethargy; apathy. 3. The dormant, inactive state of a hibernating or estivating animal.
torture ::: n. 1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment, coercion or malevolent purpose. 2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony. self-torture. *v. *3. To bring great physical or mental pain upon another. tortures.
torturing ::: that causes excruciating physical or mental pain.
To the mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunyam), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all these are mental formulas expressing the mind"s approach to it, not That but impressions which fall from That upon the receiving consciousness, not e true essence or nature (Swarupa) of the Eternal and Infinite. Even the words Eternal and Infinite are only symbolic expressions through which the mind feels without grasping some vague impression of this Supreme.” The Hour of God
trance ::: 1. A semiconscious state, as between sleeping and waking; a daze. 2. A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state. 3. A state of deep musing or mental abstraction from external things; absorption, exaltation, rapture, ecstasy. trance-bound, trance-claimed, trance-closed, splendour-trance.
Transcendent ::: “A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence—and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal—of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth—a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” The Synthesis of Yoga
transcendent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence — and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal — of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth — a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"We see then that there are three terms of the one existence, transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always contains secretly or overtly the two others. The Transcendent possesses itself always and controls the other two as the basis of its own temporal possibilities; that is the Divine, the eternal all-possessing God-consciousness, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs all existences. 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 Life Divine
The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her — the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
**Transcendent"s.**
transformation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Transformation means that the higher consciousness or nature is brought down into the mind, vital and body and takes the place of the lower. There is a higher consciousness of the true self, which is spiritual, but it is above; if one rises above into it, then one is free as long as one remains there, but if one comes down into or uses mind, vital or body — and if one keeps any connection with life, one has to do so, either to come down and act from the ordinary consciousness or else to be in the self but use mind, life and body, then the imperfections of these instruments have to be faced and mended — they can only be mended by transformation.” *Letters on Yoga
"‘Transformation" is a word that I have brought in myself (like ‘supermind") to express certain spiritual concepts and spiritual facts of the integral yoga. People are now taking them up and using them in senses which have nothing to do with the significance which I put into them. Purification of the nature by the ‘influence" of the Spirit is not what I mean by transformation; purification is only part of a psychic change or a psycho-spiritual change — the word besides has many senses and is very often given a moral or ethical meaning which is foreign to my purpose.” *Letters on Yoga
"It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all. Into that truth we shall be freed and it will transform mind and life and body. Light and bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit. The obscurations of earth will not prevail against the supramental truth-consciousness, for even into the earth it can bring enough of the omniscient light and omnipotent force of the spirit conquer. All may not open to the fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must that extent undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The Mother: "Transformation. The change by which all the elements and all the movements of the being become ready to manifest the supramental Truth.”
"One thing you must know and never forget: in the work of transformation all that is true and sincere will always be kept; only what is false and insincere will disappear.” Words of the Mother, MCW Vol. 15.
trial ::: a tentative or experimental action in order to ascertain results; experiment.
triple heavens ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Vishnu is the wide-moving one. He is that which has gone abroad — as it is put in the language of the Isha Upanishad, sa paryagât, — triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker and Former, in the superconscient Bliss, in the heaven of mind, in the earth of the physical consciousness, tredhâ vicakramânah. In those three strides he has measured out, he has formed in all their extension the earthly worlds; for in the Vedic idea the material world which we inhabit is only one of several steps leading to and supporting the vital and mental worlds beyond. In those strides he supports upon the earth and mid-world, — the earth the material, the mid-world the vital realms of Vayu, Lord of the dynamic Life-principle, — the triple heaven and its three luminous summits, trîni rocanâ. These heavens the Rishi describes as the higher seat of the fulfilling. Earth, the mid-world and heaven are the triple place of the conscious being"s progressive self-fulfilling, trishadhastha, earth the lower seat, the vital world the middle, heaven the higher. All these are contained in the threefold movement of Vishnu.” The Secret of the Veda
truth ::: 1. (Often cap.) Ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience. 2. Conformity to fact or actuality. Truth, truth"s, Truth"s, truths, Truths, truth-conscious, Truth-gaze, Truth-speaking, All-Truth, dream-truth, half-Truth, half-truths, heaven-truth, soul-truth.
tumult ::: 1. Violent and noisy commotion or disturbance of a crowd or mob; uproar. 2. A disorderly commotion or disturbance. **3. Great emotional or mental agitation. tumults.**
twisted ::: 1. Altered or distorted the intended meaning or form of. Also fig. **2.** Altered or distorted the mental, moral, or emotional character of.
twists ::: twist. 1. To bend tortuously. 2. To cause to become mentally or emotionally distorted; warp. twisted.
two-in-One ::: Sri Aurobindo: " At a certain spiritual and supramental level the Duality becomes still more perfectly Two-in-one, the Master Soul with the Conscious Force within it, and its potentiality disowns all barriers and breaks through every limit.” The Synthesis of Yoga
underlying ::: 1. Being at the basis of; forming the foundation of. 2. Implicit; discoverable only by close scrutiny or analysis. 3. Fundamental; basic.
vistas ::: 1. Distant views or prospects, especially those seen through openings, as between rows of buildings or trees. 2. Fig. Far-reaching mental views. 3. *Fig.* Awareness of ranges of time, events, or subjects; broad mental views.
visualised ::: formed mental pictures of things that are invisible or abstract.
v. To form a mental picture or image of. imagines, imagined, imagining.
watch ::: n. 1. The act or process of keeping awake or mentally alert, especially for the purpose of guarding. 2. The act of observing closely or the condition of being closely observed; surveillance. v. 3. To keep under attentive view or observation, as in order to see or learn something; view attentively or with interest. 4. To guard, tend, or oversee, esp. for protection or safe keeping. watches, watched, watching, serpent-watched.
"We are not the body, but the body is still something of ourselves. With realisation the erroneous identification ceases — in certain experiences the existence of the body is not felt at all. In the full realisation the body is within us, not we in it, it is an instrumental formation in our wider being, — our consciousness exceeds but also pervades it, — it can be dissolved without our ceasing to be the self.” Letters on Yoga
“We are not the body, but the body is still something of ourselves. With realisation the erroneous identification ceases—in certain experiences the existence of the body is not felt at all. In the full realisation the body is within us, not we in it, it is an instrumental formation in our wider being,—our consciousness exceeds but also pervades it,—it can be dissolved without our ceasing to be the self.” Letters on Yoga
weariness ::: temporary loss of strength and energy resulting from hard physical or mental work.
weary ::: adj. 1. Physically or mentally fatigued. 2. Impatient or dissatisfied with something (often followed by of). 3. Causing fatigue; tiresome. wearily. v. 4. To become exhausted tired through overuse or great strain or stress.
"We. . . become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“We. . . become conscious, in our physical movements, in our nervous and vital reactions, in our mental workings, of a Force greater than body, mind and life which takes hold of our limited instruments and drives all their motion. There is no longer the sense of ourselves moving, thinking or feeling but of that moving, feeling and thinking in us. This force that we feel is the universal Force of the Divine, which, veiled or unveiled, acting directly or permitting the use of its powers by beings in the cosmos, is the one Energy that alone exists and alone makes universal or individual action possible. For this force is the Divine itself in the body of its power; all is that, power of act, power of thought and knowledge, power of mastery and enjoyment, power of love.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery.” The Life Divine
“We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears to us as if it were inconscient, comprising the material basis and a good part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate account of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of our waking mind, but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being, not its ultimate mystery.” The Life Divine
"We now begin to have reason for concluding that the Flame, which is only another aspect of Light, is the Vedic symbol for the Force of the divine consciousness, of the supramental Truth.” The Secret of the Veda
“We now begin to have reason for concluding that the Flame, which is only another aspect of Light, is the Vedic symbol for the Force of the divine consciousness, of the supramental Truth.” The Secret of the Veda
". . . what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, — a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense.” The Life Divine
“… what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature—this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised,—a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense.” The Life Divine
“When the centres begin to open, inner experiences such as the seeing of light or images through the subtle vision in the forehead centre or psychic experiences and perceptions in the heart, become frequent—gradually one becomes aware of one’s inner being as separate from the outer, and what can be called a yogic consciousness with all its deeper movements develops in the place of the ordinary superficial mental and vital movements.” Letters on Yoga
"When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonises, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. It can bring down too a higher and yet higher force and range of the higher nature until, if that be the aim of the sadhana, it becomes possible to bring down the supramental force and existence. All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
“When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre and liberates fully the psychic and emotional being, then into the navel and other vital centres and liberates the inner vital, then into the Muladhara and below and liberates the inner physical being. It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonises, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. It can bring down too a higher and yet higher force and range of the higher nature until, if that be the aim of the sadhana, it becomes possible to bring down the supramental force and existence. All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
"When we study this Life as it manifests itself upon earth with Matter as its basis, we observe that essentially it is a form of the one cosmic Energy, a dynamic movement or current of it positive and negative, a constant act or play of the Force which builds up forms, energises them by a continual stream of stimulation and maintains them by an unceasing process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This would tend to show that the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions — false to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience — which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into the universal unity.” The Life Divine ::: *life"s, life-born, life-curve, life-delight"s, life-drift, life-foam, life-giving, life-impulse, life-impulse"s, life-motives, life-nature"s, life-pain, life-plan, life-power, life-room, life-scene, life-self, life-thought, life-wants, all-life, sense-life.
“When we study this Life as it manifests itself upon earth with Matter as its basis, we observe that essentially it is a form of the one cosmic Energy, a dynamic movement or current of it positive and negative, a constant act or play of the Force which builds up forms, energises them by a continual stream of stimulation and maintains them by an unceasing process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This would tend to show that the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions—false to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience—which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into the universal unity.” The Life Divine
will, human ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The will of man works in the ignorance by a partial light or more often flickerings of light which mislead as much as they illuminate. His mind is an ignorance striving to erect standards of knowledge, his will an ignorance striving to erect standards of right, and his whole mentality as a result very much a house divided against itself, idea in conflict with idea, the will often in conflict with the ideal of right or the intellectual knowledge. The will itself takes different shapes, the will of the intelligence, the wishes of the emotional mind, the desires and the passion of the vital being, the impulsions and blind or half-blind compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature, and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best a precarious concord among discords. The will of the mind and life is a stumbling about in search of right force, right Tapas which can wholly be attained in its true and complete light and direction only by oneness with the spiritual and supramental being.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
will ::: n. 1. Diligent purposefulness; determination; inclination, desire. 2. The mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action. Will, will"s, wills, will-to-be, Will-to-love. *v. 3. To decide or determine; effectuate. 4. To yearn for; desire. 5. To induce or try to induce by sheer force of one"s being. *wills, willed.
wine, sacramental ::: see **sacramental wine.**
KEYS (10k)
154 Sri Aurobindo
17 The Mother
6 Sri Ramakrishna
4 Sri Aurobindo
4 Ramakrishna
4 Ken Wilber
4 Jean Gebser
4 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
3 Eric Micha'el Leventhal
2 Tolstoi
2 Sri Sarada Devi
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Max Planck
2 Aswaghosha
2 Alfred North Whitehead
2 Saint Thomas Aquinas
1 William Desmond
1 to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth
1 Thomas Keating
1 Theodore Dalrymple
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1 Sylvia Plath
1 Swetawatara Upanishad
1 Swami Yatiswarananda
1 SWAMI VIRAJANANDA
1 Swami Saradananda
1 Swami Adbhutananda
1 SWAMI ABHEDANANDA
1 Schopenhauer
1 Saint Leo the Great
1 Saint Ambrose
1 Rodney Collin
1 Robert Monroe
1 Robert Greene
1 Robert Adams
1 R.D. Laing
1 R. Adams
1 Pope Francis
1 Patanjali : Aphroisms.II. 12
1 Nyogen Senzaki
1 Nikola Tesla
1 Nagarjuna
1 Mouni Sadhu
1 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
1 Martin Heidegger
1 Marshall McLuhan
1 Marijn Haverbeke
1 Margaret Atwood
1 Manly P Hall
1 Louis Dupré
1 LOIS MAI CHAN
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1 Leonard Susskind
1 Lao-Tse
1 Kodo Sawaki
1 Karol Wojtyla to Henri de Lubac
1 Joseph Campbell
1 Jon Kabat-Zinn
1 Jean Piaget
1 J. D. Salinger
1 Israel Regardie
1 Isaac Newton
1 id
1 H P Blavatsky
1 Howard Gardner
1 Hermes: The Key
1 Hermann Hesse
1 Henry David Thoreau
1 Gabriel Marcel
1 Evelyn Underhill
1 Erwin Schrodinger
1 Elon Musk
1 Eckhart Tolle
1 Donna Lu
1 Don Edward Beck
1 Dion Fortune
1 Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
1 Def
1 C S Lewis
1 Chamtrul Rinpoche
1 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V.6
1 Awaghosha
1 Austin Osman Spare
1 Anita Lucia Roddick
1 Alison Milbank
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Alexander von Humboldt to Schelling
1 Swami Vivekananda
1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Saint Teresa of Avila
1 Plotinus
1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
1 Paracelsus
1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 Jetsun Milarepa
1 Heraclitus
1 Confucius
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1 ?
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4 Robin Sharma
4 Peter Thiel
4 M Scott Peck
1:Paradox is simply the way nonduality looks to the mental level. ~ Ken Wilber, #KEYS
2:Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst." ~ Lin Yutang, #KEYS
3:Ego is the principal knot. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
4:Learn to make demands upon yourself. This is the secret. But it applies to all sides of oneself - physical, emotional, mental. ~ Rodney Collin, #KEYS
5:All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things. ~ Nagarjuna, #KEYS
6:Mental boldness: let your mind be capable of foreseeing the perfections of tomorrow.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
7:Problems are the creations of mental ignorance seeking for knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #KEYS
8:Rely on the Mother always. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences on the Subtle Physical, Vital and Mental Planes, #KEYS
9:A mental knowledge can always be blinded by the tricks of the vital. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
10:The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. ~ Nikola Tesla, #KEYS
11:Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible. ~ Jean Piaget, #KEYS
12:Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
13:The mind is an inveterate divider of the indivisible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
14:Moral evil is in reality a form of mental disease or ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Delight of Existence, The Problem, #KEYS
15:A pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #KEYS
16:Mental faith is not sufficient; it must be completed and enforced by a vital and even a physical faith, a faith of the body. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
17:Purification is an essential means towards self-perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
18:Purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
19:To get rid of mortal body is not to get rid of mortal mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
20:When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought, the all-embracing truth-ideation mahas, veda, dṛṣṭi, replaces the fragmentary mental activity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
21:A mental control can only be a control, not a cure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #KEYS
22:Mental knowledge is not an integral but always a partial knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
23:The wise man should rein in intently this mental action like a chariot drawn by untrained horses. ~ Swetawatara Upanishad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
24:Mental man has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #KEYS
25:Mental prayer is nothing else but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #KEYS
26:Mental knowledge cannot replace faith; so long as there is only mental knowledge, faith is still needed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Faith, #KEYS
27:Mental realisation is useful at the beginning and prepares spiritual experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences and Realisations, #KEYS
28:Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in physical Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ladder of Self-Transcendence, #KEYS
29:Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #KEYS
30:When one is able to effect mental concentration in any environment, the mind will always rise above the environment and rest in God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
31:Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother - On spirit possession and mental imbalances
~ ?, https://auromere.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/on-spirit-possession-and-mental-imbalances/,#KEYS
32:Owing to an increased technologization and a false application of time to technology, the deficient mental structure—rational consciousness—will dig its own grave. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
33:It does not help for spiritual knowledge to be ignorant of the things of this world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Mental Development and Sadhana, #KEYS
34:The mind does not record things as they are, but as they appear to it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #KEYS
35:As on the troubled surface of a lake the moon is reflected in broken images, in Maya the mental reflection of God is partial and broken. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
36:Even when it is widest and most complete, mental knowing is still an indirect knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #KEYS
37:Personality is a composition of Nature,—but a mental Person, manomaya puruṣa. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
38:We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
39:As on the troubled surface of a lake, the moon is reflected in broken images, in Maya the mental reflection of God is partial and broken. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
40:The centre of mental thinking is the ego, the person of the individual thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
41:The most difficult mental process of all is to consider objectively any concept which, if accepted as fact, will toss into discard a lifetime of training and experience. ~ Robert Monroe, #KEYS
42:You need not entertain any fear. I say, in the Kali Yuga the mental commission of a sin is no sin at all. Free your mind from all such worries. You have nothing to fear. ~ Sri Sarada Devi, #KEYS
43:Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
44:Know that you will not be at all tormented by mental unrest if you, without being sentimental, dedicate the good or bad results of your actions to the lotus feet of the Lord. ~ SWAMI ABHEDANANDA, #KEYS
45:Mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Three Steps of Nature, #KEYS
46:Mental perfection and moral are always closely allied to each other. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest, To N. K. Gogte, #KEYS
47:the mental psychic :::
...Thus the veiled psychic urge may express itself in the mind by a hunger in the thought for the knowledge of the Divine... ~ Sri Aurobindo,#KEYS
48:The supra-material is as much a reality as the existence of mental beings in the material universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga: The Planes of Our Existence, #KEYS
49:In spiritual matters mental logic easily blunders; intuition, faith, a plastic spiritual reason are here the only guides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, The Guru, #KEYS
50:By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,#KEYS
51:God is seen, when the mind is tranquil. When the mental sea is agitated by the wind of desires, it cannot reflect God, and then God-vision is impossible ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
52:Purification, liberation, perfection, delight of being are four constituent elements of the Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
53:The mind is really a reflector and a medium and none of its activities originate in themselves, ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
54:Even imagined experiences (honestly imagined) can help to mental realisation and mental realisation can be a step to total realisation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, #KEYS
55:Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest power of consciousness of the Being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
56:Our imperfect mental instrumentation is not the last word of our possibilities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge, #KEYS
57:The liberation from an externalised ego sense is the first step towards the soul's freedom and mastery. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #KEYS
58:Study is of importance only if you study in the right way and with the turn for knowledge and mental discipline. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Place of Study in Sadhana, #KEYS
59:Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
60:Not mental control but some descent of a control from above the mind is the power demanded in the realisation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Vital and Other Levels of Being, #KEYS
61:Such difficulties are root and product of both physical and mental workings; they produce their fruits alike in the visible and invisible. ~ Patanjali : Aphroisms.II. 12, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
62:The difference between suppression and an inward essential rejection is the difference between mental or moral control and a spiritual purification. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Desire, #KEYS
63:Our readiest and strongest mental motives and psychological needs are those which grow out of our vital necessities and instincts. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Internationalism and Human Unity, #KEYS
64:This mental being in the inner heart who has the truth and the light is the lord and sovereign of all; he who knows it, governs all this that is. ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V.6, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
65:There is an internal freedom permitted to every mental being called man to assent or not to assent to the Divine leading. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother with Letters on The Mother, Surrender to the Mother, #KEYS
66:It is not by mental activity that you can quiet your miind, it is from a higher or deeper level that you can receive the help you need. And both can be reached in silence only.
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
67:Even with skills that are primarily mental, such as computer programming or speaking a foreign language, it remains the case that we learn best through practice and repetition-the natural learning process.
~ Robert Greene, Mastery,#KEYS
68:Neither the mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
69:How to remember the Mother during work?
One starts by a mental effort - afterwards it is an inner consciousness that is formed... it is always conscious of her.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Correspondences, 17,#KEYS
70:One who wants his Yoga to be a path of peace or joy, must be prepared to dwell in his soul rather than in his outer mental and emotional nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Lower Vital Being, #KEYS
71:Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep…" ~ R.D. Laing, (1927 - 1989), Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness, Wikipedia., #KEYS
72:We must not only have the possession of a pure self-existence independent of the world-play, but possess all existence as our ow. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
73:A vacant Absolute is no Absolute,—our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Integral Knowledge, #KEYS
74:All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Supramental Godhead, #KEYS
75:Even in the most purely mental activities the fitness, readiness or perfect training of the bodily instrument is a condition indispensable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Perfection of the Body, #KEYS
76:Experience shows that, in proportion as we deliver ourselves from the limiting mental and vital ego, we command a wider life, a larger existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Ego, #KEYS
77:In order to be unattached one must be unattached everywhere, in the mental, vital, physical action and not only in the silent soul somewhere inside. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, The Sankhya-Yoga System, #KEYS
78:Never underestimate the importance of keeping your vows. Just how a castle will protect the king from being attacked by the enemy, the vows will protect your mind from being attacked by your mental afflictions. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #KEYS
79:Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #KEYS
80:When by a constant practice a man is capable of effecting mental concentration, then wherever he may be, his mind will always lift itself above his surroundings and will repose in the Eternal. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
81:On the physical plane the Divine expresses himself through beauty, on the mental plane through knowledge, on the vital plane through power and on the psychic plane through love.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
82:Perfection is the true aim of all culture, the spiritual and psychic, the mental, the vital and it must be the aim of our physical culture also. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Perfection of the Body, #KEYS
83:All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #KEYS
84:Control of consciousness determines the quality of life." ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (b. 1934) Hungarian-American psychologist, named the psychological concept of 'flow', a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity, Wikipedia His book:, #KEYS
85:The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
86:It is not true that physical work is of an inferior value to mental culture, it is the arrogance of the intellect that makes the claim. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, The Hostile Forces and the Difficulties of Yoga, #KEYS
87:When you feel something within watching all the mental activities but separate from them, just as you can watch things going on outside in the street, then that is the separation of Purusha from mental Prakriti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #KEYS
88:When by a constant practice a man is capable of effecting mental concentration, then wherever he may be, his mind will always lift itself above his surroundings and will repose in the Eternal. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
89:We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532,#KEYS
90:Don't be ruled by the light in which birds and serpents, beasts and cattle, flies and worms delight. Keep the material light for your bodily senses, and with all your mental powers embrace the 'true light that enlightens every man' ~ John 1:9). ~ Saint Leo the Great, #KEYS
91:You say solitude is necessary. The solitude that is wanted is mostly mental. Even in the midst of a crowd you can be at peace if the mind is trained properly. If you go into solitude and brood upon your own thoughts, it will lead you to lunacy. ~ Swami Yatiswarananda, #KEYS
92: the other, that the religious, the political and mental conditions of a nation are indissolubly connected and interwoven, so that you cannot alter a single feature in one of them without changing all three. Now apply these principles to the past. ~ Sri Aurobindo, ECW, #KEYS
93:What exactly should I do to accelerate the sadhana?
Wait quietly for the exact indication; all mental intervention and decisions are arbitrary. The clear indication comes in the silence of the mind.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
94:Magnitude: A mathematical notation indicating the number of times a quantity is multiplied by itself; Electricity supply; Possession of controlling influence; Possession of the qualities (especially mental qualities) required to do something or get something done ~ Def, #KEYS
95:Mental japa is very good. That helps meditation. Mind gets identified with the repetition and then you get to know what worship (puja) reall is - the losing of one's individuality in that which is worshipped. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks 31, #KEYS
96:The dying man understands with difficulty what lives, not because his mental faculties are dulled, but because he understands something the living do not and cannot understand, and in this he is entirely absorbed. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
97:This environmental milieu…does not consist just of things, objects, which are then conceived as meaning this and this; rather, the meaningful is primary and immediately given to me without any mental detours across thing-oriented apprehension. ~ Martin Heidegger, TDP p. 61, #KEYS
98:Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
99:Mental activity in the daytime creates a latent form of habitual thought which again transforms itself at night into various delusory visions sensed by the semi-consciousness. This is called the deceptive and magic-like Bardo of Dream. ~ Jetsun Milarepa, #KEYS
100:Realised mental being and realised spiritual being are really two different planes in the arrangement of our existence, the one superior and divine, the other inferior and human. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #KEYS
101:The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, #KEYS
102:You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be the body. You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
103:You are what you are, but you know what you are not. The Self is known as being, the not-self is known as transient. But in reality all is in the mind. The observed, observation and observer are mental constructs. The Self alone is. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
104:As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
~ Henry David Thoreau,#KEYS
105:The mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Infrarational Age of the Cycle, #KEYS
106:The world is but a reflection of my imagination. Whatever I want to see, I can see. But why should I invent patterns of creation, evolution and destruction? I do not need them and have no desire to lock up the world in a mental picture. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
107:What we are you cannot realise and it is a waste of time to try and do so but you can imagine (italics mine) us on the astral plane and we can contact you through your imagination, and though your mental picture is not real or actual, the results of it are real and actual.
~ Dion Fortune, The Cosmic Doctrine,#KEYS
108:It is for this meaningful development of consciousness by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading in the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the mental being, has entered into the material body.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works,#KEYS
109:Mother, Your Voice said to me, 'The Supermind is coming down in you.' Mother, is it a false voice? Because I know that I am not at all ready for the Supermind.
It is only in mental silence that you can hear the voice without distorting it - be very peaceful.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
110:I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, #KEYS
111:No one can understand by his personal mental judgment the Mother's actions and reasons for action; it can only be understood by entering into the larger consciousness from which she sees things and acts upon them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, General Rules and Individual Natures, #KEYS
112:I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited. ~ Sylvia Plath, #KEYS
113:Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience ~ who knows when such a malady may strike? ~ Margaret Atwood, #KEYS
114:When one devotes oneself to meditation, mental burdens, unnecessary worries, and wandering thoughts drop off one by one; life seems to run smoothly and pleasantly. A student may now depend on intuition to make decisions. As one acts on intuition, second thought, with its dualism, doubt and hesitation, does not arise. ~ Nyogen Senzaki, #KEYS
115:The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, #KEYS
116:Now intelligence seemed quantifiable. You could measure someone's actual or potential height, and now, it seemed, you could also measure someone's actual or potential intelligence. We had one dimension of mental ability along which we could array everyone... The whole concept has to be challenged; in fact, it has to be replaced. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
117:It may be necessary to regain one's original sexuality from the mass of fantasy and association into which it mostly sinks. This is achieved by judicious use of abstention and by arousing lust without any form of mental prop or fantasy. This exercise is also therapeutic. Be ye ever virgin unto Kia.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null, Liber LUX, Gnosis [33],#KEYS
118:Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #KEYS
119:To be born as a human being is a rare thing, something to be grateful foR But being born as a human being is worthless if you spend your whole life in a mental hospital. It is worthless if you worry about not having money. It is worthless if you become neurotic because you cannot get a prestigious job. It is worthless if you weep because you lose your girlfriend. ~ Kodo Sawaki, #KEYS
120:Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer. ~ Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, #KEYS
121:Addicts of drunkenness or other habit-forming vices cannot possibly hope to be students of concentration for the simple reason that their real will-power is too close to zero. If they cannot stop their bad habits, which they know perfectly well are harmful for them, where then would they find enough inner strength to overcome their mental apathy and laziness? ~ Mouni Sadhu, Concentration, Obstacles and Aids, #KEYS
122:tapasya :::
Tapasya: a discipline aiming at the realisation of the Divine.
Mental tapasya: the process leading to the goal.
Vital tapasya: the vital undergoes a rigorous discipline in order to transform itself.
Integral tapasya: the whole being lives only to know and serve the Divine.
Perfect tapasya: that which will reach its goal. ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
123:Mother, sometimes when I use my mental will to become aware of Your universal presence and to link myself with You, I feel the peace and assurance of Your touch. Mother, is it true or is it my mental construction?
In this case, it is of no importance, because there are mental constructions which can be true and which lead safely to the experience.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
124:We cannot counteract the harm done by mental faith in the need for drugs by any external measures. Only by escaping from the mental prison and emerging consciously into the light of the spirit, by a conscious union with the Divine, can we enable Him to give back to us the balance and health we have lost.The supramental transformation is the only true remedy.
~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,#KEYS
125:conditions of the psychic opening :::
The realisation of the psychic being, its awakening and the bringing of it in front depend mainly on the extent to which one can develop a personal relation with the Divine, a relation of Bhakti, love, reliance, self-giving, rejection of the insistences of the separating and self-asserting mental, vital and physical ego. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#KEYS
126:Our object is to change into the divine nature, but the divine nature is not a mental or moral but a spiritual condition, difficult to achieve, difficult even to conceive by our intelligence. The Master of our work and our Yoga knows the thing to be done, and we must allow him to do it in us by his own means and in his own manner.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Master of the Work, 247 [T6],#KEYS
127:These ideas have to be understood in studying dhyana, or meditation. We hear a sound. First there is the external vibration; second, the nerve motion that carries it to the mind; third, the reaction from the mind, along with which flashes the knowledgeof the object which was the external cause of these different changes, from the ethereal vibrations to the mental reaction.
~ Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga, 84,#KEYS
128:The born lover... has a certain memory of beauty but severed from it now, he longer comprehends it; spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form, he must be led under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all."
~ Plotinus, 1st Ennead, 3 tractate,#KEYS
129:X who has been studying astrology has prepared my horoscope. I send it to you to see. Do you think the indications he has given in it for my future have any value?
The horoscope is sufficiently vague and favourable to be taken in consideration as the base of a mental conception for your future. The most important factor in a horoscope is the intuitive faculty of the astrologer.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
130:God is, but man's conceptions of God are reflections in his own mentality, sometimes of the Divine, sometimes of other Beings and powers and they are what his mentality can make of the suggestions that come to him, generally very partial and imperfect so long as they are still mental, so long as he has not arrived at a higher and truer, a spiritual or mystic knowledge..
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, [T9],#KEYS
131:In the growth into a divine life the spirit must be our first preoccupation; until we have revealed and evolved it in our self out of its mental, vital, physical wrappings and disguises, extricated it with patience from our own body, as the Upanishad puts it, until we have built up in ourselves an inner life of the spirit, it is obvious that no outer divine living can become possible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life, #KEYS
132:As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
133:powers of freedom from subjection to the body :::
By a similar process the habit by which the bodily nature associates certain forms and degrees of activity with strain, fatigue, incapacity can be rectified and the power, freedom, swiftness, effectiveness of the work whether physical or mental which can be done with this bodily instrument marvelously increased, doubled, tripled, decupled.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, 346,#KEYS
134:Sri Aurobindo: With the mental will you can suppress it temporarily but that does not bring real mastery. This pull shows that you have a strong vital force - this has to be regenerated. All thoughts, desires, conventions, attachments which come from outside must be ruthlessly pushed away. The inside must be made entirely calm and quiet and there should reign an upward aspiration - a state of awaiting. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Anilbaran Roy Interviews and Conversations, #KEYS
135:All evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from life into mind, from mind into the spirit. It is this that must be the method of our growth from a mental into a spiritual and supramental manifestation, out of a still half-animal humanity into a divine being and divine living.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
136:An ocean of electric Energy
Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles
Constructing by their dance this solid scheme, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life
Wave-particles
The dictum that each has his own way is not true; each has his own way of following the common way and the "own way" may often be very defective. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Mental Development and Sadhana,#KEYS
137:The sadhana of this Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation, mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart, and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T3],#KEYS
138:I was speaking of your experiences of the higher consciousness, of your seeing the Mother in all things - these are what are called spiritual realisations, spiritual knowledge. Realisations are the essence of knowledge - thoughts about them, expression of them in words are a lesser knowledge and if the thoughts are merely mental without experience or realisation, they are not regarded as jnana in the spiritual sense at all.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III, Transformation of the Mind,#KEYS
139:Not to be disturbed by either joy or grief, pleasure or displeasure by what people say or do or by any outward things is called in yoga a state of samata, equality to all things. It is of immense importance in sadhana to be able to reach this state. It helps the mental quietude and silence as well as the vital to come. It means indeed that the vital itself and the vital mind are already falling silent and becoming quiet. The thinking mind is sure to follow.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
140: The age-old advice, "Know thyself," is more imperative than ever. The tempo of science has accelerated to such a degree that today's discoveries frequently make yesterday's equations obsolescent almost before they can be chalked up on a blackboard. Small wonder, then that every other hospital bed is occupied by a mental patient. Man was not constructed to spend his life at a crossroads, one of which leads he knows not where, and the other to threatened annihilation of his species. ~ Israel Regardie, A Garden of Pomegranates, Intro, #KEYS
141:The sword, or more usually the dagger, is the weapon of analysis or scission, or in the most simple sense, destruction. Through the sword, the magical will and perception vitalize the imagination of the undoing of things. The sword is the reservoir of the power which disintegrates aetheric influences through which the material plane is affected. Both the sword and pentacle are aetheric weapons through which the higher-order powers of will, perception, and imagination execute mental commands on the planes of middle nature.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
142:ntelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain. ~ Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, #KEYS
143:From the morning there has been a feeling of nearness to the Mother, almost as if there were no difference between us. But how can that be possible, as there is such a great gulf between her and me? I am on the mental plane and she is on the highest Supramental.
But the Mother is there not only on the Supramental but on all the planes. And especially she is close to everyone in the psychic part (the inner heart), so when that opens, the feeling of nearness naturally comes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T4],#KEYS
144:Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
145:The integral Yoga, refusing to rely upon the fragile stuff of mental and moral ideals, puts its whole emphasis in this field on three central dynamic processes -- the development of the true soul or psychic being to take the place of the false soul of desire, the sublimation of human into divine love, the elevation of consciousness from its mental to its spiritual and supramental plane by whose power alone both the soul and the life-force can be utterly delivered from the veils and prevarications of the Ignorance.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T4],#KEYS
146:Has the subconscient accepted the Higher Consciousness?
If the subconscient were to accept the Consciousness, it would no longer be the subconscient, it would become consciousness. I think that you mean: has the subconscient submitted to the rule, to the law of the higher Consciousness? This is not done as a whole, for the subconscient is vast and complex; there is a mental subconscient, a vital subconscient, a physical subconscient, a bodily subconscient. We have to wrest the subconscient fragment by fragment from its ignorant and inert...
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
147:Abandoning without exception all desires born of the will, controlling by the mind the senses in all directions, a man should gradually cease from mental action by the force of an understanding held in the grasp of a constant will; he should fix his mind in the self and think of nothing at all, and whenever the restless and mobile mentality ranges forth he should draw it back from whatever direction it takes and bring it again under control in the self alone: for when the mind has thus been quieted, there comes to man the highest peace. ~ Bhagavad Gita. VI. 24-26, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
148:People pontificate, Suicide is selfishness. Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas,#KEYS
149:Apart from the individual difficulty there is a general difficulty in the physical earth-nature. Physical nature is slow and inert and unwilling to change; its tendency is to be still and take long periods of time for a little progress. It is very difficult for even the strongest mental or vital or even psychic will to overcome this inertia. It is only by bringing down constantly the consciousness and force and light from above that it can be done. Therefore there must be a constant will and aspiration for that and for the change and it must be a steady and patient will not tired out even by the utmost resistance of the physical nature.
~ SATM?,#KEYS
150:As gnostic knowledge, will and ananda are a direct instrumentation of spirit and can only be won by growing into the spirit, into divine being, this growth has to be the first aim of our Yoga. The mental being has to enlarge itself into the oneness of the Divine before the Divine will perfect in the soul of the individual its gnostic outflowering. That is the reason why the triple way of knowledge, works and love becomes the key-note of the whole Yoga, for that is the direct means for the soul in mind to rise to its highest intensities where it passes upward into the divine oneness.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
151:Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus. Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt.
~ Peter J Carroll, The Octavo,#KEYS
152:It may yet be said that a logical succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which all the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being and a bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some new height of consciousness gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent Of The Sacrifice - I, [T1],#KEYS
153:The visions you describe are those which come in the earliest stages of sadhana. At this stage most of the things seen are formations of the mental plane and it is not always possible to put on them a precise significance, for they depend on the individual mind of the sadhak. At a later stage the power of vision becomes important for the sadhana, but at first one has to go on without attaching excessive importance to the details - until the consciousness develops more. The opening of the consciousness to the Divine Light and Truth and Presence is always the one important thing in the yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Visions and Symbols,#KEYS
154:There is a period, more or less prolonged, of internal effort and struggle in which the individual will has to reject the darkness and distortions of the lower nature and to put itself resolutely or vehemently on the side of the divine Light. The mental energies, the heart's emotions, the vital desires, the very physical being have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then, only when this has been truly done, that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 61, [T0],#KEYS
155:The person who has allowed himself to develop certain mental habits finds that attitudes can be just as much addiction as narcotics. Someone who would not under any conditions become an alcoholic can become so completely sickened by his own habitual negative thinking, that many people around him wish he would become alcoholic as the lesser of two evils. It is hard to cure an alcoholic, although Alcoholics Anonymous can do it sometimes; but the individual who falls too deeply into some of the traps of his own thinking is practically incurable because he has warped all perspective and has no real desire to make any change in himself. ~ Manly P Hall, (Change Yourself and You Change All 1969, p.7), #KEYS
156:abolishing the ego :::
In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience - a realisation in the very substance of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Ego, 363,#KEYS
157:one gradually equilibrizes the whole of one's mental structure and obtains a simple view of the incalculably vast complexity of the universe. For it is written: "Equilibrium is the basis of the work." Serious students will need to make a careful study of the attributions detailed in this work and commit them to memory. When, by persistent application to his own mental apparatus, the numerical system with its correspondences is partly understood-as opposed to being merely memorized-the student will be amazed to find fresh light breaking in on him at every turn as he continues to refer every item in experience and consciousness to this standard.
~ Israel Regardie, A Garden Of Pomegranates: Skrying On the Tree Of Life,#KEYS
158:It is in the silence of the mind that the strongest and freest action can come, e.g. the writing of a book, poetry, inspired speech etc. When the mind is active it interferes with the inspiration, puts in its own small ideas which get mixed up with the inspiration or starts something from a lower level or simply stops the inspiration altogether by bubbling up with all sorts of mere mental suggestions. So also intuitions or action etc. can come more easily when the ordinary inferior movement of the mind is not there. It is also in the silence of the mind that it is easiest for knowledge to come from within or above, from the psychic or from the higher consciousness.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
159:There is only one way if you cannot exert your will - it is to call the Force; even the call only with the mind or the mental word is better than being extremely passive and submitted to the attack, - for although it may not succeed instantaneously, the mental call even ends by bringing the Force and opening up the consciousness again. For everything depends upon that. In the externalised consciousness obscurity and suffering can always be there; the more the internalised consciousness reigns, the more these things are pushed back and out, and with the full internalised consciousness they cannot remain
- if they come, it is as outside touches unable to lodge themselves in the being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
160:... All the works of mind and intllect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 149, #KEYS
161:When we are concentrated in mental movements or intellectual pursuits, why do we sometimes forget or lose touch with the Divine?
You lose it because your consciousness is still divided. The Divine has not settled in your mind; you are not wholly consecrated to the Divine Life. Otherwise you could concentrate to any extent upon such things and still you would have the sense of being helped and supported by the Divine. In all pursuits, intellectual or active, your one motto should be, Remember and Offer. Let whatever you do be done as an offering to the Divine. And this too will be an excellent discipline for you; it will prevent you from doing many foolish and useless things.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, [T0],#KEYS
162:I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight-not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, [9:342],#KEYS
163:Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence-which we have been briefly tracking-on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual's actual history).
~ Ken Wilber?,#KEYS
164:what is meant by the psychic :::
What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#KEYS
165:January 7, 1914
GIVE them all, O Lord, Thy peace and light, open their blinded eyes and their darkened understanding; calm their futile worries and their vain anxieties. Turn their gaze away from themselves and give them the joy of being consecrated to Thy work without calculation or mental reservation. Let Thy beauty flower in all things, awaken Thy love in all hearts, so that Thy eternally progressive order may be realised upon earth and Thy harmony be spread until the day all becomes Thyself in perfect purity and peace.
Oh! let all tears be wiped away, all suffering relieved, all anguish dispelled, and let calm serenity dwell in every heart and powerful certitude strengthen every mind. Let Thy life flow through all like a regenerating stream that all may turn to Thee and draw from that contemplation the energy for all victories. ~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
166:It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophic reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable: it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5],#KEYS
167:But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His selfmanifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or atmost attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, #KEYS
168:This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical - since it does not correspond to an effective reality - it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them - at least in appearance - it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of 'mass psychology' might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystallizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely not that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present. ~ Rene Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World, #KEYS
169:A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it or dislike, - for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity and the void with cessation or non-existence: but this silence is the silence of the spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation of it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of God; it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence. Even when the being turns towards cessation, it is a cessation not in non-existence but into some vast ineffable of spiritual being or the plunge into the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life, #KEYS
170:For the contact of the human and individual consciousness with the divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of those functionings which determine the state and the experiences of our nervous being; through the mentality, whether by means of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind, or more largely by a general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. It may equally be accomplished through a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according to the point of contact that we choose will be the type of the Yoga that we practise. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, #KEYS
171:The fourth condition is study. One must cultivate the mind, know what others have thought, open the mental being to this impact of the higher vibrations of knowledge. A mental knowledge is not tantamount to realization, it is true, but still one must know mentally where one is going, what has happened to others, how they have achieved, what are the hindrances and the helping points. This education of oneself by study, study of spiritual writings, suddhydya as it is called, a disciplined reading and incorporation of the knowledge contained in scriptures and authentic texts - that is a very important part. Even when you don't understand a text, still if you persist at it, the force that is in that book creates certain new grooves in your brain and the second or the third time when you read it, it begins to make some meaning. This is the meaning of studying, of exposing your mind to the constant vibrations of higher levels of knowledge. Incidentally, the mind gets developed, a mental climate is created, a climate of spiritual culture.
~ M P Pandit, The Advent 1981, 30,#KEYS
172:We already saw that in evolution each of these structures emerges as a substitute gratification, and is abandoned when it ceases to gratify. And we can see now that each of them emerges as a substitute in evolution because each was created as substitute in involution. The self can climb back up this involved chain of substitutes only by tasting them, finding them lacking, accepting their death, and thus transcending them (all of which the self in involution refused to do). But the self will evolve up the chain of being only to the point at which it will accept the substitute gratifications as satisfactory (bodily substitutes, or mental substitutes, or subtle ones, or causal ones). At that particular level, its incest settles in, it accepts its substitutes as real, its Eros wins out over Thanatos, it will not undergo the separation anxiety of transcending and dying to that level, and so evolution stops cold (for this lifetime). The self has, in this life, gotten as close as it can to the Source (while still imagining it is the Source)
~ Ken Wilber, The Atman Project,#KEYS
173:What you write is no doubt true and it is necessary to see it so as to be able to comprehend and grasp the true attitude necessary for the sadhana. But, as I have said, one must not be distressed or depressed by perceiving the weaknesses inherent in human nature and the difficulty of getting them out. The difficulty is natural, for they have been there for thousands of lives and are the very nature of man's vital and mental ignorance. It is not surprising that they should have a power to stick and take time to disappear. But there is a true being and a true consciousness that is there in us hidden by these surface formations of nature and which can shake them off once it emerges. By taking the right attitude of selfless devotion within and persisting in it in spite of the surface nature's troublesome self-repetitions one enables this inner being and consciousness to emerge and with the Mother's Force working in it deliver the being from all return of the movements of the old nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, Dealing with Depression and Despondency, #KEYS
174:There is nothing unintelligible in what I say about strength and Grace. Strength has a value for spiritual realisation, but to say that it can be done by strength only and by no other means is a violent exaggeration. Grace is not an invention, it is a face of spiritual experience. Many who would be considered as mere nothings by the wise and strong have attained by Grace; illiterate, without mental power or training, without "strength" of character or will, they have yet aspired and suddenly or rapidly grown into spiritual realisation, because they had faith or because they were sincere. ...
Strength, if it is spiritual, is a power for spiritual realisation; a greater power is sincerity; the greatest power of all is Grace. I have said times without number that if a man is sincere, he will go through in spite of long delay and overwhelming difficulties. I have repeatedly spoken of the Divine Grace. I have referred any number of times to the line of the Gita:
"I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
175:[invocation] Let us describe the magical method of identification. The symbolic form of the god is first studied with as much care as an artist would bestow upon his model, so that a perfectly clear and unshakeable mental picture of the god is presented to the mind. Similarly, the attributes of the god are enshrined in speech, and such speeches are committed perfectly to memory. The invocation will then begin with a prayer to the god, commemorating his physical attributes, always with profound understanding of their real meaning. In the second part of the invocation, the voice of the god is heard, and His characteristic utterance is recited. In the third portion of the invocation the Magician asserts the identity of himself with the god. In the fourth portion the god is again invoked, but as if by Himself, as if it were the utterance of the will of the god that He should manifest in the Magician. At the conclusion of this, the original object of the invocation is stated.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formuale of the Elemental Weapons [149] [T4],#KEYS
176:This concentration proceeds by the Idea, using thought, form and name as keys which yield up to the concentrating mind the Truth that lies concealed behind all thought, form and name; for it is through the Idea that the mental being rises beyond all expression to that which is expressed, to that of which the Idea itself is only the instrument. By concentration upon the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm. Concentration by the Idea is, then, only a means, a key to open to us the superconscient planes of our existence; a certain self-gathered state of our whole existence lifted into that superconscient truth, unity and infinity of self-aware, self-blissful existence is the aim and culmination; and that is the meaning we shall give to the term Samadhi.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Integral Knowledge, Concentration [321],#KEYS
177:To enlarge the sense-faculties without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their right interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an unregulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the established order of the world's relativities. This, no doubt, is the root of the injunction imposed in the Gita on the man who has the knowledge not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis of the ignorant; for, impelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at a higher foundation.
Such a disorder and incapacity may be accepted personally and are accepted by many great souls as a temporary passage or as the price to be paid for the entry into a wider existence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
178:The object of this course of reading is to familiarize the student with all that has been said by the Great Masters in every time and country. He should make a critical examination of them; not so much with the idea of discovering where truth lies, for he cannot do this except by virtue of his own spiritual experience, but rather to discover the essential harmony in those varied works. He should be on his guard against partisanship with a favourite author. He should familiarize himself thoroughly with the method of mental equilibrium, endeavouring to contradict any statement soever, although it may be apparently axiomatic.
The general object of this course, besides that already stated, is to assure sound education in occult matters, so that when spiritual illumination comes it may find a well-built temple. Where the mind is strongly biased towards any special theory, the result of an illumination is often to inflame that portion of the mind which is thus overdeveloped, with the result that the aspirant, instead of becoming an Adept, becomes a bigot and fanatic. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A.#KEYS
179:The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowledge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a Goddirected seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the greatest vision of all, God-knowledge and God-vision. Its aim is to see, know and be the Divine. Works, action selects for its instrument the will of the doer of works; it makes life an offering of sacrifice to the Godhead and by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of subjection to the divine Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all Godward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Principle of the Integral Yoga, 610 [T3],#KEYS
180:It can be expected that the orthodox Christian will at first reject the theories about the Christ which occultism presents; at the same time, this same orthodox Christian will find it increasingly difficult to induce the intelligent masses of people to accept the impossible Deity and the feeble Christ, which historical Christianity has endorsed. A Christ Who is present and living, Who is known to those who follow Him, Who is a strong and able executive, and not a sweet and sentimental sufferer, Who has never left us but Who has worked for two thousand years through the medium of His disciples, the inspired men and women of all faiths, all religions, and all religious persuasions; Who has no use for fanaticism or hysterical devotion, but Who loves all men persistently, intelligently and optimistically, Who sees divinity in them all, and Who comprehends the techniques of the evolutionary development of the human consciousness (mental, emotional and physical, producing civilizations and cultures appropriate to a particular point in evolution) - these ideas the intelligent public can and will accept. p. 589/90 ~ Alice Bailey, in The Externalization of the Hierarchy (1957) #KEYS
181:five schools of yoga :::
For if, leaving aside the complexities of their particular processes, we fix our regard on the central principle of the chief schools of Yoga still prevalent in India, we find that they arrange themselves in an ascending order which starts from the lowest rung of the ladder, the body, and ascends to the direct contact between the individual soul and the transcendent and universal Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth, Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.Its method is a direct commerce between the human Purusha in the individual body and the divine Purusha who dwells in everybody and yet transcends all form and name.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,#KEYS
182:Raise Your Standards
Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.
Think of the far-reaching consequences set in motion by men and women who raised their standards and acted in accordance with them, deciding they would tolerate no less. History chronicles the inspiring examples of people like Leonardo da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Albeit Einstein, Cesar Chavez, Soichiro Honda, and many others who took the magnificently powerful step of raising their standards. The same power that was available to them is available to you, if you have the courage to claim it. Changing an organization, acompany, a country-or a world-begins with the simple step of changing yourself.
STEP TWO
Change Your Limiting Beliefs ~ Anthony Robbins, How to take Immediate Control of Your Mental Emotional Physical and Financial Destiny,#KEYS
183:In your early struggles you may have found it difficult to conquer sleep; and you may have wandered so far from the object of your meditations without noticing it, that the meditation has really been broken; but much later on, when you feel that you are "getting quite good," you will be shocked to find a complete oblivion of yourself and your surroundings. You will say: "Good heavens! I must have been to sleep!" or else "What on earth was I meditating upon?" or even "What was I doing?" "Where am I?" "Who am I?" or a mere wordless bewilderment may daze you. This may alarm you, and your alarm will not be lessened when you come to full consciousness, and reflect that you have actually forgotten who you are and what you are doing! This is only one of many adventures that may come to you; but it is one of the most typical. By this time your hours of meditation will fill most of the day, and you will probably be constantly having presentiments that something is about to happen. You may also be terrified with the idea that your brain may be giving way; but you will have learnt the real symptoms of mental fatigue, and you will be careful to avoid them. They must be very carefully distinguished from idleness! ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, #KEYS
184:In order to strengthen the higher knowledge-faculty in us we have to effect the same separation between the intuitive and intellectual elements of our thought as we have already effected between the understanding and the sense-mind; and this is no easy task, for not only do our intuitions come to us incrusted in the intellectual action, but there are a great number of mental workings which masquerade and ape the appearances of the higher faculty. The remedy is to train first the intellect to recognise the true intuilion, to distinguish it from the false and then to accustom it, when it arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine principle and wait in as complete a silence as it can command for the light from above. In this way it is possible to transmute a great part of our intellectual thinking into the luminous truth-conscious vision, -- the ideal would be a complete transition, -- or at least to increase greatly the frequency, purity and conscious force of the ideal knowledge working behind the intellect. The latter must learn to be subject and passive to the ideal faculty.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 316,#KEYS
185:Q: What is the right attitude to stick on to this path till the Supramental Truth is realised?
"A: There is the psychic condition and sincerity and devotion to the Mother."
What is "the psychic condition"?
The psychic condition? That means being in relation with one's psychic, I suppose, being governed by one's psychic being.
Sweet Mother, I don't understand very clearly the difference between faith, belief and confidence.
But Sri Aurobindo has given the full explanation here. If you don't understand, then...
He has written "Faith is a feeling in the whole being."
The whole being, yes. Faith, that's the whole being at once. He says that belief is something that occurs in the head, that is purely mental; and confidence is quite different. Confidence - one can have confidence in life, trust in the Divine, trust in others, trust in one's own destiny, that is, one has the feeling that everything is going to help him, to do what he wants to do.
Faith is a certitude without any proof.
Mother, on what does faith depend?
Probably on Divine Grace. Some people have it spontaneously. There are others who need to make a great effort to have it.
~ The Mother, Question and Answers, Volume-6, page no.120,#KEYS
186:on cultivating equality :::
For it is certain that so great a result cannot be arrived at immediately and without any previous stages. At first we have to learn to bear the shocks of the world with the central part of our being untouched and silent, even when the surface mind, heart, life are strongly shaken; unmoved there on the bedrock of our life, we must separate the soul watching behind or immune deep within from these outer workings of our nature. Afterwards, extending this calm and steadfastness of the detached soul to its instruments, it will become slowly possible to radiate peace from the luminous centre to the darker peripheries. In this process we may take the passing help of many minor phases; a certain stoicism, a certain calm philosophy, a certain religious exaltation may help us towards some nearness to our aim, or we may call in even less strong and exalted but still useful powers of our mental nature. In the end we must either discard or transform them and arrive instead at an entire equality, a perfect self-existent peace within and even, if we can, a total unassailable, self-poised and spontaneous delight in all our members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [103-104],#KEYS
187:When one goes out of the body, one must try to rush towards you I think everybody does that, dont they?
Not one in a hundred!
If you did that, very interesting things would happen to you. I knew someone in France who used to come to me every evening in order that I might show him some unknown region and take him for a ramble in the vital or mental world, and actually I used to take him there. At times there were others also, at times this person was alone. I showed him how to go out of the body, how to get back into it, how to keep the consciousness, etc., I showed him many places telling him There you must take this precaution, here you must do such and such a thing. And this continued for a long time.
I do not mean that no one among you comes to me in the night, but there are very few who do it consciously. Generally (you will tell me if I am wrong, but that is my impression), when you go to sleep and have decided to remember me before going to sleep, it is rather a call than a will to rush to me, as you say. You are there on your bed, you want to rest, to have a good sleep, remain in a good consciousness; then you call me rather than have the idea of going out of the body and coming to see me. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951, 1951-02-19,#KEYS
188:Ordinarily, man is limited in all these parts of his being and he can grasp at first only so much of the divine truth as has some large correspondence to his own nature and its past development and associations. Therefore God meets us first in different limited affirmations of his divine qualities and nature; he presents himself to the seeker as an absolute of the things he can understand and to which his will and heart can respond; he discloses some name and aspect of his Godhead.
This is what is called in Yoga the is.t.a-devata, the name and form elected by our nature for its worship. In order that the human being may embrace this Godhead with every part of himself, it is represented with a form that answers to its aspects and qualities and which becomes the living body of God to the adorer. These are those forms of Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Kali, Durga, Christ, Buddha, which the mind of man seizes on for adoration. Even the monotheist who worships a formless Godhead, yet gives to him some form of quality, some mental form or form of Nature by which he envisages and approaches him. But to be able to see a living form, a mental body, as it were, of the Divine gives to the approach a greater closeness and sweetness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Mystery of Love,#KEYS
189:Art is the human language of the nervous plane, intended to express and communicate the Divine, who in the domain of sensation manifests as beauty.
The purpose of art is therefore to give those for whom it is meant a freer and more perfect communion with the Supreme Reality. The first contact with this Supreme Reality expresses itself in our consciousness by a flowering of the being in a plenitude of vast and peaceful delight. Each time that art can give the spectator this contact with the infinite, however fleetingly, it fulfils its aim; it has shown itself worthy of its mission. Thus no art which has for many centuries moved and delighted a people can be dismissed, since it has at least partially fulfilled its mission - to be the powerful and more or less perfect utterance of that which is to be expressed. What makes it difficult for the sensibility of a nation to enjoy the delight that another nation finds in one art or another is the habitual limitation of the nervous being which, even more than the mental being, is naturally exclusive in its ability to perceive the Divine and which, when it has entered into relation with Him through certain forms, feels an almost irresistible reluctance to recognise Him through other forms of sensation. ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, 122,#KEYS
190:
Sweet Mother, Just as there is a methodical progression of exercises for mental and physical education, isn't there a similar method to progress towards Sri Aurobindo's yoga?
It should vary with each individual.
Could you make a step-by-step programme for me to follow daily?
The mechanical regularity of a fixed programme is indispensable for physical, mental and vital development; but this mechanical rigidity has little or no effect on spiritual development where the spontaneity of an absolute sincerity is indispensable. Sri Aurobindo has written very clearly on this subject. And what he has written on it has appeared in The Synthesis Of Yoga.
However, as an initial help to set you on the path, I can tell you: (1) that on getting up, before starting the day, it is good to make an offering of this day to the Divine, an offering of all that one thinks, all that one is, all that one will do; (2) and at night, before going to sleep, it is good to review the day, taking note of all the times one has forgotten or neglected to make an offering of one's self or one's action, and to aspire or pray that these lapses do not recur. This is a minimum, a very small beginning - and it should increase with the sincerity of your consecration. 31 March 1965
~ The Mother, Some Answers From The Mother, [T1],#KEYS
191:Supermind and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers of consciousness - one can regard it in various ways - in which the element or substance of mind and consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the soul's turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance. For although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above. There is no longer the essential, total, perfectly harmonising and unifying knowledge, or rather knowledge for ever harmonious because for ever one, which is the character of Supermind. In the Supermind mental divisions and oppositions cease, the problems created by our dividing and fragmenting mind disappear and Truth is seen as a luminous whole. In the Overmind there is not yet the actual fall into Ignorance, but the first step is taken which will make the fall inevitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, #KEYS
192:the great division :::
Secondly, with regard to the movements and experiences of the body the mind will come to know the Purusha seated within it as, first, the witness or observer of the movements and, secondly, the knower or perceiver of the experiences. It will cease to consider in thought or feel in sensation these movements and experiences as its own but rather consider and feel them as not its own, as operations of Nature governed by the qualities of Nature and their interaction upon each other. This detachment can be made so normal and carried so far that there will be a kind of division between the mind and the body and the former will observe and experience the hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, depression, etc. of the physical being as if they were experiences of some other person with whom it has so close a rapport as to be aware of all that is going on within him. This division is a great means, a great step towards mastery; for the mind comes to observe these things first without being overpowered and finally without at all being affected by them, dispassionately, with clear understanding but with perfect detachment. This is the initial liberation of the mental being from servitude to the body; for by right knowledge put steadily into practice liberation comes inevitably
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, 345,#KEYS
193:the psychic transformation :::
The soul, the psychic being is in direct touch with the divine Truth, but it is hidden in man by the mind, the vital being and the physical nature. One may practise yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate in all kinds of experiences in the vital; one may establish even surprising physical Siddhis; but if the true soul-power behind does not manifest, if the psychic nature does not come into the front, nothing genuine has been done. In this yoga the psychic being is that which opens the rest of the nature to the true supramental light and finally to the supreme Ananda. Mind can open by itself to its own higher reaches; it can still itself in some kind of static liberation or Nirvana; but the supramental cannot find a sufficient base in a spiritualised mind alone. If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible.... If there is a refusal of the psychic new birth, a refusal to become the child new born from the Mother, owing to attachment to intellectual knowledge or mental ideas or to some vital desire, then there will be a failure in the sadhana. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#KEYS
194:Endure and you will triumph. Victory goes to the most enduring. And with the Grace and divine love nothing is impossible. My force and love are with you. At the end of the struggle there is Victory And so we find once more that the Ego-idea must be ruthlessly rooted out before Understanding can be attained The emptiness that you described in your letter yesterday was not a bad thing - it is this emptiness inward and outward that often in Yoga becomes the first step towards a new consciousness. Man's nature is like a cup of dirty water - the water has to be thrown out, the cup left clean and empty for the divine liquor to be poured into it. The difficulty is that the human physical consciousness feels it difficult to bear this emptiness - it is accustomed to be occupied by all sorts of little mental and vital movements which keep it interested and amused or even if in trouble and sorrow still active. The cessation of these things is hard to bear for it. It begins to feel dull and restless and eager for the old interests and movements. But by this restlessness it disturbs the quietude and brings back the things that had been thrown out. It is this that is creating the difficulty and the obstruction for the moment. If you can accept emptiness as a passage to the true consciousness and true movements, then it will be easier to get rid of the obstacle.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III,#KEYS
195:The supramental memory is different from the mental, not a storing up of past knowledge and experience, but an abiding presence of knowledge that can be brought forward or, more characteristically, offers itself, when it is needed: it is not dependent on attention or on conscious reception, for the things of the past not known actually or not observed can be called up from latency by an action which is yet essentially a remembrance. Especially on a certain level all knowledge presents itself as a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of supermind. The future like the past presents itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of the preknown. The imagination transformed in the supermind acts on one side as a power of true image and symbol, always all image or index of some value or significance or other truth of being, on the other as an inspiration or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities not less true than actual or realised things. These are put in their place either by an attendant intuitive or interpretative judgment or by one inherent in the vision of the image, symbol or potentiality, or by a supereminent revelation of that which is behind the image or symbol or which determines the potential and the actual and their relations and, it may be, overrides and overpasses them, imposing ultimate truths and supreme certitudes.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
196:
Mother, in your symbol the twelve petals signify the twelve inner planes, don't they?
It signifies anything one wants, you see. Twelve: that's the number of Aditi, of Mahashakti. So it applies to everything; all her action has twelve aspects. There are also her twelve virtues, her twelve powers, her twelve aspects, and then her twelve planes of manifestation and many other things that are twelve; and the symbol, the number twelve is in itself a symbol. It is the symbol of manifestation, double perfection, in essence and in manifestation, in the creation.
What are the twelve aspects, Sweet Mother?
Ah, my child, I have described this somewhere, but I don't remember now. For it is always a choice, you see; according to what one wants to say, one can choose these twelve aspects or twelve others, or give them different names. The same aspect can be named in different ways. This does not have the fixity of a mental theory. (Silence)
According to the angle from which one sees the creation, one day I may describe twelve aspects to you; and then another day, because I have shifted my centre of observation, I may describe twelve others, and they will be equally true.
(To Vishwanath) Is it the wind that's producing this storm? It is very good for a dramatic stage-effect.... The traitor is approaching in the night... yes? We are waiting for some terrible deed....
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954, 395,#KEYS
197:
If one is too serious in yoga, doesn't one become obsessed by the difficulty of the task?
There is a limit to be kept!... But if one chooses one's obsession well, it may be very useful because it is no longer quite an obsession. For example, one has decided to find the Divine within oneself, and constantly, in every circumstance, whatever happens or whatever one may do, one concentrates in order to enter into contact with the inner Divine. Naturally, first one must have that little thing Sri Aurobindo speaks about, that "lesser truth" which consists in knowing that there is a Divine within one (this is a very good example of the "lesser truth") and once one is sure of it and has the aspiration to find it, if that aspiration becomes constant and the effort to realise it becomes constant, in the eyes of others it looks like an obsession, but this kind of obsession is not bad. It becomes bad only if one loses one's balance. But it must be made quite clear that those who lose their balance with that obsession are only those who were quite ready to lose their balance; any circumstance whatever would have produced the same result and made them lose their balance - it is a defect in the mental structure, it is not the fault of the obsession. And naturally, he who changes a desire into an obsession would be sure to go straight towards imbalance. That is why I say it is important to know the object of the obsession. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951,#KEYS
198:Are remembrance and memory the same thing?
Not necessarily. Memory is a mental phenomenon, purely mental. Remembrance can be a phenomenon of consciousness. One can remember in all the domains of one's being: one can remember vitally, one can remember physically, one can remember psychically, one can remember mentally also. But memory is a purely mental phenomenon. Memory can, first of all, be deformed and it can also be effaced, one can forget. The phenomenon of consciousness is very precise; if you can take the consciousness back to the state in which it was, things come back exactly as they were. It is as though you relived the same mo- ment. You can relive it once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, but you relive a phenomenon of consciousness. It is very different from the memory of a fact which you inscribe somewhere in your brain. And if the cerebral associations are disturbed in the least (for there are many things in your brain and it is a very delicate instrument), if there is the slightest disturbance, your memory goes out of order. And then holes are formed and you forget. On the other hand, if you know how to bring back a particular state of consciousness in you, it comes back exactly the same as it was. Now, a remembrance can also be purely mental and it may be a continuation of cerebral activities, but that is mental remembrance. And you have remembrances in feeling, remembrances in sensation.... ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 290-291,#KEYS
199:But what has fixed the modes of Nature? Or who has originated and governs the movements of Force? There is a Consciousness - or a Conscient - behind that is the lord, witness, knower, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for her works; this consciousness is Soul or Purusha. Prakriti shapes the action in us; Purusha in her or behind her witnesses, assents, bears and upholds it. Prakriti forms the thought in our minds; Purusha in her or behind her knows the thought and the truth in it. Prakriti determines the result of the action; Purusha in her or behind her enjoys or suffers the consequence. Prakriti forms mind and body, labours over them, develops them; Purusha upholds the formation and evolution and sanctions each step of her works. Prakriti applies the Will-force which works in things and men; Purusha sets that Will-force to work by his vision of that which should be done. This Purusha is not the surface ego, but a silent Self, a source of Power, an originator and receiver of Knowledge behind the ego. Our mental "I" is only a false reflection of this Self, this Power, this Knowledge. This Purusha or supporting Consciousness is therefore the cause, recipient and support of all Nature's works, but he is not himself the doer. Prakriti, NatureForce, in front and Shakti, Conscious-Force, Soul-Force behind her, - for these two are the inner and outer faces of the universal Mother, - account for all that is done in the universe. The universal Mother, Prakriti-Shakti, is the one and only worker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 214, #KEYS
200:So too we can rise to a consciousness above and observe the various parts of our being, inner and outer, mental, vital and physical and the subconscient below all, and act upon one or other or the whole from that higher status. It is possible also to go down from that height or from any height into any of these lower states and take its limited light or its obscurity as our place of working while the rest that we are is either temporarily put away or put behind or else kept as a field of reference from which we can get support, sanction or light and influence or as a status into which we can ascend or recede and from it observe the inferior movements. Or we can plunge into trance, get within ourselves and be conscious there while all outward things are excluded; or we can go beyond even this inner awareness and lose ourselves in some deeper other consciousness or some high superconscience. There is also a pervading equal consciousness into which we can enter and see all ourselves with one enveloping glance or omnipresent awareness one and indivisible. All this which looks strange and abnormal or may seem fantastic to the surface reason acquainted only with our normal status of limited ignorance and its movements divided from our inner higher and total reality, becomes easily intelligible and admissible in the light of the larger reason and logic of the Infinite or by the admission of the greater illimitable powers of the Self, the Spirit in us which is of one essence with the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.2.02 #KEYS
201:But even when the desire to know exists in the requisite strength, the mental vision by which abstract truth is recognised is hard to distinguish from vivid imaginability and consonance with mental habits. It is necessary to practise methodological doubt, like Descartes, in order to loosen the hold of mental habits; and it is necessary to cultivate logical imagination, in order to have a number of hypotheses at command, and not to be the slave of the one which common sense has rendered easy to imagine. These two processes, of doubting the familiar and imagining the unfamiliar, are correlative, and form the chief part of the mental training required for a philosopher.
The naïve beliefs which we find in ourselves when we first begin the process of philosophic reflection may turn out, in the end, to be almost all capable of a true interpretation; but they ought all, before being admitted into philosophy, to undergo the ordeal of sceptical criticism. Until they have gone through this ordeal, they are mere blind habits, ways of behaving rather than intellectual convictions. And although it may be that a majority will pass the test, we may be pretty sure that some will not, and that a serious readjustment of our outlook ought to result. In order to break the dominion of habit, we must do our best to doubt the senses, reason, morals, everything in short. In some directions, doubt will be found possible; in others, it will be checked by that direct vision of abstract truth upon which the possibility of philosophical knowledge depends. ~ Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World,#KEYS
202:[the value of sublimation:]
And since Yoga is in its essence a turning away from the ordinary material and animal life led by most men or from the more mental but still limited way of living followed by the few to a greater spiritual life, to the way divine, every part of our energies that is given to the lower existence in the spirit of that existence is a contradiction of our aim and our self-dedication. On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from the powers that oppose our progress. It is the difficulty of this wholesale conversion that is the source of all the stumblings in the path of Yoga. For our entire nature and its environment, all our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth and work against the whole-heartedness of our endeavour.
In a certain sense we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations, - an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations. What we propose in our Yoga is nothing less than to break up the whole formation of our past and present which makes up the ordinary material and mental man and to create a new centre of vision and a new universe of activities in ourselves which shall constitute a divine humanity or a superhuman nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, [71] [T1],#KEYS
203:the vital
the life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul of man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of nature. The vital part of man is a true instrument only when its feelings and tendencies have been purified by the psychic touch and governed by the spiritual light and power. The vital has three main parts:
higher vital
the mental vital and emotional vital taken together. The mental vital gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations or other movements of the vital being; the emotional vital is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred and the rest.
central vital or vital proper
dynamic, sensational and passionate, it is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, such as ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passion of various kinds and the field of many vital energies.
lower vital
made up of the smaller movements of human life-desire and life-reactions, it is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds, etc. The material vital is that part of the lower vital turned entirely upon physical things, full of desires and greeds and seekings for pleasure on the physical plane. ~ Integral Yoga; Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice,#KEYS
204:This ego or "I" is not a lasting truth, much less our essential part; it is only a formation of Nature, a mental form of thought centralisation in the perceiving and discriminating mind, a vital form of the centralisation of feeling and sensation in our parts of life, a form of physical conscious reception centralising substance and function of substance in our bodies. All that we internally are is not ego, but consciousness, soul or spirit. All that we externally and superficiallyare and do is not ego but Nature. An executive cosmic force shapes us and dictates through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped, through our individualised formulation of the cosmic energies, our actions and their results. Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed. The Sadhaka in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes of vision and recognises this truth of ego and this truth of works. He gives up the idea of a mental, vital, physical, "I" that acts or governs action; he recognises that Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature following her fixed modes, is the one and only worker in him and in all things and creatures.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 214,#KEYS
205:These are the conditions of our effort and they point to an ideal which can be expressed in these or in equivalent formulae. To live in God and not in the ego; to move, vastly founded, not in the little egoistic consciousness, but in the consciousness of the All-Soul and the Transcendent. To be perfectly equal in all happenings and to all beings, and to see and feel them as one with oneself and one with the Divine; to feel all in oneself and all in God; to feel God in all, oneself in all. To act in God and not in the ego. And here, first, not to choose action by reference to personal needs and standards, but in obedience to the dictates of the living highest Truth above us. Next, as soon as we are sufficiently founded in the spiritual consciousness, not to act any longer by our separate will or movement, but more and more to allow action to happen and develop under the impulsion and guidance of a divine Will that surpasses us. And last, the supreme result, to be exalted into an identity in knowledge, force, consciousness, act, joy of existence with the Divine Shakti; to feel a dynamic movement not dominated by mortal desire and vital instinct and impulse and illusive mental free-will, but luminously conceived and evolved in an immortal self-delight and an infinite self-knowledge. For this is the action that comes by a conscious subjection and merging of the natural man into the divine Self and eternal Spirit; it is the Spirit that for ever transcends and guides this world-Nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [101],#KEYS
206:Concentrating the Attention:
Whatever you may want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of everything, the capacity of concentrating the attention. If you are able to gather together the rays of attention and consciousness on one point and can maintain the concentration with a presistent will, nothing can resist it - whatever it may be, from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual one. But this discipline must be followed in a constant and, it may be said, imperturbable way; not that you should always be concentrated on the same thing - thats not what I mean, I mean learning to concentrate. And materially, for studies, sports, all physical or mental development, it is absolutely indispensble. And the value of an individual is proportionate to the value of his attention. And from the spiritual point of view it is still more important. There is no spiritual obstacle which can resist a penetrating power of concentration. For instance, the discovery of the psychic being, union with the inner Divine, opening to the higher spheres, all can be obtained by an intense and obstinate power of concentration - but one must learn how to do it. There is nothing in the human or even in the superhuman field, to which the power of concentration is not the key. You can be the best athlete, you can be the best student, you can be an artistic, literary or scientific genius, you can be the greatest saint with that faculty. And everyone has in himself a tiny little beginning of it - it is given to everybody, but people do not cultivate it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#KEYS
207:Instruction about Sadhana to a disciple:
Disciple: What is the nature of realisation in this yoga?
Sri Aurobindo: In this yoga we want to bring down the Truth-consciousness into the whole being - no part being left out. This can be done by the Higher Power itself. What you have to do is to open yourself to it.
Disciple: As the Higher Power is there why does it not work in all men - consciously?
Sri Aurobindo: Because man, at present, is shut up in his mental being, his vital nature and physical consciousness and their limitations. You have to open yourself. By an opening I mean an aspiration in the heart for the coming down of the Power that is above, and a will in the Mind, or above the Mind, open to it.
The first thing this working of the Higher Power does is to establish Shanti - peace - in all the parts of the being and an opening above. This peace is not mere mental Shanti, it is full of power and, whatever action takes place in it, Samata, equality, is its basis and the Shanti and Samata are never disturbed. What comes from Above is peace, power and joy. It also brings about changes in various parts of our nature so that they can bear the pressure of the Higher Power.
Knowledge also progressively develops showing all in our being that is to be thrown out and what is to be retained. In fact, knowledge and guidance both come and you have constantly to consent to the guidance. The progress may be more in one direction than in another. But it is the Higher Power that works. The rest is a matter of experience and the movement of the Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO, RECORDED BY A B PURANI (28-09-1923),#KEYS
208:Thoughts are forms and have an individual life, independent of their author: sent out from him into the world, they move in it towards the realisation of their own purpose of existence. When you think of anyone, your thought takes a form and goes out to find him; and, if your thinking is associated with some will that is behind it, the thought-form that has gone out from you makes an attempt to realise itself. Let us say, for instance, that you have a keen desire for a certain person to come and that, along with this vital impulse of desire, a strong imagination accompanies the mental form you have made; you imagine, "If he came, it would be like this or it would be like that." After a time you drop the idea altogether, and you do not know that even after you have forgotten it, your thought continues to exist. For it does still exist and is in action, independent of you, and it would need a great power to bring it back from its work. It is working in the atmosphere of the person touched by it and creates in him the desire to come. And if there is a sufficient power of will in your thought-form, if it is a well-built formation, it will arrive at its own realisation. But between the formation and the realisation there is a certain lapse of time, and if in this interval your mind has been occupied with quite other things, then when there happens this fulfilment of your forgotten thought, you may not even remember that you once harboured it; you do not know that you were the instigator of its action and the cause of what has come about. And it happens very often too that when the result does come, you have ceased to desire or care for it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
209:8. We all recognize the Universe must have been thought into shape before it ever could have become a material fact. And if we are willing to follow along the lines of the Great Architect of the Universe, we shall find our thoughts taking form, just as the universe took concrete form. It is the same mind operating through the individual. There is no difference in kind or quality, the only difference is one of degree.
9. The architect visualizes his building, he sees it as he wishes it to be. His thought becomes a plastic mold from which the building will eventually emerge, a high one or a low one, a beautiful one or a plain one, his vision takes form on paper and eventually the necessary material is utilized and the building stands complete.
10. The inventor visualizes his idea in exactly the same manner, for instance, Nikola Tesla, he with the giant intellect, one of the greatest inventors of all ages, the man who has brought forth the most amazing realities, always visualizes his inventions before attempting to work them out. He did not rush to embody them in form and then spend his time in correcting defects. Having first built up the idea in his imagination, he held it there as a mental picture, to be reconstructed and improved by his thought. "In this way," he writes in the Electrical Experimenter. "I am enabled to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of, and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete, the product of my brain. Invariably my devise works as I conceived it should; in twenty years there has not been a single exception. ~ Charles F Haanel, The Master Key System,#KEYS
210:The whole crux and difficulty of human life lies here. Man is this mental being, this mental consciousness working as mental force, aware in a way of the universal force and life of which he is part but, because he has not knowledge of its universality or even of the totality of his own being, unable to deal either with life in general or with his own life in a really effective and victorious movement of mastery. He seeks to know Matter in order to be master of the material environment, to know Life in order to be master of the vital existence, to know Mind in order to be master of the great obscure movement of mentality in which he is not only a jet of light of self-consciousness like the animal, but also more and more a flame of growing knowledge. Thus he seeks to know himself in order to be master of himself, to know the world in order to be master of the world. This is the urge of Existence in him, the necessity of the Consciousness he is, the impulsion of the Force that is his life, the secret will of Sachchidananda appearing as the individual in a world in which He expresses and yet seems to deny Himself. To find the conditions under which this inner impulsion is satisfied is the problem man must strive always to resolve and to that he is compelled by the very nature of his own existence and by the Deity seated within him; and until the problem is solved, the impulse satisfied, the human race cannot rest from its labour. Either man must fulfil himself by satisfying the Divine within him or he must produce out of himself a new and greater being who will be more capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine humanity or give place to Superman.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
211:But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive. There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; last, the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some considerable degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained identity, sayujya, the element of personal effort must normally predominate. But in proportion as this contact establishes itself, the sadhaka must become conscious that a force other than his own, a force transcending his egoistic endeavour and capacity, is at work in him and to this Power he learns progressively to submit himself and delivers up to it the charge of his Yoga. In the end his own will and force become one with the higher Power; he merges them in the divineWill and its transcendent and universal Force. He finds it thenceforward presiding over the necessary transformation of his mental, vital and physical being with an impartial wisdom and provident effectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and this self-merging are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready. Purified, liberated, plastic, illumined, it can begin to serve as a means for the direct action of a supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity or superhumanity, of the earth's spiritual progression or its transformation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T2],#KEYS
212:What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."
The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.
I have written all that only to explain what we mean whenwe speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else - so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to selfgiving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being - for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Seeking the Divine,#KEYS
213:The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 2.15, #KEYS
214:There is, indeed, a higher form of the buddhi that can be called the intuitive mind or intuitive reason, and this by its intuitions, its inspirations, its swift revelatory vision, its luminous insight and discrimination can do the work of the reason with a higher power, a swifter action, a greater and spontaneous certitude. It acts in a self-light of the truth which does not depend upon the torch-flares of the sense-mind and its limited uncertain percepts; it proceeds not by intelligent but by visional concepts: It is a kind of truth-vision, truth-hearing, truth-memory, direct truth-discernment. This true and authentic intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary mental reason which is too easily confused with it, that power of Involved reasoning that reaches its conclusion by a bound and does not need the ordinary steps of the logical mind. The logical reason proceeds pace after pace and tries the sureness of each step like a marl who is walking over unsafe ground and has to test by the hesitating touch of his foot each span of soil that he perceives with his eye. But this other supralogical process of the reason is a motion of rapid insight or swift discernment; it proceeds by a stride or leap, like a man who springs from one sure spot to another point of sure footing, -- or at least held by him to be sure. He sees this space he covers in one compact and flashing view, but he does not distinguish or measure either by eye or touch its successions, features and circumstances. This movement has something of the sense of power of the intuition, something of its velocity, some appearance of its light and certainty, arid we always are apt to take it for the intuition. But our assumption is an error and, if we trust to it, it may lead us into grievous blunders.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
215:If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya, 293, #KEYS
216:There is the one door in us that sometimes swings open upon the splendour of a truth beyond and, before it shuts again, allows a ray to touch us, - a luminous intimation which, if we have the strength and firmness, we may hold to in our faith and make a starting-point for another play of consciousness than that of the sense-mind, for the play of Intuition. For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, I am He, Thou art That, O Swetaketu, All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge,#KEYS
217:Though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence- to give it an inadequate name-the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 785-86,#KEYS
218:19 - When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer find them. - Sri Aurobindo
Is there really nothing ugly and repellent in the world? Is it our reason alone that sees things in that way?
To understand truly what Sri Aurobindo means here, you must yourself have had the experience of transcending reason and establishing your consciousness in a world higher than the mental intelligence. For from up there you can see, firstly, that everything that exists in the universe is an expression of Sachchidananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and therefore behind any appearance whatever, if you go deeply enough, you can perceive Sachchidananda, which is the principle of Supreme Beauty.
Secondly, you see that everything in the manifested universe is relative, so much so that there is no beauty which may not appear ugly in comparison with a greater beauty, no ugliness which may not appear beautiful in comparison with a yet uglier ugliness.
When you can see and feel in this way, you immediately become aware of the extreme relativity of these impressions and their unreality from the absolute point of view. However, so long as we dwell in the rational consciousness, it is, in a way, natural that everything that offends our aspiration for perfection, our will for progress, everything we seek to transcend and surmount, should seem ugly and repellent to us, since we are in search of a greater ideal and we want to rise higher.
And yet it is still only a half-wisdom which is very far from the true wisdom, a wisdom that appears wise only in the midst of ignorance and unconsciousness.
In the Truth everything is different, and the Divine shines in all things. 17 February 1960 ~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,#KEYS
219:When, in last week's aphorism, Sri Aurobindo opposed - as one might say - "knowledge" to "Wisdom", he was speaking of knowledge as it is lived in the average human consciousness, the knowledge which is obtained through effort and mental development, whereas here, on the contrary, the knowledge he speaks of is the essential Knowledge, the supramental divine Knowledge, Knowledge by identity. And this is why he describes it here as "vast and eternal", which clearly indicates that it is not human knowledge as we normally understand it.
Many people have asked why Sri Aurobindo said that the river is "slender". This is an expressive image which creates a striking contrast between the immensity of the divine, supramental Knowledge - the origin of this inspiration, which is infinite - and what a human mind can perceive of it and receive from it.
Even when you are in contact with these domains, the portion, so to say, which you perceive, is minimal, slender. It is like a tiny little stream or a few falling drops and these drops are so pure, so brilliant, so complete in themselves, that they give you the sense of a marvellous inspiration, the impression that you have reached infinite domains and risen very high above the ordinary human condition. And yet this is nothing in comparison with what is still to be perceived.
I have also been asked if the psychic being or psychic consciousness is the medium through which the inspiration is perceived.
Generally, yes. The first contact you have with higher regions is a psychic one. Certainly, before an inner psychic opening is achieved, it is difficult to have these inspirations. It can happen as an exception and under exceptional conditions as a grace, but the true contact comes through the psychic; because the psychic consciousness is certainly the medium with the greatest affinity with the divine Truth. ~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,#KEYS
220:One can concentrate in any of the three centres which is easiest to the sadhak or gives most result. The power of the concentration in the heart-centre is to open that centre and by the power of aspiration, love, bhakti, surrender remove the veil which covers and conceals the soul and bring forward the soul or psychic being to govern the mind, life and body and turn and open them all-fully-to the Divine, removing all that is opposed to that turning and opening.
This is what is called in this Yoga the psychic transformation. The power of concentration above the head is to bring peace, silence, liberation from the body sense, the identification with mind and life and open the way for the lower (mental vital-physical) consciousness to rise up to meet the higher Consciousness above and for the powers of the higher (spiritual or divine) Consciousness to descend into mind, life and body. This is what is called in this Yoga the spiritual transformation. If one begins with this movement, then the Power from above has in its descent to open all the centres (including the lowest centre) and to bring out the psychic being; for until that is done there is likely to be much difficulty and struggle of the lower consciousness obstructing, mixing with or even refusing the Divine Action from above. If the psychic being is once active this struggle and these difficulties can be greatly minimised. The power of concentration in the eyebrows is to open the centre there, liberate the inner mind and vision and the inner or Yogic consciousness and its experiences and powers. From here also one can open upwards and act also in the lower centres; but the danger of this process is that one may get shut up in one's mental spiritual formations and not come out of them into the free and integral spiritual experience and knowledge and integral change of the being and nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [where to concentrate?],#KEYS
221:Disciple: If the Asuras represent the dark side of God on the vital plane - does this dark side exist on every plane? If so, are there beings on the mental plane which correspond to the dark side?
Sri Aurobindo: The Asura is really the dark side of God on the mental plane. Mind is the very field of the Asura. His characteristic is egoistic strength, which refuses the Higher Law. The Asura has got Self-control, Tapas, intelligence, only, all that is for his ego.
On the vital plane the corresponding forces we call the Rakshashas which represent violent passions and impulses. There are other beings on the vital plane which we call pramatta and piśacha and these; manifest, more or less, on the physico-vital plane.
Distiple: What is the corresponding being on the higher plane?
Sri Aurobindo: On the higher plane there are no Asuras - there the Truth prevails. There are "Asuras" there in the Vedic sense,- "beings with divine powers". The mental Asura is only a deviation of that power.
The work of the Asura has all the characteristics of mind in it. It is mind refusing to submit to the Higher Law; it is the mind in revolt. It works on the basis of ego and ignorance.
Disciple: What are the forces that correspond to the dark side of God on the physical plane?
Sri Aurobindo: They are what may be called the "elemental beings", or rather, obscure elemental forces - they are more "forces" than "beings". It is these that the Theosophists call the "Elementals". They are not individualised beings like the Asura and the Rakshasas, they are ignorant forces working oh the subtle physical plane.
Disciple: What is the word for them in Sanskrit;?
Sri Aurobindo: What are called bhūtas seem most nearly to correspond to them.
Disciple: The term "Elemental" means that these work through the elements.
Sri Aurobindo: There are two kinds of "elementals": one mischievous and the other innocent. What the Europeans call the gnomes come under this category. ~ A B Purani, EVENING TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO, 15-06-1926,#KEYS
222:Disciple : What part does breathing exercise - Pranayama - play in bringing about the higher consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo : It sets the Pranic - vital - currents free and removes dullness of the brain so that the higher consciousness can come down. Pranayama does not bring dullness in the brain. My own experience, on the contrary, is that brain becomes illumined. When I was practising Pranayama at Baroda, I used to do it for about five hours in the day, - three hours in the morning and two in the evening. I found that the mind began to work with great illumination and power. I used to write poetry in those days. Before the Pranayama practice, usually I wrote five to eight lines per day; and about two hundred lines in a month. After the practice I could write 200 lines within half an hour. That was not the only result. Formerly my memory was dull. But after this practice I found that when the inspiration came I could remember all the lines in their order and write them down correctly at any time. Along with these enhanced functionings I could see an electrical activity all round the brain, and I could feel that it was made up of a subtle substance. I could feel everything as the working of that substance. That was far from your carbon-dioxide!
Disciple : How is it that Pranayama develops mental capacities? What part does it play in bringing about the higher consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo : It is the Pranic - vital - currents which sustain mental activity. When these currents are changed by Pranayama, they bring about a change in the brain. The cause of dullness of the brain is some obstruction in it which does not allow the higher thought to be communicated to it. When this obstruction is removed the higher mental being is able to communicate its action easily to the brain. When the higher consciousness is attained the brain does not become dull. My experience is that it becomes illumined.
~ Sri Aurobindo, A B Purani, Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, 19-9-1926,#KEYS
223:It must also be kept in mind that the supramental change is difficult, distant, an ultimate stage; it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista; it cannot be and must not be turned into a first aim, a constantly envisaged goal or an immediate objective. For it can only come into the view of possibility after much arduous self-conquest and self-exceeding, at the end of many long and trying stages of a difficult self-evolution of the nature. One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace by it our ordinary view of things, natural movements, motives of life; one must revolutionise the whole present build of our being. Next, we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the cosmic consciousness, realise the self, acquire a spiritualised and universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. Then only the passage into the supramental consciousness begins to become possible, and even then there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement. Yoga is a rapid and concentrated conscious evolution of the being, but however rapid, even though it may effect in a single life what in an instrumental Nature might take centuries and millenniums or many hundreds of lives, still all evolution must move by stages; even the greatest rapidity and concentration of the movement cannot swallow up all the stages or reverse natural process and bring the end near to the beginning.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supermind and the Yoga of Works, 281,#KEYS
224:The capacity for visions, when it is sincere and spontaneous, can put you in touch with events which you are not capable of knowing in your outer consciousness.... There is a very interesting fact, it is that somewhere in the terrestrial mind, somewhere in the terrestrial vital, somewhere in the subtle physical, one can find an exact, perfect, automatic recording of everything that happens. It is the most formidable memory one could imagine, which misses nothing, forgets nothing, records all. And if you are able to enter into it, you can go backward, you can go forward, and in all directions, and you will have the "memory" of all things - not only of things of the past, but of things to come. For everything is recorded there.
In the mental world, for instance, there is a domain of the physical mind which is related to physical things and keeps the memory of physical happenings upon earth. It is as though you were entering into innumerable vaults, one following another indefinitely, and these vaults are filled with small pigeon-holes, one above another, one above another, with tiny doors. Then if you want to know something and if you are conscious, you look, and you see something like a small point - a shining point; you find that this is what you wish to know and you have only to concentrate there and it opens; and when it opens, there is a sort of an unrolling of something like extremely subtle manuscripts, but if your concentration is sufficiently strong you begin to read as though from a book. And you have the whole story in all its details. There are thousands of these little holes, you know; when you go for a walk there, it is as though you were walking in infinity. And in this way you can find the exact facts about whatever you want to know. But I must tell you that what you find is never what has been reported in history - histories are always planned out; I have never come across a single "historical" fact which is like history.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951, 109 [T7],#KEYS
225:indifference to things of the body :::
This detachment of the mind must be strengthened by a certain attitude of indifference to the things of the body; we must not care essentially about its sleep or its waking, its movement or its rest, its pain or its pleasure, its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its comfort or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. This does not mean that we shall not keep the body in right order so far as we can; we have not to fall into violent asceticisms or a positive neglect of the physical frame. But we have not either to be affected in mind by hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-health or attach the importance which the physical and vital man attaches to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor must this instrumental importance be allowed to assume the proportions of a necessity; we must not for instance imagine that the purity of the mind depends on the things we eat or drink, although during a certain stage restrictions in eating and drinking are useful to our inner progress; nor on the other hand must we continue to think that the dependence of the mind or even of the life on food and drink is anything more than a habit, a customary relation which Nature has set up between these principles. As a matter of fact the food we take can be reduced by contrary habit and new relation to a minimum without the mental or vital vigour being in any way reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious development they can be trained to a greater potentiality of vigour by learning to rely on the secret fountains of mental and vital energy with which they are connected more than upon the minor aid of physical aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is however more important in the Yoga of self-perfection than here; for our present purpose the important point is the renunciation by the mind of attachment to or dependence on the things of the body.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from Subjection to the Body,#KEYS
226:My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time. My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance. I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse. After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way. In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power OF MOVEMENT RESPONDING TO THE STIMULI OF THE SENSE ORGANS AND THINKING AND ACTING ACCORDINGLY.
~ Nikola Tesla, The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla,#KEYS
227:The way of integral knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of the thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations; a greater faculty of knowledge is behind that can open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe. An integral self-fulfilment, - an absolute, a culmination for the experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit of works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute, a culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its hunger after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge. Not something quite other than themselves from which they are all cast away is the end of these things in our nature, but something supreme in which they at once transcend themselves and find their own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,#KEYS
228:Nati is the submission of the soul to the will of God; its acceptance of all touches as His touches, of all experience as His play with the soul of man. Nati may be with titiksha, feeling the sorrow but accepting it as God's will, or with udasinata, rising superior to it and regarding joy and sorrow equally as God's working in these lower instruments, or with ananda, receiving everything as the play of Krishna and therefore in itself delightful. The last is the state of the complete Yogin, for by this continual joyous or anandamaya namaskara to God constantly practised we arrive eventually at the entire elimination of grief, pain etc, the entire freedom from the dwandwas, and find the Brahmananda in every smallest, most trivial, most apparently discordant detail of life & experience in this human body. We get rid entirely of fear and suffering; Anandam Brahmano vidvan na bibheti kutaschana. We may have to begin with titiksha and udasinata but it is in this ananda that we must consummate the siddhi of samata. The Yogin receives victory and defeat, success and ill-success, pleasure and pain, honour and disgrace with an equal, a sama ananda, first by buddhi-yoga, separating himself from his habitual mental & nervous reactions & insisting by vichara on the true nature of the experience itself and of his own soul which is secretly anandamaya, full of the sama ananda in all things. He comes to change all the ordinary values of experience; amangala reveals itself to him as mangala, defeat & ill-success as the fulfilment of God's immediate purpose and a step towards ultimate victory, grief and pain as concealed and perverse forms of pleasure. A stage arrives even, when physical pain itself, the hardest thing for material man to bear, changes its nature in experience and becomes physical ananda; but this is only at the end when this human being, imprisoned in matter, subjected to mind, emerges from his subjection, conquers his mind and delivers himself utterly in his body, realising his true anandamaya self in every part of the adhara.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Record Of Yoga,#KEYS
229:Many men think and write through inspiration. From where does it come?
Many! That is indeed a wonderful thing. I did not think there have been so many.... So?
Poets, when they write poems...
Ah! Inspirations come from very many different places. There are inspirations that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher be- ing.... One may be inspired also to do and say many stupid things!
What does "inspired" mean?
It means receiving something which is beyond you, which was not within you; to open yourself to an influence which is outside your individual conscious being.
Indeed, one can have also an inspiration to commit a murder! In countries where they decapitate murderers, cut off their heads, this causes a very brutal death which throws out the vital being, not allowing it the time to decompose for coming out of the body; the vital being is violently thrown out of the body, with all its impulses; and generally it goes and lodges itself in one of those present there, men half horrified, half with a kind of unhealthy curiosity. That makes the opening and it enters within. Statistics have proved that most young murderers admit that the impulse came to them when they were present at the death of another murderer. It was an "inspiration", but of a detestable kind.
Fundamentally it is a moment of openness to something which was not within your personal consciousness, which comes from outside and rushes into you and makes you do something. This is the widest formula that can be given.
Now, generally, when people say: "Oh! he is an inspired poet", it means he has received something from high above and expressed it in a remarkable manneR But one should rather say that his inspiration is of a high quality. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#KEYS
230:It is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached to its past and present associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically changed in what are now our fixed circumstances.We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop into that animal. Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own instinctive aspiration,-Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Ego and the Dualities, #KEYS
231:separating from the heart and mind and the benefits of doing so :::
Therefore the mental Purusha has to separate himself from association and self-identification with this desire-mind. He has to say I am not this thing that struggles and suffers, grieves and rejoices, loves and hates, hopes and is baffled, is angry and afraid and cheerful and depressed, a thing of vital moods and emotional passions. All these are merely workings and habits of Prakriti in the sensational and emotional mind. The mind then draws back from its emotions and becomes with these, as with the bodily movements and experiences, the observer or witness. There is again an inner cleavage. There is this emotional mind in which these moods and passions continue to occur according to the habit of the modes of Nature and there is the observing mind which sees them, studies and understands but is detached from them. It observes them as if in a sort of action and play on a mental stage of personages other than itself, at first with interest and a habit of relapse into identification, then with entire calm and detachment, and, finally, attaining not only to calm but to the pure delight of its own silent existence, with a smile at thier unreality as at the imaginary joys and sorrows of a child who is playing and loses himself in the play. Secondly, it becomes aware of itself as master of the sanction who by his withdrawl of sanction can make this play to cease. When the sanction is withdrawn, another significant phenomenon takes place; the emotional mind becomes normally calm and pure and free from these reactions, and even when they come, they no longer rise from within but seem to fall on it as impression from outside to which its fibers are still able to respond; but this habit of reponse dies away and the emotional mind is in time entirely liberated from the passions which it has renounced. Hope and fear, joy and grief, liking and disliking, attraction and repulsion, content and discontent, gladness and depression, horror and wrath and fear and disgust and shame and the passions of love and hatred fall away from the liberated psychic being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Heart and the Mind, 352,#KEYS
232:I know perfectly well that pain and suffering and struggle and excesses of despair are natural - though not inevitable - on the way, - not because they are helps, but because they are imposed on us by the darkness of this human nature out of which we have to struggle into the Light. . . .
The dark path is there and there are many who make like the Christians a gospel of spiritual suffering; many hold it to be the unavoidable price of victory. It may be so under certain circumstances, as it has been in so many lives at least at the beginning, or one may choose to make it so. But then the price has to be paid with resignation, fortitude or a tenacious resilience. I admit that if borne in that way the attacks of the Dark Forces or the ordeals they impose have a meaning. After each victory gained over them, there is then a sensible advance; often they seem to show us the difficulties in ourselves which we have to overcome and to say, "Here you must conquer us and here."
But all the same it is a too dark and difficult way which nobody should follow on whom the necessity does not lie.
In any case one thing can never help and that is to despond always and say, "I am unfit; I am not meant for the Yoga." And worse still are these perilous mental formations such as you are always accepting that you must fare like X (one whose difficulty of exaggerated ambition was quite different from yours) and that you have only six years etc. These are clear formations of the Dark Forces seeking not only to sterilise your aspiration but to lead you away and so prevent your sharing in the fruit of the victory hereafter. I do not know what Krishnaprem has said but his injunction, if you have rightly understood it, is one that cannot stand as valid, since so many have done Yoga relying on tapasya or anything else but not confident of any Divine Grace. It is not that, but the soul's demand for a higher Truth or a higher life that is indispensable. Where that is, the Divine Grace whether believed in or not, will intervene. If you believe, that hastens and facilitates things; if you cannot yet believe, still the soul's aspiration will justify itself with whatever difficulty and struggle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV,#KEYS
233:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a qualityless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe. It is the cosmic and the supracosmic spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha and supreme shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the Mystery, translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit, but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light and impenetrable for ever. These things are to the dimensional mind irreconcilable opposites, but to the constant vision and experience of the supramental Truth-Consciousness they are so simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence. The walls constructed by the measuring and separating Intellect have disappeared and the Truth in its simplicity and beauty appears and reduces all to terms of its harmony and unity and light. Dimensions and distinctions remain but as figures for use, not a separative prison for the self-forgetting Spirit.
2:In the ordinary Yoga of knowledge it is only necessary to recognise two planes of our consciousness, the spiritual and the materialised mental; the pure reason standing between these two views them both, cuts through the illusions of the phenomenal world, exceeds the materialised mental plane, sees the reality of the spiritual; and then the will of the individual Purusha unifying itself with this poise of knowledge rejects the lower and draws back to the supreme plane, dwells there, loses mind and body, sheds life from it and merges itself in the supreme Purusha, is delivered from individual existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 2.01 - The Object of Knowledge,#KEYS
234:The guiding law of spiritual experience can only come by an opening of human consciousness to the Divine Consciousness; there must be the power to receive in us the working and command and dynamic presence of the Divine Shakti and surrender ourselves to her control; it is that surrender and that control which bring the guidance. But the surrender is not sure, there is no absolute certitude of the guidance so long as we are besieged by mind formations and life impulses and instigations of ego which may easily betray us into the hands of a false experience. This danger can only be countered by the opening of a now nine-tenths concealed inmost soul or psychic being that is already there but not commonly active within us. That is the inner light we must liberate; for the light of this inmost soul is our one sure illumination so long as we walk still amidst the siege of the Ignorance and the Truth-consciousness has not taken up the entire control of our Godward endeavour. The working of the Divine Force in us under the conditions of the transition and the light of the psychic being turning us always towards a conscious and seeing obedience to that higher impulsion and away from the demands and instigations of the Forces of the Ignorance, these between them create an ever progressive inner law of our action which continues till the spiritual and supramental can be established in our nature. In the transition there may well be a period in which we take up all life and action and offer them to the Divine for purification, change and deliverance of the truth within them, another period in which we draw back and build a spiritual wall around us admitting through its gates only such activities as consent to undergo the law of the spiritual transformation, a third in which a free and all-embracing action, but with new forms fit for the utter truth of the Spirit, can again be made possible. These things, however, will be decided by no mental rule but in the light of the soul within us and by the ordaining force and progressive guidance of the Divine Power that secretly or overtly first impels, then begins clearly to control and order and finally takes up the whole burden of the Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 138, #KEYS
235:Are there no false visions?
There are what in appearance are false visions. There are, for instance, hundreds or thousands of people who say that they have seen the Christ. Of that number those who have actually seen Him are perhaps less than a dozen, and even with them there is much to say about what they have seen. What the others saw may be an emanation; or it may be a thought or even an image remembered by the mind. There are, too, those who are strong believers in the Christ and have had a vision of some Force or Being or some remembered image that is very luminous and makes upon them a strong impression. They have seen something which they feel belongs to another world, to a supernatural order, and it has created in them an emotion of fear, awe or joy; and as they believe in the Christ, they can think of nothing else and say it is He. But the same vision or experience if it comes to one who believes in the Hindu, the Mohammedan or some other religion, will take a different name and form. The thing seen or experienced may be fundamentally the same, but it is formulated differently according to the different make-up of the apprehending mind. It is only those that can go beyond beliefs and faiths and myths and traditions who are able to say what it really is; but these are few, very few. You must be free from every mental construction, you must divest yourself of all that is merely local or temporal, before you can know what you have seen.
Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your mental predisposition. There is only one truth, one reality; but the forms through which it may be expressed are many. 21 April 1929 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
236:So then let the Adept set this sigil upon all the Words he hath writ in the book of the Works of his Will. And let him then end all, saying: Such are the Words!2 For by this he maketh proclamation before all them that be about his Circle that these Words are true and puissant, binding what he would bind, and loosing what he would loose. Let the Adept perform this ritual right, perfect in every part thereof, once daily for one moon, then twice, at dawn and dusk, for two moons; next thrice, noon added, for three moons; afterwards, midnight making up his course, for four moons four times every day. Then let the Eleventh Moon be consecrated wholly to this Work; let him be instant in constant ardour, dismissing all but his sheer needs to eat and sleep.3 For know that the true Formula4 whose virtue sufficed the Beast in this Attainment, was thus:
INVOKE OFTEN
So may all men come at last to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel: thus sayeth The Beast, and prayeth his own Angel that this Book be as a burning Lamp, and as a living Spring, for Light and Life to them that read therein.
1. There is an alternative spelling, TzBA-F, where the Root, "an Host," has the value of 93. The Practicus should revise this Ritual throughout in the Light of his personal researches in the Qabalah, and make it his own peculiar property. The spelling here suggested implies that he who utters the Word affirms his allegiance to the symbols 93 and 6; that he is a warrior in the army of Will, and of the Sun. 93 is also the number of AIWAZ and 6 of The Beast.
2. The consonants of LOGOS, "Word," add (Hebrew values) to 93 [reading the Sigma as Samekh = 60; reading it as Shin = 300 gives 333], and ΕΠΗ, "Words" (whence "Epic") has also that value; ΕΙ∆Ε ΤΑ ΕΠΗ might be the phrase here intended; its number is 418. This would then assert the accomplishment of the Great Work; this is the natural conclusion of the Ritual. Cf. CCXX, III, 75.
3. These needs are modified during the process of Initiation both as to quantity and quality. One should not become anxious about one's phyiscal or mental health on à priori grounds, but pay attention only to indubitable symptoms of distress should such arise. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber Samekh,#KEYS
237:An old man of sixty began practising Yoga by reading your books. Eventually he developed signs of insanity. His son describes his condition and asks for advice. I am sending his letter.
As for the letter, I suppose you will have to tell the writer that his father committed a mistake when he took up Yoga without a Guru—for the mental idea about a Guru cannot take the place of the actual living influence. This Yoga especially, as I have written in my books, needs the help of the Guru and cannot be done without it. The condition into which his father got was a breakdown, not a state of siddhi. He passed out of the normal mental consciousness into a contact with some intermediate zone of consciousness (not the spiritual) where one can be subjected to all sorts of voices, suggestions, ideas, so-called aspirations which are not genuine. I have warned against the dangers of this intermediate zone in one of my books. The sadhak can avoid entering into this zone—if he enters, he has to look with indifference on all these things and observe them without lending any credence, by so doing he can safely pass into the true spiritual light. If he takes them all as true or real without discrimination, he is likely to land himself in a great mental confusion and, if there is in addition a lesion or weakness of the brain—the latter is quite possible in one who has been subject to apoplexy—it may have serious consequences and even lead to a disturbance of the reason. If there is ambition, or other motive of the kind mixed up in the spiritual seeking, it may lead to a fall in the Yoga and the growth of an exaggerated egoism or megalomania—of this there are several symptoms in the utterances of his father during the crisis. In fact one cannot or ought not to plunge into the experiences of this sadhana without a fairly long period of preparation and purification (unless one has already a great spiritual strength and elevation). Sri Aurobindo himself does not care to accept many into his path and rejects many more than he accepts. It would be well if he can get his father to pursue the sadhana no farther—for what he is doing is not really Sri Aurobindo's Yoga but something he has constructed in his own mind and once there has been an upset of this kind the wisest course is discontinuance.
21 April 1937
~ Sri Aurobindo, LOHATA, The Guru,#KEYS
238:34
D: What are the eight limbs of knowledge (jnana ashtanga)?
M: The eight limbs are those which have been already mentioned, viz., yama, niyama etc., but differently defined:
(1) Yama: This is controlling the aggregate of sense-organs, realizing the defects that are present in the world consisting of the body, etc.
(2) Niyama: This is maintaining a stream of mental modes that relate to the Self and rejecting the contrary modes. In other words, it means love that arises uninterruptedly for the Supreme Self.
(3) Asana: That with the help of which constant meditation on Brahman is made possible with ease is asana.
(4) Pranayama: Rechaka (exhalation) is removing the two unreal aspects of name and form from the objects constituting the world, the body etc., puraka (inhalation) is grasping the three real aspects, existence, consciousness and bliss, which are constant in those objects, and kumbhaka is retaining those aspects thus grasped.
(5) Pratyahara: This is preventing name and form which have been removed from re-entering the mind.
(6) Dharana: This is making the mind stay in the Heart, without straying outward, and realizing that one is the Self itself which is Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.
(7) Dhyana: This is meditation of the form 'I am only pure consciousness'. That is, after leaving aside the body which consists of five sheaths, one enquires 'Who am I?', and as a result of that, one stays as 'I' which shines as the Self.
(8) Samadhi: When the 'I-manifestation' also ceases, there is (subtle) direct experience. This is samadhi.
For pranayama, etc., detailed here, the disciplines such as asana, etc., mentioned in connection with yoga are not necessary.
The limbs of knowledge may be practised at all places and at all times. Of yoga and knowledge, one may follow whichever is pleasing to one, or both, according to circumstances. The great teachers say that forgetfulness is the root of all evil, and is death for those who seek release,10 so one should rest the mind in one's Self and should never forget the Self: this is the aim. If the mind is controlled, all else can be controlled. The distinction between yoga with eight limbs and knowledge with eight limbs has been set forth elaborately in the sacred texts; so only the substance of this teaching has been given here. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Self-Enquiry, 34,#KEYS
239:the three stages of the ascent :::
There are three stages of the ascent, -at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, the higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, ideas, and at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance.In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process.In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will,#KEYS
240:requirements for the psychic :::
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on will and strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that surpasses the mere practical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, -- for it prefers rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, -- on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or with its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery as instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,#KEYS
241:Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tenement, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and spaceless Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify themselves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect. Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often represented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regulating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no acceptance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier will of the great Mother. It is better and more rational to accept what she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with intermittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Human Aspiration, #KEYS
242:Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality. But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Integral Knowledge, 681,#KEYS
243:Why do we forget things?
Ah! I suppose there are several reasons. First, because one makes use of the memory to remember. Memory is a mental instrument and depends on the formation of the brain. Your brain is constantly growing, unless it begins to degenerate, but still its growth can continue for a very, very long time, much longer than that of the body. And in this growth, necessarily some things will take the place of others. And as the mental instrument develops, things which have served their term or the transitory moment in the development may be wiped out to give place to the result. So the result of all that you knew is there, living in itself, but the road traversed to reach it may be completely blurred. That is, a good functioning of the memory means remembering only the results so as to be able to have the elements for moving forward and a new construction. That is more important than just retaining things rigidly in the mind.
Now, there is another aspect also. Apart from the mental memory, which is something defective, there are states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness in which one happens to be registers the phenomena of a particular moment, whatever they may be. If your consciousness remains limpid, wide and strong, you can at any moment whatsoever, by concentrating, call into the active consciousness what you did, thought, saw, observed at any time before; all this you can remember by bringing up in yourself the same state of consciousness. And that, that is never forgotten. You could live a thousand years and you would still remember it. Consequently, if you don't want to forget, it must be your consciousness which remembers and not your mental memory. Your mental memory will be wiped out inevitably, get blurred, and new things will take the place of the old ones. But things of which you are conscious you do not forget. You have only to bring up the same state of consciousness again. And thus one can remember circumstances one has lived thousands of years ago, if one knows how to bring up the same state of consciousness. It is in this way that one can remember one's past lives. This never gets blotted out, while you don't have any more the memory of what you have done physically when you were very young. You would be told many things you no longer remember. That gets wiped off immediately. For the brain is constantly changing and certain weaker cells are replaced by others which are much stronger, and by other combinations, other cerebral organisations. And so, what was there before is effaced or deformed.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
244:
"Without conscious occult powers, is it possible to help or protect from a distance somebody in difficulty or danger? If so, what is the practical procedure?"
Then a sub-question:
"What can thought do?"
We are not going to speak of occult processes at all; although, to tell the truth, everything that happens in the invisible world is occult, by definition. But still, practically, there are two processes which do not exclude but complete each other, but which may be used separately according to one's preference.
It is obvious that thought forms a part of one of the methods, quite an important part. I have already told you several times that if one thinks clearly and powerfully, one makes a mental formation, and that every mental formation is an entity independent of its fashioner, having its own life and tending to realise itself in the mental world - I don't mean that you see your formation with your physical eyes, but it exists in the mental world, it has its own particular independent existence. If you have made a formation with a definite aim, its whole life will tend to the realisation of this aim. Therefore, if you want to help someone at a distance, you have only to formulate very clearly, very precisely and strongly the kind of help you want to give and the result you wish to obtain. That will have its effect. I cannot say that it will be all-powerful, for the mental world is full of innumerable formations of this kind and naturally they clash and contradict one another; hence the strongest and the most persistent will have the best of it.
Now, what is it that gives strength and persistence to mental formations? - It is emotion and will. If you know how to add to your mental formation an emotion, affection, tenderness, love, and an intensity of will, a dynamism, it will have a much greater chance of success. That is the first method. It is within the scope of all those who know how to think, and even more of those who know how to love. But as I said, the power is limited and there is great competition in that world.
Therefore, even if one has no knowledge at all but has trust in the divine Grace, if one has the faith that there is something in the world like the divine Grace, and that this something can answer a prayer, an aspiration, an invocation, then, after making one's mental formation, if one offers it to the Grace and puts one's trust in it, asks it to intervene and has the faith that it will intervene, then indeed one has a chance of success.
Try, and you will surely see the result.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1956, 253,#KEYS
245:Vijnana, true ideation, called ritam, truth or vedas, knowledge in the Vedas, acts in human mind by four separate functions; revelation, termed drishti, sight; inspiration termed sruti,hearing; and the two faculties of discernment, smriti, memory,which are intuition, termed ketu, and discrimination, termed daksha, division, or viveka, separation. By drishti we see ourselves the truth face to face, in its own form, nature or self-existence; by sruti we hear the name, sound or word by which the truth is expressed & immediately suggested to the knowledge; by ketu we distinguish a truth presented to us behind a veil whether of result or process, as Newton discovered the law of gravitation hidden behind the fall of the apple; by viveka we distinguish between various truths and are able to put them in their right place, order and relation to each other, or, if presented with mingled truth & error, separate the truth from the falsehood. Agni Jatavedas is termed in the Veda vivichi, he who has the viveka, who separates truth from falsehood; but this is only a special action of the fourth ideal faculty & in its wider scope, it is daksha, that which divides & rightly distributes truth in its multiform aspects. The ensemble of the four faculties is Vedas or divine knowledge. When man is rising out of the limited & error-besieged mental principle, the faculty most useful to him, most indispensable is daksha or viveka. Drishti of Vijnana transmuted into terms of mind has become observation, sruti appears as imagination, intuition as intelligent perception, viveka as reasoning & intellectual judgment and all of these are liable to the constant touch of error. Human buddhi, intellect, is a distorted shadow of the true ideative faculties. As we return from these shadows to their ideal substance viveka or daksha must be our constant companion; for viveka alone can get rid of the habit of mental error, prevent observation being replaced by false illumination, imagination by false inspiration, intelligence by false intuition, judgment & reason by false discernment. The first sign of human advance out of the anritam of mind to the ritam of the ideal faculty is the growing action of a luminous right discernment which fixes instantly on the truth, feels instantly the presence of error. The fullness, the manhana of this viveka is the foundation & safeguard of Ritam or Vedas. The first great movement of Agni Jatavedas is to transform by the divine will in mental activity his lower smoke-covered activity into the bright clearness & fullness of the ideal discernment. Agne adbhuta kratw a dakshasya manhana.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire, 717,#KEYS
246:INVOCATION
The ultimate invocation, that of Kia, cannot be performed. The paradox is that as Kia has no dualized qualities, there are no attributes by which to invoke it. To give it one quality is merely to deny it another. As an observant dualistic being once said:
I am that I am not.
Nevertheless, the magician may need to make some rearrangements or additions to what he is. Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which one is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation. Alternatively, the process of invocation may be seen as adding to the magician's psyche any elements which are missing. It is true that the mind must be finally surrendered as one enters fully into Chaos, but a complete and balanced psychocosm is more easily surrendered.
The magical process of shuffling beliefs and desires attendant upon the process of invocation also demonstrates that one's dominant obsessions or personality are quite arbitrary, and hence more easily banished.
There are many maps of the mind (psychocosms), most of which are inconsistent, contradictory, and based on highly fanciful theories. Many use the symbology of god forms, for all mythology embodies a psychology. A complete mythic pantheon resumes all of man's mental characteristics. Magicians will often use a pagan pantheon of gods as the basis for invoking some particular insight or ability, as these myths provide the most explicit and developed formulation of the particular idea's extant. However it is possible to use almost anything from the archetypes of the collective unconscious to the elemental qualities of alchemy.
If the magician taps a deep enough level of power, these forms may manifest with sufficient force to convince the mind of the objective existence of the god. Yet the aim of invocation is temporary possession by the god, communication from the god, and manifestation of the god's magical powers, rather than the formation of religious cults.
The actual method of invocation may be described as a total immersion in the qualities pertaining to the desired form. One invokes in every conceivable way. The magician first programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature. In the most elaborate form of ritual he may surround himself with the sounds, smells, colors, instruments, memories, numbers, symbols, music, and poetry suggestive of the god or quality. Secondly he unites his life force to the god image with which he has united his mind. This is accomplished with techniques from the gnosis. Figure 5 shows some examples of maps of the mind. Following are some suggestions for practical ritual invocation.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
247:10000 ::: The True Object of Spiritual Seeking:
To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him,-that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth-these things cannot be the first or true object of spiritual seeking. We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in the inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a half-way formation the true growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an outflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outward, not by the working out of a mental principle.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T1],#KEYS
248:What is the difference between meditation and concentration?
Meditation is a purely mental activity, it interests only the mental being. One can concentrate while meditating but this is a mental concentration; one can get a silence but it is a purely mental silence, and the other parts of the being are kept immobile and inactive so as not to disturb the meditation. You may pass twenty hours of the day in meditation and for the remaining four hours you will be an altogether ordinary man because only the mind has been occupied-the rest of the being, the vital and the physical, is kept under pressure so that it may not disturb. In meditation nothing is directly done for the other parts of the being.
Certainly this indirect action can have an effect, but... I have known in my life people whose capacity for meditation was remarkable but who, when not in meditation, were quite ordinary men, even at times ill-natured people, who would become furious if their meditation was disturbed. For they had learnt to master only their mind, not the rest of their being.
Concentration is a more active state. You may concentrate mentally, you may concentrate vitally, psychically, physically, and you may concentrate integrally. Concentration or the capacity to gather oneself at one point is more difficult than meditation. You may gather together one portion of your being or consciousness or you may gather together the whole of your consciousness or even fragments of it, that is, the concentration may be partial, total or integral, and in each case the result will be different.
If you have the capacity to concentrate, your meditation will be more interesting and easieR But one can meditate without concentrating. Many follow a chain of ideas in their meditation - it is meditation, not concentration.
Is it possible to distinguish the moment when one attains perfect concentration from the moment when, starting from this concentration, one opens oneself to the universal Energy?
Yes. You concentrate on something or simply you gather yourself together as much as is possible for you and when you attain a kind of perfection in concentration, if you can sustain this perfection for a sufficiently long time, then a door opens and you pass beyond the limit of your ordinary consciousness-you enter into a deeper and higher knowledge. Or you go within. Then you may experience a kind of dazzling light, an inner wonder, a beatitude, a complete knowledge, a total silence. There are, of course, many possibilities but the phenomenon is always the same.
To have this experience all depends upon your capacity to maintain your concentration sufficiently long at its highest point of perfection. ~ The Mother,#KEYS
249:The preliminary movement of Rajayoga is careful self-discipline by which good habits of mind are substituted for the lawless movements that indulge the lower nervous being. By the practice of truth, by renunciation of all forms of egoistic seeking, by abstention from injury to others, by purity, by constant meditation and inclination to the divine Purusha who is the true lord of the mental kingdom, a pure, clear state of mind and heart is established.
This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery. But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pranayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, typified in Yogic terminology by the kundalini, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of mental force by the successive stages which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state of the consciousness which is called Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on its object which our philosophy asserts as the primary cosmic energy and the method of divine action upon the world. By this capacity the Yogin, already possessed of the highest supracosmic knowledge and experience in the state of trance, is able in the waking state to acquire directly whatever knowledge and exercise whatever mastery may be useful or necessary to his activities in the objective world.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga, 36,#KEYS
250:root of the falsification and withdrawl of divine love :::
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 Nature-forces. 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. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 166,#KEYS
251:What do we understand by the term "chance"? Chance can only be the opposite of order and harmony. There is only one true harmony and that is the supramental - the reign of Truth, the expression of the Divine Law. In the Supermind, therefore, chance has no place. But in the lower Nature the supreme Truth is obscured: hence there is an absence of that divine unity of purpose and action which alone can constitute order. Lacking this unity, the domain of lower Nature is governed by what we may call chance - that is to say, it is a field in which various conflicting forces intermix, having no single definite aim. Whatever arises out of such a rushing together of forces is a result of confusion, dissonance and falsehood - a product of chance. Chance is not merely a conception to cover our ignorance of the causes at work; it is a description of the uncertain mele ́e of the lower Nature which lacks the calm one-pointedness of the divine Truth. The world has forgotten its divine origin and become an arena of egoistic energies; but it is still possible for it to open to the Truth, call it down by its aspiration and bring about a change in the whirl of chance. What men regard as a mechanical sequence of events, owing to their own mental associations, experiences and generalisations, is really manipulated by subtle agencies each of which tries to get its own will done. The world has got so subjected to these undivine agencies that the victory of the Truth cannot be won except by fighting for it. It has no right to it: it has to gain it by disowning the falsehood and the perversion, an important part of which is the facile notion that, since all things owe their final origin to the Divine, all their immediate activities also proceed directly from it. The fact is that here in the lower Nature the Divine is veiled by a cosmic Ignorance and what takes place does not proceed directly from the divine knowledge. That everything is equally the will of God is a very convenient suggestion of the hostile influences which would have the creation stick as tightly as possible to the disorder and ugliness to which it has been reduced. So what is to be done, you ask? Well, call down the Light, open yourselves to the power of Transformation. Innumerable times the divine peace has been given to you and as often you have lost it - because something in you refuses to surrender its petty egoistic routine. If you are not always vigilant, your nature will return to its old unregenerate habits even after it has been filled with the descending Truth. It is the struggle between the old and the new that forms the crux of the Yoga; but if you are bent on being faithful to the supreme Law and Order revealed to you, the parts of your being belonging to the domain of chance will, however slowly, be converted and divinised. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #KEYS
252:How can one awaken his Yoga-shakti?
It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That's all.
Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that's not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one's life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that's enough.
One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes.
Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must find one's own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before.
If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn't have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing - how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about - if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one's being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it - afterwards. Like that it is sure.
One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 211-212,#KEYS
253:- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expression, - all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in ideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin's distinction from other men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from there: it must not be made in the mind, - for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man's that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 142 [T4],#KEYS
254:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.
This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
255:Concentration is a gathering together of the consciousness and either centralising at one point or turning on a single object, e.g., the Divine; there can be also be a gathered condition throughout the whole being, not at a point. In meditation it is not indispensable to gather like this, one can simply remain with a quiet mind thinking of one subject or observing what comes in the consciousness and dealing with it. ... Of this true consciousness other than the superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other ways.
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Infinite. There it begins to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head in only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise, one may get shut up in one's own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reflection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there. For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternatively - but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the most desirable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
256:There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge. This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#KEYS
257:3. Conditions internal and external that are most essential for meditation. There are no essential external conditions, but solitude and seculsion at the time of meditation as well as stillness of the body are helpful, sometimes almost necessary to the beginning. But one should not be bound by external conditions. Once the habit of meditation is formed, it should be made possible to do it in all circumstances, lying, sitting, walking, alone, in company, in silence or in the midst of noise etc.
The first internal condition necessary is concentration of the will against the obstacles to meditation, i.e. wandering of the mind, forgetfulness, sleep, physical and nervous impatience and restlessness etc. If the difficulty in meditation is that thoughts of all kinds come in, that is not due to hostile forces but to the ordinary nature of the human mind. All sadhaks have this difficulty and with many it lasts for a very long time. There are several was of getting rid of it. One of them is to look at the thoughts and observe what is the nature of the human mind as they show it but not to give any sanction and to let them run down till they come to a standstill - this is a way recommended by Vivekananda in his Rajayoga. Another is to look at the thoughts as not one's own, to stand back as the witness Purusha and refuse the sanction - the thoughts are regarded as things coming from outside, from Prakriti, and they must be felt as if they were passers-by crossing the mind-space with whom one has no connection and in whom one takes no interest. In this way it usually happens that after the time the mind divides into two, a part which is the mental witness watching and perfectly undisturbed and quiet and a part in which the thoughts cross or wander. Afterwards one can proceed to silence or quiet the Prakriti part also. There is a third, an active method by which one looks to see where the thoughts come from and finds they come not from oneself, but from outside the head as it were; if one can detect them coming, then, before enter, they have to be thrown away altogether. This is perhaps the most difficult way and not all can do it, but if it can be done it is the shortest and most powerful road to silence. It is not easy to get into the Silence. That is only possible by throwing out all mental-vital activities. It is easier to let the Silence descend into you, i.e., to open yourself and let it descend. The way to do this and the way to call down the higher powers is the same. It is to remain quiet at the time of efforts to pull down the Power or the Silence but keeping only a silent will and aspiration for them. If the mind is active one has to learn to look at it, drawn back and not giving sanction from within, until its habitual or mechanical activities begin to fall quiet for want of support from within. if it is too persistent, a steady rejection without strain or struggle is the one thing to be done.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes,#KEYS
258:on purifying ego and desire :::
The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation, the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consummation we desire. And since in the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego; for otherwise we shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage.These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate.
In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all is the vital selfs craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, -wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama karma. ...
The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [102],#KEYS
259:The Mother once described the characteristics of the unity-body, of the future supramental body, to a young Ashramite: 'You know, if there is something on that window-sill and if I [in a supramental body] want to take it, I stretch out my hand and it becomes - wow! - long, and I have the thing in my hand without even having to get up from my chair ... Physically, I shall be able to be here and there at the same time. I shall be able to communicate with many people at the same time. To have something in my hand, I'll just have to wish for it. I think about something and I want it and it is already in my hand. With this transformed body I shall be free of the fetters of ignorance, pain, of mortality and unconsciousness. I shall be able to do many things at the same time. The transparent, luminous, strong, light, elastic body won't need any material things to subsist on ... The body can even be lengthened if one wants it to become tall, or shrunk when one wants it to be small, in any circumstances ... There will be all kinds of changes and there will be powers without limit. And it won't be something funny. Of course, I am giving you somewhat childish examples to tease you and to show the difference. 'It will be a true being, perfect in proportion, very, very beautiful and strong, light, luminous or else transparent. It will have a supple and malleable body endowed with extraordinary capacities and able to do everything; a body without age, a creation of the New Consciousness or else a transformed body such as none has ever imagined ... All that is above man will be within its reach. It will be guided by the Truth alone and nothing less. That is what it is and more even than has ever been conceived.'895 This the Mother told in French to Mona Sarkar, who noted it down as faithfully as possible and read it out to her for verification. The supramental body will not only be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnipresent. And immortal. Not condemned to a never ending monotonous immortality - which, again, is one of our human interpretations of immortality - but for ever existing in an ecstasy of inexhaustible delight in 'the Joy that surpasses all understanding.' Moment after moment, eternity after eternity. For in that state each moment is an eternity and eternity an ever present moment. If gross matter is not capable of being used as a permanent coating of the soul in the present phase of its evolution, then it certainly is not capable of being the covering of the supramental consciousness, to form the body that has, to some extent, been described above. This means that the crux of the process of supramental transformation lies in matter; the supramental world has to become possible in matter, which at present still is gross matter. - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were supramentalized in their mental and vital, but their enormous problem was the supramentalization of the physical body, consisting of the gross matter of the Earth. As the Mother said: 'It is matter itself that must change so that the Supramental may manifest. A new kind of matter no longer corresponding with Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements? Is that possible?
~ Georges Van Vrekhem,#KEYS
260:28 August 1957
Mother, Sri Aurobindo says here: "Whether the whole of humanity would be touched [by the Supramental influence] or only a part of it ready for the change would depend on what was intended or possible in the continued order of the universe."
The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 56
What is meant by "what was intended or possible"? The two things are different. So far you have said that if humanity changes, if it wants to participate in the new birth...
It is the same thing. But when you look at an object on a certain plane, you see it horizontally, and when you look at the same object from another plane, you see it vertically. (Mother shows the cover and the back of her book.) So, if one looks from above, one says "intended"; if one looks from below, one says "possible".... But it is absolutely the same thing, only the point of view is different.
But in that case, it is not our incapacity or lack of will to change that makes any difference.
We have already said this many a time. If you remain in a consciousness which functions mentally, even if it is the highest mind, you have the notion of an absolute determinism of cause and effect and feel that things are what they are because they are what they are and cannot be otherwise.
It is only when you come out of the mental consciousness completely and enter a higher perception of things - which you may call spiritual or divine - that you suddenly find yourself in a state of perfect freedom where everything is possible.
(Silence)
Those who have contacted that state or lived in it, even if only for a moment, try to describe it as a feeling of an absolute Will in action, which immediately gives to the human mentality the feeling of being arbitrary. And because of that distortion there arises the idea - which I might call traditional - of a supreme and arbitrary God, which is something most unacceptable to every enlightened mind. I suppose that this experience badly expressed is at the origin of this notion. And in fact it is incorrect to express it as an absolute Will: it is very, very, very different. It is something else altogether. For, what man understands by "Will" is a decision that is taken and carried out. We are obliged to use the word "will", but in its truth the Will acting in the universe is neither a choice nor a decision that is taken. What seems to me the closest expression is "vision". Things are because they are seen. But of course "seen", not seen as we see with these eyes.
(Mother touches her eyes...) All the same, it is the nearest thing.
It is a vision - a vision unfolding itself.
The universe becomes objective as it is progressively seen.
And that is why Sri Aurobindo has said "intended or possible". It is neither one nor the other. All that can be said is a distortion.
(Silence)
Objectivisation - universal objectivisation - is something like a projection in space and time, like a living image of what is from all eternity. And as the image is gradually projected on the screen of time and space, it becomes objective:
The Supreme contemplating His own Image.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#KEYS
261:If the Divine that is all love is the source of the creation, whence have come all the evils abounding upon earth?"
"All is from the Divine; but the One Consciousness, the Supreme has not created the world directly out of itself; a Power has gone out of it and has descended through many gradations of its workings and passed through many agents. There are many creators or rather 'formateurs', form-makers, who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them 'Formateurs' and not 'Creators'; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many, and some have formed things harmonious and benignant and some have shaped things mischievous and evil. And some too have been distorters rather than builders, for they have interfered and spoiled what was begun well by others." - Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (30 June 1929)
You say, "Many creators or rather 'formateurs', formmakers, have presided over the creation of the world." Who are these 'formateurs'?
That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds. Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contributed to the formation of certain beings upon earth. The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these emanations again had their emanations and so on. What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental plane - there are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.
For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magnified under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water? Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magnified, however, that they look like monsters. Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altogether unpleasant.
Did these intermediaries also come out of the Divine Power?
Through intermediaries, yes, not directly. These beings are not in direct contact with the Divine (there are exceptions, I mean as a general rule), they are beings who are in relation with other beings, who are again in relation with others, and these with still others, and so on, in a hierarchy, up to the Supreme.(to be continued....) ~ The Mother, Question and Answers,#KEYS
262:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#KEYS
263:There is no invariable rule of such suffering. It is not the soul that suffers; the Self is calm and equal to all things and the only sorrow of the psychic being is the sorrow of the resistance of Nature to the Divine Will or the resistance of things and people to the call of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. What is affected by suffering is the vital nature and the body. When the soul draws towards the Divine, there may be a resistance in the mind and the common form of that is denial and doubt - which may create mental and vital suffering. There may again be a resistance in the vital nature whose principal character is desire and the attachment to the objects of desire, and if in this field there is conflict between the soul and the vital nature, between the Divine Attraction and the pull of the Ignorance, then obviously there may be much suffering of the mind and vital parts. The physical consciousness also may offer a resistance which is usually that of a fundamental inertia, an obscurity in the very stuff of the physical, an incomprehension, an inability to respond to the higher consciousness, a habit of helplessly responding to the lower mechanically, even when it does not want to do so; both vital and physical suffering may be the consequence. There is moreover the resistance of the Universal Nature which does not want the being to escape from the Ignorance into the Light. This may take the form of a vehement insistence on the continuation of the old movements, waves of them thrown on the mind and vital and body so that old ideas, impulses, desires, feelings, responses continue even after they are thrown out and rejected, and can return like an invading army from outside, until the whole nature, given to the Divine, refuses to admit them. This is the subjective form of the universal resistance, but it may also take an objective form - opposition, calumny, attacks, persecution, misfortunes of many kinds, adverse conditions and circumstances, pain, illness, assaults from men or forces. There too the possibility of suffering is evident. There are two ways to meet all that - first that of the Self, calm, equality, a spirit, a will, a mind, a vital, a physical consciousness that remain resolutely turned towards the Divine and unshaken by all suggestion of doubt, desire, attachment, depression, sorrow, pain, inertia. This is possible when the inner being awakens, when one becomes conscious of the Self, of the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical, for that can more easily attune itself to the divine Will, and then there is a division in the being as if there were two beings, one within, calm, strong, equal, unperturbed, a channel of the Divine Consciousness and Force, one without, still encroached on by the lower Nature; but then the disturbances of the latter become something superficial which are no more than an outer ripple, - until these under the inner pressure fade and sink away and the outer being too remains calm, concentrated, unattackable. There is also the way of the psychic, - when the psychic being comes out in its inherent power, its consecration, adoration, love of the Divine, self-giving, surrender and imposes these on the mind, vital and physical consciousness and compels them to turn all their movements Godward. If the psychic is strong and master...
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, 669,#KEYS
264:Can it be said in justification of one's past that whatever has happened in one's life had to happen?
The Mother: Obviously, what has happened had to happen; it would not have been, if it had not been intended. Even the mistakes that we have committed and the adversities that fell upon us had to be, because there was some necessity in them, some utility for our lives. But in truth these things cannot be explained mentally and should not be. For all that happened was necessary, not for any mental reason, but to lead us to something beyond what the mind imagines. But is there any need to explain after all? The whole universe explains everything at every moment and a particular thing happens because the whole universe is what it is. But this does not mean that we are bound over to a blind acquiescence in Nature's inexorable law. You can accept the past as a settled fact and perceive the necessity in it, and still you can use the experience it gave you to build up the power consciously to guide and shape your present and your future.
Is the time also of an occurrence arranged in the Divine Plan of things?
The Mother: All depends upon the plane from which one sees and speaks. There is a plane of divine consciousness in which all is known absolutely, and the whole plan of things foreseen and predetermined. That way of seeing lives in the highest reaches of the Supramental; it is the Supreme's own vision. But when we do not possess that consciousness, it is useless to speak in terms that hold good only in that region and are not our present effective way of seeing things. For at a lower level of consciousness nothing is realised or fixed beforehand; all is in the process of making. Here there are no settled facts, there is only the play of possibilities; out of the clash of possibilities is realised the thing that has to happen. On this plane we can choose and select; we can refuse one possibility and accept another; we can follow one path, turn away from another. And that we can do, even though what is actually happening may have been foreseen and predetermined in a higher plane.
The Supreme Consciousness knows everything beforehand, because everything is realised there in her eternity. But for the sake of her play and in order to carry out actually on the physical plane what is foreordained in her own supreme self, she moves here upon earth as if she did not know the whole story; she works as if it was a new and untried thread that she was weaving. It is this apparent forgetfulness of her own foreknowledge in the higher consciousness that gives to the individual in the active life of the world his sense of freedom and independence and initiative. These things in him are her pragmatic tools or devices, and it is through this machinery that the movements and issues planned and foreseen elsewhere are realised here.
It may help you to understand if you take the example of an actor. An actor knows the whole part he has to play; he has in his mind the exact sequence of what is to happen on the stage. But when he is on the stage, he has to appear as if he did not know anything; he has to feel and act as if he were experiencing all these things for the first time, as if it was an entirely new world with all its chance events and surprises that was unrolling before his eyes. 28th April ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
265:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, anı̄sa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216, #KEYS
266:THE WAND
THE Magical Will is in its essence twofold, for it presupposes a beginning and an end; to will to be a thing is to admit that you are not that thing.
Hence to will anything but the supreme thing, is to wander still further from it - any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black Magick - yet this surrender is so simple an act that to our complex minds it is the most difficult of all acts; and hence training is necessary. Further, the Self surrendered must not be less than the All-Self; one must not come before the altar of the Most High with an impure or an imperfect offering. As it is written in Liber LXV, "To await Thee is the end, not the beginning."
This training may lead through all sorts of complications, varying according to the nature of the student, and hence it may be necessary for him at any moment to will all sorts of things which to others might seem unconnected with the goal. Thus it is not "a priori" obvious why a billiard player should need a file.
Since, then, we may want "anything," let us see to it that our will is strong enough to obtain anything we want without loss of time.
It is therefore necessary to develop the will to its highest point, even though the last task but one is the total surrender of this will. Partial surrender of an imperfect will is of no account in Magick.
The will being a lever, a fulcrum is necessary; this fulcrum is the main aspiration of the student to attain. All wills which are not dependent upon this principal will are so many leakages; they are like fat to the athlete.
The majority of the people in this world are ataxic; they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent) and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved; except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision. Such an one is torn limb from limb by Choronzon.
How then is the will to be trained? All these wishes, whims, caprices, inclinations, tendencies, appetites, must be detected, examined, judged by the standard of whether they help or hinder the main purpose, and treated accordingly.
Vigilance and courage are obviously required. I was about to add self-denial, in deference to conventional speech; but how could I call that self-denial which is merely denial of those things which hamper the self? It is not suicide to kill the germs of malaria in one's blood.
Now there are very great difficulties to be overcome in the training of the mind. Perhaps the greatest is forgetfulness, which is probably the worst form of what the Buddhists call ignorance. Special practices for training the memory may be of some use as a preliminary for persons whose memory is naturally poor. In any case the Magical Record prescribed for Probationers of the A.'.A.'. is useful and necessary.
Above all the practices of Liber III must be done again and again, for these practices develop not only vigilance but those inhibiting centres in the brain which are, according to some psychologists, the mainspring of the mechanism by which civilized man has raised himself above the savage.
So far it has been spoken, as it were, in the negative. Aaron's rod has become a serpent, and swallowed the serpents of the other Magicians; it is now necessary to turn it once more into a rod.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, The Wand,#KEYS
267:We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations. 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.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge [511] [T1],#KEYS
268:
Sometimes while reading a text one has ideas, then Sweet Mother, how can one distinguish between the other person's idea and one's own?
Oh! This, this doesn't exist, the other person's idea and one's own idea.
Nobody has ideas of his own: it is an immensity from which one draws according to his personal affinity; ideas are a collective possession, a collective wealth.
Only, there are different stages. So there is the most common level, the one where all our brains bathe; this indeed swarms here, it is the level of "Mr. Everybody". And then there is a level that's slightly higher for people who are called thinkers. And then there are higher levels still - many - some of them are beyond words but they are still domains of ideas. And then there are those capable of shooting right up, catching something which is like a light and making it come down with all its stock of ideas, all its stock of thoughts. An idea from a higher domain if pulled down organises itself and is crystallised in a large number of thoughts which can express that idea differently; and then if you are a writer or a poet or an artist, when you make it come lower down still, you can have all kinds of expressions, extremely varied and choice around a single little idea but one coming from very high above. And when you know how to do this, it teaches you to distinguish between the pure idea and the way of expressing it.
Some people cannot do it in their own head because they have no imagination or faculty for writing, but they can do it through study by reading what others have written. There are, you know, lots of poets, for instance, who have expressed the same idea - the same idea but with such different forms that when one reads many of them it becomes quite interesting to see (for people who love to read and read much). Ah, this idea, that one has said it like this, that other has expressed it like that, another has formulated it in this way, and so on. And so you have a whole stock of expressions which are expressions by different poets of the same single idea up there, above, high above. And you notice that there is an almost essential difference between the pure idea, the typal idea and its formulation in the mental world, even the speculative or artistic mental world. This is a very good thing to do when one loves gymnastics. It is mental gymnastics.
Well, if you want to be truly intelligent, you must know how to do mental gymnastics; as, you see, if you want really to have a fairly strong body you must know how to do physical gymnastics. It is the same thing. People who have never done mental gymnastics have a poor little brain, quite over-simple, and all their life they think like children. One must know how to do this - not take it seriously, in the sense that one shouldn't have convictions, saying, "This idea is true and that is false; this formulation is correct and that one is not and this religion is the true one and that religion is false", and so on and so forth... this, if you enter into it, you become absolutely stupid.
But if you can see all that and, for example, take all the religions, one after another and see how they have expressed the same aspiration of the human being for some Absolute, it becomes very interesting; and then you begin... yes, you begin to be able to juggle with all that. And then when you have mastered it all, you can rise above it and look at all the eternal human discussions with a smile. So there you are master of the thought and can no longer fly into a rage because someone else does not think as you, something that's unfortunately a very common malady here.
Now, there we are. Nobody has any questions, no?
That's enough? Finished! ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955,#KEYS
269:The Teachings of Some Modern Indian Yogis
Ramana Maharshi
According to Brunton's description of the sadhana he (Brunton) practised under the Maharshi's instructions,1 it is the Overself one has to seek within, but he describes the Overself in a way that is at once the Psychic Being, the Atman and the Ishwara. So it is a little difficult to know what is the exact reading.
*
The methods described in the account [of Ramana Maharshi's technique of self-realisation] are the well-established methods of Jnanayoga - (1) one-pointed concentration followed by thought-suspension, (2) the method of distinguishing or finding out the true self by separating it from mind, life, body (this I have seen described by him [Brunton] more at length in another book) and coming to the pure I behind; this also can disappear into the Impersonal Self. The usual result is a merging in the Atman or Brahman - which is what one would suppose is meant by the Overself, for it is that which is the real Overself. This Brahman or Atman is everywhere, all is in it, it is in all, but it is in all not as an individual being in each but is the same in all - as the Ether is in all. When the merging into the Overself is complete, there is no ego, no distinguishable I, or any formed separative person or personality. All is ekakara - an indivisible and undistinguishable Oneness either free from all formations or carrying all formations in it without being affected - for one can realise it in either way. There is a realisation in which all beings are moving in the one Self and this Self is there stable in all beings; there is another more complete and thoroughgoing in which not only is it so but all are vividly realised as the Self, the Brahman, the Divine. In the former, it is possible to dismiss all beings as creations of Maya, leaving the one Self alone as true - in the other it is easier to regard them as real manifestations of the Self, not as illusions. But one can also regard all beings as souls, independent realities in an eternal Nature dependent upon the One Divine. These are the characteristic realisations of the Overself familiar to the Vedanta. But on the other hand you say that this Overself is realised by the Maharshi as lodged in the heart-centre, and it is described by Brunton as something concealed which when it manifests appears as the real Thinker, source of all action, but now guiding thought and action in the Truth. Now the first description applies to the Purusha in the heart, described by the Gita as the Ishwara situated in the heart and by the Upanishads as the Purusha Antaratma; the second could apply also to the mental Purusha, manomayah. pran.asarı̄ra neta of the Upanishads, the mental Being or Purusha who leads the life and the body. So your question is one which on the data I cannot easily answer. His Overself may be a combination of all these experiences, without any distinction being made or thought necessary between the various aspects. There are a thousand ways of approaching and realising the Divine and each way has its own experiences which have their own truth and stand really on a basis, one in essence but complex in aspects, common to all, but not expressed in the same way by all. There is not much use in discussing these variations; the important thing is to follow one's own way well and thoroughly. In this Yoga, one can realise the psychic being as a portion of the Divine seated in the heart with the Divine supporting it there - this psychic being takes charge of the sadhana and turns the ......
1 The correspondent sent to Sri Aurobindo two paragraphs from Paul Brunton's book A Message from Arunachala (London: Rider & Co., n.d. [1936], pp. 205 - 7). - Ed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
270:In the process of this change there must be by the very necessity of the effort two stages of its working. First, there will be the personal endeavour of the human being, as soon as he becomes aware by his soul, mind, heart of this divine possibility and turns towards it as the true object of life, to prepare himself for it and to get rid of all in him that belongs to a lower working, of all that stands in the way of his opening to the spiritual truth and its power, so as to possess by this liberation his spiritual being and turn all his natural movements into free means of its self-expression. It is by this turn that the self-conscious Yoga aware of its aim begins: there is a new awakening and an upward change of the life motive. So long as there is only an intellectual, ethical and other self-training for the now normal purposes of life which does not travel beyond the ordinary circle of working of mind, life and body, we are still only in the obscure and yet unillumined preparatory Yoga of Nature; we are still in pursuit of only an ordinary human perfection. A spiritual desire of the Divine and of the divine perfection, of a unity with him in all our being and a spiritual perfection in all our nature, is the effective sign of this change, the precursory power of a great integral conversion of our being and living. By personal effort a precursory change, a preliminary conversion can be effected; it amounts to a greater or less spiritualising of our mental motives, our character and temperament, and a mastery, stilling or changed action of the vital and physical life. This converted subjectivity can be made the base of some communion or unity of the soul in mind with the Divine and some partial reflection of the divine nature in the mentality of the human being. That is as far as man can go by his unaided or indirectly aided effort, because that is an effort of mind and mind cannot climb beyond itself permanently: at most it arises to a spiritualised and idealised mentality. If it shoots up beyond that border, it loses hold of itself, loses hold of life, and arrives either at a trance of absorption or a passivity. A greater perfection can only be arrived at by a higher power entering in and taking up the whole action of the being. The second stage of this Yoga will therefore be a persistent giving up of all the action of the nature into the hands of this greater Power, a substitution of its influence, possession and working for the personal effort, until the Divine to whom we aspire becomes the direct master of the Yoga and effects the entire spiritual and ideal conversion of the being. Two rules there are that will diminish the difficulty and obviate the danger. One must reject all that comes from the ego, from vital desire, from the mere mind and its presumptuous reasoning incompetence, all that ministers to these agents of the Ignorance. One must learn to hear and follow the voice of the inmost soul, the direction of the Guru, the command of the Master, the working of the Divine Mother. Whoever clings to the desires and weaknesses of the flesh, the cravings and passions of the vital in its turbulent ignorance, the dictates of his personal mind unsilenced and unillumined by a greater knowledge, cannot find the true inner law and is heaping obstacles in the way of the divine fulfilment. Whoever is able to detect and renounce those obscuring agencies and to discern and follow the true Guide within and without will discover the spiritual law and reach the goal of the Yoga. A radical and total change of consciousness is not only the whole meaning but, in an increasing force and by progressive stages, the whole method of the integral Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Self-Perfection, The Integral Perfection [618],#KEYS
271:EVOCATION
Evocation is the art of dealing with magical beings or entities by various acts which create or contact them and allow one to conjure and command them with pacts and exorcism. These beings have a legion of names drawn from the demonology of many cultures: elementals, familiars, incubi, succubi, bud-wills, demons, automata, atavisms, wraiths, spirits, and so on. Entities may be bound to talismans, places, animals, objects, persons, incense smoke, or be mobile in the aether. It is not the case that such entities are limited to obsessions and complexes in the human mind. Although such beings customarily have their origin in the mind, they may be budded off and attached to objects and places in the form of ghosts, spirits, or "vibrations," or may exert action at a distance in the form of fetishes, familiars, or poltergeists. These beings consist of a portion of Kia or the life force attached to some aetheric matter, the whole of which may or may not be attached to ordinary matter.
Evocation may be further defined as the summoning or creation of such partial beings to accomplish some purpose. They may be used to cause change in oneself, change in others, or change in the universe. The advantages of using a semi-independent being rather than trying to effect a transformation directly by will are several: the entity will continue to fulfill its function independently of the magician until its life force dissipates. Being semi-sentient, it can adapt itself to a task in that a non-conscious simple spell cannot. During moments of the possession by certain entities the magician may be the recipient of inspirations, abilities, and knowledge not normally accessible to him.
Entities may be drawn from three sources - those which are discovered clairvoyantly, those whose characteristics are given in grimoires of spirits and demons, and those which the magician may wish to create himself.
In all cases establishing a relationship with the spirit follows a similar process of evocation. Firstly the attributes of the entity, its type, scope, name, appearance and characteristics must be placed in the mind or made known to the mind. Automatic drawing or writing, where a stylus is allowed to move under inspiration across a surface, may help to uncover the nature of a clairvoyantly discovered being. In the case of a created being the following procedure is used: the magician assembles the ingredients of a composite sigil of the being's desired attributes. For example, to create an elemental to assist him with divination, the appropriate symbols might be chosen and made into a sigil such as the one shown in figure 4.
A name and an image, and if desired, a characteristic number can also be selected for the elemental.
Secondly, the will and perception are focused as intently as possible (by some gnostic method) on the elemental's sigils or characteristics so that these take on a portion of the magician's life force and begin autonomous existence. In the case of preexisting beings, this operation serves to bind the entity to the magician's will.
This is customarily followed by some form of self-banishing, or even exorcism, to restore the magician's consciousness to normal before he goes forth.
An entity of a low order with little more than a singular task to perform can be left to fulfill its destiny with no further interference from its master. If at any time it is necessary to terminate it, its sigil or material basis should be destroyed and its mental image destroyed or reabsorbed by visualization. For more powerful and independent beings, the conjuration and exorcism must be in proportion to the power of the ritual which originally evoked them. To control such beings, the magicians may have to re-enter the gnostic state to the same depth as before in order to draw their power. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
272:The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all powers of our human existence into a means of reaching the divine Being. In an ordinary Yoga one main power of being or one group of its powers is made the means, vehicle, path. In a synthetic Yoga all powers will be combined and included in the transmuting instrumentation.
In Hathayoga the instrument is the body and life. All the power of the body is stilled, collected, purified, heightened, concentrated to its utmost limits or beyond any limits by Asana and other physical processes; the power of the life too is similarly purified, heightened, concentrated by Asana and Pranayama. This concentration of powers is then directed towards that physical centre in which the divine consciousness sits concealed in the human body. The power of Life, Nature-power, coiled up with all its secret forces asleep in the lowest nervous plexus of the earth-being,-for only so much escapes into waking action in our normal operations as is sufficient for the limited uses of human life,-rises awakened through centre after centre and awakens, too, in its ascent and passage the forces of each successive nodus of our being, the nervous life, the heart of emotion and ordinary mentality, the speech, sight, will, the higher knowledge, till through and above the brain it meets with and it becomes one with the divine consciousness.
In Rajayoga the chosen instrument is the mind. our ordinary mentality is first disciplined, purified and directed towards the divine Being, then by a summary process of Asana and Pranayama the physical force of our being is stilled and concentrated, the life-force released into a rhythmic movement capable of cessation and concentrated into a higher power of its upward action, the mind, supported and strengthened by this greater action and concentration of the body and life upon which it rests, is itself purified of all its unrest and emotion and its habitual thought-waves, liberated from distraction and dispersion, given its highest force of concentration, gathered up into a trance of absorption. Two objects, the one temporal, the other eternal,are gained by this discipline. Mind-power develops in another concentrated action abnormal capacities of knowledge, effective will, deep light of reception, powerful light of thought-radiation which are altogether beyond the narrow range of our normal mentality; it arrives at the Yogic or occult powers around which there has been woven so much quite dispensable and yet perhaps salutary mystery. But the one final end and the one all-important gain is that the mind, stilled and cast into a concentrated trance, can lose itself in the divine consciousness and the soul be made free to unite with the divine Being.
The triple way takes for its chosen instruments the three main powers of the mental soul-life of the human being. Knowledge selects the reason and the mental vision and it makes them by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of a Goddirected seeking its means for the greatest knowledge and the greatest vision of all, God-knowledge and God-vision. Its aim is to see, know and be the Divine. Works, action selects for its instrument the will of the doer of works; it makes life an offering of sacrifice to the Godhead and by purification, concentration and a certain discipline of subjection to the divine Will a means for contact and increasing unity of the soul of man with the divine Master of the universe. Devotion selects the emotional and aesthetic powers of the soul and by turning them all Godward in a perfect purity, intensity, infinite passion of seeking makes them a means of God-possession in one or many relations of unity with the Divine Being. All aim in their own way at a union or unity of the human soul with the supreme Spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Self-Perfection, The Principle of the Integral Yoga, 609,#KEYS
273:The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule.It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit's impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego.
If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, 206,#KEYS
274:PRATYAHARA
PRATYAHARA is the first process in the mental part of our task. The previous practices, Asana, Pranayama, Yama, and Niyama, are all acts of the body, while mantra is connected with speech: Pratyahara is purely mental.
And what is Pratyahara? This word is used by different authors in different senses. The same word is employed to designate both the practice and the result. It means for our present purpose a process rather strategical than practical; it is introspection, a sort of general examination of the contents of the mind which we wish to control: Asana having been mastered, all immediate exciting causes have been removed, and we are free to think what we are thinking about.
A very similar experience to that of Asana is in store for us. At first we shall very likely flatter ourselves that our minds are pretty calm; this is a defect of observation. Just as the European standing for the first time on the edge of the desert will see nothing there, while his Arab can tell him the family history of each of the fifty persons in view, because he has learnt how to look, so with practice the thoughts will become more numerous and more insistent.
As soon as the body was accurately observed it was found to be terribly restless and painful; now that we observe the mind it is seen to be more restless and painful still. (See diagram opposite.)
A similar curve might be plotted for the real and apparent painfulness of Asana. Conscious of this fact, we begin to try to control it: "Not quite so many thoughts, please!" "Don't think quite so fast, please!" "No more of that kind of thought, please!" It is only then that we discover that what we thought was a school of playful porpoises is really the convolutions of the sea-serpent. The attempt to repress has the effect of exciting.
When the unsuspecting pupil first approaches his holy but wily Guru, and demands magical powers, that Wise One replies that he will confer them, points out with much caution and secrecy some particular spot on the pupil's body which has never previously attracted his attention, and says: "In order to obtain this magical power which you seek, all that is necessary is to wash seven times in the Ganges during seven days, being particularly careful to avoid thinking of that one spot." Of course the unhappy youth spends a disgusted week in thinking of little else.
It is positively amazing with what persistence a thought, even a whole train of thoughts, returns again and again to the charge. It becomes a positive nightmare. It is intensely annoying, too, to find that one does not become conscious that one has got on to the forbidden subject until one has gone right through with it. However, one continues day after day investigating thoughts and trying to check them; and sooner or later one proceeds to the next stage, Dharana, the attempt to restrain the mind to a single object.
Before we go on to this, however, we must consider what is meant by success in Pratyahara. This is a very extensive subject, and different authors take widely divergent views. One writer means an analysis so acute that every thought is resolved into a number of elements (see "The Psychology of Hashish," Section V, in Equinox II).
Others take the view that success in the practice is something like the experience which Sir Humphrey Davy had as a result of taking nitrous oxide, in which he exclaimed: "The universe is composed exclusively of ideas."
Others say that it gives Hamlet's feeling: "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so," interpreted as literally as was done by Mrs. Eddy.
However, the main point is to acquire some sort of inhibitory power over the thoughts. Fortunately there is an unfailing method of acquiring this power. It is given in Liber III. If Sections 1 and 2 are practised (if necessary with the assistance of another person to aid your vigilance) you will soon be able to master the final section. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
275:To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul's will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the Sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the Dharma or law of the being.
This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it m an inner Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the state into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not the aim of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenuous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contemplation of the one object of thought-vision, but first to still the mind altogether. This may be done by various ways; one is to stand back from the mental action altogether not participating in but simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet. Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away from the mind whenever they come and firmly hold to the peace of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman, everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon. On the basis of this calm everything else may be built up in the knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation.
Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary. A free concentration of will using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place. This Will will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old Vedic Sadhakas. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Concentration,#KEYS
276:CHAPTER XIII
OF THE BANISHINGS: AND OF THE PURIFICATIONS.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The wand is not a wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.
That is a mere logical commonplace: in magick one must go much farther than this. One finds one's analogy in electricity. If insulation is imperfect, the whole current goes back to earth. It is useless to plead that in all those miles of wire there is only one-hundredth of an inch unprotected. It is no good building a ship if the water can enter, through however small a hole.
That first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.
If one littlest thought intrude upon the mind of the Mystic, his concentration is absolutely destroyed; and his consciousness remains on exactly the same level as the Stockbroker's. Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother. If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it.> {101}
The Magician must therefore take the utmost care in the matter of purification, "firstly", of himself, "secondly", of his instruments, "thirdly", of the place of working. Ancient Magicians recommended a preliminary purification of from three days to many months. During this period of training they took the utmost pains with diet. They avoided animal food, lest the elemental spirit of the animal should get into their atmosphere. They practised sexual abstinence, lest they should be influenced in any way by the spirit of the wife. Even in regard to the excrements of the body they were equally careful; in trimming the hair and nails, they ceremonially destroyed> the severed portion. They fasted, so that the body itself might destroy anything extraneous to the bare necessity of its existence. They purified the mind by special prayers and conservations. They avoided the contamination of social intercourse, especially the conjugal kind; and their servitors were disciples specially chosen and consecrated for the work.
In modern times our superior understanding of the essentials of this process enables us to dispense to some extent with its external rigours; but the internal purification must be even more carefully performed. We may eat meat, provided that in doing so we affirm that we eat it in order to strengthen us for the special purpose of our proposed invocation.> {102}
By thus avoiding those actions which might excite the comment of our neighbours we avoid the graver dangers of falling into spiritual pride.
We have understood the saying: "To the pure all things are pure", and we have learnt how to act up to it. We can analyse the mind far more acutely than could the ancients, and we can therefore distinguish the real and right feeling from its imitations. A man may eat meat from self-indulgence, or in order to avoid the dangers of asceticism. We must constantly examine ourselves, and assure ourselves that every action is really subservient to the One Purpose.
It is ceremonially desirable to seal and affirm this mental purity by Ritual, and accordingly the first operation in any actual ceremony is bathing and robing, with appropriate words. The bath signifies the removal of all things extraneous to antagonistic to the one thought. The putting on of the robe is the positive side of the same operation. It is the assumption of the fame of mind suitable to that one thought.
A similar operation takes place in the preparation of every instrument, as has been seen in the Chapter devoted to that subject. In the preparation of theplace of working, the same considerations apply. We first remove from that place all objects; and we then put into it those objects, and only those {103} objects, which are necessary. During many days we occupy ourselves in this process of cleansing and consecration; and this again is confirmed in the actual ceremony.
The cleansed and consecrated Magician takes his cleansed and consecrated instruments into that cleansed and consecrated place, and there proceeds to repeat that double ceremony in the ceremony itself, which has these same two main parts. The first part of every ceremony is the banishing; the second, the invoking. The same formula is repeated even in the ceremony of banishing itself, for in the banishing ritual of the pentagram we not only command the demons to depart, but invoke the Archangels and their hosts to act as guardians of the Circle during our pre-occupation with the ceremony proper.
In more elaborate ceremonies it is usual to banish everything by name. Each element, each planet, and each sign, perhaps even the Sephiroth themselves; all are removed, including the very one which we wished to invoke, for that force ... ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
277:
In the lower planes can't one say what will happen at a particular moment?
That depends. On certain planes there are consciousnesses that form, that make formations and try to send them down to earth and manifest them. These are planes where the great forces are at play, forces struggling with each other to organise things in one way or another. On these planes all the possibilities are there, all the possibilities that present themselves but have not yet come to a decision as to which will come down.... Suppose a plane full of the imaginations of people who want certain things to be realised upon earth - they invent a novel, narrate stories, produce all kinds of phenomena; it amuses them very much. It is a plane of form-makers and they are there imagining all kinds of circumstances and events; they play with the forces; they are like the authors of a drama and they prepare everything there and see what is going to happen. All these formations are facing each other; and it is those which are the strongest, the most successful or the most persistent or those that have the advantage of a favourable set of circumstances which dominate. They meet and out of the conflict yet another thing results: you lose one thing and take up another, you make a new combination; and then all of a sudden, you find, pluff! it is coming down. Now, if it comes down with a sufficient force, it sets moving the earth atmosphere and things combine; as for instance, when with your fist you thump the saw-dust, you know surely what happens, don't you? You lift your hand, give a formidable blow: all the dust gets organised around your fist. Well, it is like that. These formations come down into matter with that force, and everything organises itself automatically, mechanically as around the striking fist. And there's your wished object about to be realised, sometimes with small deformations because of the resistance, but it will be realised finally, even as the person narrating the story up above wanted it more or less to be realised. If then you are for some reason or other in the secret of the person who has constructed the story and if you follow the way in which he creates his path to reach down to the earth and if you see how a blow with the fist acts on earthly matter, then you are able to tell what is going to happen, because you have seen it in the world above, and as it takes some time to make the whole journey, you see in advance. And the higher you rise, the more you foresee in advance what is going to happen. And if you pass far beyond, go still farther, then everything is possible.
It is an unfolding that follows a wide road which is for you unknowable; for all will be unfolded in the universe, but in what order and in what way? There are decisions that are taken up there which escape our ordinary consciousness, and so it is very difficult to foresee. But there also, if you enter consciously and if you can be present up there... How shall I explain that to you? All is there, absolute, static, eternal: but all that will be unfolded in the material world, naturally more or less one thing after another; for in the static existence all can be there, but in the becoming all becomes in time, that is, one thing after another. Well, what path will the unfolding follow? Up there is the domain of absolute freedom.... Who says that a sufficiently sincere aspiration, a sufficiently intense prayer is not capable of changing the path of the unfolding?
This means that all is possible.
Now, one must have a sufficient aspiration and a prayer that's sufficiently intense. But that has been given to human nature. It is one of the marvellous gifts of grace given to human nature; only, one does not know how to make use of it. This comes to saying that in spite of the most absolute determinisms in the horizontal line, if one knows how to cross all these horizontal lines and reach the highest Point of consciousness, one is able to make things change, things apparently absolutely determined. So you may call it by any name you like, but it is a kind of combination of an absolute determinism with an absolute freedom. You may pull yourself out of it in any way you like, but it is like that.
I forgot to say in that book (perhaps I did not forget but just felt that it was useless to say it) that all these theories are only theories, that is, mental conceptions which are merely more or less imaged representations of the reality; but it is not the reality at all. When you say "determinism" and when you say "freedom", you say only words and all that is only a very incomplete, very approximate and very weak description of what is in reality within you, around you and everywhere; and to be able to begin to understand what the universe is, you must come out of your mental formulas, otherwise you will never understand anything.
To tell the truth, if you live only a moment, just a tiny moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufficiently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953,#KEYS
278: Sri Aurobindo writes here: "...Few and brief in their visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour." Why?
(1 "The Way", Cent. Vol. 17, p. 40.)
One must go and ask them! But there is a conclusion, the last sentences give a very clear explanation. It is said: "Nay, then, is immortality a plaything to be given lightly to a child, or the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling?" This comes back to the question why the adverse forces have the right to interfere, to harass you. But this is precisely the test necessary for your sincerity. If the way were very easy, everybody would start on the way, and if one could reach the goal without any obstacle and without any effort, everybody would reach the goal, and when one has come to the end, the situation would be the same as when one started, there would be no change. That is, the new world would be exactly what the old has been. It is truly not worth the trouble! Evidently a process of elimination is necessary so that only what is capable of manifesting the new life remains. This is the reason and there is no other, this is the best of reasons. And, you see, it is a tempering, it is the ordeal of fire, only that which can stand it remains absolutely pure; when everything has burnt down, there remains only the little ingot of pure gold. And it is like that. What puts things out very much in all this is the religious idea of fault, sin, redemption. But there is no arbitrary decision! On the contrary, for each one it is the best and most favourable conditions which are given. We were saying the other day that it is only his friends whom God treats with severity; you thought it was a joke, but it is true. It is only to those who are full of hope, who will pass through this purifying flame, that the conditions for attaining the maximum result are given. And the human mind is made in such a way that you may test this; when something extremely unpleasant happens to you, you may tell yourself, "Well, this proves I am worth the trouble of being given this difficulty, this proves there is something in me which can resist the difficulty", and you will notice that instead of tormenting yourself, you rejoice - you will be so happy and so strong that even the most unpleasant things will seem to you quite charming! This is a very easy experiment to make. Whatever the circumstance, if your mind is accustomed to look at it as something favourable, it will no longer be unpleasant for you. This is quite well known; as long as the mind refuses to accept a thing, struggles against it, tries to obstruct it, there are torments, difficulties, storms, inner struggles and all suffering. But the minute the mind says, "Good, this is what has to come, it is thus that it must happen", whatever happens, you are content. There are people who have acquired such control of their mind over their body that they feel nothing; I told you this the other day about certain mystics: if they think the suffering inflicted upon them is going to help them cross the stages in a moment and give them a sort of stepping stone to attain the Realisation, the goal they have put before them, union with the Divine, they no longer feel the suffering at all. Their body is as it were galvanised by the mental conception. This has happened very often, it is a very common experience among those who truly have enthusiasm. And after all, if one must for some reason or other leave one's body and take a new one, is it not better to make of one's death something magnificent, joyful, enthusiastic, than to make it a disgusting defeat? Those who cling on, who try by every possible means to delay the end even by a minute or two, who give you an example of frightful anguish, show that they are not conscious of their soul.... After all, it is perhaps a means, isn't it? One can change this accident into a means; if one is conscious one can make a beautiful thing of it, a very beautiful thing, as of everything. And note, those who do not fear it, who are not anxious, who can die without any sordidness are those who never think about it, who are not haunted all the time by this "horror" facing them which they must escape and which they try to push as far away from them as they can. These, when the occasion comes, can lift their head, smile and say, "Here I am."
It is they who have the will to make the best possible use of their life, it is they who say, "I shall remain here as long as it is necessary, to the last second, and I shall not lose one moment to realise my goal"; these, when the necessity comes, put up the best show. Why? - It is very simple, because they live in their ideal, the truth of their ideal; because that is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in all things they can see this ideal, this reason of existence, and never do they come down into the sordidness of material life.
So, the conclusion:
One must never wish for death.
One must never will to die.
One must never be afraid to die.
And in all circumstances one must will to exceed oneself. ~ The Mother, Question and Answers, Volume-4, page no.353-355,#KEYS
279:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
280:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]
We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.
Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.
But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],#KEYS
281:What are these operations? They are not mere psychological self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like intellectual discrimination by the process of meditative thought they will have an effect of purification; they will lead to self-knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of the disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of the understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction.We can look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because there, in things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. (2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being.
The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience of the modes of our being. It is a "realisation", in the full sense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity.
This internal vision, dr.s.t.i, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it-to the soul and not merely to the intellect-as do things seen to the physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaks.a, of that which is present to the eyes, and paroks.a, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,-for no other sense is adequate,-we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge. Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of he Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration;3 but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever fadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held. The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity.
(2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the 2 In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so much hampered by the sense of the limited ego as in ourselves; one obstacle to the realisation of God is therefore removed.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge,#KEYS
282:summary of the entire process of psychic awakening :::
You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is another, a hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we can become aware of the real Self and of a larger deeper truth of nature, can realise the Self and liberate and transform the nature. To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object of this concentration. Of this true consciousness other then the superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it an d all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other way.
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and it the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Infinite. There it behind to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head is only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise, one may get shut up in one's own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reflection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there. For some the mental consciousness is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternatively - but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable.
The other side of the discipline is with regard to the activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord the nature with the inner realisation so that one may not be divided into two discordant parts. There are here several disciplines or processes possible. One is to offer all the activities to the Divine and call for the inner guidance and the taking up of one's nature by a Higher Power. If there is the inward soul-opening, if the psychic being comes forward, then there is no great difficulty - there comes with it a psychic discrimination, a constant intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, bring the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by past workings, not as any part of our real being; in proportion as one succeeds in this, becomes detached, sees mind and its activities as not oneself, life and its activities as not oneself, the body and its activities as not oneself, one becomes aware of an inner Being within us - inner mental, inner vital, inner physical - silent, calm, unbound, unattached which reflects the true Self above and can be its direct representative; from this inner silent Being proceeds a rejection of all that is to be rejected, an acceptance only of what can be kept and transformed, an inmost Will to perfection or a call to the Divine Power to do at each step what is necessary for the change of the Nature. It can also open mind, life and body to the inmost psychic entity and its guiding influence or its direct guidance. In most cases these two methods emerge and work together and finally fuse into one. But one can being with either, the one that one feels most natural and easy to follow.
Finally, in all difficulties where personal effort is hampered, the help of the Teacher can intervene and bring above what is needed for the realisation or for the immediate step that is necessary.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, 6, {871},#KEYS
283:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#KEYS
284:Education
THE EDUCATION of a human being should begin at birth and continue throughout his life.
Indeed, if we want this education to have its maximum result, it should begin even before birth; in this case it is the mother herself who proceeds with this education by means of a twofold action: first, upon herself for her own improvement, and secondly, upon the child whom she is forming physically. For it is certain that the nature of the child to be born depends very much upon the mother who forms it, upon her aspiration and will as well as upon the material surroundings in which she lives. To see that her thoughts are always beautiful and pure, her feelings always noble and fine, her material surroundings as harmonious as possible and full of a great simplicity - this is the part of education which should apply to the mother herself. And if she has in addition a conscious and definite will to form the child according to the highest ideal she can conceive, then the very best conditions will be realised so that the child can come into the world with his utmost potentialities. How many difficult efforts and useless complications would be avoided in this way!
Education to be complete must have five principal aspects corresponding to the five principal activities of the human being: the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. Usually, these phases of education follow chronologically the growth of the individual; this, however, does not mean that one of them should replace another, but that all must continue, completing one another until the end of his life.
We propose to study these five aspects of education one by one and also their interrelationships. But before we enter into the details of the subject, I wish to make a recommendation to parents. Most parents, for various reasons, give very little thought to the true education which should be imparted to children. When they have brought a child into the world, provided him with food, satisfied his various material needs and looked after his health more or less carefully, they think they have fully discharged their duty. Later on, they will send him to school and hand over to the teachers the responsibility for his education.
There are other parents who know that their children must be educated and who try to do what they can. But very few, even among those who are most serious and sincere, know that the first thing to do, in order to be able to educate a child, is to educate oneself, to become conscious and master of oneself so that one never sets a bad example to one's child. For it is above all through example that education becomes effective. To speak good words and to give wise advice to a child has very little effect if one does not oneself give him an example of what one teaches. Sincerity, honesty, straightforwardness, courage, disinterestedness, unselfishness, patience, endurance, perseverance, peace, calm, self-control are all things that are taught infinitely better by example than by beautiful speeches. Parents, have a high ideal and always act in accordance with it and you will see that little by little your child will reflect this ideal in himself and spontaneously manifest the qualities you would like to see expressed in his nature. Quite naturally a child has respect and admiration for his parents; unless they are quite unworthy, they will always appear to their child as demigods whom he will try to imitate as best he can.
With very few exceptions, parents are not aware of the disastrous influence that their own defects, impulses, weaknesses and lack of self-control have on their children. If you wish to be respected by a child, have respect for yourself and be worthy of respect at every moment. Never be authoritarian, despotic, impatient or ill-tempered. When your child asks you a question, do not give him a stupid or silly answer under the pretext that he cannot understand you. You can always make yourself understood if you take enough trouble; and in spite of the popular saying that it is not always good to tell the truth, I affirm that it is always good to tell the truth, but that the art consists in telling it in such a way as to make it accessible to the mind of the hearer. In early life, until he is twelve or fourteen, the child's mind is hardly open to abstract notions and general ideas. And yet you can train it to understand these things by using concrete images, symbols or parables. Up to quite an advanced age and for some who mentally always remain children, a narrative, a story, a tale well told teach much more than any number of theoretical explanations.
Another pitfall to avoid: do not scold your child without good reason and only when it is quite indispensable. A child who is too often scolded gets hardened to rebuke and no longer attaches much importance to words or severity of tone. And above all, take good care never to scold him for a fault which you yourself commit. Children are very keen and clear-sighted observers; they soon find out your weaknesses and note them without pity.
When a child has done something wrong, see that he confesses it to you spontaneously and frankly; and when he has confessed, with kindness and affection make him understand what was wrong in his movement so that he will not repeat it, but never scold him; a fault confessed must always be forgiven. You should not allow any fear to come between you and your child; fear is a pernicious means of education: it invariably gives birth to deceit and lying. Only a discerning affection that is firm yet gentle and an adequate practical knowledge will create the bonds of trust that are indispensable for you to be able to educate your child effectively. And do not forget that you have to control yourself constantly in order to be equal to your task and truly fulfil the duty which you owe your child by the mere fact of having brought him into the world.
Bulletin, February 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
285:To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of God instinct with Knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a divine worker, the mediator between earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightnings, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality.
Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, - truth of being, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things - for creation is out-bringing, expression by the Truth and Will - and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude.
Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who fulfil functions that arise from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and crooked falsehood, - and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and impulses, - this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration and endeavour, - this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering, - this is Bhaga. These four are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unmaimed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Ashwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical being for an easy and victorious ascension.
Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Ribhus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indra's horses, the chariot of the Ashwins, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of Truth and as Vritra-slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the gods also are either activising souls or passively executive and methodising energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the Gods, comes first; and there are besides five powers of the Truthconsciousness, - Mahi or Bharati, the vast Word that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ila, the strong primal word of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who descends into the cavern of the subconscient and finds there the concealed illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities, - Parjanya, giver of the rain of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine war-horse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trita Aptya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides.
The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels, - in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to upbear our endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Doctrine of the Mystics,#KEYS
286:The Two Paths Of Yoga :::
14 April 1929 - What are the dangers of Yoga? Is it especially dangerous to the people of the West? Someone has said that Yoga may be suitable for the East, but it has the effect of unbalancing the Western mind.
Yoga is not more dangerous to the people of the West than to those of the East. Everything depends upon the spirit with which you approach it. Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. It is not dangerous, on the contrary, it is safety and security itself, if you go to it with a sense of its sacredness, always remembering that the aim is to find the Divine.
Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. if you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.
There are two paths of Yoga, one of tapasya (discipline), and the other of surrender. The path of tapasya is arduous. Here you rely solely upon yourself, you proceed by your own strength. You ascend and achieve according to the measure of your force. There is always the danger of falling down. And once you fall, you lie broken in the abyss and there is hardly a remedy. The other path, the path of surrender, is safe and sure. It is here, however, that the Western people find their difficulty. They have been taught to fear and avoid all that threatens their personal independence. They have imbibed with their mothers' milk the sense of individuality. And surrender means giving up all that. In other words, you may follow, as Ramakrishna says, either the path of the baby monkey or that of the baby cat. The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it and cry ma ma.
If you take up this path of surrender fully and sincerely, there is no more danger or serious difficulty. The question is to be sincere. If you are not sincere, do not begin Yoga. If you were dealing in human affairs, then you could resort to deception; but in dealing with the Divine there is no possibility of deception anywhere. You can go on the Path safely when you are candid and open to the core and when your only end is to realise and attain the Divine and to be moved by the Divine. There is another danger; it is in connection with the sex impulses. Yoga in its process of purification will lay bare and throw up all hidden impulses and desires in you. And you must learn not to hide things nor leave them aside, you have to face them and conquer and remould them. The first effect of Yoga, however, is to take away the mental control, and the hungers that lie dormant are suddenly set free, they rush up and invade the being. So long as this mental control has not been replaced by the Divine control, there is a period of transition when your sincerity and surrender will be put to the test. The strength of such impulses as those of sex lies usually in the fact that people take too much notice of them; they protest too vehemently and endeavour to control them by coercion, hold them within and sit upon them. But the more you think of a thing and say, "I don't want it, I don't want it", the more you are bound to it. What you should do is to keep the thing away from you, to dissociate from it, take as little notice of it as possible and, even if you happen to think of it, remain indifferent and unconcerned. The impulses and desires that come up by the pressure of Yoga should be faced in a spirit of detachment and serenity, as something foreign to yourself or belonging to the outside world. They should be offered to the Divine, so that the Divine may take them up and transmute them. If you have once opened yourself to the Divine, if the power of the Divine has once come down into you and yet you try to keep to the old forces, you prepare troubles and difficulties and dangers for yourself. You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires. There are many self-appointed Masters, who do nothing but that. And then when you are off the straight path and when you have a little knowledge and not much power, it happens that you are seized by beings or entities of a certain type, you become blind instruments in their hands and are devoured by them in the end. Wherever there is pretence, there is danger; you cannot deceive God. Do you come to God saying, "I want union with you" and in your heart meaning "I want powers and enjoyments"? Beware! You are heading straight towards the brink of the precipice. And yet it is so easy to avoid all catastrophe. Become like a child, give yourself up to the Mother, let her carry you, and there is no more danger for you.
This does not mean that you have not to face other kinds of difficulties or that you have not to fight and conquer any obstacles at all. Surrender does not ensure a smooth and unruffled and continuous progression. The reason is that your being is not yet one, nor your surrender absolute and complete. Only a part of you surrenders; and today it is one part and the next day it is another. The whole purpose of the Yoga is to gather all the divergent parts together and forge them into an undivided unity. Till then you cannot hope to be without difficulties - difficulties, for example, like doubt or depression or hesitation. The whole world is full of the poison. You take it in with every breath. If you exchange a few words with an undesirable man or even if such a man merely passes by you, you may catch the contagion from him. It is sufficient for you to come near a place where there is plague in order to be infected with its poison; you need not know at all that it is there. You can lose in a few minutes what it has taken you months to gain. So long as you belong to humanity and so long as you lead the ordinary life, it does not matter much if you mix with the people of the world; but if you want the divine life, you will have to be exceedingly careful about your company and your environment.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
287:Attention on Hypnagogic Imagery The most common strategy for inducing WILDs is to fall asleep while focusing on the hypnagogic imagery that accompanies sleep onset. Initially, you are likely to see relatively simple images, flashes of light, geometric patterns, and the like.
Gradually more complicated forms appear: faces, people, and finally entire scenes. 6
The following account of what the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky called "half-dream states" provides a vivid example of what hypnagogic imagery can be like:
I am falling asleep. Golden dots, sparks and tiny stars appear and disappear before my eyes. These sparks and stars gradually merge into a golden net with diagonal meshes which moves slowly and regularly in rhythm with the beating of my heart, which I feel quite distinctly. The next moment the golden net is transformed into rows of brass helmets belonging to Roman soldiers marching along the street below. I hear their measured tread and watch them from the window of a high house in Galata, in Constantinople, in a narrow lane, one end of which leads to the old wharf and the Golden Horn with its ships and steamers and the minarets of Stamboul behind them. I hear their heavy measured tread, and see the sun shining on their helmets. Then suddenly I detach myself from the window sill on which I am lying, and in the same reclining position fly slowly over the lane, over the houses, and then over the Golden Horn in the direction of Stamboul. I smell the sea, feel the wind, the warm sun. This flying gives me a wonderfully pleasant sensation, and I cannot help opening my eyes. 7
Ouspensky's half-dream states developed out of a habit of observing the contents of his mind while falling asleep or in half-sleep after awakening from a dream. He notes that they were much easier to observe in the morning after awakening than before sleep at the beginning of the night and did not occur at all "without definite efforts." 8
Dr. Nathan Rapport, an American psychiatrist, cultivated an approach to lucid dreaming very similar to Ouspensky's: "While in bed awaiting sleep, the experimenter interrupts his thoughts every few minutes with an effort to recall the mental item vanishing before each intrusion that inquisitive attention." 9 This habit is continued sleep itself, with results like the following:
Brilliant lights flashed, and a myriad of sparkles twinkled from a magnificent cut glass chandelier. Interesting as any stage extravaganza were the many quaintly detailed figurines upon a mantel against the distant, paneled wall adorned in rococo.
At the right a merry group of beauties and gallants in the most elegant attire of Victorian England idled away a pleasant occasion. This scene continued for [a] period of I was not aware, before I discovered that it was not reality, but a mental picture and that I was viewing it. Instantly it became an incommunicably beautiful vision. It was with the greatest stealth that my vaguely awakened mind began to peep: for I knew that these glorious shows end abruptly because of such intrusions.
I thought, "Have I here one of those mind pictures that are without motion?" As if in reply, one of the young ladies gracefully waltzed about the room. She returned to the group and immobility, with a smile lighting her pretty face, which was turned over her shoulder toward me. The entire color scheme was unobtrusive despite the kaleidoscopic sparkles of the chandelier, the exquisite blues and creamy pinks of the rich settings and costumes. I felt that only my interest in dreams brought my notice to the tints - delicate, yet all alive as if with inner illumination. 10
Hypnagogic Imagery Technique
1. Relax completely
While lying in bed, gently close your eyes and relax your head, neck, back, arms, and legs. Completely let go of all muscular and mental tension, and breathe slowly and restfully. Enjoy the feeling of relaxation and let go of your thoughts, worries, and concerns. If you have just awakened from sleep, you are probably sufficiently relaxed.
Otherwise, you may use either the progressive relaxation exercise (page 33) or the 61-point relaxation exercise (page 34) to relax more deeply. Let everything wind down,
slower and slower, more and more relaxed, until your mind becomes as serene as the calmest sea.
2. Observe the visual images
Gently focus your attention on the visual images that will gradually appear before your mind's eye. Watch how the images begin and end. Try to observe the images as delicately as possible, allowing them to be passively reflected in your mind as they unfold. Do not attempt to hold onto the images, but instead just watch without attachment or desire for action. While doing this, try to take the perspective of a detached observer as much as possible. At first you will see a sequence of disconnected, fleeting patterns and images. The images will gradually develop into scenes that become more and more complex, finally joining into extended sequences.
3. Enter the dream
When the imagery becomes a moving, vivid scenario, you should allow yourself to be passively drawn into the dream world. Do not try to actively enter the dream scene,
but instead continue to take a detached interest in the imagery. Let your involvement with what is happening draw you into the dream. But be careful of too much involvement and too little attention. Don't forget that you are dreaming now!
Commentary
Probably the most difficult part of this technique to master is entering the dream at Step 3. The challenge is to develop a delicate vigilance, an unobtrusive observer perspective, from which you let yourself be drawn into the dream. As Paul Tholey has emphasized, "It is not desirable to want actively to enter into the scenery,
since such an intention as a rule causes the scenery to disappear." 11 A passive volition similar to that described in the section on autosuggestion in the previous chapter is required: in Tholey's words, "Instead of actively wanting to enter into the scenery, the subject should attempt to let himself be carried into it passively." 12 A Tibetan teacher advises a similar frame of mind: "While delicately observing the mind, lead it gently into the dream state, as though you were leading a child by the hand." 13
Another risk is that, once you have entered into the dream, the world can seem so realistic that it is easy to lose lucidity, as happened in the beginning of Rapport's WILD described above. As insurance in case this happens, Tholey recommends that you resolve to carry out a particular action in the dream, so that if you momentarily lose lucidity, you may remember your intention to carry out the action and thereby regain lucidity.
~ Stephen LaBerge, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming,#KEYS
288:
Why do we forget our dreams?
Because you do not dream always at the same place. It is not always the same part of your being that dreams and it is not at the same place that you dream. If you were in conscious, direct, continuous communication with all the parts of your being, you would remember all your dreams. But very few parts of the being are in communication.
For example, you have a dream in the subtle physical, that is to say, quite close to the physical. Generally, these dreams occur in the early hours of the morning, that is between four and five o'clock, at the end of the sleep. If you do not make a sudden movement when you wake up, if you remain very quiet, very still and a little attentive - quietly attentive - and concentrated, you will remember them, for the communication between the subtle physical and the physical is established - very rarely is there no communication.
Now, dreams are mostly forgotten because you have a dream while in a certain state and then pass into another. For instance, when you sleep, your body is asleep, your vital is asleep, but your mind is still active. So your mind begins to have dreams, that is, its activity is more or less coordinated, the imagination is very active and you see all kinds of things, take part in extraordinary happenings.... After some time, all that calms down and the mind also begins to doze. The vital that was resting wakes up; it comes out of the body, walks about, goes here and there, does all kinds of things, reacts, sometimes fights, and finally eats. It does all kinds of things. The vital is very adventurous. It watches. When it is heroic it rushes to save people who are in prison or to destroy enemies or it makes wonderful discoveries. But this pushes back the whole mental dream very far behind. It is rubbed off, forgotten: naturally you cannot remember it because the vital dream takes its place. But if you wake up suddenly at that moment, you remember it. There are people who have made the experiment, who have got up at certain fixed hours of the night and when they wake up suddenly, they do remember. You must not move brusquely, but awake in the natural course, then you remember.
After a time, the vital having taken a good stroll, needs to rest also, and so it goes into repose and quietness, quite tired at the end of all kinds of adventures. Then something else wakes up. Let us suppose that it is the subtle physical that goes for a walk. It starts moving and begins wandering, seeing the rooms and... why, this thing that was there, but it has come here and that other thing which was in that room is now in this one, and so on. If you wake up without stirring, you remembeR But this has pushed away far to the back of the consciousness all the stories of the vital. They are forgotten and so you cannot recollect your dreams. But if at the time of waking up you are not in a hurry, you are not obliged to leave your bed, on the contrary you can remain there as long as you wish, you need not even open your eyes; you keep your head exactly where it was and you make yourself like a tranquil mirror within and concentrate there. You catch just a tiny end of the tail of your dream. You catch it and start pulling gently, without stirring in the least. You begin pulling quite gently, and then first one part comes, a little later another. You go backward; the last comes up first. Everything goes backward, slowly, and suddenly the whole dream reappears: "Ah, there! it was like that." Above all, do not jump up, do not stir; you repeat the dream to yourself several times - once, twice - until it becomes clear in all its details. Once that dream is settled, you continue not to stir, you try to go further in, and suddenly you catch the tail of something else. It is more distant, more vague, but you can still seize it. And here also you hang on, get hold of it and pull, and you see that everything changes and you enter another world; all of a sudden you have an extraordinary adventure - it is another dream. You follow the same process. You repeat the dream to yourself once, twice, until you are sure of it. You remain very quiet all the time. Then you begin to penetrate still more deeply into yourself, as though you were going in very far, very far; and again suddenly you see a vague form, you have a feeling, a sensation... like a current of air, a slight breeze, a little breath; and you say, "Well, well...." It takes a form, it becomes clear - and the third category comes. You must have a lot of time, a lot of patience, you must be very quiet in your mind and body, very quiet, and you can tell the story of your whole night from the end right up to the beginning.
Even without doing this exercise which is very long and difficult, in order to recollect a dream, whether it be the last one or the one in the middle that has made a violent impression on your being, you must do what I have said when you wake up: take particular care not even to move your head on the pillow, remain absolutely still and let the dream return.
Some people do not have a passage between one state and another, there is a little gap and so they leap from one to the other; there is no highway passing through all the states of being with no break of the consciousness. A small dark hole, and you do not remember. It is like a precipice across which one has to extend the consciousness. To build a bridge takes a very long time; it takes much longer than building a physical bridge.... Very few people want to and know how to do it. They may have had magnificent activities, they do not remember them or sometimes only the last, the nearest, the most physical activity, with an uncoordinated movement - dreams having no sense.
But there are as many different kinds of nights and sleep as there are different days and activities. There are not many days that are alike, each day is different. The days are not the same, the nights are not the same. You and your friends are doing apparently the same thing, but for each one it is very different. And each one must have his own procedure.
Why are two dreams never alike?
Because all things are different. No two minutes are alike in the universe and it will be so till the end of the universe, no two minutes will ever be alike. And men obstinately want to make rules! One must do this and not that.... Well! we must let people please themselves.
You could have put to me a very interesting question: "Why am I fourteen years old today?" Intelligent people will say: "It is because it is the fourteenth year since you were born." That is the answer of someone who believes himself to be very intelligent. But there is another reason. I shall tell this to you alone.... I have drowned you all sufficiently well! Now you must begin to learn swimming!
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 36?,#KEYS
289:
Mother, when one imagines something, does it not exist?
When you imagine something, it means that you make a mental formation which may be close to the truth or far from the truth - it also depends upon the quality of your formation. You make a mental formation and there are people who have such a power of formation that they succeed in making what they imagine real. There are not many of these but there are some. They imagine something and their formation is so well made and so powerful that it succeeds in being realised. These are creators; there are not many of them but there are some.
If one thinks of someone who doesn't exist or who is dead?
Ah! What do you mean? What have you just said? Someone who doesn't exist or someone who is dead? These are two absolutely different things.
I mean someone who is dead.
Someone who is dead!
If this person has remained in the mental domain, you can find him immediately. Naturally if he is no longer in the mental domain, if he is in the psychic domain, to think of him is not enough. You must know how to go into the psychic domain to find him. But if he has remained in the mental domain and you think of him, you can find him immediately, and not only that, but you can have a mental contact with him and a kind of mental vision of his existence.
The mind has a capacity of vision of its own and it is not the same vision as with these eyes, but it is a vision, it is a perception in forms. But this is not imagination. It has nothing to do with imagination.
Imagination, for instance, is when you begin to picture to yourself an ideal being to whom you apply all your conceptions, and when you tell yourself, "Why, it should be like this, like that, its form should be like this, its thought like that, its character like that," when you see all the details and build up the being. Now, writers do this all the time because when they write a novel, they imagine. There are those who take things from life but there are those who are imaginative, creators; they create a character, a personage and then put him in their book later. This is to imagine. To imagine, for example, a whole concurrence of circumstances, a set of events, this is what I call telling a story to oneself. But it can be put down on paper, and then one becomes a novelist. There are very different kinds of writers. Some imagine everything, some gather all sorts of observations from life and construct their book with them. There are a hundred ways of writing a book. But indeed some writers imagine everything from beginning to end. It all comes out of their head and they construct even their whole story without any support in things physically observed. This truly is imagination. But as I say, if they are very powerful and have a considerable capacity for creation, it is possible that one day or other there will be a physical human being who realises their creation. This too is true.
What do you suppose imagination is, eh? Have you never imagined anything, you?
And what happens?
All that one imagines.
You mean that you imagine something and it happens like that, eh? Or it is in a dream...
What is the function, the use of the imagination?
If one knows how to use it, as I said, one can create for oneself his own inner and outer life; one can build his own existence with his imagination, if one knows how to use it and has a power. In fact it is an elementary way of creating, of forming things in the world. I have always felt that if one didn't have the capacity of imagination he would not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life. When you think of yourself, usually you imagine what you want to be, don't you, and this goes ahead, then you follow, then it continues to go ahead and you follow. Imagination opens for you the path of realisation. People who are not imaginative - it is very difficult to make them move; they see just what is there before their nose, they feel just what they are moment by moment and they cannot go forward because they are clamped by the immediate thing. It depends a good deal on what one calls imagination. However...
Men of science must be having imagination!
A lot. Otherwise they would never discover anything. In fact, what is called imagination is a capacity to project oneself outside realised things and towards things realisable, and then to draw them by the projection. One can obviously have progressive and regressive imaginations. There are people who always imagine all the catastrophes possible, and unfortunately they also have the power of making them come. It's like the antennae going into a world that's not yet realised, catching something there and drawing it here. Then naturally it is an addition to the earth atmosphere and these things tend towards manifestation. It is an instrument which can be disciplined, can be used at will; one can discipline it, direct it, orientate it. It is one of the faculties one can develop in himself and render serviceable, that is, use it for definite purposes.
Sweet Mother, can one imagine the Divine and have the contact?
Certainly if you succeed in imagining the Divine you have the contact, and you can have the contact with what you imagine, in any case. In fact it is absolutely impossible to imagine something which doesn't exist somewhere. You cannot imagine anything at all which doesn't exist somewhere. It is possible that it doesn't exist on the earth, it is possible that it's elsewhere, but it is impossible for you to imagine something which is not already contained in principle in the universe; otherwise it could not occur.
Then, Sweet Mother, this means that in the created universe nothing new is added?
In the created universe? Yes. The universe is progressive; we said that constantly things manifest, more and more. But for your imagination to be able to go and seek beyond the manifestation something which will be manifested, well, it may happen, in fact it does - I was going to tell you that it is in this way that some beings can cause considerable progress to be made in the world, because they have the capacity of imagining something that's not yet manifested. But there are not many. One must first be capable of going beyond the manifested universe to be able to imagine something which is not there. There are already many things which can be imagined.
What is our terrestrial world in the universe? A very small thing. Simply to have the capacity of imagining something which does not exist in the terrestrial manifestation is already very difficult, very difficult. For how many billions of years hasn't it existed, this little earth? And there have been no two identical things. That's much. It is very difficult to go out from the earth atmosphere with one's mind; one can, but it is very difficult. And then if one wants to go out, not only from the earth atmosphere but from the universal life!
To be able simply to enter into contact with the life of the earth in its totality from the formation of the earth until now, what can this mean? And then to go beyond this and enter into contact with universal life from its beginnings up to now... and then again to be able to bring something new into the universe, one must go still farther beyond.
Not easy!
That's all?
(To the child) Convinced?
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, [T1],#KEYS
290:The Supermind [Supramental consciousness] is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda. Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and the divine Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and possesses its own essential law of being; it has not to be created or to emerge or evolve into existence out of involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view to have so emerged from life and Matter or to have evolved out of an involution in life and Matter. The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge, not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and therefore inevitable. Its -manifestation of the divine life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life with it and establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence. The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in this material existence. A manifestation of the Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this world sooner or lateR But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator, and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature; it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of divine gradations, a free growth to the supreme Supermind or beyond it to yet undreamed levels of being, consciousness and Ananda.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, 558,#KEYS
291:How to Meditate
Deep meditation is a mental procedure that utilizes the nature of the mind to systematically bring the mind to rest. If the mind is given the opportunity, it will go to rest with no effort. That is how the mind works.
Indeed, effort is opposed to the natural process of deep meditation. The mind always seeks the path of least resistance to express itself. Most of the time this is by making more and more thoughts. But it is also possible to create a situation in the mind that turns the path of least resistance into one leading to fewer and fewer thoughts. And, very soon, no thoughts at all. This is done by using a particular thought in a particular way. The thought is called a mantra.
For our practice of deep meditation, we will use the thought - I AM. This will be our mantra.
It is for the sound that we will use I AM, not for the meaning of it.
The meaning has an obvious significance in English, and I AM has a religious meaning in the English Bible as well. But we will not use I AM for the meaning - only for the sound. We can also spell it AYAM. No meaning there, is there? Only the sound. That is what we want. If your first language is not English, you may spell the sound phonetically in your own language if you wish. No matter how we spell it, it will be the same sound. The power of the sound ...I AM... is great when thought inside. But only if we use a particular procedure. Knowing this procedure is the key to successful meditation. It is very simple. So simple that we will devote many pages here to discussing how to keep it simple, because we all have a tendency to make things more complicated. Maintaining simplicity is the key to right meditation.
Here is the procedure of deep meditation: While sitting comfortably with eyes closed, we'll just relax. We will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. We just let them go by without minding them. After about a minute, we gently introduce the mantra, ...I AM...
We think the mantra in a repetition very easily inside. The speed of repetition may vary, and we do not mind it. We do not intone the mantra out loud. We do not deliberately locate the mantra in any particular part of the body. Whenever we realize we are not thinking the mantra inside anymore, we come back to it easily. This may happen many times in a sitting, or only once or twice. It doesn't matter. We follow this procedure of easily coming back to the mantra when we realize we are off it for the predetermined time of our meditation session. That's it.
Very simple.
Typically, the way we will find ourselves off the mantra will be in a stream of other thoughts. This is normal. The mind is a thought machine, remember? Making thoughts is what it does. But, if we are meditating, as soon as we realize we are off into a stream of thoughts, no matter how mundane or profound, we just easily go back to the mantra.
Like that. We don't make a struggle of it. The idea is not that we have to be on the mantra all the time. That is not the objective. The objective is to easily go back to it when we realize we are off it. We just favor the mantra with our attention when we notice we are not thinking it. If we are back into a stream of other thoughts five seconds later, we don't try and force the thoughts out. Thoughts are a normal part of the deep meditation process. We just ease back to the mantra again. We favor it.
Deep meditation is a going toward, not a pushing away from. We do that every single time with the mantra when we realize we are off it - just easily favoring it. It is a gentle persuasion. No struggle. No fuss. No iron willpower or mental heroics are necessary for this practice. All such efforts are away from the simplicity of deep meditation and will reduce its effectiveness.
As we do this simple process of deep meditation, we will at some point notice a change in the character of our inner experience. The mantra may become very refined and fuzzy. This is normal. It is perfectly all right to think the mantra in a very refined and fuzzy way if this is the easiest. It should always be easy - never a struggle. Other times, we may lose track of where we are for a while, having no mantra, or stream of thoughts either. This is fine too. When we realize we have been off somewhere, we just ease back to the mantra again. If we have been very settled with the mantra being barely recognizable, we can go back to that fuzzy level of it, if it is the easiest. As the mantra refines, we are riding it inward with our attention to progressively deeper levels of inner silence in the mind. So it is normal for the mantra to become very faint and fuzzy. We cannot force this to happen. It will happen naturally as our nervous system goes through its many cycles ofinner purification stimulated by deep meditation. When the mantra refines, we just go with it. And when the mantra does not refine, we just be with it at whatever level is easy. No struggle. There is no objective to attain, except to continue the simple procedure we are describing here.
When and Where to Meditate
How long and how often do we meditate? For most people, twenty minutes is the best duration for a meditation session. It is done twice per day, once before the morning meal and day's activity, and then again before the evening meal and evening's activity.
Try to avoid meditating right after eating or right before bed.
Before meal and activity is the ideal time. It will be most effective and refreshing then. Deep meditation is a preparation for activity, and our results over time will be best if we are active between our meditation sessions. Also, meditation is not a substitute for sleep. The ideal situation is a good balance between meditation, daily activity and normal sleep at night. If we do this, our inner experience will grow naturally over time, and our outer life will become enriched by our growing inner silence.
A word on how to sit in meditation: The first priority is comfort. It is not desirable to sit in a way that distracts us from the easy procedure of meditation. So sitting in a comfortable chair with back support is a good way to meditate. Later on, or if we are already familiar, there can be an advantage to sitting with legs crossed, also with back support. But always with comfort and least distraction being the priority. If, for whatever reason, crossed legs are not feasible for us, we will do just fine meditating in our comfortable chair. There will be no loss of the benefits.
Due to commitments we may have, the ideal routine of meditation sessions will not always be possible. That is okay. Do the best you can and do not stress over it. Due to circumstances beyond our control, sometimes the only time we will have to meditate will be right after a meal, or even later in the evening near bedtime. If meditating at these times causes a little disruption in our system, we will know it soon enough and make the necessary adjustments. The main thing is that we do our best to do two meditations every day, even if it is only a short session between our commitments. Later on, we will look at the options we have to make adjustments to address varying outer circumstances, as well as inner experiences that can come up.
Before we go on, you should try a meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit where you are not likely to be interrupted and do a short meditation, say ten minutes, and see how it goes. It is a toe in the water.
Make sure to take a couple of minutes at the end sitting easily without doing the procedure of meditation. Then open your eyes slowly. Then read on here.
As you will see, the simple procedure of deep meditation and it's resulting experiences will raise some questions. We will cover many of them here.
So, now we will move into the practical aspects of deep meditation - your own experiences and initial symptoms of the growth of your own inner silence. ~ Yogani, Deep Meditation,#KEYS
292:Intuition And The Value Of Concentration :::
Mother, how can the faculty of intuition be developed?
... There are different kinds of intuition, and we carry these capacities within us. They are always active to some extent but we don't notice them because we don't pay enough attention to what is going on in us. Behind the emotions, deep within the being, in a consciousness seated somewhere near the level of the solar plexus, there is a sort of prescience, a kind of capacity for foresight, but not in the form of ideas: rather in the form of feelings, almost a perception of sensations. For instance, when one is going to decide to do something, there is sometimes a kind of uneasiness or inner refusal, and usually, if one listens to this deeper indication, one realises that it was justified. In other cases there is something that urges, indicates, insists - I am not speaking of impulses, you understand, of all the movements which come from the vital and much lower still - indications which are behind the feelings, which come from the affective part of the being; there too one can receive a fairly sure indication of the thing to be done. These are forms of intuition or of a higher instinct which can be cultivated by observation and also by studying the results. Naturally, it must be done very sincerely, objectively, without prejudice. If one wants to see things in a particular way and at the same time practise this observation, it is all useless. One must do it as if one were looking at what is happening from outside oneself, in someone else. It is one form of intuition and perhaps the first one that usually manifests. There is also another form but that one is much more difficult to observe because for those who are accustomed to think, to act by reason - not by impulse but by reason - to reflect before doing anything, there is an extremely swift process from cause to effect in the half-conscious thought which prevents you from seeing the line, the whole line of reasoning and so you don't think that it is a chain of reasoning, and that is quite deceptive. You have the impression of an intuition but it is not an intuition, it is an extremely rapid subconscious reasoning, which takes up a problem and goes straight to the conclusions. This must not be mistaken for intuition. In the ordinary functioning of the brain, intuition is something which suddenly falls like a drop of light. If one has the faculty, the beginning of a faculty of mental vision, it gives the impression of something coming from outside or above, like a little impact of a drop of light in the brain, absolutely independent of all reasoning. This is perceived more easily when one is able to silence one's mind, hold it still and attentive, arresting its usual functioning, as if the mind were changed into a kind of mirror turned towards a higher faculty in a sustained and silent attention. That too one can learn to do. One must learn to do it, it is a necessary discipline.
When you have a question to solve, whatever it may be, usually you concentrate your attention here (pointing between the eyebrows), at the centre just above the eyes, the centre of the conscious will. But then if you do that, you cannot be in contact with intuition. You can be in contact with the source of the will, of effort, even of a certain kind of knowledge, but in the outer, almost material field; whereas, if you want to contact the intuition, you must keep this (Mother indicates the forehead) completely immobile. Active thought must be stopped as far as possible and the entire mental faculty must form - at the top of the head and a little further above if possible - a kind of mirror, very quiet, very still, turned upwards, in silent, very concentrated attention. If you succeed, you can - perhaps not immediately - but you can have the perception of the drops of light falling upon the mirror from a still unknown region and expressing themselves as a conscious thought which has no connection with all the rest of your thought since you have been able to keep it silent. That is the real beginning of the intellectual intuition.
It is a discipline to be followed. For a long time one may try and not succeed, but as soon as one succeeds in making a mirror, still and attentive, one always obtains a result, not necessarily with a precise form of thought but always with the sensations of a light coming from above. And then, if one can receive this light coming from above without entering immediately into a whirl of activity, receive it in calm and silence and let it penetrate deep into the being, then after a while it expresses itself either as a luminous thought or as a very precise indication here (Mother indicates the heart), in this other centre.
Naturally, first these two faculties must be developed; then, as soon as there is any result, one must observe the result, as I said, and see the connection with what is happening, the consequences: see, observe very attentively what has come in, what may have caused a distortion, what one has added by way of more or less conscious reasoning or the intervention of a lower will, also more or less conscious; and it is by a very deep study - indeed, almost of every moment, in any case daily and very frequent - that one succeeds in developing one's intuition. It takes a long time. It takes a long time and there are ambushes: one can deceive oneself, take for intuitions subconscious wills which try to manifest, indications given by impulses one has refused to receive openly, indeed all sorts of difficulties. One must be prepared for that. But if one persists, one is sure to succeed.
And there comes a time when one feels a kind of inner guidance, something which is leading one very perceptibly in all that one does. But then, for the guidance to have its maximum power, one must naturally add to it a conscious surrender: one must be sincerely determined to follow the indication given by the higher force. If one does that, then... one saves years of study, one can seize the result extremely rapidly. If one also does that, the result comes very rapidly. But for that, it must be done with sincerity and... a kind of inner spontaneity. If one wants to try without this surrender, one may succeed - as one can also succeed in developing one's personal will and making it into a very considerable power - but that takes a very long time and one meets many obstacles and the result is very precarious; one must be very persistent, obstinate, persevering, and one is sure to succeed, but only after a great labour.
Make your surrender with a sincere, complete self-giving, and you will go ahead at full speed, you will go much faster - but you must not do this calculatingly, for that spoils everything! (Silence) Moreover, whatever you may want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of everything, the capacity of concentrating the attention. If you are able to gather together the rays of attention and consciousness on one point and can maintain this concentration with a persistent will, nothing can resist it - whatever it may be, from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual one. But this discipline must be followed in a constant and, it may be said, imperturbable way; not that you should always be concentrated on the same thing - that's not what I mean, I mean learning to concentrate.
And materially, for studies, sports, all physical or mental development, it is absolutely indispensable. And the value of an individual is proportionate to the value of his attention.
And from the spiritual point of view it is still more important.
There is no spiritual obstacle which can resist a penetrating power of concentration. For instance, the discovery of the psychic being, union with the inner Divine, opening to the higher spheres, all can be obtained by an intense and obstinate power of concentration - but one must learn how to do it. There is nothing in the human or even in the superhuman field, to which the power of concentration is not the key. You can be the best athlete, you can be the best student, you can be an artistic, literary or scientific genius, you can be the greatest saint with that faculty. And everyone has in himself a tiny little beginning of it - it is given to everybody, but people do not cultivate it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#KEYS
293:
Can a Yogi attain to a state of consciousness in which he can know all things, answer all questions, relating even to abstruse scientific problems, such as, for example, the theory of relativity?
Theoretically and in principle it is not impossible for a Yogi to know everything; all depends upon the Yogi.
But there is knowledge and knowledge. The Yogi does not know in the way of the mind. He does not know everything in the sense that he has access to all possible information or because he contains all the facts of the universe in his mind or because his consciousness is a sort of miraculous encyclopaedia. He knows by his capacity for a containing or dynamic identity with things and persons and forces. Or he knows because he lives in a plane of consciousness or is in contact with a consciousness in which there is the truth and the knowledge.
If you are in the true consciousness, the knowledge you have will also be of the truth. Then, too, you can know directly, by being one with what you know. If a problem is put before you, if you are asked what is to be done in a particular matter, you can then, by looking with enough attention and concentration, receive spontaneously the required knowledge and the true answer. It is not by any careful application of theory that you reach the knowledge or by working it out through a mental process. The scientific mind needs these methods to come to its conclusions. But the Yogi's knowledge is direct and immediate; it is not deductive. If an engineer has to find out the exact position for the building of an arch, the line of its curve and the size of its opening, he does it by calculation, collating and deducing from his information and data. But a Yogi needs none of these things; he looks, has the vision of the thing, sees that it is to be done in this way and not in another, and this seeing is his knowledge.
Although it may be true in a general way and in a certain sense that a Yogi can know all things and can answer all questions from his own field of vision and consciousness, yet it does not follow that there are no questions whatever of any kind to which he would not or could not answer. A Yogi who has the direct knowledge, the knowledge of the true truth of things, would not care or perhaps would find it difficult to answer questions that belong entirely to the domain of human mental constructions. It may be, he could not or would not wish to solve problems and difficulties you might put to him which touch only the illusion of things and their appearances. The working of his knowledge is not in the mind. If you put him some silly mental query of that character, he probably would not answer. The very common conception that you can put any ignorant question to him as to some super-schoolmaster or demand from him any kind of information past, present or future and that he is bound to answer, is a foolish idea. It is as inept as the expectation from the spiritual man of feats and miracles that would satisfy the vulgar external mind and leave it gaping with wonder.
Moreover, the term "Yogi" is very vague and wide. There are many types of Yogis, many lines or ranges of spiritual or occult endeavour and different heights of achievement, there are some whose powers do not extend beyond the mental level; there are others who have gone beyond it. Everything depends on the field or nature of their effort, the height to which they have arrived, the consciousness with which they have contact or into which they enter.
Do not scientists go sometimes beyond the mental plane? It is said that Einstein found his theory of relativity not through any process of reasoning, but through some kind of sudden inspiration. Has that inspiration anything to do with the Supermind?
The scientist who gets an inspiration revealing to him a new truth, receives it from the intuitive mind. The knowledge comes as a direct perception in the higher mental plane illumined by some other light still farther above. But all that has nothing to do with the action of Supermind and this higher mental level is far removed from the supramental plane. Men are too easily inclined to believe that they have climbed into regions quite divine when they have only gone above the average level. There are many stages between the ordinary human mind and the Supermind, many grades and many intervening planes. If an ordinary man were to get into direct contact even with one of these intermediate planes, he would be dazzled and blinded, would be crushed under the weight of the sense of immensity or would lose his balance; and yet it is not the Supermind.
Behind the common idea that a Yogi can know all things and answer all questions is the actual fact that there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence. All mental movements that belong to the life of the earth are memorised and registered in this plane. Those who are capable of going there and care to take the trouble, can read in it and learn anything they choose. But this region must not be mistaken for the supramental levels. And yet to reach even there you must be able to silence the movements of the material or physical mind; you must be able to leave aside all your sensations and put a stop to your ordinary mental movements, whatever they are; you must get out of the vital; you must become free from the slavery of the body. Then only you can enter into that region and see. But if you are sufficiently interested to make this effort, you can arrive there and read what is written in the earth's memory.
Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light. The queries put must come from some sense of the truth and reality behind things. There are many questions and much debated problems that are cobwebs woven of mere mental abstractions or move on the illusory surface of things. These do not pertain to real knowledge; they are a deformation of knowledge, their very substance is of the ignorance. Certainly the supramental knowledge may give an answer, its own answer, to the problems set by the mind's ignorance; but it is likely that it would not be at all satisfactory or perhaps even intelligible to those who ask from the mental level. You must not expect the supramental to work in the way of the mind or demand that the knowledge in truth should be capable of being pieced together with the half-knowledge in ignorance. The scheme of the mind is one thing, but Supermind is quite another and it would no longer be supramental if it adapted itself to the exigencies of the mental scheme. The two are incommensurable and cannot be put together.
When the consciousness has attained to supramental joys, does it no longer take interest in the things of the mind?
The supramental does not take interest in mental things in the same way as the mind. It takes its own interest in all the movements of the universe, but it is from a different point of view and with a different vision. The world presents to it an entirely different appearance; there is a reversal of outlook and everything is seen from there as other than what it seems to the mind and often even the opposite. Things have another meaning; their aspect, their motion and process, everything about them, are watched with other eyes. Everything here is followed by the supermind; the mind movements and not less the vital, the material movements, all the play of the universe have for it a very deep interest, but of another kind. It is about the same difference as that between the interest taken in a puppet-play by one who holds the strings and knows what the puppets are to do and the will that moves them and that they can do only what it moves them to do, and the interest taken by another who observes the play but sees only what is happening from moment to moment and knows nothing else. The one who follows the play and is outside its secret has a stronger, an eager and passionate interest in what will happen and he gives an excited attention to its unforeseen or dramatic events; the other, who holds the strings and moves the show, is unmoved and tranquil. There is a certain intensity of interest which comes from ignorance and is bound up with illusion, and that must disappear when you are out of the ignorance. The interest that human beings take in things founds itself on the illusion; if that were removed, they would have no interest at all in the play; they would find it dry and dull. That is why all this ignorance, all this illusion has lasted so long; it is because men like it, because they cling to it and its peculiar kind of appeal that it endures.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, 93?
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294:
The whole question.
The whole question? And now, do you understand?... Not quite? I told you that you did not understand because it was muddled up; in one question three different ideas were included. So naturally it created a confusion. But taken separately they are what I explained to you just now, most probably; that is to say, one has this altogether ignorant and obliterated consciousness and is convinced that he is the cause and effect, the origin and result of himself, separate from all others, separate with a limited power to act upon others and a little greater capacity to be set in movement by others or to react to others' influence. That is how people think usually, something like that, isn't that so? How do you feel, you? What effect do you have upon yourself? And you? And you?... You have never thought about it? You have never looked into yourself to see what effect you exercise upon yourself? Never thought over it? No? How do you feel? Nobody will tell me? Come, you tell me that. Never tried to understand how you feel? Yes? No? How strange! Never sought to understand how, for example, decisions take place in you? From where do they come? What makes you decide one thing rather than another? And what is the relation between a decision of yours and your action? And to what extent do you have the freedom of choice between one thing and another? And how far do you feel you are able to, you are free to do this or that or that other or nothing at all?... You have pondered over that? Yes? Is there any one among the students who has thought over it? No? Nobody put the question to himself? You? You?...
Even if one thinks over it, perhaps one is not able to answer!
One cannot explain?
No.
It is difficult to explain? Even this simple little thing, to see where in your consciousness the wills that come from outside meet your will (which you call yours, which comes from within), at what place the two join together and to what extent the one from outside acts upon that from within and the one from within acts upon that from outside? You have never tried to find this out? It has never seemed to you unbearable that a will from outside should have an action upon your will? No?
I do not know.
Oh! I am putting very difficult problems! But, my children, I was preoccupied with that when I was a child of five!... So I thought you must have been preoccupied with it since a long time. In oneself, there are contradictory wills. Yes, many. That is one of the very first discoveries. There is one part which wants things this way; and then at another moment, another way, and a third time, one wants still another thing! Besides, there is even this: something that wants and another which says no. So? But it is exactly that which has to be found if you wish in the least to organise yourself. Why not project yourself upon a screen, as in the cinema, and then look at yourself moving on it? How interesting it is!
This is the first step.
You project yourself on the screen and then observe and see all that is moving there and how it moves and what happens. You make a little diagram, it becomes so interesting then. And then, after a while, when you are quite accustomed to seeing, you can go one step further and take a decision. Or even a still greater step: you organise - arrange, take up all that, put each thing in its place, organise in such a way that you begin to have a straight movement with an inner meaning. And then you become conscious of your direction and are able to say: "Very well, it will be thus; my life will develop in that way, because that is the logic of my being. Now, I have arranged all that within me, each thing has been put in its place, and so naturally a central orientation is forming. I am following this orientation. One step more and I know what will happen to me for I myself am deciding it...." I do not know, I am telling you this; to me it seemed terribly interesting, the most interesting thing in the world. There was nothing, no other thing that interested me more than that.
This happened to me.... I was five or six or seven years old (at seven the thing became quite serious) and I had a father who loved the circus, and he came and told me: "Come with me, I am going to the circus on Sunday." I said: "No, I am doing something much more interesting than going to the circus!" Or again, young friends invited me to attend a meeting where we were to play together, enjoy together: "No, I enjoy here much more...." And it was quite sincere. It was not a pose: for me, it was like this, it was true. There was nothing in the world more enjoyable than that.
And I am so convinced that anybody who does it in that way, with the same freshness and sincerity, will obtain most interesting results.... To put all that on a screen in front of yourself and look at what is happening. And the first step is to know all that is happening and then you must not try to shut your eyes when something does not appear pleasant to you! You must keep them wide open and put each thing in that way before the screen. Then you make quite an interesting discovery. And then the next step is to start telling yourself: "Since all that is happening within me, why should I not put this thing in this way and then that thing in that way and then this other in this way and thus wouldn't I be doing something logical that has a meaning? Why should I not remove that thing which stands obstructing the way, these conflicting wills? Why? And what does that represent in the being? Why is it there? If it were put there, would it not help instead of harming me?" And so on.
And little by little, little by little, you see clearer and then you see why you are made like that, what is the thing you have got to do - that for which you are born. And then, quite naturally, since all is organised for this thing to happen, the path becomes straight and you can say beforehand: "It is in this way that it will happen." And when things come from outside to try and upset all that, you are able to say: "No, I accept this, for it helps; I reject that, for that harms." And then, after a few years, you curb yourself as you curb a horse: you do whatever you like, in the way you like and you go wherever you like.
It seems to me this is worth the trouble. I believe it is the most interesting thing.
...
You must have a great deal of sincerity, a little courage and perseverance and then a sort of mental curiosity, you understand, curious, seeking to know, interested, wanting to learn. To love to learn: that, one must have in one's nature. To find it impossible to stand before something grey, all hazy, in which nothing is seen clearly and which gives you quite an unpleasant feeling, for you do not know where you begin and where you end, what is yours and what is not yours and what is settled and what is not settled - what is this pulp-like thing you call yourself in which things get intermingled and act upon one another without even your being aware of it? You ask yourself: "But why have I done this?" You know nothing about it. "And why have I felt that?" You don't know that, either. And then, you are thrown into a world outside that is only fog and you are thrown into a world inside that is also for you another kind of fog, still more impenetrable, in which you live, like a cork thrown upon the waters and the waves carry it away or cast it into the air, and it drops and rolls on. That is quite an unpleasant state. I do not know, but to me it appears unpleasant.
To see clearly, to see one's way, where one is going, why one is going there, how one is to go there and what one is going to do and what is the kind of relation with others... But that is a problem so wonderfully interesting - it is interesting - and you can always discover things every minute! One's work is never finished.
There is a time, there is a certain state of consciousness when you have the feeling that you are in that condition with all the weight of the world lying heavy upon you and besides you are going in blinkers and do not know where you are going, but there is something which is pushing you. And that is truly a very unpleasant condition. And there is another moment when one draws oneself up and is able to see what is there above, and one becomes it; then one looks at the world as though from the top of a very very high mountain and one sees all that is happening below; then one can choose one's way and follow it. That is a more pleasant condition. This then is truly the truth, you are upon earth for that, surely. All individual beings and all the little concentrations of consciousness were created to do this work. It is the very reason for existence: to be able to become fully conscious of a certain sum of vibrations representing an individual being and put order there and find one's way and follow it.
And so, as men do not know it and do not do it, life comes and gives them a blow here: "Oh! that hurts", then a blow there: "Ah! that's hurting me." And the thing goes on like that and all the time it is like that. And all the time they are getting pain somewhere. They suffer, they cry, they groan. But it is simply due to that reason, there is no other: it is that they have not done that little work. If, when they were quite young, there had been someone to teach them to do the work and they had done it without losing time, they could have gone through life gloriously and instead of suffering they would have been all-powerful masters of their destiny.
This is not to say that necessarily all things would become pleasant. It is not at all that. But your reaction towards things becomes the true reaction and instead of suffering, you learn; instead of being miserable, you go forward and progress. After all, I believe it is for this that you are here - so that there is someone who can tell you: "There, well, try that. It is worth trying." ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 199,#KEYS
295:[The Gods and Their Worlds]
[...] According to traditions and occult schools, all these zones of realities, these planes of realities have got different names; they have been classified in a different way, but there is an essential analogy, and if you go back far enough into the traditions, you see only the words changing according to the country and the language. Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists offer great similarities. All who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw, give a very similar description, whether they be from here or there; they use different words, but the experience is very similar and the handling of forces is the same.
This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies. They are what the psychological method calls "states of consciousness", but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure consists then in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in becoming sufficiently a master of them so as to be able to go out of them successively, one after another. There is indeed a whole scale of subtleties, increasing or decreasing according to the direction in which you go, and the occult procedure consists in going out of a denser body into a subtler body and so on again, up to the most ethereal regions. You go, by successive exteriorisations, into bodies or worlds more and more subtle. It is somewhat as if every time you passed into another dimension. The fourth dimension of the physicists is nothing but the scientific transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another image, one can say that the physical body is at the centre - it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest - and the inner bodies, more subtle, overflow more and more the central physical body; they pass through it, extending themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming a kind of steam all around. And the greater the subtlety, the more the extension tends to unite with that of the universe: one ends by universalising oneself. And it is altogether a concrete process which gives an objective experience of invisible worlds and even enables one to act in these worlds.
There are, then, only a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary - more or less wildly imaginary - but that they correspond to a universal truth.
All these regions, all these domains are filled with beings who exist, each in its own domain, and if you are awake and conscious on a particular plane - for instance, if on going out of a more material body you awake on some higher plane, you have the same relation with the things and people of that plane as you had with the things and people of the material world. That is to say, there exists an entirely objective relation that has nothing to do with the idea you may have of these things. Naturally, the resemblance is greater and greater as you approach the physical world, the material world, and there even comes a time when the one region has a direct action upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the overmental worlds, you will find a concrete reality absolutely independent of your personal experience; you go back there and again find the same things, with the differences that have occurred during your absence. And you have relations with those beings that are identical with the relations you have with physical beings, with this difference that the relation is more plastic, supple and direct - for example, there is the capacity to change the external form, the visible form, according to the inner state you are in. But you can make an appointment with someone and be at the appointed place and find the same being again, with certain differences that have come about during your absence; it is entirely concrete with results entirely concrete.
One must have at least a little of this experience in order to understand these things. Otherwise, those who are convinced that all this is mere human imagination and mental formation, who believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have thought them to be like that, and that they have certain defects and certain qualities because men have thought them to be like that - all those who say that God is made in the image of man and that he exists only in human thought, all these will not understand; to them this will appear absolutely ridiculous, madness. One must have lived a little, touched the subject a little, to know how very concrete the thing is.
Naturally, children know a good deal if they have not been spoilt. There are so many children who return every night to the same place and continue to live the life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoilt with age, you can keep them with you. At a time when I was especially interested in dreams, I could return exactly to a place and continue a work that I had begun: supervise something, for example, set something in order, a work of organisation or of discovery, of exploration. You go until you reach a certain spot, as you would go in life, then you take a rest, then you return and begin again - you begin the work at the place where you left off and you continue it. And you perceive that there are things which are quite independent of you, in the sense that changes of which you are not at all the author, have taken place automatically during your absence.
But for this, you must live these experiences yourself, you must see them yourself, live them with sufficient sincerity and spontaneity in order to see that they are independent of any mental formation. For you can do the opposite also, and deepen the study of the action of mental formation upon events. This is very interesting, but it is another domain. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you become aware of how far you can delude yourself. So you must study both, the dream and the occult reality, in order to see what is the essential difference between the two. The one depends upon us; the other exists in itself; entirely independent of the thought that we have of it.
When you have worked in that domain, you recognise in fact that once a subject has been studied and something has been learnt mentally, it gives a special colour to the experience; the experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality. Whereas if you had learnt nothing about the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be completely spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it would be more or less adequate, but it would not be the outcome of a previous mental formation.
Naturally, this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because in those who do not have a developed inner life, there are veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the first time, they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being!
I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it would be worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him "go out" - but it was a frightful thing! When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active, and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being; then he remembered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon. And to go out of one's body means to pass gradually through all the states of being, if one does the thing systematically. Well, already in the subtle physical, one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised.
Thus, when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, to enter into themselves, they are in agony - naturally! They have the impression that they are vanishing. And with reason: there is nothing, no consciousness!
These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are, for people who know nothing, wild imagination. If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to the West, well, unless you have been frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with open eyes. And when you have turned your back, they hasten to say, "These people are cranks!" Now to come back to the gods and conclude. It must be said that all those beings who have never had an earthly existence - gods or demons, invisible beings and powers - do not possess what the Divine has put into man: the psychic being. And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.
In the gods there is no fault because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint: as gods, it is their manner of being. But if you take a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see that they lack certain qualities that are exclusively human. By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his egoism.
If he fulfils the required condition, man is nearer to the Supreme than the gods are. He can be nearer. He is not so automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality.
If human love manifested itself without mixture, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love there is as much love of oneself as of the one loved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself. - 4 November 1958
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III, 355
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296:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
297:Mental Education
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and in the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
(3) Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
It is not possible to give here all the details concerning the methods to be employed in the application of these five phases of education to different individuals. Still, a few explanations on points of detail can be given.
Undeniably, what most impedes mental progress in children is the constant dispersion of their thoughts. Their thoughts flutter hither and thither like butterflies and they have to make a great effort to fix them. Yet this capacity is latent in them, for when you succeed in arousing their interest, they are capable of a good deal of attention. By his ingenuity, therefore, the educator will gradually help the child to become capable of a sustained effort of attention and a faculty of more and more complete absorption in the work in hand. All methods that can develop this faculty of attention from games to rewards are good and can all be utilised according to the need and the circumstances. But it is the psychological action that is most important and the sovereign method is to arouse in the child an interest in what you want to teach him, a liking for work, a will to progress. To love to learn is the most precious gift that one can give to a child: to love to learn always and everywhere, so that all circumstances, all happenings in life may be constantly renewed opportunities for learning more and always more.
For that, to attention and concentration should be added observation, precise recording and faithfulness of memory. This faculty of observation can be developed by varied and spontaneous exercises, making use of every opportunity that presents itself to keep the child's thought wakeful, alert and prompt. The growth of the understanding should be stressed much more than that of memory. One knows well only what one has understood. Things learnt by heart, mechanically, fade away little by little and finally disappear; what is understood is never forgotten. Moreover, you must never refuse to explain to a child the how and the why of things. If you cannot do it yourself, you must direct the child to those who are qualified to answer or point out to him some books that deal with the question. In this way you will progressively awaken in the child the taste for true study and the habit of making a persistent effort to know.
This will bring us quite naturally to the second phase of development in which the mind should be widened and enriched.
You will gradually show the child that everything can become an interesting subject for study if it is approached in the right way. The life of every day, of every moment, is the best school of all, varied, complex, full of unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. It is so easy to arouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numerous questions they ask. An interesting reply to one readily brings others in its train and so the attentive child learns without effort much more than he usually does in the classroom. By a choice made with care and insight, you should also teach him to enjoy good reading-matter which is both instructive and attractive. Do not be afraid of anything that awakens and pleases his imagination; imagination develops the creative mental faculty and through it study becomes living and the mind develops in joy.
In order to increase the suppleness and comprehensiveness of his mind, one should see not only that he studies many varied topics, but above all that a single subject is approached in various ways, so that the child understands in a practical manner that there are many ways of facing the same intellectual problem, of considering it and solving it. This will remove all rigidity from his brain and at the same time it will make his thinking richer and more supple and prepare it for a more complex and comprehensive synthesis. In this way also the child will be imbued with the sense of the extreme relativity of mental learning and, little by little, an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge will awaken in him.
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
All that has just been said concerns the speculative mind, the mind that learns. But learning is only one aspect of mental activity; the other, which is at least equally important, is the constructive faculty, the capacity to form and thus prepare action. This very important part of mental activity has rarely been the subject of any special study or discipline. Only those who want, for some reason, to exercise a strict control over their mental activities think of observing and disciplining this faculty of formation; and as soon as they try it, they have to face difficulties so great that they appear almost insurmountable.
And yet control over this formative activity of the mind is one of the most important aspects of self-education; one can say that without it no mental mastery is possible. As far as study is concerned, all ideas are acceptable and should be included in the synthesis, whose very function is to become more and more rich and complex; but where action is concerned, it is just the opposite. The ideas that are accepted for translation into action should be strictly controlled and only those that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have no influence on the action. This work of mental purification should be done very regularly in order to secure a complete control over one's actions.
For this purpose, it is good to set apart some time every day when one can quietly go over one's thoughts and put one's synthesis in order. Once the habit is acquired, you can maintain control over your thoughts even during work and action, allowing only those which are useful for what you are doing to come to the surface. Particularly, if you have continued to cultivate the power of concentration and attention, only the thoughts that are needed will be allowed to enter the active external consciousness and they then become all the more dynamic and effective. And if, in the intensity of concentration, it becomes necessary not to think at all, all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the inspirations that come from there.
But even before reaching this point, silence in itself is supremely useful, because in most people who have a somewhat developed and active mind, the mind is never at rest. During the day, its activity is kept under a certain control, but at night, during the sleep of the body, the control of the waking state is almost completely removed and the mind indulges in activities which are sometimes excessive and often incoherent. This creates a great stress which leads to fatigue and the diminution of the intellectual faculties.
The fact is that like all the other parts of the human being, the mind too needs rest and it will not have this rest unless we know how to provide it. The art of resting one's mind is something to be acquired. Changing one's mental activity is certainly one way of resting; but the greatest possible rest is silence. And as far as the mental faculties are concerned a few minutes passed in the calm of silence are a more effective rest than hours of sleep.
When one has learned to silence the mind at will and to concentrate it in receptive silence, then there will be no problem that cannot be solved, no mental difficulty whose solution cannot be found. When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquillity, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. Bulletin, November 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
298:The Supreme Discovery
IF WE want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life.
Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the intellectual representation symbolising That which is at the centre of our being, That which is our life and our light.
This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages.
The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning?
The ancient traditions rightly said:
"Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one."
And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity.
Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to reascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that what he wants to attain, what he believes to be so far from him, is within him.
For how could he know anything of the origin until he becomes conscious of this origin in himself?
It is by understanding himself, by learning to know himself, that he can make the supreme discovery and cry out in wonder like the patriarch in the Bible, "The house of God is here and I knew it not."
That is why we must express that sublime thought, creatrix of the material worlds, and make known to all the word that fills the heavens and the earth, "I am in all things and all beings."When all shall know this, the promised day of great transfigurations will be at hand. When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."
This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought which should be ever present to our remembrance as the sun that illumines all life.
That is why I remind you of it today. For if we follow our path bearing this thought in our hearts like the rarest jewel, the most precious treasure, if we allow it to do its work of illumination and transfiguration within us, we shall know that it lives in the centre of all beings and all things, and in it we shall feel the marvellous oneness of the universe.
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real apprenticeship in order to achieve this: their egoistic being is too all-absorbing, too rigid, too conservative, and their struggles against it are long and painful. Others, on the contrary, who are more impersonal, more plastic, more spiritualised, come easily into contact with the inexhaustible divine source of their being.But let us not forget that they too should devote themselves daily, constantly, to a methodical effort of adaptation and transformation, so that nothing within them may ever again obscure the radiance of that pure light.
But how greatly the standpoint changes once we attain this deeper consciousness! How understanding widens, how compassion grows!
On this a sage has said:
"I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'"
Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed as if by miracle.
This is the attitude of true, conscious and discerning love, the love which knows how to see behind appearances, understand in spite of words, and which, amid all obstacles, is in constant communion with the depths.
What value have our impulses and our desires, our anguish and our violence, our sufferings and our struggles, all these inner vicissitudes unduly dramatised by our unruly imagination - what value do they have before this great, this sublime and divine love bending over us from the innermost depths of our being, bearing with our weaknesses, rectifying our errors, healing our wounds, bathing our whole being with its regenerating streams?
For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself, conceals and forgets herself in the heart of all beings and things; she never accuses, she neither judges nor curses nor condemns, but works unceasingly to perfect without constraint, to mend without reproach, to encourage without impatience, to enrich each one with all the wealth he can receive; she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything, excuse and pardon everything, hope and prepare for everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things....
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
To achieve this total self-consecration, all means are good, all methods have their value. The one thing needful is to persevere in our will to attain this goal. For then everything we study, every action we perform, every human being we meet, all come to bring us an indication, a help, a light to guide us on the path.
Before I close, I shall add a few pages for those who have already made apparently fruitless efforts, for those who have encountered the pitfalls on the way and seen the measure of their weakness, for those who are in danger of losing their self-confidence and courage. These pages, intended to rekindle hope in the hearts of those who suffer, were written by a spiritual worker at a time when ordeals of every kind were sweeping down on him like purifying flames.
You who are weary, downcast and bruised, you who fall, who think perhaps that you are defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment, and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart. Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults, the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace.
You who weep, who suffer and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild, no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child, you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this, that the most sublime forces of the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only makes him greater.
Hear the story of the worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates a richer and deeper unity, and by multiplying the surfaces of the material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity, but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place and sanctuary.
That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, The Supreme Discovery,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Love is a serious mental disease. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 2:With a sort of mental squint. ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 3:Madness is a kind of mental suicide. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 4:Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 5:Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 6:Mental toughness is essential to success. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 7:A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 8:Freedom from mental distraction equals power. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 9:Your own mental attitude is your real boss. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 10:Concentration is at the root of mental mastery. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 11:Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 12:Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 13:It is impossible even to think without a mental picture. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 14:An emotion is both a mental and a physical event. ~ nathaniel-branden, @wisdomtrove 15:Variety – the need for physical and mental stimulation ~ tony-robbins, @wisdomtrove 16:The ultimate source of happiness is our mental attitude. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 17:Holy meditation helps to burn out all mental impurities. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 18:I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 19:Our mental attitude is the x factor that determines our fate. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 20:It isn't work that makes you tired, it's your mental attitude. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 21:Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 22:Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 23:Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 24:The mental pattern must always precede the material form. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 25:True spirituality is a mental attitude you can practice at any time. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 26:If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 27:Your mental attitude is the most dependable key to your personality. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 28:There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 29:I will not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 30:The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 31:Today I do a mental housecleaning, making room for new, positive thoughts. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 32:Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 33:The best way to improve mental performance, is to improve physical performance ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 34:Your mental attitude attracts to you everything that makes you what you are. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 35:Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 36:The measure of mental health is the disposition to see good everywhere. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 37:All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 38:Change your mental attitude, and the World around you will change accordingly. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 39:Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds! ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 40:I am what I am, not identifiable with any physical or mental state. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 41:Any pleasure gained by means other than mental control weakens the body. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 42:Some tortures are physical and some are mental, but the one that's both is dental. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 43:Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 44:The very word possibility creates a mental climate conducive to creativity. ~ robert-h-schuller, @wisdomtrove 45:Only lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty. ~ george-bernard-shaw, @wisdomtrove 46:Some tortures are physical And some are mental, But the one that is both Is dental. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 47:We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 48:The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 49:Then blessings on thee, my afternoon torpor Thou makest a prince of a mental porpor. ~ ogden-nash, @wisdomtrove 50:Take heart! Many great things have been done by people in poor mental health. ~ ashleigh-brilliant, @wisdomtrove 51:Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 52:Combine your mental images with the emotion of desire to accelerate their realization. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 53:Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 54:Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 55:Mental toughness is a state of mind - you could call it & 56:Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 57:Real happiness in life comes from the mental capacity to adapt to any situation. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 58:The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 59:Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 60:Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 61:... and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky... ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 62:Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 63:Fear is nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative stream of consciousness ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 64:I have always believed that a good laugh was good for both the mental and physical digestion. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 65:Your world and everything in it is a reflection of your own mental attitude toward yourself. ~ earl-nightingale, @wisdomtrove 66:The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved& 67:The person is a mental construct, a collective noun for a set of memories and habits. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 68:A positive mental attitude is an irresistible force that knows no such thing as an immovable body. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 69:The only thing over which you have complete right of control at all times is your mental attitude. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 70:There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 71:Condition comes from hard work during practice and proper mental and moral conduct between practices. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 72:In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove 73:Ability may get you to the top, nut it takes chracter to keep you there - mental, moral, and physical. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 74:Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 75:Of all the mental and physical polluters of life, nothing exercises such a poisonous effect as fear. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 76:The individual with a negative mental attitude attracts troubles as a magnet attracts steel fittings. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 77:Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 78:Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 79:Anything that brings spiritual, mental, or physical weakness, touch it not with the toes of your feet. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 80:Definiteness of purpose with positive mental attitude is the starting point of all worthwhile achievement. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 81:Learn to see negative thoughts as a form of mental static, and you can stop paying so much attention to them. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 82:The use of the Will as the projector of Mentative Currents is the real base of all Mental Magic. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 83:When an idea exclusively occupies the mind, it is transformed into an actual physical or mental state. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 84:Whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 85:Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, just as weight training strengthens your muscles. ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 86:In vocal prayer we speak to God; in mental prayer he speaks to us. It is then that God pours Himself into us. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 87:Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 88:Our supreme duty is to advance toward freedom - physical, mental, and spiritual - and help others to do so. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 89:When a new idea comes our way, we must put it on our mental scales and weigh it carefully before deciding its value. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 90:One of the best places to start to turn your life around is by doing whatever appears on your mental "I should" list. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 91:You attract the good and desirable with positive mental attitude. You repel them with negative mental attitude. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 92:Yoga is more than physical. It is cellular, mental, intellectual and spiritual-it involves man in his entire being ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 93:Thought and action can be perceived as two different dimensions of who you are: the mental you and the physical you ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 94:When every physical and mental resources is focused, one's power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 95:Mental prayer is nothing else but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove 96:You either ride life or it rides you. Your mental attitude determines who is & 97:Mental toughness is Spartanism, with all its qualities of self-denial, sacrifice, dedication, fearlessness, and love. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 98:Reality is what makes the present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely mental. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 99:The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 100:Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 101:You can profit by disappointment - if it is turned into inspirational dissatisfaction with a positive mental attitude. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 102:Accept the consequences of your actions in order to become the agent of your mental, physical, spiritual and material success. ~ les-brown, @wisdomtrove 103:As you let go and willingly release the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of your being, Spirit becomes your state. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 104:I relax and cast aside all mental burdens, allowing God to express through me His perfect love, peace, and wisdom. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 105:Most haters are stuck in a poisonous mental prison of jealousy and self-doubt that blinds them to their own potentiality. ~ steve-maraboli, @wisdomtrove 106:The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 107:It is true that the mental aspect of kung-fu is the desired end; however, to achieve this end, technical skill must come first. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 108:Occasionally an old reaction, emotional or mental, happens in the mind, but it is at once noticed and discarded. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 109:Success is achieved and maintained by those who keep trying with positive mental attitude. What you try for is up to you. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 110:But Doc had one mental habit he could not get over. When anyone asked a question, Doc thought he wanted to know the answer. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 111:Everything in your life, every experience, every relationship is a mirror of the mental pattern that is going on inside of you. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 112:To become a champion requires a good mental attitude toward preparation. You have to accept the most tedious task with pleasure. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 113:A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 114:Career success is using your daily work, schoolwork, work in the world, work at home, as a way of advancing your mental state. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 115:Many a person has changed his whole physical and mental condition by a careful, persistent course of auto-suggestion. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 116:We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 117:Everyone faces defeat. It may be a stepping-stone or a stumbling block, depending on the mental attitude with which it is faced. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 118:Keep fear out of your child's mind, as you would keep poison out of his body; for fear is the deadliest of mental poisons. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 119:Never underestimate the repellent power of a negative mental attitude. It can prevent life's lucky breaks from benefiting you. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 120:The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clich√©s. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 121:We are Physical, Mental and Spiritual beings. If you don't deal with ALL OF LIFE you're not going to get all that life has to offer. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 122:You don't see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 123:This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 124:Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system. ~ norman-cousins, @wisdomtrove 125:I'm always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life. ~ steve-martin, @wisdomtrove 126:Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 127:We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 128:Fundamentally, what everyone needs is mental strength and confidence, to manage the mind, just as we manage the outside world. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 129:School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 130:The physical is external reality. The mental is our thought process - an intermediate reality. And the vital is the reality behind both. ~ barry-long, @wisdomtrove 131:To me, good health is more than just exercise and diet. Its really a point of view and a mental attitude you have about yourself. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 132:Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 133:It takes energy, mental toughness and spiritual reinforcement to successfully deal with life's opportunities, and to reach your objectives. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 134:What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 135:Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles. The mental pattern must always precede the material form. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 136:Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 137:True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is a spiritual commerce with the Creator of heaven and earth. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 138:I have mental joys and mental health,Mental friends and mental wealth,I've a wife that I love and that loves me;I've all but riches bodily. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 139:The feeling of being valuable & 140:Your mental attitude gives your entire personality a drawing power that attracts the circumstances, things and people you think about most! ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 141:A country is as strong, really, as its citizens. And I think that mental and physical health - mental and physical vigor - go hand in hand. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 142:Cease negative mental chattering. If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 143:Would you really dig into yesterday's garbage to make tonight's meal? Do you dig into yesterday's mental garbage to create today's experiences? ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 144:I have mental joys and mental health, Mental friends and mental wealth, I've a wife that I love and that loves me; I've all but riches bodily. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 145:Love tames the benumbed beast. A man is put to use regarding a woman's physical safety, but a woman is put to use regarding a man's mental safety. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 146:A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 147:If you would be free of greed, first you have to leave egotism behind. The best mental exercise for relinquishing egotism is contemplating impermanence. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 148:The most important thing I've come to believe in is that people with mental handicaps have a unique mission to bring God's blessing to the World. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 149:Stop the mental chatter about what's wrong and what's not complete. There is a presence of Love that is seeking to express itself through you. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 150:The time is a critical one, for it marks the beginning of the second half of life, when a metanoia, a mental transformation, not infrequently occurs. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 151:As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 152:[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 153:I've seen many miracles take place in people's lives. Financial miracles, miracles of physical healing, mental healing, healing of relationships. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 154:The atom cannot disobey the law. Whether it is the mental or the physical atom, it must obey the law. "What is the use of [external restraint]?" ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 155:YOU DO NOT need to be a victim of worry. Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 156:Throughout the developed world,we have moved from "man power"to "mind power."We have moved from the use of physical muscle to the use of mental muscle. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 157:‘Unconscious,’ the way I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies complete absence of the watcher. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 158:There is but ONE. That ONE is Spirit. In the Infinite Mind of that ONE SPIRIT there arose the Mental Image or Thought-Form of this Universe. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 159:Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what we are. By ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 160:With a Cosmos mental in nature— consisting in fact of but One Universal Mind in which all particular things are but Centres of Consciousness. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 161:I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 162:Know that all healing forces are within, not without! The applications from without are merely to create within a coordinating mental and spiritual force. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 163:There is no body, nor a world to contain it; there is only a mental condition, a dream-like state, easy to dispel by questioning its reality. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 164:Above all, you must maintain a positive mental attitude, looking for the good in every situation, and remain determined to be a completely positive person. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 165:With every adversity there is a seed of an equivalent or greater benefit for those who are motivated with positive mental attitude to become achievers. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 166:Vipassana meditation is an ongoing creative purification process. Observation of the moment-to-moment experience cleanses the mental layers, one after another. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 167:In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 168:Many philosophies have held that the universe is mental, in its last analysis, and that the Universal Mind is the reality behind the appearances. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 169:All exists in the mind, even the body is an integration in the mind of a vast number of sensory perceptions, each perception also a mental state. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 170:all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 171:Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly. ~ tim-ferris, @wisdomtrove 172:Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 173:Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 174:Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 175:The whole universe is composed of name and form. Whatever we see is either a compound of name and form, or simply name with form which is a mental image. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 176:Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly, before all the World, in some mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 177:Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 178:The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 179:By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 180:Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 181:We have a mental block inside us that stops us from earning more than we think we are worth. If we want to earn more in reality, we have to upgrade our self-concept. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 182:Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit. When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 183:The Master Mind principle: Two or more people actively engaged in the pursuit of a definite purpose with a positive mental attitude, constitute an unbeatable force. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 184:Bring into reality the possibility of the improbable by acquiring a positive mental attitude. Say to yourself, as Henry Ford said to his engineers, "Keep working!" ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 185:Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 186:And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 187:Today give up false mental attachments and beliefs! Free yourself from the delusion that anything external can fulfill the hunger of your soul for God-Consciousness. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 188:Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 189:Compassion is not religious business, it is human business. It is not luxury. It is essential for our own peace and mental stability. It is essential for human survival. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 190:Continually reorder the mind and the mental structures, the ability to think in prescribed ways, to analyze in prescribed ways, and to stop thought for periods of time. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 191:Enter into the plane of mental development. Start to increase your personal power level. Your life will become quite wonderful and very happy. You move beyond delusion. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 192:Freedom from mental distraction equals power. Body mind masters eventually come to the realization that this and every moment, on or off the field, is the moment of truth. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 193:To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise and no faculty grows save as it is exercised. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 194:When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint. ~ lewis-carroll, @wisdomtrove 195:In my judgment, such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more by the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 196:The weak have no place here, in this life or any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to all kinds of misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 197:Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 198:A level of mental maturity is reached when nothing external is of any value and the heart is ready to relinquish all. Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 199:Success is hastened or delayed by one’s habits. It is not your passing inspirations or brilliant ideas so much as your everyday mental habits that control your life. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 200:Begin with the end in mind is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove 201:By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath—you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 202:Words, heard or read, will only create images in your mind, but you are not a mental image. You are the power of perception and action behind and beyond the image. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 203:If you are not satisfied with what is coming to you, start to work and change your mental attitude and mental states, and you will see a change gradually setting in. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 204:We are never conscious of any experience separated or detached from the mind.… You yourself enter as a constituent into every mental fact of which you are conscious. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 205:I recommend computer science to people who practice meditation. The mental structures that are used in computer science are very similar exercises done in Buddhist monasteries. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 206:The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 207:Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 208:In memory and anticipation there is a clear feeling that it is a mental state under observation, while in the actual the feeling is primarily of being present and aware. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 209:Pain, n. An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 210:I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 211:The teacher has nothing to do with people who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control? ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 212:Contemplative prayer [oración mental] in my opinion is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove 213:Atkinson, William Walker. The Complete Works of (Unabridged): The Key To Mental Power Development & Efficiency, The Power of Concentration, Thought-Force ... Raja Yoga ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 214:Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness... . It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 215:Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 216:You cannot take the mild approach to the weeds in your mental garden. You have got to hate weeds enough to kill them. Weeds are not something you handle; weeds are something you devastate. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 217:For all healing, mental or material, is attuning each atom of the body, each reflex of the brain forces, to the awareness of the divine that lies within each atom, each cell of the body. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 218:Man Made & 219:Your mind is your invisible talisman. The letters PMA (positive mental attitude) are emblazoned on one side, and NMA (negative mental attitude) on the other. These are powerful forces. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 220:All great undertakings are achieved through mighty obstacles. Keep up the deepest mental poise. Take not even the slightest notice of what puerile creatures may be saying against you. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 221:Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not? ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 222:Why is it, I wonder, that anyone who displays superior athletic ability is an object of admiration to his classmates, while one who displays superior mental ability is an object of hatred? ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 223:Success in life isn't only for the gifted or the privileged or those with a high IQ. Success is totally dependent on three things: persistence, determination and a positive mental attitude. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 224:Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 225:Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network. ~ peter-russell, @wisdomtrove 226:You have to free yourself from your mental conditioning through association with the holy, through doing good works, through meditating, through laughter, through love and through solitude. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 227:Mind is indeed the Builder . . . what is held in the act of mental vision becomes a reality in the material experience. We are gradually builded to that image created within our own mental being. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 228:Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so. ~ roger-penrose, @wisdomtrove 229:We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 230:Yoga is an art, a science and a philosophy. It touches the life of man at every level, physical, mental, and spiritual. It is a practical method for making one's life purposeful, useful and noble. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 231:Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 232:An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child's energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 233:If human equality is to be forever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 234:Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere. ~ a-a-milne, @wisdomtrove 235:Pessimism is a form of mental dipsomania; it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection which thirsts for a stronger draught. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 236:Integral wisdom involves a direct participation in every moment: the observer and the observed are dissolved in the light of pure awareness, and no mental concepts or attitudes are present to dim that light. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 237:The secret of visualization lies in the occult and psychological principle that, as is the mental matrix, so is the mental form; and as is the mental form, so is the physical materialization. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 238:A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 239:With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow. ~ william-faulkner, @wisdomtrove 240:Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 241:Discipline is training that corrects and perfects our mental faculties or molds our moral character. Discipline is control gained by enforced obedience. It is the deliberate cultivation of inner order. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 242:The degree of success that you attain in all of your physical, mental and spiritual undertakings is dependent upon the strength and clarity of your finite mind and your ability to access your infinite mind. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 243:At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 244:I accept perfect health as the natural state of my being. I now consciously release any mental patterns within me that could express as dis-ease in any way. Perfect health is my Divine right, and I claim it now. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 245:Beginning with the early dawn of each day, I will radiate joy to everyone I meet. I will be mental sunshine for all who cross my path. Before the unfailing light of my cheer, darkness will take flight. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 246:Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm, but also as experiences in the material realm. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 247:Science has the capacity to show mankind the full development of the mental life. Spirituality has the capacity to show mankind the possibility and inevitability of the life beyond the mind, the supramental life. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 248:What Is Meditation? It is not musing, not daydreaming; but as ye find you bodies made up of the physical, mental and spiritual, it is the attuning of the mental body and the physical body to its spiritual source. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 249:You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is allpurely secondary& 250:Your mental attitude is something you can control outright and you must use self-discipline until you create a positive mental attitude - your mental attitude attracts to you everything that makes you what you are. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 251:The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 252:I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow... it is the honest state before the apple. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 253:Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 254:There is mental conditioning in your mind put in there during this life by your parents, teachers, the society. You've been told what is and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. This has to be pushed aside. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 255:A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 256:Most of the world is like a mental hospital. Some persons are sick with jealousy, others with anger, hatred, passion. They are victims of their habits and emotions. But you can make your home a place of peace. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 257:According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 258:It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 259:The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 260:The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 261:There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties... The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 262:A mental image gives you a framework upon which to work. It is like the drawing of the architect, or the map of the explorer. Think over this for a few moments until you get the idea firmly fixed in your mind. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 263:Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 264:If you meditate regularly, even when you don't feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 265:There are four powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 266:To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 267:The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 268:The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of al mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 269:You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 270:Try to gather the strength to live as brother and sister after one or two children are born. This is essential for reaping the full benefit of spiritual practice and to make spiritual progress through mental restraint. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 271:But when we perceive without interpreting or mental labelling, which means without adding thought to our perceptions, we can actually still sense the deeper connectedness underneath our perception of seemingly separate things. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 272:There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 273:When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 274:The mind is what the brain does.Therefore, an awakening mind means an awakening brain. Throughout history, unsung men and women and great teachers alike have cultivated remarkable mental states by generating remarkable brain states. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 275:What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve with Positive Mental Attitude. It is a form of self-suggestion. It is a self-motivator to success. When it becomes a part of you, you dare to aim higher. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 276:Carrying a thought with dynamic will power means holding it until that thought pattern develops dynamic force. When a thought is made dynamic by will force, it can manifest according to the mental blueprint you have created. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 277:The mind is but a set of mental habits, of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must be brought to the surface and examined. This also takes time. Just resolve and persevere, the rest will take care of itself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 278:I believe in Christian charity, but I don't believe in Christian tolerance... When we become so tolerate that we lead people into mental fog and spiritual darkness, we are not acting like Christians; we are acting like cowards! ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 279:So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 280:Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enmity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike. ~ adi-shankara, @wisdomtrove 281:True happiness Is not a mental hallucination. True happiness Is not a complacent feeling. True happiness Is the spontaneous feeling of joy That comes from knowing 132 You are doing the right thing 133 And leading a divine life. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 282:As a beginner, it is most important that you secure your own well-being, guarding your mind in solitude, abandoning distractions and busyness, avoiding unfavorable situations, and subduing the mental afflictions with appropriate antidotes. ~ longchenpa, @wisdomtrove 283:As all waves are in the ocean, so are all things physical and mental in awareness. Hence awareness itself is all important, not the content of it. Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 284:A spiritual intention is a resounding YES to awakening to your fullest potential. It may include several of your life structures: mental, emotional, financial, relational - because there is no aspect of your life that is not spiritual. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 285:The soul loves to meditate, for in contact with the Spirit lies its greatest joy. If, then you experience mental resistance during meditation, remember that reluctance to meditate comes from the ego; it doesn't belong to the soul. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 286:Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‚ÄúMy tooth is aching‚Äù than to say ‚ÄúMy heart is broken. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 287:There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what? You can only be the real - which you are, anyhow. The problem is only mental. Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 288:Ahimsa is not mere negative non-injury. It is positive, cosmic love. It is the development of a mental attitude in which hatred is replaced by love. Ahimsa is true sacrifice. Ahimsa is forgiveness. Ahimsa is Sakti (power). Ahimsa is true strength. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 289:Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 290:Instead of trying to free myself by constantly quieting the mind, perhaps I should be asking why the mind is so active. What is in the motivation behind all the mental chatter? If that motivation was to be removed, the struggle would be over. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 291:Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 292:It's pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don't actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what's going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 293:The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 294:The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields... : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 295:Strengthen your mind and refuse to carry the burden of mental and moral weakness acquired in past years; burn them in the fires of your present divine resolutions and right activities. By this constructive attitude you will attain freedom. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 296:Never do anything that taints your mind. Wrong actions cause negative or evil mental vibrations that are reflected in your whole appearance and personality. Engage in those actions and thoughts that nurture the good qualities you want to have. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 297:Confronting and overcoming challenges is an exhilarating experience. It does something to feed the soul and the mind. It makes you more than you were before. It strengthens the mental muscles and enables you to become better prepared for the next challenge. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 298:The teacher's task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 299:The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 300:Mind Like Water: A mental and emotional state in which your head is clear, able to create and respond freely, unencumbered with distractions and split focus. David Allen ~ david-allen, @wisdomtrove 301:The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 302:The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 303:Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 304:Self-Enquiry is not asking you to believe or to trust - it is putting a mirror in front of you and asking you to look. Enquiry is suited to many people in the West, because we are more mental. And it is very direct. So unsparing is its look that nothing can escape. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 305:No one can tell you what is right for you except yourself. So start telling yourself what to do. If you blunder for ten years while thinking for yourself, that is rich treasure when compared with living these ten years under the mental domination of another. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 306:A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 307:You create your future by your thoughts now; if you think nobly, you will be noble in conduct. If you think basely no environment will make you different. Thus, thoughts and actions are interdependent. Be vigilant and allow only good thoughts in your mental field. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 308:A desire arises in the mind. It is satisfied immediately another comes. In the interval which separates two desires a perfect calm reigns in the mind. It is at this moment freed from all thought, love or hate. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 309:All you need to do is recognize your true position as the witness. You only have to do this for some time, until the spell is broken. Even after the spell is broken these mental tendencies may arise, but without any power, just like you can see the moon in the daylight. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 310:In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 311:What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 312:Every man gravitates to where he belongs in life, just as surely as water seeks and finds its level. His position is measured precisely by the quality and quantity of the service he renders, plus the mental attitude with which he relates himself to other people. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 313:I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world's largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research - but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 314:I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 315:Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with a perfectly disciplined will that refuses to give in. It's a state of mind-you could call it character in action. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 316:The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 317:Meditation increases your vitality and strengthens your intelligence... your mental clarity and health improve. You acquire the patience and fortitude to face any problem in life. So, meditate! Only through meditation will you find the treasure you are seeking. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 318:Character is the direct result of mental attitude. I believe that character is higher than the intellect. I believe that leadership is in sacrifice, in self-denial, in humility and in the perfectly disciplined will. This is the distinction between great and little men. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 319:Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and re-read them... digest them... a student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by 20 books he has merely skimmed. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 320:All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 321:Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, just as weight training strengthens your muscles. You wouldn't go into a gym for the first time and try to lift 300 pounds, so don't think that to be courageous you must tackle your most paralyzing fear right away. ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 322:Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 323:The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 324:George on the benefits of mental institutions: "I should be in a place like this. You get to wear slippers all day. Friends visit. They pity you. Pity is very underrated. I like it, it's good. Plus, they give you those word association tests. I love those. Seinfeld TV show ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove 325:Ultimate REALITY, or Spirit, is identical with Infinite Mind and therefore must ever remain Unknowable even to itself. Mind in itself is beyond the range of mental knowledge. Efforts so to know it intellectually are akin to lifting one's self by one's boot straps. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 326:The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 327:When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 328:The greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 329:There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 330:One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 331:Genuine mental health would involve a balanced interplay of both modes of experience, a way of life in which one's identification with the ego is playful and tentative rather than absolute and mandatory, while the concern with material possessions is pragmatic rather than obsessive. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 332:It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 333:Love is everywhere, but if our eyes aren't open to see it, we miss out. Who among us hasn't missed out on love because we were looking for it in one package and it came in another? Our problem is rarely a lack of love so much as a mental block to our awareness of its presence.* ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 334:The fourth state Is a state of pure witnessing, detached awareness, passionless and wordless. It is like space, unaffected by whatever it contains. Bodily and mental troubles do not reach it - they are outside, & 335:The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration? ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 336:When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person. You are also who you will be when the form dissolves. When you are still, you are beyond your temporal existence: consciousness- unconditional, formless, eternal. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 337:You can't make good decisions that are going to be meaningful, productive, when you lose control, and you have to maintain mental control, emotional control and to be able to perform physically up to your own particular level of competency; you have to keep your emotions under control. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 338:It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you’re doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It’s what you think of it. Two people may in the same place doing the same thing, and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 339:The mental disposition of the one who prepares the food is transmitted to all those who consume it. Therefore, as far as possible the mothers should do the cooking for the entire family. If it is done while chanting the mantra, the food will benefit everyone in a spiritual way. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 340:The self is neither, between nor beyond. To look for it on the mental level is futile. Stop searching, and see - it is here and now - it is that & 341:Continuity, permanency, these are illusions created by memory, mere mental projections of a pattern where no pattern can be; Abandon all ideas of temporary or permanent, body or mind, man or women; what remains? What is the state of your mind when all separation is given up? ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 342:If you focus on what others expect of you, you'll continue to act on and attract more of what they desire for you. But when you can shift your inner thoughts to what you intend to create and attract into your life, you will no longer have to give mental energy to what others want for you. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 343:Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 344:The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 345:Meditation increases our vitality and strengthens our intelligence. Our beauty is enhanced and our mental accuracy and health are improved. We gain the mental fortitude and patience to face life's problems. Meditate! Only through meditation can we find the treasure we're looking for. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 346:A man of 25 has before him some 100,000 working hours should he retire at 65. How many of your working hours will be alive with the magnificent force of positive mental attitude? And how many of them will have the life knocked out of them with the stunning blows of negative mental attitude? ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 347:But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 348:If you're not feeling good and you want to change the way you feel, or if you want to lift good feelings higher, then take a minute or two and god through a mental list of everything you love and adore. You can do it while getting dressed in the morning, walking, driving or traveling anywhere. ~ rhonda-byrne, @wisdomtrove 349:It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference — inference either intuitive or deliberate. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 350:It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 351:Mental toughness is many things. It is humility because it behooves all of us to remember that simplicity is the sign of greatness and meekness is the sign of true strength. Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 352:Nothing constructive and worthy of man's efforts ever has or ever will be achieved except by that which comes from a positive mental attitude, based on a definiteness of purpose and activated by a burning desire, and acted upon until the burning desire is elevated to the level of applied faith. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 353:The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 354:Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 355:Man’s only possible escape from the pain of the mental plane is through the channel of spiritual unfoldment— the growth of consciousness along spiritual lines— the turning of the light of consciousness into the heretofore unexplored field of the spiritual faculties. Here alone is peace. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 356:& 357:The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you imagined it. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 358:I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 359:Meditation is a journey to know yourself. Knowing yourself has many layers. Start knowing your bodily discomforts. Know your success, know your failures. Know your fears. Know your irritations. Know your pleasures, joy and happiness. Know your mental wounds. Go deeper and examine every feeling you have. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 360:The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 361:The power of material things, to bestow happiness, to bring joy into the life is tremendously exaggerated. But The right mental attitude for example gratitude that things are not worse, the trained mind the right habits of thought - lifeskills, will bring to us the best there is in the universe. ~ orison-swett-marden, @wisdomtrove 362:The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 363:When you become successful and a depression or any other unfavorable circumstance arises which causes you a loss or defeat, act on the self-motivator: Success is achieved by those who try and maintained by those who keep trying with a positive mental attitude. This is the way to avoid being crushed. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 364:Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 365:“I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!"” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 366:Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 367:The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 368:Kant ... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 369:Real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you've inherited as an emotional mammal. ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 370:The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 371:Children, those who are unmarried should conserve their vital energy by maintaining celibacy. To turn what we gain by this in to ojas (vitality), we also need to do spiritual practice. With increase in ojas, our intelligence, memory, health and beauty will also increase. We will gain lasting mental quietude. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 372:What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 373:Every atom is trying to go and join itself to the next atom. Atoms after atoms combine, making huge balls, the earths, the suns, the moons, the stars, the planets. They in their turn, are trying to rush towards each other, and at last, we know that the whole universe, mental and material, will be fused into one. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 374:If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 375:And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 376:Worry is just about the worst form of mental activity there is—next to hate, which is deeply self-destructive. Worry is pointless. It is wasted mental energy. It also creates bio- chemical reactions which harm the body, producing everything from indigestion to coronary arrest, and a multitude of things in between. ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove 377:Being an elite performer on the playing field of life is not about being perfect. Rather, it is about cultivating a mental focus towards mastery in every area of your life. It is about commiting yourself, from the core of your heart, to manifest and polish your highest talents and become the person you are destined to be. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 378:Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 379:The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 380:Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 381:... no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 382:The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 383:Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 384:Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-sr, @wisdomtrove 385:In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 386:Mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. The important thing is not to think much but to love much and so do that which best stirs you to love. Love is not great delight but desire to please God in everything. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove 387:The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands... ..We may also infer... ..The average mental power in man must be above that of woman. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 388:The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 389:The pleasant life is not produced by continual drinking and dancing, nor sexual intercourse, nor rare dishes of sea food and other delicacies of a luxurious table. On the contrary, it is produced by sober reasoning which examines the motives for every choice and avoidance, driving away beliefs which are the source of mental disturbances. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 390:So, you've got a problem? That's good! Why? Because repeated victories over your problems are the rungs on your ladder of success. With each victory, you grow in wisdom, stature and experience. You become a better, bigger, more successful person each time you meet a problem and tackle and conquer it with a positive mental attitude. ~ w-clement-stone, @wisdomtrove 391:The psychic being and the mental being, Manomaya Purusha, are not the same. The psychic being is behind the mind, it is what the Westerners call the soul. It takes interest in the movements of the mind and the vital only when there is a harmony between these movements and the truth above. The knowledge of the psychic being is deeper. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 392:Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of & 393:No building is better than its structural foundation, and no man (woman) is better than his (her) mental foundation. When I prepared my original Success Pyramid years ago, I put industriousness and enthusiasm as the two cornerstones with LOYALTY right in the middle of the pyramid - Loyalty to yourself and to all those dependent upon you. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 394:Even after the Truth has been realised, there remains that strong, obstinate impression that one is still an ego - the agent and experiencer. This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme non-dual Self. Full Awakening is the eventual ceasing of all the mental impressions of being an ego. ~ adi-shankara, @wisdomtrove 395:Healing of the physical without the change in the mental and spiritual aspects brings little real help to the individual in the end. How true, because the mind and the body imprint and imitate each other. What we think, we become. What we become, we think. It's an insidious process that can predispose us to illness or it can lead us to health. ~ edgar-cayce, @wisdomtrove 396:When you have done the spiritual growing up you realize that every human being is of equal importance, has work to do in this world, and has equal potential. We are in many varied stages of growth; this is true because we have free will. You have free will as to whether you will finish the mental and emotional growing up. Many choose not to. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 397:Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 398:You are always the Supreme. But your attention is fixed on things, physical or mental. When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When through the practice of discrimination and detachment, you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 399:I don't believe that a writer & 400:I realize the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality; therefore, I will concentrate my thoughts for thirty minutes daily, upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear mental picture. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 401:Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has a good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will pa tronize in vain,& 402:Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep- seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 403:An effective mission statement: Is an expression of your own unique capacities. Inspires you rather than impresses anyone else. Is based on true principles which produce quality-of-life. Includes the physical, social, mental & spiritual areas. Deals with what you want to be and do with your life. Balances all the significant roles of your life. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove 404:On the top of the head is a Chakra - Sahasradala or the thousand-petalled lotus. There is a Chakra in the middle of the forehead between the eyebrows and one in the heart-centre. The region between the navel and head constitutes the mental field. From navel downward extending till the terminus of the spinal chord, m≈´lƒÅdhƒÅra, is the seat of the vital. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 405:Vipassana arises as you pay awareness to the inner and outer experience unfolding at the present moment. Vipassana is not associated with any rigid formula or methods. Whenever you are aware of your mental or physical feelings like tension in the muscles, movement of limbs, stiffness, heat or cold, you have begun to develop special understanding of realities. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 406:The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds... . It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.” ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 407:Consciousness is an ever-unfolding, deepening, and expanding process with no end point. We are infinite and complex beings, and our human journey involves not just a spiritual awakening, but the development of all levels of our being - spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical - and the integration of all these aspects into a healthy and balanced daily life. ~ shakti-gawain, @wisdomtrove 408:Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 409:Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 410:Nothing can be more touching than to behold a soft and tender female, who had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous paths of life, suddenly rising in mental force to be the comforter and supporter of her husband under misfortune, and abiding with unshrinking firmness the bitterest blast of adversity. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 411:In his essay & 412:It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 413:The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 414:Your mental diet largely determines your character and your personality and almost everything that happens to you in life. When you feed your mind with positive affirmations, information, books, conversations, audio programs, and thoughts, you develop a more positive attitude and personality. You become more influential and persuasive. You enjoy greater confidence and self-esteem. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 415:Intensity is a mental attitude more than a physical attitude. Many people misunderstand what intensity means. They think it means straining and sweating. No! That is a wrong meaning of the word! Intensity is to get totally involved, fully immersed and absorbed in what one is doing. Intense practice means a fast and keen mode in adjusting, correcting, and progressively proceeding. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 416:But in another way, community is a terrible place. It is the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others, we discover our poverty and our weakness, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks . . . our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 417:Habit 7 is taking the time to sharpen the saw. By renewing the four dimensions of your nature - physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional, you can work more quickly and effortlessly. To do this, we must be proactive. This is a Quadrant II (important, not urgent) activity that must be acted on. It's at the center of our Circle of Influence, so we must do it for ourselves. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove 418:Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, “What a pretty flower,” but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel it’s essence, it’s holiness- just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 419:Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 420:The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 421:A flash of enlightenment offers a preview of coming attractions, but when it fades, you will see more clearly what separates you from that state - your compulsive habits, outmoded beliefs, false associations, and other mental structures. Just when our lives are starting to get better, we may feel like things are getting worse - because for the first time we see clearly what needs to be done. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 422:A Positive Mental Attitude is the right mental attitude. What is the right mental attitude? It is most often comprised of the "plus" characteristics symbolized by such words as faith, integrity, hope, optimism, courage, initiative, generosity, tolerance, tact, kindliness, and good common sense. A person with positive mental attitude aims for high goals and constantly strives to achieve them. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 423:. . . nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. "Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death." ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 424:Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication& 425:Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. Zen, therefore, is more than meditation and Dhyana in its ordinary sense. The discipline of Zen consists in opening the mental eye in order to look into the very reason of existence. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 426:Your greatest need is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters your mind. You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life, work on controlling your mind. In most cases, that’s the only thing you should be trying to control. ~ marc-and-angel-chernoff, @wisdomtrove 427:When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, & 428:M: Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 429:Reckon then that to acquire soul-winning power, you will have to go through mental torment and soul distress. You must go into the fire if you are going to pull others out of it, and you will have to dive into the floods if you are going to draw others out of the water. You cannot work a fire escape without feeling the scorch of the conflagration, nor man a lifeboat without being covered with the waves. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 430:A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 431:That which men suppose the imagination to be, and to do, is often frivolous enough and mischievous enough; but that which God meant it to be in the mental economy is not merely noble, but supereminent. It is the distinguishing element in all refinement. It is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith. The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 432:Your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subsconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behaviour. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 433:A chief cause of unhappiness is what I call mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theatre playing a horrible movie. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 434:God-realization is the most difficult state to reach. Let no one fool himself, nor think that someone else can "give" it to him. Whenever I fell into a state of mental stagnation, my Master could do nothing for me. But I never gave up trying to keep in tune with him by cheerfully performing whatever he asked me to do. "I have come to him for God-realization," I reasoned, "and I must listen to his advice." ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 435:How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen. ~ michael-singer, @wisdomtrove 436:One should not excessively seek partners or friends, one should seek to know and be oneself. As you begin to awaken to the Truth, you start noticing how well life flows by itself and how well you are cared for. Life supports the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs of the one who is open to self-discovery. Trust opens your eyes to the recognition of this. Surrender allows you to merge in your own eternal being. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 437:Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is & 438:When all mental activity around who you think you are is stopped, there is a crack in the authority of perception, in the structure of the mind. I invite you to enter through that crack. Come in through that opening. When you do, the mind is no longer filled with its latest self-definition. In that moment, there is only silence. And in that silence, it is possible to recognize absolute fulfilment: the truth of who you are. ~ gangaji, @wisdomtrove 439:Be careful what you think, because your thoughts run your life. Do you want to be happy tomorrow? Then sow seeds of happiness today -count blessings, memorize Bible verses, pray, sing hymns, spend time with encouraging people. Do you want to guarantee tomorrow's misery? Then wallow in a mental mud pit of self-pity or guilt or anxiety today assume the worst, beat yourself up, rehearse your regrets, complain to complainers. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 440:The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 441:You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind's desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he really is. This is why adhering to gossip subtly affects the mental state of the listener - he goes on holding shady opinions regardless of where the realities of their lights and darknesses may stand. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 442:Mental purity will come through constant chanting of the divine name. This is the simplest way. You are trying to cross the ocean of transmigration, the cycle of birth and death. The mantra is the oar of the boat; it is the instrument you use to cross the samsara of your restless mind, with its unending thought waves. The mantra can also be compared to a ladder that you climb to reach the heights of God realization. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 443:Combining these two ancient teachings (yoga and vipassana) in a seamless manner, which will bring maximum benefits to the meditators, is not at all a challenge. It is just removal of some mental blocks. Ideally speaking, this combination should be done based on scientific, clinical and neurobiological studies and the combined structure should be made brick by brick, layer by layer in a flawless manner as a homogeneous composition. ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 444:This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 445:A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 446:For the powers of our mind, life, and body are bound to their own limitations, and however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise beyond them. But still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a Supramental Light, Truth, and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, Supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 447:There is much suffering in the world - physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 448:It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 449:I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the & 450:In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 451:As regards the quietude of the sage, he is not quiet because quietness is said to be good. He is quiet because the multitude of things cannot disturb his quietude. When water is still, one's beard and eyelashes are reflected in it. A skilled carpenter uses it in a level to obtain a measurement. If still water is so clear, how much more are the mental faculties! The mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth in which all things are reflected. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 452:Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 453:When all mental activity around who you think you are or what you need for happiness is stopped, there is a crack in the authority of perception, in the structure of the mind. I invite you to enter through that crack. Come in through that opening. When you do, the mind is no longer filled with its latest self-definition. In that moment, there is only silence. And in that silence, it is possible to recognize absolute fulfilment: the truth of who you are. ~ gangaji, @wisdomtrove 454:Your goal in life should be to enjoy the highest levels of health and energy possible. This requires that you eat the right foods and fewer of them. It requires you to get regular exercise and move every joint of your body daily. To enjoy superb physical health, you must get lots of rest and recreation. Above all, you maintain a positive mental attitude, looking for the good in every situation, and remain determined to be a completely positive person. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 455:The result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace. Where there had been chaos there was now order. My mind was at rest. I had a philosophy at last. The words of Christ "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," had a new meaning for me. Not in the past or in the future, but now and here is Heaven within us. All our duties lie in this world and in the present, and trying impatiently to peer into that which lies beyond is as vain as fruitless. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 456:To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 457:The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God's relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 458:Let us meditate until we perceive the Infinite Christ reigning in our own hearts. Let us learn to love those who love us not; and to forgive those who do ill against us. Let us break all our mental boundaries of color, creed, and nationality, and receive all - even our inanimate and animal brothers - in the endless, all embracing arms of our Christ Consciousness. This will be a true and fitting celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 459:Now when I hear about someone's illness, no matter what dire their predicament seems to be, I know that if they're willing to do the mental work of releasing and forgiving, almost anything can be healed. The word incurable, which is so frightening to so many people, really only means that the particular condition cannot be cured by & 460:Matter cannot be conceived to actually exist, as the only real substance is Universal Mind, and that the material and phenomenal universe is nothing but a series of mental appearances and impressions which appear and disappear in accordance with mental laws which are called "The Laws of Nature"; that the only reality of the phenomenal world consists in its being consciously "perceived" by God, Spirit, the Absolute, or whatever Ultimate reality may be termed. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 461:The biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are those people. The truth is…we are the others. Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being those people–the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our kids play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 462:R is a velocity of measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being, and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly as almost infinite variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility, this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers, and even death. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 463:There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 464:Unless Spirit, or Universal Mind, is conceived as having and using this mental creative power of ideation and imagination, we cannot conceive it as creating at all. If we deprive it of this possibility and capacity, we deprive it of all power of expression, manifestation, and activity. Moreover, the conception of this ideative and imaging power, raised to infinity, gives us the best and only adequate conception of the nature of Creation and the creation of Nature. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 465:The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 466:George Berkeley was a bishop of the Church of England, who lived a.d. 1685– 1753. He was the founder of the modern school of Idealism, which system he developed largely upon the basis of Locke, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz. He held that matter cannot be conceived to actually exist, the only real substance being mind; and that the material world is nothing but a complex of mental impressions which appear and disappear in accordance with established laws of nature. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 467:The whole universe is one. There is only one Self in the universe, only One Existence, and that One Existence, when it passes through the forms of time, space, causation, is called by different names, buddhi, fine matter, gross matter, all mental and physical forms. Everything in the universe is that One, appearing in various forms. When a little part of it comes, as it were, into this network of time, space and causation, it takes forms. Take off the network, and it is all one. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 468:There are many things in life over which you have no choice. But the greatest activity of life is well within your dominion. You can choose what you think about. You can be the air traffic controller of your mental airport. You occupy the control tower and can direct the mental traffic of your world. Thoughts circle above, coming and going. If one of them lands, it's because you gave it permission. If it leaves, it's because you directed it to do so. You can select your thought pattern. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 469:Let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being "in Christ" or of Christ being "in them", this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts& 470:To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind. ~ meister-eckhart, @wisdomtrove 471:It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove 472:No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 473:An adept of Kriya Yoga conquers death by taking the soul beyond identification with the physical body, consciously and at will; and then returning to the consciousness of the mortal form again. By this process, he experiences the body as merely the material dwelling place of the soul. He can remain therein as long as he wants; and after that body has fulfilled its usefulness, he can quit it at will without suffering physical pain or mental pain due to attachment, and enter his omnipresent home in God. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 474:Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 475:God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove 476:The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 477:Universal Mind, cannot be conceived of as having sense organs or nerves whereby it might receive impressions of external objects or perceive changes in the condition of its body. There are no external objects to be sensed, no sense organs or nerves to sense them if they did exist, and no body to give rise to sensation of its change of condition. Therefore Spirit, or Universal Mind, cannot be thought of as manifesting or experiencing Sensation. This plane of mental activity belongs solely to the phenomenal world. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 478:Q: If I know myself, shall I not desire and fear? M: For some time, the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the known past and fearing the unknown future. When you know these are of the mind only, you can go beyond them. As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water, you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 479:I behold Thee, 0 Lord my God, in a kind of mental trance, ... Thus, while I am borne to loftiest heights, I behold Thee as Infinity... And when I behold Thee as absolute Infinity, to whom is befitting neither the name of creating Creator nor of creatable Creator-then indeed I begin to behold Thee unveiled, and to enter into the garden of delights! ... [In that vision] nothing is seen other than Thyself, [for Thou] art Thyself the object of Thyself (for Thou seest, and art That which is seen, and art the sight as well) . ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 480:One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that at one time half of all the beds in our hospitals were reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who had collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives — if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: “Have no anxiety about the morrow”; or the words of Sir William Osler: "Live in day-tight compartments." ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 481:Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 482:Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes... What kinds of emotional factors tire the sedentary (or sitting) worker? Joy? Contentment? No! Never! Boredom, resentment, a feeling of not being appreciated, a feeling of futility, hurry, anxiety, worry-those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous headache. Yes, we get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 483:You can only kill the body, you cannot stop the mental process, nor can you put an end to the person you think you are. Just remain unaffected. This complete aloofness, unconcern with mind and body is the best proof that at the core of your being you are neither mind nor body. What happens to the body and the mind may not be within your power to change, but you can always put an end to your imagining yourself to be body and mind. What-ever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 484:As mindfulness stabilizes, you will rest more and more as awareness itself. Awareness contains mind-objects, a general term for any mental content, including perceptions, thoughts, desires, memories, emotions, and so on. Although mind-objects may dance busily with each other, awareness itself is never disturbed. Awareness is a kind of screen on which mind-objects register, like—in the Zen saying—the reflections on a pond of geese flying overhead. But awareness is never sullied or rattled by the passing show. In your brain, the neural patterns ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 485:Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil. ~ walt-disney, @wisdomtrove 486:Jerusalem (1804) And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green And was the holy lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen And did the countenance divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills And was Jerusalem builded here Among those dark Satanic mills Bring me my bow of burning gold Bring me my arrows of desire Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold Bring me my chariot of fire I will not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand & 487:In medicine, we have invented an entirely new healing paradigm. Now we no longer simply look to the doctor and to medicine to heal us. We now recognize what has been substantiated scientifically everywhere from Harvard to Duke to Stanford - that the power of the mental and spiritual consciousness of the patient is as significant in healing as physical factors are. If we apply that same paradigm to politics, we see that the mind and the spiritual consciousness of the citizen are every bit as important as anything that goes on in the government. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 488:The yoga we practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being. It is not personal Ananda, but the bringing down of the divine Ananda - Christ's kingdom of heaven, our Satyayuga - upon the earth. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 489:Courage is a way of thinking Real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you've inherited as an emotional mammal. Hope is a way of thinking Hope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Brené Brown Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone. Martha Beck ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 490:The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with." ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 491:Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 492:Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them‚ ¶digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be much not many. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 493:There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfilment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. The need to live is our physical need for such things as food, clothing, shelter, economical well- being, health. The need to love is our social need to relate to other people, to belong, to love and to be loved. The need to learn is our mental need to develop and to grow. And the need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution. ~ stephen-r-covey, @wisdomtrove 494:We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 495:So when such challenges come, as they always do, make it a habit to go within at once and focus as much as you can on the inner energy field of your body. This need not take long, just a few seconds. But you need to do it the moment that the challenge presents itself. Any delay will allow a conditioned mental- emotional reaction to arise and take you over. When you focus within and feel the inner body, you immediately become still and present as you are withdrawing consciousness from the mind. If a response is required in that situation, it will come up from this deeper level. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 496:In the depths of the Ocean of Mind there is quiet and calm and peace— the embodiment of latent power and potential energy. On its surface are ripples, waves, great movements of energy, currents, whirlpools, eddies— phases of fierce tempest alternating with phases of calm and quiet. And from the depths of that Ocean of Mind, all mental and physical power emerges— and to its bosom all must return. And in that Ocean of Mind there is an infinite store of energy, from which may be drawn that which the human centres of consciousness and power require, when they learn the secret. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 497:while all the forms, shapes, and phenomena of the Universe are but parts of a great show-world, still the essence of all must be Reality, itself, else there would not be even the "appearance" of a Universe. Before a thing can be a Mental Image, there must be a Mind to hold that Mental Image, and a BEING to possess that Mind. And, the very essence of that BEING must pervade and be immanent in every Image in that Mind. Just as You are really in your Mental Images, as well as they in You, so must the Absolute be in Its Mental Images, or Creations, or Thought Forms, as truly as they are in the Mind of the Absolute. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 498:These truths I hold to be self-evident: That man was made to be happy; that happiness is only attainable through useful effort; that the very best way to help ourselves is to help others, and often the best way to help others is to mind our own business; that useful effort means the proper exercise of all our faculties; that we grow only through exercise; that education should continue through life, and the joys of mental endeavor should be, especially, the solace of the old; that where men alternate work, play and study in right proportion, the organs of the mind are the last to fail, and death for such has no terrors. That ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 499:How then should I love God?’ You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental images. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. As long as she lacks simplicity, she does not truly love God, for true love depends upon simplicity . . . Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen. ~ meister-eckhart, @wisdomtrove 500:Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words — the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into your close relationships. No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise. If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Are — you — mental? ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
2:Positive Mental Health ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
3:DIAGNOSIS: MENTAL LITE! ~ David Leite, #NFDB
4:her house. The mental ~ Kendra Elliot, #NFDB
5:Love: a grave mental disease. ~ Plato, #NFDB
6:Mental note: no swimming. ~ Ruby Dixon, #NFDB
7:Love is a grave mental illness. ~ Plato, #NFDB
8:Everything is mental, ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
9:Love is a serious mental illness ~ Plato, #NFDB
10:Chess is mental torture. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
11:Love is a serious mental disease. ~ Plato, #NFDB
12:Love is a serious mental illness. ~ Plato, #NFDB
13:Love is a severe mental disorder. ~ Plato, #NFDB
14:Rage is mental imbecility. ~ Hosea Ballou, #NFDB
15:Concepts are mental images. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
16:90% of the game is half mental. ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
17:Jealousy... is a mental cancer. ~ B C Forbes, #NFDB
18:Mental illness is not funny. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
19:I like to break a mental sweat!!! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
20:Storm is prerequisite to mental gain ~ Eyedea, #NFDB
21:With a sort of mental squint. ~ Lewis Carroll, #NFDB
22:Commence mental back patting. ~ Adrianne Brooks, #NFDB
23:El amor es una grave enfermedad mental. ~ Plato, #NFDB
24:Mental illness is real illness ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
25:Mental illness is a cruel disease. ~ Pete Earley, #NFDB
26:Golf is a mental disorder. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs, #NFDB
27:Liberalism is a mental disorder. ~ Michael Savage, #NFDB
28:Slavery is more mental than anything ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
29:Mental strength induces mind and body. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
30:I crave for mental exaltation. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
31:made a mental note to look up whether ~ Diane Capri, #NFDB
32:Madness is a kind of mental suicide. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
33:Prejudice marks a mental landmine. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
34:You have severe mental constipation. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
35:Use PMA: Positive Mental Actitude. ~ Benjamin Carson, #NFDB
36:All philosophies are mental fabrications. ~ N g rjuna, #NFDB
37:Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
38:All the physical comes from the mental. ~ Clara Hughes, #NFDB
39:Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
40:Mental energy from within keeps me higher, ~ Masta Ace, #NFDB
41:El insulto mental sólo admite el tuteo. ~ Javier Mar as, #NFDB
42:Freedom and slavery are mental states. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
43:Reading is fundamental - fun to mental. ~ Eddie Griffin, #NFDB
44:We’d connected on a purely mental level. ~ Ernest Cline, #NFDB
45:A mental midget with the IQ of a fence post. ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
46:But she had run out of mental highway and, ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
47:Donald Trump needs mental-health help. ~ Mika Brzezinski, #NFDB
48:It's 90% mental. The other half is physical ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
49:Ninety percent of this game is half mental. ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
50:Nothing more isolating than a mental illness. ~ Hannibal, #NFDB
51:Psychology is the science of mental life ~ William James, #NFDB
52:You are quite acute for a mental stillborn ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
53:Anything cruel I do is mental, not physical ~ Bette Davis, #NFDB
54:I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency ~ Plato, #NFDB
55:Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
56:Truth is more than a mental exercise. ~ Thurgood Marshall, #NFDB
57:MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy. ~ Mina Loy, #NFDB
58:Mental toughness is essential to success. ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
59:was in the grip of his moral, mental being. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
60:A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
61:A fight is 10% physical and 90% mental. ~ Georges St Pierre, #NFDB
62:Everything depends on your mental attitude. ~ Dharma Mittra, #NFDB
63:Pictures help you to form the mental mold. ~ Robert Collier, #NFDB
64:The soul never thinks without a mental picture. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
65:Your own mental attitude is your real boss. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
66:for all Force or Energy is Mental. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
67:Mental health is one of the last great taboos. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
68:Our ultimate destination is mental peace. ~ Bikram Choudhury, #NFDB
69:Practical Techniques in Mental Healings An ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
70:We are being programmed by mental pygmies. ~ Howard Hesseman, #NFDB
71:We try not to talk much about mental fatigue. ~ Tommy Bowden, #NFDB
72:A diet of solely mental work is suffocating. ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
73:his blue eyes glittering with mental hygiene. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
74:Invention at its core is mental association. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
75:Mental slavery is worst than physical slavery ~ Dave Hockaday, #NFDB
76:physical pain to make the mental pain go away ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
77:Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
78:Concentration is at the root of mental mastery. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
79:Let a bitch enjoy her mental breakdown in peace. ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
80:People get really irritated by mental illness. ~ Maria Bamford, #NFDB
81:There was mental and physical abuse in my family. ~ Erin Moran, #NFDB
82:You are the mental architect of your own destiny ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
83:Dispassion is the best of mental states. . . . ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
84:Mental seduction. He’d never thought it possible ~ Karen Ranney, #NFDB
85:They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure. ~ Nathanael West, #NFDB
86:I have this mental sickness called creativity. ~ Philippe Starck, #NFDB
87:The attitudes towards mental health must change ~ Kate Middleton, #NFDB
88:Whatever we know without inference is mental. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
89:When you're dead you don't have a mental problem. ~ Gene Simmons, #NFDB
90:75% of baseball is mental the other half is phisical ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
91:I want to destigmatize the words mental illness. ~ Linda Hamilton, #NFDB
92:Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains. ~ Herbert Spencer, #NFDB
93:Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one. ~ Bobby Knight, #NFDB
94:Reasoning is the mental tool that use to think with ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
95:the transient character of the mental disintegration. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
96:Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness? ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
97:giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
98:I write rhymes with addition and algebra, mental geometry. ~ Ice T, #NFDB
99:Ninety percent of all mental errors are in your head. ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
100:The first mile is mental. The rest are all heart. ~ Summer Sanders, #NFDB
101:Complete peace equally reigns between two mental waves. ~ Sivananda, #NFDB
102:Mental Health is dedication to reality at all costs. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
103:Physical pain will never compare to mental anguish ~ Gena Showalter, #NFDB
104:pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort— ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
105:The mental sciences? A strange synonym for magic. ~ Lindsay Buroker, #NFDB
106:The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
107:What you call types of mind are only mental ages. ~ Fran oise Sagan, #NFDB
108:Women always have some mental reservation. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine, #NFDB
109:Comes off like she’s got the mental capacity of broccoli, ~ J D Robb, #NFDB
110:It is a question of our own peace and mental stability. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
111:Mental indolence is one of the commonest of human traits ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
112:Physical pain will never compare to mental anguish. ~ Gena Showalter, #NFDB
113:A joke was the best barometer for mental weather. ~ Charles Sheffield, #NFDB
114:An emotion is both a mental and a physical event. ~ Nathaniel Branden, #NFDB
115:Geometry is the rules of all mental investigation ~ Mikhail Lomonosov, #NFDB
116:Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health. ~ Ishmael, #NFDB
117:para mí, un sinónimo de salud mental y podría definirse ~ Jorge Bucay, #NFDB
118:Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
119:The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
120:This mental space is occupied and everything is mine. ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
121:To make a commencement requires a mental effort. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
122:You can't love somebody into a state of mental health. ~ Harold Ramis, #NFDB
123:Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
124:In a mental hospital, we do not want psychotic doctors. ~ Roger Fisher, #NFDB
125:Mental confusion can be the product of divine discipline. ~ Max Anders, #NFDB
126:Physical pain is far easier to bear than mental agony. ~ Preeti Shenoy, #NFDB
127:the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
128:case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
129:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
130:How you live your life can affect your mental state. ~ Mariel Hemingway, #NFDB
131:It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
132:Left alone with our own heads on, we can be pretty mental. ~ Tony Adams, #NFDB
133:Mental clarity ain't for the faint of heart. ~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer, #NFDB
134:mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met ~ Peter Hessler, #NFDB
135:Suicide and mental health problems have no boundaries. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
136:The most effective torture is not physical, it's mental. ~ Raine Miller, #NFDB
137:We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
138:What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich? ~ John Ashbery, #NFDB
139:A positive mental attitude is the right mental attitude. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
140:Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial. ~ Anna Deavere Smith, #NFDB
141:I believe that every human being has mental challenges. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
142:Matter is matter, and mental association only a delusion. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
143:Meditation is nothing but taking a mental shower. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
144:There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
145:It's about mental toughness. Mental toughness is everything. ~ Jon Gordon, #NFDB
146:The physical part has a lot to do with the mental part. ~ Adrian Peterson, #NFDB
147:...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
148:I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book. ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
149:Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness. ~ Moriah Jovan, #NFDB
150:Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness. ~ William Temple, #NFDB
151:Worry is an unhealthy and destructive mental habit. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
152:Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
153:Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
154:Happiness is mental harmony; unhappiness is mental inharmony. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
155:Honey mustard is obviously not good for my mental state. ~ Lauren Barnholdt, #NFDB
156:If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it. ~ Namie Amuro, #NFDB
157:Mental attitude is more important than mental capacity. ~ Walter Dill Scott, #NFDB
158:Mental health courts exist because the system has failed. ~ E Fuller Torrey, #NFDB
159:Regret is like a mental parasite that alters your behavior. ~ Peter Tieryas, #NFDB
160:"The ultimate source of happiness is our mental attitude." ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
161:You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. ~ Phil Gramm, #NFDB
162:Holy meditation helps to burn out all mental impurities. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
163:Positive mental attitude is determined by you. Not others. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
164:possessed by the demon of mental afflictions, such as anger. ~ Thupten Jinpa, #NFDB
165:Psychology is the science of mental life.” William James ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
166:Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. ~ Fran Lebowitz, #NFDB
167:The stigma of mental illness is still alive and well. ~ Kate Clifford Larson, #NFDB
168:But it's pretty hard to get a liberal off their mental grooves.) ~ John Ringo, #NFDB
169:Examine your own mental attitudes. Become your own therapist. ~ Thubten Yeshe, #NFDB
170:give a mental assent to the customs of their forefathers, ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
171:It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
172:Our mental attitude is the X factor that determines our fate. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
173:Our mental attitude is the x factor that determines our fate. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
174:Paradox is simply the way nonduality looks to the mental level. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
175:proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
176:Some of my earlier songs are kind of more about mental illness. ~ Andrew Bird, #NFDB
177:The Anti-christ of mental health and emotional maturity. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
178:We control by attitudes-positive mental attitudes-not by rules. ~ Woody Hayes, #NFDB
179:Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking. ~ Elsa Maxwell, #NFDB
180:far from being weird, mental illness was absolutely normal. So ~ Bryony Gordon, #NFDB
181:Horniness is just a mental state with a physical repercussion. ~ Bink Cummings, #NFDB
182:It isn't work that makes you tired, it's your mental attitude. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
183:Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
184:Mental attitude and concentration are the keys to pitching. ~ Ferguson Jenkins, #NFDB
185:Mental note: never interrupt a villain who is monologuing. I ~ Hannu Rajaniemi, #NFDB
186:Ninety percent of baseball is mental, the other half is physical. ~ Yogi Berra, #NFDB
187:Nothing is more tragic - or more common - than mental inertia. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
188:Don't look to the approval of others for your mental stability ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
189:I made a mental note to buy stock in the Iraqi padlock company. ~ Jack Coughlin, #NFDB
190:I would like to have a girlfriend who is more mature than my mental age. ~ Yuki, #NFDB
191:Perception is the mental articulation of the choices we make. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
192:Republicans are not a political party. It's a mental condition. ~ Jesse Ventura, #NFDB
193:The most important attribute a player must have is mental toughness. ~ Mia Hamm, #NFDB
194:The tougher the fight, the more important the mental attitude. ~ Michael Landon, #NFDB
195:To master an actual technique, mental culture should come first. ~ Kyuzo Mifune, #NFDB
196:Your mental attitude is your motivation and your inspiration. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
197:From mental imprisonment to freedom. From love to heartbreak. It’s ~ Celia Aaron, #NFDB
198:I sent mental voodoo arrows into the back of his had the whole way. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
199:knowledge. Kindly remove my bodily ailments and mental maladies. oÊÒ ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
200:Lady is the buddy of man, skilled with equivalent mental limit. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
201:people look for books that support their mental program. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
202:your mental picture of yourself “the strongest force within you. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
203:All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
204:Bill Frindall has done a bit of mental arithmetic with a calculator ~ John Arlott, #NFDB
205:Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one. ~ Bridget Riley, #NFDB
206:Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
207:I fell asleep in the sun with Pandy, tired from mental exhausted, ~ Felicia Tatum, #NFDB
208:In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
209:I sent mental voodoo arrows into the back of his head the whole way. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
210:Sinto a tristeza tanto - uma sensação física de cansaço mental. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
211:The fruits of one’s sweat and mental labour are always rewarding ~ Haile Selassie, #NFDB
212:This was bad. This was toss-Emma-back-into-the-mental-hospital-bad. ~ Lee Nichols, #NFDB
213:True spirituality is a mental attitude you can practice at any time. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
214:All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
215:but the brilliant were subject to mental aberrations, were they not? ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
216:do you get when you cross an optic with a mental object? An eye-dea ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
217:Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
218:For so many reasons, this approach to mental health has to change. ~ Bryony Gordon, #NFDB
219:Having a mental breakdown is not on my list of things to do today. ~ Marissa Meyer, #NFDB
220:Homelessness is frequently met with many mental health challenges. ~ Asa Don Brown, #NFDB
221:I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things. ~ James Ellroy, #NFDB
222:If you want a man who's commited, go look in a mental hospital. ~ Alexandra Potter, #NFDB
223:Inner mental technique is more important than the physical one. ~ Gichin Funakoshi, #NFDB
224:Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
225:Actresses are mental on the whole. But I think I'm pretty normal. ~ Alexandra Roach, #NFDB
226:Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
227:Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses, not lifestyle choices. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
228:I love the NBA playoffs. It's just a great mental test for each team. ~ Doc Rivers, #NFDB
229:I'm not going to sacrifice my mental health to have the perfect body. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
230:I used to find that I could get mental serenity surrounded by chaos. ~ Alexis Knapp, #NFDB
231:Minha revolução vai dar um golpe no Estado mental chamado patriarcado. ~ Eve Ensler, #NFDB
232:Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
233:Our reality is the thoughts and dramas we see in our mental movies. We ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
234:Sounds like the sort of mental thing Dumbledore would say,’ said Ron. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
235:The mental pattern must always precede the material form. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
236:Your level of mental awareness attracts the habitual life you lead. ~ Vernon Howard, #NFDB
237:Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
238:Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
239:If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
240:mental scrapbooks form our tastes, and our tastes influence our work. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
241:Remind yourself that your mental & emotional health are important. ~ Allan Lokos, #NFDB
242:The first prerequisite of elaborate mental exercise was a full stomach. ~ Mark Frost, #NFDB
243:The pain was considerable, but trivial compared with my mental state. ~ Harold Lloyd, #NFDB
244:three main mental poisons, which are ignorance, desire, and hatred. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
245:Your mental attitude is the most dependable key to your personality. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
246:~ Deepak ChopraAny feeling is both mental and physical~ Deepak Chopra ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
247:El ingenio nos ayuda a fluir; el mal genio genera estancamiento mental. ~ Walter Riso, #NFDB
248:Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.... ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
249:he seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
250:Is she okay? I mean, no offense, she sounds more mental than I do. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
251:I try and be as normal as I can, but it's all pretty mental to be honest. ~ Kate Moss, #NFDB
252:Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
253:Some people take no mental exercise apart from jumping to conclusions. ~ Harold Acton, #NFDB
254:Supply yourself with a mental equivalent, and the thing must come to you. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
255:Tapas is not a penance, it's a mental training to develop will power ~ Baba Hari Dass, #NFDB
256:There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
257:True spirituality is a mental attitude you can practice at any time. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
258:Worry is just about the worst form of mental activity there is. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
259:don’t waste your precious life only dreaming, but not mental mapping ~ Jesse Duplantis, #NFDB
260:If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed. ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
261:I had mental arguments with nearly everyone who spoke. (I usually won.) ~ Sarah Hepola, #NFDB
262:Love merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
263:Most of the people near Hitler were mental breast-stroke swimmers. ~ Ernst Hanfstaengl, #NFDB
264:The mental suffering you create is always some form of non-acceptance, ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
265:the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
266:We are, every one of us, like a wise guru in charge of a mental patient. ~ Jamie Catto, #NFDB
267:A child's mental health is just as important as their physical health. ~ Kate Middleton, #NFDB
268:As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form. ~ Avicenna, #NFDB
269:Creativity, not normality, has become the paradigm of mental health. ~ Stephen Mitchell, #NFDB
270:Getting started is as much a mental activity as it is a physical activity. ~ Bob Harper, #NFDB
271:However, workplace wellness programs are not treatments for mental illness. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
272:In order to be effective you need not only virtue but also mental strength. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
273:I will not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
274:Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve. ~ A M Homes, #NFDB
275:They kept chirping and flipping and fingering their mental assholes. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
276:Today I do a mental housecleaning, making room for new, positive thoughts. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
277:Turning God into some kind of celestial insurance policy is just mental. ~ Justin Welby, #NFDB
278:We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
279:A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense. ~ Franz Liszt, #NFDB
280:being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
281:Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
282:If we take care of our mental health like our dental health; we'll be ok. ~ Howie Mandel, #NFDB
283:I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
284:Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
285:Physical limitedness can only be surpassed by mental unlimitedness! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
286:The biggest factor between winning and losing is the mental approach. ~ Benson Henderson, #NFDB
287:We have produced many of our problems through our confused mental states. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
288:You don't know what mental telepathy exists from the human to the animal. ~ Tippi Hedren, #NFDB
289:did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
290:¿Habrá mayor síntoma de salud mental que no tomarse uno mismo muy en serio? ~ Walter Riso, #NFDB
291:I give 98 percent of my mental energy to Chess Others give only 2 percent ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
292:I hadn’t realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been, ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
293:I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness. ~ Brian Lindstrom, #NFDB
294:Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
295:Plenty poisoned minds of the people are ours. Slaves, from mental death. ~ Big Daddy Kane, #NFDB
296:Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
297:The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
298:Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
299:Christian Science explains all cause and effect as mental, not physical. ~ Mary Baker Eddy, #NFDB
300:I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
301:I believe in such a thing called mental illness that leads to some evil. ~ Robert Jeffress, #NFDB
302:I filed him in my mental database under Useless Prick, for future reference. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
303:I made a mental note to call. Later.
Tomorrow. Next month. Or January. ~ Dani Alexander,#NFDB
304:In spiritual communication,
Mental telepathy
Is the beginners' course. ~ Sri Chinmoy,#NFDB
305:I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. ~ William Blake,#NFDB
306:Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
307:Mental health and mental balance is critical to leading a healthy life. ~ Mariel Hemingway, #NFDB
308:Mental tranquility, or calmness, is a very important source of happiness. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
309:Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering. ~ Ayya Khema, #NFDB
310:Our mental limitations prevent us from accepting our mental limitations. ~ Robert A Burton, #NFDB
311:Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
312:self-consciousness is the source of all our knowledge of mental things. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
313:We teach mental literacy and radiant thinking; a revolution in human thought. ~ Tony Buzan, #NFDB
314:you remain faithful to your mental attitude, your prayer will be answered. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
315:anyone who smiled all the time clearly suffered from a mental imbalance ~ Danielle L Jensen, #NFDB
316:Change your mental attitude, & the World around you will change accordingly ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
317:complicated human behavior was increasingly getting labeled a mental disorder. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
318:Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. ~ Pam Grout, #NFDB
319:Extreme liberalism is not a political philosophy. It is a mental disorder. ~ Michael Savage, #NFDB
320:I could sense her mental shields going up, like this was not a safe subject. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
321:I give 98 percent of my mental energy to chess. Others give only 2 percent. ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
322:It isn’t defeat, but rather your mental attitude toward it, that whips you. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
323:Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
324:Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
325:Studying French has been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth! ~ William Alexander, #NFDB
326:There is a direct correlation between physical exertion and mental relief. ~ Sakyong Mipham, #NFDB
327:This one’s mental.’ ‘Eccentric.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘A bag of cash. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
328:You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
329:Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity. ~ Christopher Fowler, #NFDB
330:Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
331:It is a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes, ~ Lee Smith, #NFDB
332:It's all mental management. Whether you can do something or not is in your head. ~ Kris Carr, #NFDB
333:I was never in a mental institution for a long time. I was in psych wards. ~ Darrell Hammond, #NFDB
334:I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients. ~ Oscar Levant, #NFDB
335:Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all. ~ Bill Clinton, #NFDB
336:Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature. ~ Edward Thorndike, #NFDB
337:Now that I'm in your mind, want to see some naked mental pictures of Jace? ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
338:the ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
339:The best way to improve mental performance, is to improve physical performance ~ Tim Ferriss, #NFDB
340:The other two waited respectfully while M. Bouc struggled in mental agony. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
341:...the problem is that giving too many fucks is
bad for your mental health. ~ Mark Manson,#NFDB
342:Your mental attitude attracts to you everything that makes you what you are. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
343:A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
344:Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
345:love is a mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder romanticized! ~ Eric Jerome Dickey, #NFDB
346:Now I have you, which makes me significantly less mental.” “Less mental is good. ~ E Lockhart, #NFDB
347:Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy. ~ Anthony Daniels, #NFDB
348:Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
349:The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
350:To grant thought causal efficacy is not to invoke a disembodied mental state ~ Albert Bandura, #NFDB
351:Tradition is a kind of mental illness with a clear symptom of repetition ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
352:Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ K W Jeter Herr Doktor Pavel ~ K W Jeter, #NFDB
353:Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
354:Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds! ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
355:Enlightenment is the complete awareness of life without mental modifications. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
356:I definitely have some kind of mental problem and I haven't pinpointed what it is. ~ Megan Fox, #NFDB
357:Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
358:The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illnesses we may not ~ Elyn R Saks, #NFDB
359:The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
360:The secondary function of a bathroom mirror is to measure murmurs in mental mud. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
361:The suicide risk for mental health patients goes up during changes in medication. ~ Iris Chang, #NFDB
362:You'll never have any mental muscle if you don't have any heavy stuff to pick up. ~ Diane Lane, #NFDB
363:you only have five minutes before your pitch wanders into a mental no-man’s land. ~ Oren Klaff, #NFDB
364:All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour. One ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
365:Any pleasure gained by means other than mental control weakens the body. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
366:[...] daí a alegação de que não havia regra para a completa sanidade mental. ~ Machado de Assis, #NFDB
367:Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
368:Every person's mental programming is partly unique, partly shared with others. ~ Geert Hofstede, #NFDB
369:For the love of Christ, shut-up! Let a bitch enjoy you mental breakdown in peace. ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
370:If you had the mental energy in the tank, you could create in an instant. ~ Wayne Thomas Batson, #NFDB
371:Love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
372:Mental toughness is a state of mind - you could call it 'character in action.' ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
373:Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment. ~ Cyril Connolly, #NFDB
374:[Positive mental attitude] is a practice, you gotta practice. I practice being still. ~ Ab Soul, #NFDB
375:Sometimes it's dramatic, but mental health, as a whole, has to become mainstream. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
376:The bikku should not rest content until mental intoxicants are fully extinct. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
377:The cause of your drinking is you! It is your sour mental attitude toward life. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
378:Watching television is the mental and emotional equivalent of eating junk food. ~ Tony Schwartz, #NFDB
379:And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly. ~ Sara Baume, #NFDB
380:Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions. ~ Peggy Noonan, #NFDB
381:Don’t do that to me. Losing you would not be good for my mental health, get it? ~ James L Rubart, #NFDB
382:Everything seemed awesome, now that I wasn't in the mental clutches of a demon. ~ Veronica Rossi, #NFDB
383:Fasting: Improves mental clarity and concentration Induces weight and body fat loss ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
384:Healing is due to a changed mental attitude, or to a transformation of the mind. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
385:I'm a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks. ~ Feist, #NFDB
386:I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
387:Jealousy is an inner consciousness of one's own inferiority. It is a mental cancer. ~ B C Forbes, #NFDB
388:Mental stains can not be removed by time, nor washed away by any waters. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
389:Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
390:Some tortures are physical And some are mental, But the one that is both Is dental. ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
391:There are tremendous benefits when employers improve mental health in the workplace. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
392:There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
393:You have been gifted with mental faculties to improve any circumstance around you. ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
394:1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both. ~ Ruby Wax, #NFDB
395:Angus...had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental hygiene... ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
396:Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds. ~ Bob Marley,#NFDB
397:For the love of Christ, shut - up! Let a bitch enjoy her mental breakdown in peace. ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
398:For the love of Christ, shut – up! Let a bitch enjoy her mental breakdown in peace. ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
399:Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for. ~ Patrick deWitt, #NFDB
400:I don't believe you have to have eating disorders and mental illness to screw up. ~ Kirstie Alley, #NFDB
401:It's almost selfishness, taking care of your mental health. You can't just not do it. ~ Roz Chast, #NFDB
402:mental alchemy you can effect by thinking of any adversity as an opportunity for power. ~ 50 Cent, #NFDB
403:Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
404:Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
405:Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
406:The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
407:Then blessings on thee, my afternoon torpor Thou makest a prince of a mental porpor. ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
408:There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
409:When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that’s all. ~ Richard Matheson, #NFDB
410:Your body is a tool for creating desired mental states. Use it judiciously. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
411:Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it. ~ T E Lawrence, #NFDB
412:I must say that I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization. ~ Candice Millard, #NFDB
413:I think diversity is very key to anybody's resume, and also for your mental well-being. ~ Lucy Liu, #NFDB
414:It’s always helpful to have a sense of humor about one’s own mental foibles. By ~ Joseph Goldstein, #NFDB
415:What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation. ~ Glenn Close, #NFDB
416:Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’—you will feel better! ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
417:Everything, both mental and physical, is rigidly bound by the law of causation. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
418:In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
419:I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness ~ Glenn Close, #NFDB
420:Some pains are physical, and some pains are mental, but the one that's both is dental. ~ Ogden Nash, #NFDB
421:There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
422:Thus the incidence of mental illness correlates closely to income in the US and the UK, ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
423:Addiction is a serious desease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
424:A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer. ~ R D Laing, #NFDB
425:Applying makeup took energy and choosing the perfect outfit drained mental faculties ~ William Massa, #NFDB
426:dictionaries are not set up to adapt to a user’s mental pictorial database of things. ~ Kory Stamper, #NFDB
427:Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
428:Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
429:Everything has been created twice once on a mental plain and once on a physical plain. ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
430:Holmes’s mental journeying goes by many names, but most commonly it is called meditation ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
431:Komatsu believed that mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
432:Meditation is the freeing of ourselves from all mental states and concepts of self. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
433:Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
434:Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
435:Movement is medicine for changing a person’s physical, emotional, and mental state. ~ Maria Emmerich, #NFDB
436:Never Let Your Inner Mental Peace Be Disturbed By External Circumstances. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, #NFDB
437:Preaching is the pastor's main work, and preaching is heart work, not just mental work. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
438:Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
439:The journey of life is a mental one, which is taking place in the sea of illusion. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
440:The public must come to see that chess is a violent sport. Chess is mental torture. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
441:When you change a belief you change a mental construction and, therefore, your life. ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
442:Who's your daddy?'Myrnin stared at him as if he'd gone completely mental. 'Excuse me? ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
443:dominates our entire mental life....A new experience must be redacted into old categories ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
444:I didn't know a damned thing about mental illness and neither did anyone around me. ~ George McGovern, #NFDB
445:Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject. ~ Hermann Ebbinghaus, #NFDB
446:Mental strength is really important because you either win or lose in your mind. ~ Wladimir Klitschko, #NFDB
447:Ninety percent of my game is mental. It's my concentration that has gotten me this far. ~ Chris Evert, #NFDB
448:Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
449:Such mental haziness is in order, given the delightful vagueness of the terrain. ~ William T Vollmann, #NFDB
450:The best solution to our suffering is mental immunity, but it takes time to develop. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
451:A boy who was such a threat to my mental health and happiness should not be so tall. ~ Jennifer Echols, #NFDB
452:Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
453:Ego is the principal knot. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #NFDB
454:I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
455:I take medication every day for mental illness and depression and don't feel bad about it. ~ Lady Gaga, #NFDB
456:I would've been able to write anything about mental-health crises had I not felt good. ~ Maria Bamford, #NFDB
457:Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical. ~ Jim Morrison, #NFDB
458:Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice. ~ Shannon Hale, #NFDB
459:So many memories she faced each day, all coming at her like a mental assault. ~ Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, #NFDB
460:Tea, opera and poetry should not be missed—longevity depends on one's mental cultivation. ~ Anchee Min, #NFDB
461:The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible. ~ Jean Dubuffet, #NFDB
462:We are products of our culture and interpret the world through our mental conditioning. ~ Myles Munroe, #NFDB
463:When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
464:You can feel like a mental patient, but that doesn't mean you have to act like one. ~ Marsha M Linehan, #NFDB
465:Your mind must be the most marvelous playground.” “I think my mental swing sets are rusty. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
466:book, what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality. ~ Shawn Achor, #NFDB
467:It bears repeating: the mental states needed to compete are not always socially palatable. ~ Po Bronson, #NFDB
468:I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
469:Real happiness in life comes from the mental capacity to adapt to any situation. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
470:Small-minded men had large opinions that left no mental room for any ideas but their own. ~ Susan Spann, #NFDB
471:Tennis is a mental game. Everyone is fit, everyone hits great forehands and backhands. ~ Novak Djokovic, #NFDB
472:The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
473:You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action. ~ Thomas Metzinger, #NFDB
474:Your Personal Brand is the mental picture your prospects get when they think about you. ~ Peter Montoya, #NFDB
475:Blue's mental state surfed the crest of a wave that divided empathy and frustration. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
476:Desire and feeling joined together in a mental marriage will become the answered prayer. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
477:Enthusiasm is the power that transfers the mental blueprint into the physical dimension. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
478:Habits are changed by practicing new behaviors, and this is true for mental habits as well. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
479:I discovered that running actually gave me both physical and mental clarity. I love it. ~ Mallika Chopra, #NFDB
480:Life is mental; it's all about attitude. The majority of it is lived in your head. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
481:Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage. ~ James Thurber, #NFDB
482:One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people. ~ Alastair Campbell, #NFDB
483:Pain is the great equalizer, the cure to mental anguish, the antidote for a hopeful heart. ~ David Estes, #NFDB
484:Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves. ~ Sammy Davis Jr, #NFDB
485:The present isn’t more capable of causing mental pain than the past or the future. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
486:There is no relation to sound for deaf people. It is a totally different mental process. ~ Richard Masur, #NFDB
487:To think that the world can ever change without changes in our mental models is folly. ~ Joseph Jaworski, #NFDB
488:When I care about someone, I hang on with a desperation that borders on mental illness. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
489:And see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
490:First, mental illness per se is not incompatible with reliably functioning at a high level, ~ Bandy X Lee, #NFDB
491:I know how important good mental health care can be because I personally benefited from it. ~ Tipper Gore, #NFDB
492:I'm probably better than I ever was in my career, as far as the mental aspect of the game. ~ Michael Vick, #NFDB
493:In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns. ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
494:I recommend free writing in the morning and the evening as a type of mental shower. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein, #NFDB
495:"Loving thoughts and actions are clearly beneficial for our physical and mental health." ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
496:Mere mental, that is, intellectual labour, is for the soul and has its own satisfaction. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
497:Nuestro modelo cultural y mental de persona poderosa sigue siendo irrevocablemente masculino ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
498:The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
499:The mental system is geared more toward predicting rewards than in the rewards themselves. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
500:There's also way too much religion in the South to be consistent with good mental health. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
501:Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
502:But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty inky smell of mental fidgeting. ~ Anne Tyler, #NFDB
503:Compassion is a mental quality that can bring us true lasting inner peace and inner strength. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
504:effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
505:I always felt that my greatest asset was not my physical ability, it was my mental ability. ~ Bruce Jenner, #NFDB
506:I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
507:I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution. ~ Tom Verlaine, #NFDB
508:Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel, #NFDB
509:Our mental attitude transforms a situation into either a problem or an opportunity. ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, #NFDB
510:We could improve worldwide mental health if we acknowledged that parents can make you crazy. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
511:Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
512:Your mind must be the most marvelous playground.” “I think my mental swing sets are rusty. ~ Tiffany Reisz, #NFDB
513:A fight is mental, not just physical and psychological warfare is absolutely part of that. ~ Conor McGregor, #NFDB
514:Do you want my one-word secret of happiness? It's growth - - mental, financial you name it. ~ Harold Geneen, #NFDB
515:Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. ~ Carol Tavris, #NFDB
516:Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
517:Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
518:How can I annotate his metadata on my mental card catalog if I don’t know what to annotate? ~ Sierra Simone, #NFDB
519:If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
520:Physical inertia favors mental passivity and renders the mind more receptive to suggestion. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
521:Political persuasion emerges at the intersection of the mental and the corporal. Traveling ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
522:The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved-- they are Jesus in disguise. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
523:The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. –109 ~ Adam Gopnik, #NFDB
524:Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
525:¡Al diablo las limitaciones sociales! Pensar que no somos capaces es una miseria mental. ~ Elena Poniatowska, #NFDB
526:Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people. ~ Phyllis Chesler, #NFDB
527:I gave myself a mental shake. Snapping out of a slump, that was what today was all about. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
528:I picture success and winning. The body has a physical response to mental images of winning. ~ Randy Couture, #NFDB
529:It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
530:It really is all about believing in yourself: 80 per cent mental, 20 per cent physical. ~ Victoria Pendleton, #NFDB
531:Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight. ~ Ajahn Brahm, #NFDB
532:Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. ~ J B Priestley, #NFDB
533:The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
534:The mind of no man is a unit, but is a community of mental states that influence one another. ~ Charles Fort, #NFDB
535:There are six mental faculties that we have, and how we use them sets the course for our life. ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
536:Truth" never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation. ~ Anton Szandor LaVey, #NFDB
537:Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude. ~ Steven Biko, #NFDB
538:Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
539:I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
540:I made a mental note to put a safety label on my scalp: WARNING, TOP STEP IS NOT FOR STANDING. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
541:Mental note to self: Next time make sure we're both naked before I piss her off.
Javier ~ Eve Langlais,#NFDB
542:Mental Toughness is doing the right thing for the team when it's not the best thing for you. ~ Bill Belichick, #NFDB
543:Mental wellbeing counts as much as physical wellbeing - indeed, it is part of physical wellbeing. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
544:Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train. ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB
545:Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people. ~ Clint Eastwood, #NFDB
546:Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive. ~ William James, #NFDB
547:There is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bullshit. I mean, you just can't define it. ~ Jon Rappoport, #NFDB
548:Vision is a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
549:What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
550:Yeah, we’ll call you,” muttered Ron as the knight disappeared, “If we ever need someone mental. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
551:You translate everything-whether physical, mental, or spiritual into muscular tension. ~ F Matthias Alexander, #NFDB
552:A lot of your mental energy goes to figuring out where does one word end and the next begin. ~ Nicholas G Carr, #NFDB
553:...and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky... ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
554:Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
555:But with this mental clarity comes an even sharper awareness of what has been done to Peeta. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
556:Fear is nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative stream of consciousness ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
557:For a thinking person, the most serious mental illness is not being sure of who you are. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot, #NFDB
558:Hate causes distress, potentially leading to mental and physical health problems. Adolescents ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
559:In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns. (75) ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
560:One of the most obvious ways dogs can improve our physical and mental health is via daily walks. ~ Andrew Weil, #NFDB
561:Pero me horroriza la aburrida rutina de la existencia. Tengo ansias de exaltación mental. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
562:Sharpening your logical and practical mental toolbox is not being an atheist or unspiritual. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
563:Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
564:We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
565:Es imposible formarse una imagen mental del Ser, y nadie puede pretender su posesión exclusiva. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
566:Even a few minutes of mindful breathing a day can improve your sense of well-being and mental calm. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
567:He wasn’t about to let himself be distracted by irrelevant mental trickery. He needed to focus. ~ Christa Faust, #NFDB
568:I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital. ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
569:I have always believed that a good laugh was good for both the mental and physical digestion. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
570:Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
571:I think if I had one year of college, I'd have done better with the mental part [of the NBA]. ~ Jermaine O Neal, #NFDB
572:Mental illness is primarily an unconscious escape from this design, a form of passive resistance. ~ John Zerzan, #NFDB
573:Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
574:That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
575:Who's your daddy?'
Myrnin stared at him as if he'd gone completely mental. 'Excuse me? ~ Rachel Caine,#NFDB
576:Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy ~ Robin Tunney, #NFDB
577:Be passionate. Generate the magnetic power of eros through sensual, mental, and spiritual delight. ~ John Friend, #NFDB
578:Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. ~ Tara Moss, #NFDB
579:I don't feel that no fighter has the mental or physical agility to match Floyd Mayweather. ~ Floyd Mayweather Jr, #NFDB
580:If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
581:I'm either going to go completely mental, completely bankrupt, or have the best success of my life. ~ Katy Perry, #NFDB
582:I'm not afraid of anyone, but sometimes I'm afraid of myself. The mental part is very important. ~ Justine Henin, #NFDB
583:I'm now much more aware of my mental state. I have a lot more control over it and can choose how I feel. ~ Flume, #NFDB
584:In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness. ~ Alastair Campbell, #NFDB
585:it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
586:Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
587:Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
588:Our mental life is teeming with thoughts, many of them going on unconsciously and automatically. ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
589:The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
590:The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
591:The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
592:We have a mental emergency here. Our noble pal Sevak has just been wickedly divorced by his mind. ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
593:Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
594:Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional. ~ Johann Hari, #NFDB
595:Family trees full of nuts have nothing on me. My family is temperamental. Half temper, half mental. ~ Kelly Moran, #NFDB
596:Fear is nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative stream of consciousness. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
597:Fighting is very physical and extreme and you're very vulnerable. It's a very mental type of thing. ~ Gina Carano, #NFDB
598:He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and as far as possible less mental strain, ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
599:Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see. ~ Peter Senge, #NFDB
600:loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
601:Love is mental illness going in and mental illness coming out. In between, you do a lot of laundry. ~ Steve L pez, #NFDB
602:maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
603:modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward! ~ Sarah Waters, #NFDB
604:More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
605:Playing the Game of Privilege is mental masturbation - it only feels good to those playing the game. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
606:que la felicidad está determinada más por el estado mental que por los acontecimientos externos. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
607:Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. —RICHARD CARLSON, PH.D. ~ Daniel G Amen, #NFDB
608:The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
609:the feeling of control—whether real or illusory—is one of the wellsprings of mental health. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert, #NFDB
610:Todos estamos prontos para pensar que há algo de errado no processo mental de quem discorda de nós. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
611:You still go to therapy?"
"Nah. I gave up years ago."
"Mental health ins't for everyone. ~ Jonathan Tropper,#NFDB
612:You still go to therapy?"
"Nah. I gave up years ago."
"Mental health isn't for everyone. ~ Jonathan Tropper,#NFDB
613:A positive mental attitude is an irresistible force that knows no such thing as an immovable body. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
614:I'm probably the only person on earth who had to be committed to a mental hospital to find a date. ~ Julie Halpern, #NFDB
615:Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
616:Never forget that the circumstances of your life for tomorrow are molded by your mental conduct today. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
617:Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water. Hope is the fuel for our mental engine. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
618:The only thing over which you have complete right of control at all times is your mental attitude. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
619:There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
620:The vibrations of mental forces are the finest and consequently the most powerful in existence. ~ Charles F Haanel, #NFDB
621:You like feeling lost. You enjoy being baffled. It gives you a false sense of mental energy, activity. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
622:Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states. ~ Gabor Mat, #NFDB
623:Dance is a physical and mental workout. Once you get your body moving, you'll see a difference. ~ Kathryn McCormick, #NFDB
624:I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. ~ Tom Petty, #NFDB
625:Mental work is like a vitamin a person needs every day. A muscle that otherwise atrophies with disuse. ~ A G Riddle, #NFDB
626:My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions.. with intrusions of irrelevant information. ~ Marlene Dumas, #NFDB
627:... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both. ~ Laura McHugh, #NFDB
628:(Randle McMurphy) Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
629:Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities. ~ Walter Scott, #NFDB
630:The highest mental health is not liking myself but being joyfully interested in everything but myself. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
631:The parent-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind. ~ Bessel van der Kolk, #NFDB
632:the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
633:We must take situations as they are. We must only change our mental attitudes towards them. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, #NFDB
634:A judgment is the mental act by which one thing is affirmed or denied of another. ~ Sir William Hamilton 9th Baronet, #NFDB
635:Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees. ~ Nelson DeMille, #NFDB
636:Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
637:Enmity is a mental state, our task is to transform the enmity between Kim and Trump into deep friendship. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
638:Hell, at this rate she’d end up in the mental institution by the end of the year. Cause: Celibacy. ~ Jennifer Probst, #NFDB
639:It was possible that he was making some progress in his mental health condition by seeing me. ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan, #NFDB
640:Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls. ~ Gregory Bateson, #NFDB
641:Make a mental list of happy thoughts and pass them through your mind several times every day. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
642:Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons, but one out of one. ~ Karl A Menninger, #NFDB
643:Mental illness and creativity are - it's a thin line in between the two. I tend to believe that. ~ Bruce Springsteen, #NFDB
644:Some 40 percent of people with serious mental illnesses have been arrested at some point in their lives. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
645:This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
646:Today I know that physical training should have as much place in the curriculum as mental training. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
647:Turn the disadvantage to account by utilizing it for the gaining of mental and spiritual strength, and ~ James Allen, #NFDB
648:Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
649:We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
650:You can never turn the clock back and, since we're talking about mental health, I would stress that. ~ Peter Shilton, #NFDB
651:Get yourself prepared, educationally and emotionally, and develop mental toughness. Don't ever give up. ~ Jim Clyburn, #NFDB
652:Of all the mental and physical polluters of life, nothing exercises such a poisonous effect as fear. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
653:The individual with a negative mental attitude attracts troubles as a magnet attracts steel fittings. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
654:The thing of which the act of perception is the perception is experienced as something not mental. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
655:Think of today as an opportunity to discover and grow beyond your mental and emotional discomfort. ~ James Van Praagh, #NFDB
656:Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin. ~ Robert Collier, #NFDB
657:Fear is
nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative
stream of consciousness ~ Robin S Sharma,#NFDB
658:Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc. Develop good mental habits. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
659:Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them. ~ Paul Lockhart, #NFDB
660:Mental face palm. Suddenly I wasn't sure there was enough room on the campus for both me and his ego. ~ Gemma Halliday, #NFDB
661:Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them. ~ Lysette Anthony, #NFDB
662:Mental life is indeed practical through and through. It begins in practice and it ends in practice. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
663:Most partners do not have sex frequently enough for optimum mental, physical, and emotional health. ~ Diana Richardson, #NFDB
664:on a scale of mental breakdowns from Justin Bieber to Britney Spears, I think I’m about a Shia LaBeouf. ~ Jill Shalvis, #NFDB
665:There's no magic to running far or climbing Everest. Endurance is mental strength. It's all about heart. ~ Bear Grylls, #NFDB
666:Ability is the result of mental and physical toughness, resourcefulness, and powerful concentration. ~ Howard A Tullman, #NFDB
667:A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
668:Have a healthy mental attitude; that's the most important thing and the best thing you can do for yourself. ~ Arden Cho, #NFDB
669:If physical fasting is not accompanied by mental fasting it is bound to end in hypocrisy and disaster. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
670:If you wish, gentle reader, you may augment your mental tableau with dramatic orchestral accompaniment. ~ Marie Brennan, #NFDB
671:Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
672:Keep your mental and spiritual contact points cleaned so that God can operate through your mind. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
673:Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with. ~ Adam Ant, #NFDB
674:People who succeed are those who know how to mobilize all their physical and mental resources on a goal. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
675:Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence. ~ Vernon Howard, #NFDB
676:Shabbat is a day of rest, of mental scrutiny and of balance. Without it the workdays are insipid. ~ Hayim Nahman Bialik, #NFDB
677:So I stuck that in the back of my mental filing cabinet too, under the drawer labeled: Unthinkable. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
678:The life of a couple is lived on the mental level of the more mediocre of the two beings who compose it. ~ Andr Maurois, #NFDB
679:The prevalence of mental illness compels me to give it - and the people suffering from it - a voice. ~ Mariel Hemingway, #NFDB
680:There has to be a balance between your mental satisfaction and the financial needs of your company. ~ Alexander McQueen, #NFDB
681:Transcendental meditation is like a car, a vehicle that allows you to go within. It's a mental technique. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
682:With the strength and mental stability derived from inner peace, we can endure all kinds of adversity. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
683:All in all, in-person social interaction is much better for mental health than electronic communication. ~ Jean M Twenge, #NFDB
684:Bravo can't be responsible for the mental state of every single person that comes onto their network. ~ Bethenny Frankel, #NFDB
685:I'm a big proponent of having a mental health component go along with whatever the physical realities are. ~ Alan Thicke, #NFDB
686:Instead of heading for a big mental breakdown, I decided to have a small breakdown every Tuesday evening. ~ Graham Parke, #NFDB
687:I think I have mental problems, I think I have like weird obsessions with things, really annoying. ~ Kourtney Kardashian, #NFDB
688:It was not about losing my mental power; it's about not feeling good about my contribution to the game. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
689:One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance. ~ Clifton Fadiman, #NFDB
690:Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
691:The karma that is most interesting is the mental karma because ultimately it generates physical action. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
692:You either ride life or it rides you. Your mental attitude determines who is 'rider' and who is 'horse.' ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
693:Approach or come: refers not to the physical act of coming, but to the mental attitude; the heart is ~ Abdullah Yusuf Ali, #NFDB
694:Christians are called to tear down mental fortresses and liberate people from the power of false ideas. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
695:Everywhere you look you see people with things that you do not have, and it has a profound mental effect. ~ Damien Echols, #NFDB
696:Failure or success in business is primarily not determined by mental capacity but by MENTAL ATTITUDES ~ Walter Dill Scott, #NFDB
697:I make a mental note to be more rebellious in the future. Clearly I haven’t been living up to my potential. ~ Kristin Rae, #NFDB
698:It's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers, you know? ~ Moby, #NFDB
699:Jackson made a mental note to speak to her about her demeanor on the bridge later when they were alone. ~ Joshua Dalzelle, #NFDB
700:Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
701:Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When "I" is replaced by "We", illness becomes wellness. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
702:Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
703:The wise man should rein in intently this mental action like a chariot drawn by untrained horses. ~ Swetawatara Upanishad, #NFDB
704:Voices in the darkness scream away my mental health, can I ask a question to help me save me from myself? ~ Ozzy Osbourne, #NFDB
705:when humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
706:With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
707:All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. Shakespeare is my bible, Burns my hymn-book. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
708:Anything that brings spiritual, mental, or physical weakness, touch it not with the toes of your feet. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
709:Believing you’re the only person with their head on straight is usually not a sign of good mental health. ~ Sylvain Neuvel, #NFDB
710:Definiteness of purpose with positive mental attitude is the starting point of all worthwhile achievement. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
711:Disempowerment," Michael [Marmot] told me, "is at the heart of poor health"—physical, mental, and emotional. ~ Johann Hari, #NFDB
712:Every day in every way, I am increasing my mental and physical capacity. I am reversing my biological age. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
713:How we “feel”—tired or energetic, listless or enthusiastic—is mental and chemical; it is physiological. ~ Shad Helmstetter, #NFDB
714:If we have a positive mental attitude, then even when surrounded by hostility, we shall not lack inner peace. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
715:Problems are the creations of mental ignorance seeking for knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #NFDB
716:Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
717:The door is always open. You don’t think I’d stay locked up in here with a load of mental patients, do you? ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
718:There are two kinds of satisfaction or happiness: one mainly through mental peace; another physical comfort ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
719:The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
720:The use of the Will as the projector of Mentative Currents is the real base of all Mental Magic. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
721:When an idea exclusively occupies the mind, it is transformed into an actual physical or mental state. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
722:Whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
723:But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
724:Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman, #NFDB
725:El pensar claro y sentirlo lleva a la demostración, porque en esa forma se edifica el equivalente mental. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
726:Forty percent of the people who are being treated for mental illness are not addressing the physical body. ~ Linda Hamilton, #NFDB
727:How was I supposed to concentrate on my mental health when my therapist was encased in orange sparkle madness? ~ E Lockhart, #NFDB
728:If you are worried or afraid of anything, there is something in your mental attitude that needs correction. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
729:it was rare for a patient to readjust successfully to normal life after a period spent in a mental hospital. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
730:La postergación es un ladrón. Roba nuestro tiempo, nuestro potencial, nuestra autoestima, nuestra paz mental. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
731:Mental health has commonly been called conscience, instinct, wisdom, common sense, or the inner voice. We ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
732:Pause one second. And be honest." Thorne held up a finger.
"Are you having a mental breakdown right now? ~ Marissa Meyer,#NFDB
733:'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state. ~ Paul Schrader, #NFDB
734:The open ocean often takes you past your physical limits and when it does, sailing becomes a mental game. ~ Abby Sunderland, #NFDB
735:There have been, and may be again, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
736:The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
737:They connected on every level - mental, philosophical, emotional. But she couldn't have him, not all of him. ~ Nicole Mones, #NFDB
738:A lot of people who get into any art form have some form of mental..something in their head which is unstable ~ Daniel Johns, #NFDB
739:Application is the price to be paid for mental acquisition. To have the harvest, we must sow the seed. ~ Philip James Bailey, #NFDB
740:Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
741:Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.10 ~ James Clear, #NFDB
742:In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
743:I've been doing a lot of yoga to help with my running, recovery, and mental clarity. It works great for me. ~ Angie Martinez, #NFDB
744:Mental boldness: let your mind be capable of foreseeing the perfections of tomorrow.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB
745:Overthinking numbs our instincts and turns what should be a quick decision into a mental committee meeting. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
746:park…The mental hurdle people seem to have is accepting that the dog decides what is spooky or threatening. ~ Bronwen Dickey, #NFDB
747:We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
748:Worry causes your precious mental energy and potential to leak, just like air leaking out of an inner tube. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
749:You could tie my hands to my sides, I suppose, but I have to write. For my own mental health, I need to write. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
750:All the mental skills needed in meditation are innate abilities we can selectively choose to cultivate. ~ Culadasa John Yates, #NFDB
751:At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
752:I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one. ~ Bobby Knight, #NFDB
753:I hear Nine make an oohing noise off to the side and make a mental note to destroy him the next chance I get. ~ Pittacus Lore, #NFDB
754:In vocal prayer we speak to God; in mental prayer he speaks to us. It is then that God pours Himself into us. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
755:It's impossible to measure the type of mental strength and determination that's required to be an elite wrestler. ~ Joe Rogan, #NFDB
756:Mental burds; needy, crazy, strength-sappin n soul-destroyin, aye, but mair often than not barry fuckin rides. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB
757:My mental capacities are quite intact, Abigail Miller.” I had severe doubts on his ability to ascertain that. ~ Ashlan Thomas, #NFDB
758:Never waste valuable time or mental peace of mind on the affairs of others - that is too high a price to pay. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
759:Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others—that is too high a price to pay. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
760:The most important thing that a change in physical perspective can do is to prompt a change in mental perspective ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
761:the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
762:The pain is indescribable… physical, mental… metaphysical… it is everywhere, seeping into the marrow of my bones. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
763:Valuing physical sensations above moral considerations is evidence of either mental deficiency or demonic evil. ~ Osamu Dazai, #NFDB
764:we are talking about relationships in hell. We are talking about the mental disease that exists on this planet. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
765:All disease has a mental correspondence, and in order to heal the body one must first 'heal the soul'. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn, #NFDB
766:Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
767:Generally with women, I have the finesse and mental fortitude of a rhinoceros charging through a watering hole. ~ Kendall Ryan, #NFDB
768:If your mental health is sound, then when disturbances come, you will have some distress but quickly recover. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
769:I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
770:I should have let my other self tell me his plan. Mental note: never interrupt a villain who is monologuing. ~ Hannu Rajaniemi, #NFDB
771:I thought about making what Bernie calls a mental note, but nothing came next and I dropped the whole shebang. ~ Spencer Quinn, #NFDB
772:Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
773:[M]ental peace is not meditation. Meditation is the flight beyond the mind. It has nothing to do with mental peace. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
774:Morgan may be autistic, but he is a normal man with a mental condition, not a mental condition who is a man. ~ Adrienne Wilder, #NFDB
775:One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
776:Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
777:Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation. ~ Constantin Stanislavski, #NFDB
778:Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation. ~ Konstantin Stanislavski, #NFDB
779:The vibrations of mental forces are the finest and consequently the most powerful in existence.” Charles Haanel ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
780:To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
781:We are not omniscient or all-powerful. Even enhanced by technology, our physical and mental powers are limited. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
782:Besides, we feel always a sort of mental superiority over those whose lives we know better than they suppose. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
783:Hanya mereka yang bisa menjiwai mental para pahlawannya yang akan meraih prestasi-prestasi gemilang. ~ Habiburrahman El Shirazy, #NFDB
784:If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
785:I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
786:My brain had been burping up such inappropriate thoughts at inopportune moments. Mental gas I couldn’t control. ~ Gillian Flynn, #NFDB
787:Our supreme duty is to advance toward freedom - physical, mental, and spiritual - and help others to do so. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
788:Playing sick. That is so hard to do. It has to be a total mental challenge, as well as the physical challenge. ~ Michael Jordan, #NFDB
789:Rely on the Mother always. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences on the Subtle Physical, Vital and Mental Planes, #NFDB
790:Research shows that 75 to 98 percent of mental, physical, and behavioral illness comes from one’s thought life. ~ Caroline Leaf, #NFDB
791:sisu”—the mental strength to continue to try even after you feel you’ve reached the limits of your abilities. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
792:The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life - mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical. ~ Julius Erving, #NFDB
793:The reason one enters into lower mental states is because you don't have the power or chi flowing through you. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
794:The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
795:What a paradox that is. The things you dislike the most succeed in taking up the majority of your mental time. ~ Joan Borysenko, #NFDB
796:When a new idea comes our way, we must put it on our mental scales and weigh it carefully before deciding its value. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
797:Abandone la espera como un estado mental. Cuando se sorprenda a sí mismo cayendo en ella...salga inmediatamente. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
798:Evil habits, in which men indulge, are the chief cause of disease in the physical as well as the mental state. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
799:For too long we have swept the problems of mental illness under the carpet... and hoped that they would go away. ~ Richard Codey, #NFDB
800:I believe it is important for people to create a healthy mental environment in which to accomplish daily tasks. ~ Darren Johnson, #NFDB
801:If we keep practicing mental skills it is likely we can strengthen neural connections and make new connections. ~ Philippa Perry, #NFDB
802:La mecánica de la mafia Empecemos con un experimento mental: ¿qué aspecto tendría la cultura ideal de una empresa? ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
803:Making excuses is one of a host of self-defeating behaviours and mental patterns that can block your success. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
804:One of the best places to start to turn your life around is by doing whatever appears on your mental "I should" list. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
805:Se necesitaban las mismas cosas: talento, cojones y estar en forma. Sólo que la forma era mental, espiritual. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
806:Some girls love to go to the airport and have 50 paparazzi on them. I go to the airport and have a mental breakdown. ~ Megan Fox, #NFDB
807:Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. ~ Elyn Saks, #NFDB
808:The brain creates both the mind and the body we experience. A physical thing creates the mental world we inhabit. ~ Bruce M Hood, #NFDB
809:The mental thought patterns that cause the most dis-ease in the body are criticism, anger, resentment, and guilt. ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
810:The renown which riches or beauty confer is fleeting and frail mental excellence is a splendid and lasting possession. ~ Sallust, #NFDB
811:Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
812:Ugh! Why can’t you just read my mind already? It’s so inconvenient to be a mental mute! ~ Stephenie MeyerBella ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
813:All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
814:A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
815:Choose your own mental state, rather than letting the environment govern it. Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. ~ Pavan Choudary, #NFDB
816:For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
817:Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
818:If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different, I'd rather be completely #$%^&^& mental. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
819:In my world, one doesn’t discuss mental health. One pretends life is lovely and suffers silently.” “It’s ~ Barbara Claypole White, #NFDB
820:It’s sort of like an invitation to the White House—only you meet a better class of people in the mental hospital. ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
821:Keep talking Milligan. I think I can get you out on Mental Grounds.’ ‘That’s how I got in, sir.’ ‘Didn’t we all. ~ Spike Milligan, #NFDB
822:Learning is a process of modifying or completely changing our mental models based on new experiences or evidence. ~ Edward D Hess, #NFDB
823:loss of mental equilibrium take place in persons who are too affected by material conditions ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhup da, #NFDB
824:Okay, take a deep breath, I told myself. Don't go all hormonal. Get the facts straight. Have a mental doughnut. ~ Janet Evanovich, #NFDB
825:Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema. ~ Mary Garden, #NFDB
826:The 3 key components for success are as follows: Psychological Preparedness Physical Conditioning Mental Toughness ~ Chuck Norris, #NFDB
827:The instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted , or even reasoned about , we are mental serfs. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
828:The use of mental imagery is one of the strongest and most effective strategies for making something happen for you. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
829:They say Im demonic in humor in the sense that I think people need somebody to wake up their mental processes. ~ Kenneth Williams, #NFDB
830:To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
831:We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
832:We now come to the third stage of a prisoner’s mental reactions: the psychology of the prisoner after his liberation. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
833:When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing- ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
834:When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
835:A mental knowledge can always be blinded by the tricks of the vital. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Thought and Knowledge, #NFDB
836:Building concentration is primarily a matter of removing certain mental factors that hinder its application. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
837:"Disagreement functions as a vehicle of mental life in society, but it is not a goal; agreement is equally important." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
838:interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
839:I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death. ~ Martin Gilbert, #NFDB
840:Mental reactions weren’t logical, but they happened, and they could destroy the lives of those suffering through them. ~ J S Scott, #NFDB
841:Remember: One must consistently practice mental skills and pre-game routines in order to tap one’s full potential. ~ D C Gonzalez, #NFDB
842:Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. ~ Elyn R Saks, #NFDB
843:the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
844:We have the right to invite what mental guests we wish - let us be careful to whom we issue invitations. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
845:Yoga is more than physical. It is cellular, mental, intellectual and spiritual-it involves man in his entire being ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
846:A heart full of love and compassion is the main source of inner strength, willpower, happiness, and mental tranquility ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
847:Covetousness is a sort of mental gluttony, not confined to money, but craving honor, and feeding on selfishness. ~ Nicolas Chamfort, #NFDB
848:Einstein called this tactic “combinatory play”—the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
849:Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more. ~ Mike Jay, #NFDB
850:I appreciated that all animals have some form of mental life that reflects the architecture of their nervous system. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
851:If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different....I'd rather be completely fucking mental. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
852:I have so much respect for people in the service. The mental strength it takes to do what they do is unbelievable. ~ Torrey DeVitto, #NFDB
853:I keep saying this about a mental state, but the more that I am physically active, the more that my mind is clear. ~ Julianne Hough, #NFDB
854:I request you to try to be warm-hearted. I ask this of you because these mental attitudes actually bring us happiness. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
855:It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association ~ William James, #NFDB
856:I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
857:[L]ibrarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with mental health disorders, can make people nervous. ~ Ian Sansom, #NFDB
858:Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility. ~ Karl Abraham, #NFDB
859:The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. ~ William James, #NFDB
860:The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
861:The mind is an inveterate divider of the indivisible. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #NFDB
862:When every physical and mental resources is focused, one's power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
863:Homophobia” is now the new mental illness and moral deficiency, while homosexuality is accepted as the new normal. ~ Russell D Moore, #NFDB
864:In terms of instilling the values of mental toughness and work ethic, discipline is the gift that keeps on giving. ~ William Baldwin, #NFDB
865:Moral evil is in reality a form of mental disease or ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Delight of Existence, The Problem, #NFDB
866:So, lemme get this right. We're gonna make a go of it. You and me? Togevver? Even though I'm orange and you're mental? ~ Alexis Hall, #NFDB
867:Tenemos internet en el móvil y enviamos naves a Marte, pero mental y emocionalmente vivimos todavía en la Edad Media. ~ Samuel Bj rk, #NFDB
868:The mind is the most important part of achieving any fitness goal. Mental change always comes before physical change. ~ Matt McGorry, #NFDB
869:The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not as ~ Lundy Bancroft, #NFDB
870:What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist? ~ Peter D Kramer, #NFDB
871:All disease originates in the mind. Nothing appears on the body unless there is a mental pattern corresponding to it. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
872:a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
873:If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
874:Is a lukewarm attitude to one’s work a sign of mental health? Is a merely professional attitude the only sane approach? ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
875:I've always sung in the shower. Now I make the stage a mental shower in order not to get too uptight and enjoy it. ~ Elizabeth Taylor, #NFDB
876:Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man. ~ Ernst Haeckel, #NFDB
877:The ancient Greeks considered love a mental illness that led to suicide, homicide, betrayal, war, all sorts of fun. ~ Marion G Harmon, #NFDB
878:...the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. ~ Alexis Carrel, #NFDB
879:There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
880:Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
881:Usually people just do their own work. But I want to deal with the place and what it means to show in a mental hospital. ~ Nan Goldin, #NFDB
882:Walking the narrow way involves not a distorted mental attitude but a clear understanding of what righteousness demands. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
883:We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
884:And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
885:A pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #NFDB
886:Audacity only takes one thus far - .
Denial is a mental illusion.
Lie is the wicked weapon used by the deceiver. ~ Hans Lindor,#NFDB
887:Before users create the mental associations that activate their automatic behaviors, they must first invest in the product. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
888:Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
889:fo·lie à deux n. (pl.fo·lies à deux) delusion or mental illness shared by two people in close association. ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
890:For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh, #NFDB
891:Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual.” – RICHARD CONN HENRY ~ Ziad Masri, #NFDB
892:He pushed the thought into a mental closet. It was a thing he was good at. There was all sorts of stuff in that closet. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
893:I always do a mental audit at the end of the week to make sure Im balancing time between my career and my personal life. ~ Jill Wagner, #NFDB
894:IF MENTAL EMOTIONAL CONCENTRATION FELT FLARED UP WELL MADLY BY TIME INFLUENCE ? MUTUAL SOUL ENJOYMENT IS PLEASINGLY ENSURED. ~ Various, #NFDB
895:Lets try to come to a place of compassion about mental illness, in all its forms, and help each other find healing. ~ Mariel Hemingway, #NFDB
896:Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
897:Mental strength is more powerful than physical strength.- STRONG: Powerful Philosophy for Timeless Thoughts by Kailin Gow ~ Kailin Gow, #NFDB
898:Mental toughness is Spartanism, with all its qualities of self-denial, sacrifice, dedication, fearlessness, and love. ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
899:She started drawing up a mental list of everyone she didn’t trust, and had to stop immediately. She didn’t have all day. ~ Mick Herron, #NFDB
900:The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself. ~ William James, #NFDB
901:The Mental Warrior learns from his setbacks and he doesn’t allow them to distract him from reaching his true potential. ~ D C Gonzalez, #NFDB
902:The principal means of acquiring an ardent love of Christ are mental prayer, Communion, mortification, retirement. ~ Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
903:This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
904:Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
905:What the world, social and political, concrete and mental, really needs is not new things, but the old things made new. ~ Ethel M Dell, #NFDB
906:All mental discipline and symmetrical growth are from activity of the mind under the yoke of the will or personal power. ~ Mark Hopkins, #NFDB
907:He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
908:In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year. ~ Karl Kraus, #NFDB
909:Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the net of physical theory. ~ Donald Davidson, #NFDB
910:Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
911:Most people view health only in the physical sense, but I view it also in the mental, spiritual, and emotional sense. ~ Malcolm Goodwin, #NFDB
912:Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn’t need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
913:People little dream of how their affairs react on the body. There is a mental correspondence for every disease. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn, #NFDB
914:Purification is an essential means towards self-perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #NFDB
915:Tenía la idea de que, si ejercías un control mental y te decías muy seria: «No tendré hijos», seguramente no vendrían. ~ Barbara Comyns, #NFDB
916:The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
917:This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem, and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem. ~ Joe Rogan, #NFDB
918:Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
919:If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
920:In a country which had accepted caste distinctions for many centuries, inequality had become an inborn mental concept. ~ Khushwant Singh, #NFDB
921:Just as mental toughness and physical energy are the primary traits of an army, they also mark God's beautiful woman. ~ Elizabeth George, #NFDB
922:La felicidad no es una estación a la cual hay que llegar, sino una manera de viajar”. Ésa es la salud mental: viajar bien. ~ Walter Riso, #NFDB
923:Mia, what is the most important thing for a soccer player to have?” With no hesitation, she answered, “Mental toughness. ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
924:Myrnin: "I think your ghost girl's afraid I'll try to bite her. I believe she may have, you know, mental issues... ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
925:Self-awareness includes awareness of your mental realm, which encompasses your thoughts, feelings, energy, and emotions. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
926:So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it? ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
927:The constant flux and caprice of mental events do not admit of the establishment of stable experimental conditions. ~ Hermann Ebbinghaus, #NFDB
928:Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
929:The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity. ~ Northrop Frye, #NFDB
930:the pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—they dilate substantially when people multiply two-digit numbers, ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
931:Una necesidad es un vaso para ser llenado, mientras que escasez es un estado mental, una limitación en la conciencia. ~ Eric Butterworth, #NFDB
932:Almighty God freely bestows the good things in this world in proportion to a person's mental readiness to receive. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
933:Inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity always means resistance. Resist all evils, mental and physical... ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
934:I think that carrying on a life that is meant to be private in public is a breach of taste, common sense, and mental hygiene. ~ Myrna Loy, #NFDB
935:I think when you have a character as richly drawn, I suppose then there are subconscious, mental notes that you've made. ~ Cate Blanchett, #NFDB
936:It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
937:Like every alternative to Christianity, the mechanistic worldview was essentially a substitute religion, a mental idol. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
938:Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously. ~ Josh Waitzkin, #NFDB
939:Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive. ~ Mary Jane Ward, #NFDB
940:Only in a true life or death scenario can you have mental clearness to know that you cannot feel guilty for surviving. ~ George Zimmerman, #NFDB
941:Purification is not complete till it brings about liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #NFDB
942:the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
943:The important point is to become intensely interested in the mental picture or imaginary act, making it real and natural. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
944:To get rid of mortal body is not to get rid of mortal mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Difficulties of the Mental Being, #NFDB
945:What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both. ~ Rufi Thorpe, #NFDB
946:When mental energy is allowed to follow the line of least resistance and to fall into easy channels, it is called weakness. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
947:...about a year after that, I was invited to go to a mental hospital. And, you know, you don't want to be rude, so you go. ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
948:As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint. ~ Joan Aiken, #NFDB
949:As for wondering if it's okay to be who you are--that's not a symptom of mental illness. That's a symptom of being a person. ~ Jeff Garvin, #NFDB
950:Daemon: I have something really corny to say. Get ready for it.
Katy: I'm ready.
Daemon: I'm mental for you. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
951:Death should be KNOWN. Known as a difficult mental, physical and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is. ~ Caitlin Doughty, #NFDB
952:Everyone should try no gluten for a week! The change in your skin, physical and mental health is amazing. You won't go back! ~ Miley Cyrus, #NFDB
953:Fighting is 90% mental. There are people who run from the fire and there are people that turn around and run to the fire. ~ Frank Shamrock, #NFDB
954:Instead of always asking yourself how to clear up your mental fog, learn to ask: "Can confusion know anything about clarity?" ~ Guy Finley, #NFDB
955:I relax and cast aside all mental burdens, allowing God to express through me His perfect love, peace, and wisdom. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
956:[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
957:Keeping away for all evil deeds, cultivation of life by doing good deeds and purification of mind from mental impunities. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
958:Life is crueller than art, for the latter usually assures that physical surroundings reflect characters' mental states". ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
959:Mental prayer is nothing else but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #NFDB
960:Most haters are stuck in a poisonous mental prison of jealousy and self-doubt that blinds them to their own potentiality. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
961:Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person. ~ Upton Sinclair, #NFDB
962:Prayers are answered when the individual’s subconscious mind responds to the mental picture or thought in his or her mind. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
963:Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life. ~ Mark Haddon, #NFDB
964:That the mental experiences of dogs aren’t as complex as ours is no reason to dismiss those experiences altogether. ~ Patricia B McConnell, #NFDB
965:The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
966:To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer the universe. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
967:We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
968:A sense of humor is regarded as a sign of mental health - apart from excessive punning, which is another matter entirely. ~ Helen Cresswell, #NFDB
969:Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is. ~ Caitlin Doughty, #NFDB
970:Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
971:I don't think it is a good mental health practice to fantasize that you know the infinite thoughts of imaginary entities. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
972:Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order. ~ George H Mead, #NFDB
973:i think the idea of a 'mental health day' was invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
974:It is true that the mental aspect of kung-fu is the desired end; however, to achieve this end, technical skill must come first. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
975:It’s a dangerous misperception among reporters, the public and policymakers that mental illness is at the root of violence. ~ Helen Thomson, #NFDB
976:I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. ~ Rand Paul, #NFDB
977:Meditation is the direct means of eradicating the very cause of the majority of diseases, both mental and physical. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, #NFDB
978:Mental prayer is nothing else but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #NFDB
979:Mental toughness must be developed before you start fighting because you don't want to be that guy who quits in the ring. ~ Forrest Griffin, #NFDB
980:Most adult emotions are emergent properties. They are subjective mental states that represent the convergence of more primitive ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
981:Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness. ~ Elyn Saks, #NFDB
982:the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author's skill in well dressing it up. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
983:The lesbian is a mental energy which gives breath and meaning to the most positive of images a woman can have of herself. ~ Nicole Brossard, #NFDB
984:The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
985:Yes, somehow I'd reached the point of mental instability where I was making up excuses to justify my actions to my own brain. ~ Jeff Strand, #NFDB
986:You can't help people like her unless they want to be helped. That's the first law of mental health. You know it, I know it. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
987:all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
988:As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it. ~ Susan Faludi, #NFDB
989:But Doc had one mental habit he could not get over. When anyone asked a question, Doc thought he wanted to know the answer. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
990:Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
991:Each mental act opens up a new dimension of actuality. In a manner of speaking, your slightest thought gives birth to worlds. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
992:Everything in your life, every experience, every relationship is a mirror of the mental pattern that is going on inside of you. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
993:In the end faith always moves beyond mental assent and duty and will involve the whole self—mind, will, and emotions. Why ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
994:My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I'd spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
995:The feeling of being valuable—“I am a valuable person”—is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
996:The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
997:The principal means of acquiring an ardent love of Christ are mental prayer, Communion, mortification, retirement. ~ Saint Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
998:To become a champion requires a good mental attitude toward preparation. You have to accept the most tedious task with pleasure. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
999:We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past. ~ Timothy Leary, #NFDB
1000:When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health, ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
1001:When you resist doing what you know needs done, it is difficult. Find a mental way to enjoy it, and just do it, and it is easy. ~ Joe Vitale, #NFDB
1002:You cannot continue to hate someone without repeatedly wasting, on them, some of your precious time and mental energy. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1003:And while there’s nothing wrong with good business, the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1004:Being born into the Royal Family is like being born into a mental asylum. Marrying into it is not something to be taken lightly. ~ John Lydon, #NFDB
1005:Cuando observaba yo aquel último y supremo síntoma del trastorno mental de mi amigo, no podía apenas contener las lágrimas. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1006:Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill. ~ John Darnielle, #NFDB
1007:Dolor, s. Estado de ánimo ingrato, que puede tener una base física, o ser puramente mental y causado por la felicidad ajena. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
1008:Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. ~ J D Vance, #NFDB
1009:He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
1010:If you lack the mental focus to stay with one activity for any length of time, you will never be able to achieve your goals, ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1011:If you're spending so much time at the gym that your mail is forwarded there, you're not dedicated - you've got a mental disorder. ~ Dan John, #NFDB
1012:I guess when people ask what is the biggest transition to the NBA from college, it is definitely defense and the mental part. ~ Magic Johnson, #NFDB
1013:In visualizing, or making a mental picture you are not endeavoring to change the laws of nature. You are fulfilling them. ~ Genevieve Behrend, #NFDB
1014:I want to be doing things today, not just flipping through crinkled and yellowed mental pictures of what happened a long time ago. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
1015:Most people let their reactive mental process run a lot of the show, especially where the too-much-to-do syndrome is concerned. ~ David Allen, #NFDB
1016:Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of insanity and becomes addicted to it. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1017:Proper physical exercise increases your chances for health, and proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1018:Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1019:...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
1020:so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health. During ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1021:This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1022:To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1023:What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1024:When you are forced to think, you expand your mental capacity. When you expand your mental capacity, your wealth increases. ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1025:You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
1026:A teacher is a sower of seed, a spiritual agriculturist, while he who teaches himself is the wise farmer of his own mental plot. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1027:Being confronted with one's worst nightmares is both a way of testing your mental fortitude and seeing where your heart lies. ~ Rachel Hawkins, #NFDB
1028:But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It´s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
1029:Eleri decided to call Wade and ask how he had handled it. She made a mental note to call between two and four a.m. if possible. ~ A J Scudiere, #NFDB
1030:I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started. ~ William Golding, #NFDB
1031:I got a dog-training book. It says Grendel needs mental stimulation, so I tried to train him, but I think he must be retarded. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
1032:It is all about confidence: 90% mental and 10% physical, that is what basketball is. I live by that and it seems to be working. ~ Michael Redd, #NFDB
1033:It's mental discipline that sets one apart, the ability to think differently and to generate energy in the right direction. ~ Sachin Tendulkar, #NFDB
1034:It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
1035:One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon, #NFDB
1036:Physically, I'm healthy as a horse, always held up. But in the mental illness department, I got my share. It's just what I got. ~ Shawn Colvin, #NFDB
1037:[R]egard your thoughts and feelings as passing, ephemeral "mental events" rather than as accurate reflections of reality. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1038:Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1039:The mental and physical diseases we face in old age are tied together through the cardiovascular system and metabolic system. A ~ John J Ratey, #NFDB
1040:We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives; ~ Thomas Bernhard, #NFDB
1041:When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose... with a resulting improvement in mental health, ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
1042:While obsession with one’s personal appearance is a sign of being a vacant prat, total oblivion to it is a sign of mental illness. ~ Kate Cann, #NFDB
1043:You know, there are very few people I could tell that to and have them laugh instead of calling the cops. Or mental health. ~ Cherise Sinclair, #NFDB
1044:Career success is using your daily work, schoolwork, work in the world, work at home, as a way of advancing your mental state. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1045:Don't think for one min that I haven't been taking mental notes of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone! ~ LeBron James, #NFDB
1046:Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1047:He was making potential customers burn too many mental calories to figure out how he was going to help them survive and thrive. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
1048:In China, viewers usually experience mental travel and tend to lose themselves in these paintings thereby inducing a sense of calm. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1049:Information overload will lead to 'future shock syndrome' as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances. ~ Alvin Toffler, #NFDB
1050:I thought I’d bounce back. I’d been through deals before,” she said. “But I didn’t. My mental resilience had become so depleted. ~ David Gelles, #NFDB
1051:I tried to will them with my super mental powers so he’d put them around my waist, but apparently I had no super mental powers. ~ J A Redmerski, #NFDB
1052:I will now proceed to point out how you may definitely and positively convey an idea or mental image to your subconscious mind. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1053:la clave de la vida es edificar un equivalente mental de lo que deseas y eliminar los equivalentes de lo que no quieres. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
1054:No one has ever thought this: Now that I'm out of therapy and have fixed my mental problems, I think I want to be a ventriloquist. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
1055:Prayers are answered when the individual’s subconscious mind responds to the mental picture or thought in his or her mind. This ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1056:Room Full Of Mirrors, that's more of a mental disarrangement. This says something about broken glass used to be all in my brain. ~ Jimi Hendrix, #NFDB
1057:Small minds select narrow roads; expand your mental vision and take to the broad road of helpfulness, compassion and service. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
1058:The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction. ~ Russell Baker, #NFDB
1059:The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1060:There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. ~ Mark Vonnegut, #NFDB
1061:The subconscious mind is nothing but an energy field or mental level that resonates in line with the universal subjectivity. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
1062:To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. ~ George Gissing, #NFDB
1063:Too evident sorrow does not inspire pity but repugnance, it is the sign of mental instability or of bad manners: it is morbid. ~ Philippe Ari s, #NFDB
1064:We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto. ~ Chaim Potok, #NFDB
1065:We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1066:When every physical and mental resource is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously.” (Norman Vincent Peale) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1067:Your job, with all that mental training and suffering, is just to push your line of breaking so far your opponent can't find it. ~ Greg Jackson, #NFDB
1068:28. Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1069:A mental control can only be a control, not a cure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #NFDB
1070:Anna felt suddenly as if all of her - physical, mental and emotional - was draining out and into this other unknown human being. ~ Lucinda Riley, #NFDB
1071:Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1072:Everyone faces defeat. It may be a stepping-stone or a stumbling block, depending on the mental attitude with which it is faced. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1073:For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante, #NFDB
1074:Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves. ~ Rebecca McNutt, #NFDB
1075:Keep fear out of your child's mind, as you would keep poison out of his body; for fear is the deadliest of mental poisons. ~ Orison Swett Marden, #NFDB
1076:Melting our attachment to self is the most powerful medication for bringing mental and emotional imbalances in check. ~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, #NFDB
1077:My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1078:Proper physical exercise increases your chances for health, and proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. My ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
1079:Reaching our full physical maturity, for example, does not necessarily assure us of simultaneous emotional or mental maturity. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
1080:Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1081:The feeling of being valuable – ‘I am a valuable person’ – is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1082:The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1083:the individual mind had to create a mental perspective for the whole organism relative to those two sets of representations— ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1084:The simple act of visualizing, which requires mindfulness, focus, and creativity, frees the mind from mental chatter and negativity. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
1085:Time itself is only as real as your own mental discrimination between the revelation and concealment of the one Light. ~ Eric Micha el Leventhal, #NFDB
1086:We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1087:When hecklers stand up, I get a mental jump for joy. It gives me something to get my teeth into - and the audiences love it. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
1088:All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things. ~ N g rjuna, #NFDB
1089:A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1090:A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1091:A veces el tiempo que marca el calendario no tiene nada que ver con el tiempo mental o emocional que cada uno vive por dentro. ~ Eva Garc a S enz, #NFDB
1092:going down my mental checklist: TV, Xbox, phones, computers, laptops. I snapped my fingers. “Leave your iPads in my office, too.” “But ~ J R Rain, #NFDB
1093:Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1094:How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
1095:I decided to go for the honest answer. “My guess is I’m going to bed with a mental image of you, some lube and a box of tissues. ~ Kirsty Moseley, #NFDB
1096:If you go into acting to make money then you're an idiot. It's my hobby and the fact that I'm doing my hobby for a job is mental. ~ Jeremy Irvine, #NFDB
1097:I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
1098:I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They're a way of relieving pressure. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1099:mental immunity creates a healthy disposition of the mind so that it will be less susceptible to negative thoughts and feelings. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1100:Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the the freedom that exists in the world of insanity and becomes addicted to it. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1101:Our objective of life is only to survive but to achieve some mental objectives. If not, we have to live like animals and have to face tortures. ~, #NFDB
1102:plus on est à même de respecter et d’accepter le moment présent, plus on est libéré de la douleur, de la souffrance et du mental. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1103:the acquisition of mental skills is a matter of volition and focused effort; it is not a special mystical gift given to the few. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1104:The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1105:There is only a half step difference between the champions and those who finish on the bottom. And much of that half step is mental. ~ Tom Landry, #NFDB
1106:There’s no consensus in the mental health community on how to maintain the sanity of a person whose whole existence is fictional. ~ Robert Kroese, #NFDB
1107:victim
noun \ˈvik-təm\
1. The moment you tell everyone you have a mental disorder, in order to excuse your behavior. ~ Shannon L Alder,#NFDB
1108:When looking at triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1109:When you've learned to believe in yourself, there's no telling how good a player you can be. That's because you have the mental edge. ~ Rod Carew, #NFDB
1110:Wife, I require supper. I am hungry, as the mental effort required to digest politics is quite taxing. You would not understand. ~ Rivers Solomon, #NFDB
1111:All causes are essentially mental, and whosoever comes into daily contact with a high order of thinking must take on some of it ~ Charles Fillmore, #NFDB
1112:All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things. ~ Nagarjuna, #NFDB
1113:And mental states may be inferred from actions. The tyrant rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an enemy. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1114:Angels are made of pure spirit (mind and will) without matter, without bodies. Therefore they must communicate by mental telepathy. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
1115:Computer animation is one way to liberate people from their circumstantial gravity, and it is one way to give them mental freedom. ~ Cai Guo Qiang, #NFDB
1116:Here inside, everyone can say what they like, do what they want, without being criticized. After all, they’re in a mental hospital. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1117:If we are to survive as free men, we must face up to this problem of politically inspired mental coercion, with all its ramifications. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1118:..."if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live 'out in the world'?" How indeed? ~ Janet Frame, #NFDB
1119:Important lesson there: you don’t survive in the field by obeying all the
rules, including those relating to mental processes ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1120:I try to make my bed every day for mental health. Coming home to an unmade bed or a room with clothes all over will depress me. ~ David Alan Grier, #NFDB
1121:Mental knowledge is not an integral but always a partial knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #NFDB
1122:Normal was the simple wish of everyone with a mental illness. Normal was what everyone else, the worried well, took for granted. ~ Lisa Scottoline, #NFDB
1123:Psychology is the science of the act of experiencing, and deals with the whole system of such acts as they make up mental life. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
1124:That, and the untended mental health problems. We have all these insane armed hobos coming from the Midwest, usually Ohio. Fuck Ohio. ~ Tim Dorsey, #NFDB
1125:The 7 factors of enlightenment: mindfullness, investigation of mental objects, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration and equanimity. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1126:The man stared at him, belligerence creeping up in his eyes, then dampening down like he’d stepped into a cold mental shower. “Yuaa, ~ J T Ellison, #NFDB
1127:We are built to walk. Not to SoulCycle and jog and hike. Walking is mental. You sharpen your thoughts and process your emotions. ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
1128:What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
1129:When we free ourselves from physical disabilities, emotional disturbances, and mental distractions, we open the gates to our soul. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
1130:Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable. ~ Johann Most, #NFDB
1131:Do not fight them. Instead think of them the way you think of children, or pets, not important enough to affect your mental balance ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1132:Dwarfs can often do the work of giants when they are transformed by the almost magic power of great mental concentration. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1133:He`d felt himself give others the exact same look she was giving him, a mental fuck you layered with a middle finger against authority. ~ Rhys Ford, #NFDB
1134:Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
1135:Ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. The problem with making mental notes is that the ink fades very rapidly.
—ROLF SMITH ~ Hal Elrod,#NFDB
1136:I definitely thought about touching it to satisfy my curiosity, but luckily for me my mental instability kicked in and I left it alone. ~ Mark Tufo, #NFDB
1137:I'm always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life. ~ Steve Martin, #NFDB
1138:In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~ St phane Mallarm, #NFDB
1139:Just because you cannot avoid this tool altogether doesn’t mean you have to cede all authority over its role in your mental landscape ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
1140:Live from the inside out. Your mind, body and spirit are interconnected. Nourish your soul with mental and physical wellness. ~ Janet Taylor Spence, #NFDB
1141:Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival instincts. It does not take you towards liberation. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
1142:Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
1143:Mental man has not been Nature’s last effort or highest reach. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #NFDB
1144:Si los chicos no aprenden esto, que la cultura no es acumulación de saber sino discriminación, no hay educación sino desorden mental. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1145:someone like me needed to not only refrain from drugs but also engage in careful mental and physical upkeep in order to stay balanced. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
1146:Sometimes you can put the bandage on yourself. Sometimes you need a doctor. Why should we treat the mental stuff like it’s different? ~ Elliott Kay, #NFDB
1147:The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1148:There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers. ~ Thomas Cahill, #NFDB
1149:This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
1150:To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them ~ Francis Parker Yockey, #NFDB
1151:Well, you know my type," Ty responded with a saccharine smile as he passed Zane's desk. "No self control and loads of mental issues. ~ Abigail Roux, #NFDB
1152:We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1153:What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1154:William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
1155:Anyone with any degree of mental toughness ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
1156:As far as mental development is concerned, we should never be complacent. We can develop our minds infinitely - there is no limitation. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
1157:bent down and plucked the fae’s sword free of the fleshy mess that had once been his hand. Mental note: Don’t mess with the spiders. ~ Pippa DaCosta, #NFDB
1158:But recently I've, the past few years, I'm more focused on meditation. It's not a physical part. It's more mental part, to understand life. ~ Jet Li, #NFDB
1159:But taking a few minutes out of your morning routine to spend outside can have a profound effect on your mental and physical well-being. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
1160:First, know thine own ideal - spiritual, mental and material; not as to what ye would have others do, but what ye would do for others. ~ Edgar Cayce, #NFDB
1161:I disconnected and made a mental note not to call Tank unless I was bleeding profusely, and he was the only other person on earth. ~ Janet Evanovich, #NFDB
1162:In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~ Stephane Mallarme, #NFDB
1163:In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~ St phane Mallarm, #NFDB
1164:It may sound strange to laymen, but psychotherapists are familiar with the fact that people are routinely terrified by mental health. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1165:Mental prayer is, as I see it, simply a friendly intercourse and frequent solitary conversation with Him who, as we know, loves us. ~ Teresa of vila, #NFDB
1166:My experience is that I can think while strolling but cannot engage in mental work that imposes a heavy load on short-term memory. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1167:The one thing I never want to do is act drunk or act high. You don’t do it from a mental kind of place because then you’re just acting. ~ Eva Mendes, #NFDB
1168:The point is, as we will see throughout this book, what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality. ~ Shawn Achor, #NFDB
1169:To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment.... ~ Joseph Epstein, #NFDB
1170:When we cling to a thought or follow its track, we are performing a mental karma, and that, in turn, is the seed of all physical actions. ~ Om Swami, #NFDB
1171:Disease is in essence the result of conflict between Soul and Mind, and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort. ~ Edward Bach, #NFDB
1172:Fundamentally, what everyone needs is mental strength and confidence, to manage the mind, just as we manage the outside world. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
1173:He can’t walk down steps … can’t walk down hills. [He’s got] mental blocks … [He] can’t handle numbers … they have no meaning to him. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
1174:He took that mental image and filed it away under Pleasant-Sounding Impossibilities. Right between “flying carriage” and “beer fountain. ~ Tessa Dare, #NFDB
1175:I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to. ~ Shaun Bythell, #NFDB
1176:If I train the hardest, run the longest, go beyond what anyone else has the mental determination to do, I will be the winner. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
1177:iGen is on the verge of the most severe mental health crisis for young people in decades. On the surface, though, everything is fine. ~ Jean M Twenge, #NFDB
1178:In fact, it has been proposed that absolute neuron count, regardless of brain or body size, best predicts a species’ mental powers.61 ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
1179:I’ve developed a pretty good survival system involving nothing more than mental alertness exercises, positive thinking and amphetamines. ~ David Wong, #NFDB
1180:My best advice for mental training is simply to create good habits, in order to build a sense of security and calm around you. ~ Alexander Gustafsson, #NFDB
1181:Of course, this kind of speculation was a waste of mental energy, and he knew it. All they could do at that point was watch and wait. ~ Christa Faust, #NFDB
1182:Our aim is to find the real self, and to bring our mental images of ourselves more in line with the objects represented by our goals. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
1183:Prayer,in its truest sense,is an attempt to invoke the mightier potential that is already in us,through mental integration. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati, #NFDB
1184:School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
1185:The mind and the body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1186:The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
1187:To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1188:To me, good health is more than just exercise and diet. Its really a point of view and a mental attitude you have about yourself. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
1189:Two thoughts cannot coexist at the same time: if the clear light of mindfulness is present, there is no room for mental twilight. ~ Nyanaponika Thera, #NFDB
1190:What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe. ~ James J Gibson, #NFDB
1191:What first attracted me to doing Swiss Army Man was just how mental it was - how insane and wonderful and original the script was. ~ Daniel Radcliffe, #NFDB
1192:Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
1193:Do not let your to-do list (written or mental) become an idol directing your life. Instead, ask My Spirit to guide you moment by moment. ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
1194:it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess! ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1195:Mental knowledge cannot replace faith; so long as there is only mental knowledge, faith is still needed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - II, Faith, #NFDB
1196:Mental realisation is useful at the beginning and prepares spiritual experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences and Realisations, #NFDB
1197:My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life. ~ Elyn Saks, #NFDB
1198:Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, ~ Carrie Fisher, #NFDB
1199:Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.”
“Really? Was that how you quit me? ~ Gayle Forman,#NFDB
1200:Raising self-centered kids is not good for society, but it's also not good for their own mental health to be completely self-absorbed. ~ William Damon, #NFDB
1201:The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as “my god” or “our god. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1202:The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise. ~ Matthew Walker, #NFDB
1203:the “self-image,” the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
1204:When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
1205:Forgiveness is the key to inner peace because it is the mental technique by which our thoughts are transformed from fear to love. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1206:I swear by the invigorating shampoo and conditioner by Como Shambhala. When you’re in need for a quick mental vacation, it does the trick ~ Phillip Lim, #NFDB
1207:Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind. ~ John Kennedy Toole, #NFDB
1208:Mental bearing (calmness), not skill, is the sign of a matured samurai. A Samurai therefore should neither be pompous nor arrogant. ~ Tsukahara Bokuden, #NFDB
1209:Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire. ~ William James, #NFDB
1210:Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something. But it's the next best thing. And the right kind of a story is a simulation. ~ Chip Heath, #NFDB
1211:Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
1212:Pain (any pain-emotional, physical, mental) has a message. Once we get the pains message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away. ~ Peter McWilliams, #NFDB
1213:The mind, ever the willing servant, will respond to boldness, for boldness, in effect, is a command to deliver mental resources. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
1214:The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
1215:The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. ~ Tara Westover, #NFDB
1216:What happens with every role, you have to trick yourself, you have to creatively find ways to explore the mental state of your character. ~ Irrfan Khan, #NFDB
1217:Who would seriously want to listen to anything emanating from a quasi-chimpanzee's irrational bundle of mental accidents and energies? ~ David A Noebel, #NFDB
1218:Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive. ~ Gregory Bateson, #NFDB
1219:You can develop the right mental attitude when you realize that nothing external can upset you or hurt you without your mental consent. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1220:you must stretch your own imagination, rouse yourself from mental lethargy, and be bold enough to discard old dogmatic comfort blankets. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
1221:A physician who treated mental cases says that he based his diagnosis on the way his patients moved: "The body never lies" was his maxim. ~ Gerald Jonas, #NFDB
1222:I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis. ~ Mira Bartok, #NFDB
1223:In a 100-miler, anything can happen. Speed isn't your biggest thing, you need to learn how to mentally get through it. It is very mental. ~ Karl Meltzer, #NFDB
1224:I think spiritualism, mesmerism, the mental healing movement, provided some people with the most meaningful experiences of their lives. ~ Mitch Horowitz, #NFDB
1225:Man is a spirit, but a spirit that lives as a mental being in physical Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ladder of Self-Transcendence, #NFDB
1226:Mental activity is like a deadly poisonous cobra. If we don't interfere with a cobra, how poisonous it may be, it simply goes its own away. ~ Ajahn Chah, #NFDB
1227:Mental projection only, I'm afraid; your body is still back in the room. The network works with your mind to translate the information. ~ Benedict Jacka, #NFDB
1228:My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life. ~ Elyn R Saks, #NFDB
1229:"The ego doesn't know that mind and mental positions have nothing to do with who you are because the ego is the unobserved mind itself." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1230:What mental darkness, what ignorance of the truth blinds those who, though afflicted by the fear of poverty, yet take pleasure in imitating it! ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1231:When we lack gratitude for simply being alive, it’s because we have strayed from the present into an illusory mental state called “time. ~ Michael Brown, #NFDB
1232:Acting is not that far from mental disease: An actor works on splitting his character into others. It is like a kind of schizophrenia. ~ Vittorio Gassman, #NFDB
1233:I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
1234:It was only after the earthquake that the health minister said mental health should be a priority and that the issue was talked about. ~ Reggie Fils Aime, #NFDB
1235:later down the road of life, i made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land. ~ Jimmy Buffett, #NFDB
1236:Man is able to speculate and reason about the mental states of other men, because he recognizes these states within himself. As ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1237:Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #NFDB
1238:None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1239:Personality is a composition of Nature,—but a mental Person, manomaya puruṣa. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Perfection of the Mental Being, #NFDB
1240:The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
1241:There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library. ~ Anthony Hecht, #NFDB
1242:This is an an abundant universe. Grasp your birthright. Success is a massive abundance of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. ~ David Wolfe, #NFDB
1243:trastorno bipolar I (BPI) e s una enfermedad mental cróni c a y grave que se caracteriza por episodios recurrentes de depresión mayor y manía ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1244:We are, because we remember. As each new present blinks out, its heart is weighed and then judged, preserved in mental amber or consumed. ~ Myla Goldberg, #NFDB
1245:when your consciousness or mental attitude shifts, remarkable things begin to happen. That shift is the ultimate business tool and life tool. ~ Guy Spier, #NFDB
1246:Xav!
Got you. Not letting you go.
I realised I wasn't alone in mental deep space; he had always been there and could pilot me home. ~ Joss Stirling,#NFDB
1247:As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter. ~ Deanna Raybourn, #NFDB
1248:I detest 'love lyrics.' I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics. ~ Frank Zappa, #NFDB
1249:I had to train myself to focus my attention. I became very visual and learned how to create mental images in order to comprehend what I read. ~ Tom Cruise, #NFDB
1250:I'm very pleased when the smartest people come [to the U.S.] and almost never pleased when the very bottom of the mental barrel comes in. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
1251:Mental note when dealing with Mitch: he was a police detective and he had ways of getting information therefore never let your guard down ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
1252:No matter how closely we look, it is difficult to find a mental act that can take place without the support of some physical function. ~ Moshe Feldenkrais, #NFDB
1253:Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
1254:Shared mental models—most particularly those that take the form of religion—are critical in facilitating large-scale collective action. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
1255:Tampoco sugería su aspecto exterior la especie de hombre al que las mujeres están dispuestas a perdonarle un abundante grado de deficiencia mental. ~ Saki, #NFDB
1256:The metaphysician knows that all disease has a mental correspondence, and in order to heal the body one must first "heal the soul. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn, #NFDB
1257:Then he took that mental image and filed it away under Pleasant-Sounding Impossibilities. Right between “flying carriage” and “beer fountain. ~ Tessa Dare, #NFDB
1258:The way past despair and false hope is just letting go. It doesn't improve your odds of survival, but it doesn't waste mental energy. ~ James Alan Gardner, #NFDB
1259:True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is a spiritual commerce with the Creator of heaven and earth. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
1260:An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total. ~ William James, #NFDB
1261:Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1262:Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
1263:I know I have the mental capacity of a thousand bloggers, but because of that, my obligation to serve God is also that of a thousand bloggers ~ Mickey Kaus, #NFDB
1264:Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles. The mental pattern must always precede the material form. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1265:It does not help for spiritual knowledge to be ignorant of the things of this world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Mental Development and Sadhana, #NFDB
1266:I wake up: I am mental, I got to bed and I am mental, I am mental within my dreams, I am mental within my normal state, I'm out of my mind. ~ Joey Jordison, #NFDB
1267:Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce. ~ Geraldine Brooks, #NFDB
1268:More than anything, the weed really helped with my mental state, because marijuana works on the brain. And if anything, it soothes the brain. ~ Tommy Chong, #NFDB
1269:Nothing irritates me more than chronic laziness in others. Mind you, it's only mental sloth I object to. Physical sloth can be heavenly. ~ Elizabeth Hurley, #NFDB
1270:Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. ~ Tim Ferriss, #NFDB
1271:The concept of a mental state is primarily the concept of a state of the person apt for bringing about a certain sort of behaviour. ~ David Malet Armstrong, #NFDB
1272:The mind does not record things as they are, but as they appear to it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #NFDB
1273:Therapists always struck me as a hire-a-friend service. Therapists are to mental and emotional purging what prostitutes are to physical urges. ~ L H Cosway, #NFDB
1274:Your mental attitude gives your entire personality a drawing power that attracts the circumstances, things and people you think about most! ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1275:A country is as strong, really, as its citizens. And I think that mental and physical health - mental and physical vigor - go hand in hand. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1276:And so personal setbacks that might once have become “teachable moments” turn into triggers for a mental health diagnosis. “Students are seeking ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1277:At the creative heart of invention lies appropriation, some sort of mental borrowing that comes in the form of a half-conscious suggestion. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
1278:Cease negative mental chattering. If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
1279:Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
1280:Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
1281:Even with mental health as well as physical health, it's about taking responsibility and knowing that you're part of the solution always. ~ Mariel Hemingway, #NFDB
1282:I fell in love. Why can't I fall out of it?" He got a look on his face, which I knew meant he was making a mental note of that line too. ~ Marshall Thornton, #NFDB
1283:If there's a therapist who wants a writing project, I think there's a need for a book about how the culture affects the mental health of boys. ~ Mary Pipher, #NFDB
1284:Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. ~ Daniel Keyes, #NFDB
1285:Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
1286:Nature intends all men and women to be mental and spiritual giants, and does not intend that any one should follow the will of another. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
1287:One of the major causes of mental health problems, he felt, was a lack of belongingness, the perception that we are cut off from our fellows. ~ Kristin Neff, #NFDB
1288:Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists. ~ L A Paul, #NFDB
1289:Physical strength (hard work), mental strength (perseverance) and spiritual strength (love & acceptance) are the keys to continuous growth. ~ Rickson Gracie, #NFDB
1290:Polite applause filled the room. Only a single whoop echoed out, and Kat made a mental note to have a word with Hamish once this was all over. ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB
1291:Presence may require that we move both our neural and our mental sides of experience flexibly toward the open plane of possibility. Rather ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
1292:Psychic phenomena does not mean wisdom; it only means mental understanding of the relationship of the outer world to the inner world. ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
1293:The key questions are: Which mental state would be most useful in this situation? And which version of reality would help you get there? ~ Olivia Fox Cabane, #NFDB
1294:The mental secularization of Christians means that nowadays we meet only as worshipping beings and as moral beings, not as thinking beings. ~ Harry Blamires, #NFDB
1295:The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
1296:There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. ~ Patrisse Khan Cullors, #NFDB
1297:would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.' I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1298:Would you really dig into yesterday's garbage to make tonight's meal? Do you dig into yesterday's mental garbage to create today's experiences? ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
1299:Another thing rappers, I admire your rebellious spirit, but materialism is a form of mental slavery. Slow down on the jewelry, pick up a book. ~ Dov Davidoff, #NFDB
1300:But I got real tired of people using religion to suit their agendas. God became a mental genie that could be called upon to justify anything. ~ Peter Tieryas, #NFDB
1301:Even when it is widest and most complete, mental knowing is still an indirect knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #NFDB
1302:Give your good bacteria an upgrade and get your microbiome in shape. Faster fat-loss and better mental health are just two of the benefits. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1303:How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1304:I find I have much better drive and focus when in a state of ketosis. I have a lot more mental clarity and productivity.
Bryan Barksdale ~ Jimmy Moore,#NFDB
1305:I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health. ~ Frankie Cosmos, #NFDB
1306:I stopped thinking too much about what could happen and relied on my physical and mental strength to play the right shots at the right time. ~ Novak Djokovic, #NFDB
1307:It is not enough to maintain physical purity alone. One must also guard against mental acts of unfaithfulness (see Ex. 20:17; compare Ps. 19:14). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1308:It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence. ~ William H Macy, #NFDB
1309:One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
1310:Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
1311:physical, mental, and financial collapse had had its roots in years of weakness and self-indulgence. Near financial ruin rarely came overnight. ~ Mary Balogh, #NFDB
1312:Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking. ~ Lauren Oliver, #NFDB
1313:The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it. ~ Thomas Metzinger, #NFDB
1314:The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
1315:Those only are happy .... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness,
"a crisis in my mental history ~ John Stuart Mill,#NFDB
1316:You find sprinters testing other sprinters' mental capability. But these are my good friends on the track. I don't think we need to do that. ~ Donovan Bailey, #NFDB
1317:Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
1318:And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence? ~ Carmen Maria Machado, #NFDB
1319:el que más sirve más cosecha, emocional, física, mental y espiritualmente. Éste es el camino hacia la paz interior y la realización exterior. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
1320:He is the best!!! says one review, with an overkill of exclamation points that makes me question the reviewer’s mental health and state of mind. ~ Mary Kubica, #NFDB
1321:Hooves pound behind me, shouts and curses follow, and I make a mental note to always, always put a knife in my sleeve when I go on missions. The ~ Sara Raasch, #NFDB
1322:If you spend time in a mental hospital you pick up the drill. You could pass as an orderly, get a job doing it when you got out,” Graham said. ~ Thomas Harris, #NFDB
1323:I have mental joys and mental health, Mental friends and mental wealth, I've a wife that I love and that loves me; I've all but riches bodily. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
1324:Irene made a private mental resolution that if she ever became a queen, her throne would incorporate a cushion. Also a convenient bookcase. ~ Genevieve Cogman, #NFDB
1325:I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies. ~ Jello Biafra, #NFDB
1326:many people have trouble passionately loving and living for God because they have a mental picture of him that inspires anything but passion. ~ Gregory A Boyd, #NFDB
1327:Mental illness is often in the eye of the beholder. Too often on this PLANET it refers to those who think and act differently from the majority. ~ Gene Brewer, #NFDB
1328:Mga 3days-3weeks tapos unahan na yan mag-offline kunyari naputol connection ng internet pero naputol na yung mental and emotional connection. ~ Ramon Bautista, #NFDB
1329:Positive mental attitude is the right mental attitude in all circumstances. Success attracts more success while failure attracts more failure. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1330:The centre of mental thinking is the ego, the person of the individual thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #NFDB
1331:The ego is a false sense based on mental concepts. It is identification with the body and the mind-primarily identification with thought form. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1332:The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
1333:*1. Productivity *2. Relationships *3. Finances *4. Organization *5. Spirituality and Mental Well-being *6. Health and Physical Fitness *7. Leisure ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
1334:Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
1335:Believe me, the mental sickness and confusion of a wilfully degraded existence are worse tortures than are contained in the priestly notions of Hell. ~ Various, #NFDB
1336:Fighting emotions is like flailing in quicksand—it only makes things worse. Sometimes, the most proactive “defense” is a mental nod and wink. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
1337:happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. ~ Robert Wright, #NFDB
1338:It was because a great-looking man with no apparent mental defects found her attractive. Imagine feeling so buoyant over something so juvenile. ~ Maggie Shayne, #NFDB
1339:I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1340:Los humanos que convivan con los robots en las nuevas fábricas manufactureras estarán ahí por su trabajo mental, no por su trabajo manual. ~ Andr s Oppenheimer, #NFDB
1341:Love tames the benumbed beast. A man is put to use regarding a woman's physical safety, but a woman is put to use regarding a man's mental safety. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1342:LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry. ~ Stanislav Grof, #NFDB
1343:modern humans rarely have to contend with lion attacks. Instead, most of our stress today comes from mental processes: from worrying about things. ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
1344:My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs, #NFDB
1345:o amor estava acabando como experiência real por conta da nova capacidade do homem de só pensar em sua saúde mental, física e política. Amar ~ Luiz Felipe Pond, #NFDB
1346:The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself. Erika ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
1347:Their imaginations put the scene on a film loop. Guiltily, they watched it until their mental screens began to wash the rest of the past away. ~ Charles Baxter, #NFDB
1348:The United States were a 35-year-old man, I think he'd be in a mental institution. Violent tendencies - delusions of grandeur - medicate heavily. ~ Rick Mercer, #NFDB
1349:They aren’t having a mental conversation between people with different thought processes. All their thoughts are present, together, at once. ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1350:Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1351:You cannot describe the universe completely with any accuracy unless you're willing to admit that it's both physical and mental in nature. ~ Christopher Langan, #NFDB
1352:A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
1353:As her life choked away beneath the tightness , in a strange way she welcomed the physical pain over the anguished years of mental affliction. ~ Patricia Gibney, #NFDB
1354:At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most, it is the mental agony caused by injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1355:Bodybuilding is much like any other sport. To be successful, you must dedicate yourself 100% to your training, diet and mental approach. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
1356:Continually, and, if possible, in the case of every mental image, consider its nature, realize its emotional content, and judge it rationally. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1357:I mean, I am human, got feelings and desires, and might ultimately want the same thang, but can I get a moment of mental stimulation first? ~ Eric Jerome Dickey, #NFDB
1358:It can be difficult to present mental illness in film without resorting to devices that, if not handled well, can seem heavy-handed or cliché. ~ Brian Lindstrom, #NFDB
1359:I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
1360:I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
1361:Many of us have a mental conception of what a Christian should be, and the lives of the saints become a hindrance to our concentration on God. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
1362:Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention. ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
1363:Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1364:Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. ~ J. B. Priestley in International Herald Tribune, January 3, 1978., #NFDB
1365:Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it." ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
1366:Religion without philosophy is sentiment, or sometimes fanaticism, while philosophy without religion is mental speculation. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, #NFDB
1367:Religion without philosophy is sentiment, or sometimes fanaticism, while philosophy without religion is mental speculation. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhup da, #NFDB
1368:Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations. ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB
1369:Surprised, she realized that keeping physically busy is the most effective blockade against totally mental activity human beings can erect. ~ Colleen McCullough, #NFDB
1370:that physical qualities such as strength and agility are highly trainable, mental qualities such as joy and calmness are also highly trainable. ~ Chade Meng Tan, #NFDB
1371:The most important thing I've come to believe in is that people with mental handicaps have a unique mission to bring God's blessing to the World. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
1372:The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
1373:Words" he growled.
His mental message almost changed my mind.
"Your all the fun I need, Chloe. When will you figure it out? I. Want.You. ~ Carol Van Atta,#NFDB
1374:Al observar celibato, reservamos no sólo la energía física si no también la mental, moral, intelectual y, finalmente la energía espiritual. ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
1375:And what does that signify to you?" he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient. ~ Joanne Greenberg, #NFDB
1376:Any method that causes you to move from fear and worry to faith and expectancy will heal. True scientific, mental healing is brought about by the ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1377:Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. ~ Julian Jaynes, #NFDB
1378:Depression is not always feeling sad. Most of the time it is feeling nothing.
Class Struggle and Mental Health: Live to Fight Another Day ~ Various,#NFDB
1379:I click my teeth together every time I want to take a mental picture of something, like, "Wow, what a beautiful sunset!" Slam your teeth together. ~ Rich Fulcher, #NFDB
1380:If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1381:It's a mental fake-out to myself. I make believe I'm making a new show so I forget the material I was working on and make up some fresh material. ~ Eric Bogosian, #NFDB
1382:Mental disorders don't really live 'out there' waiting to be explained. They are constructs we have made up - and often not very compelling ones. ~ Allen Frances, #NFDB
1383:Nick and I could become goodwill ambassadors for the city now that the porno shops on 42nd Street are gone. Must make mental note to contact mayor. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
1384:Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
1385:People who consistently succeed are those who can commit all of their resources, mental and physical, to work together toward achieving a task. ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
1386:Stop the mental chatter about what's wrong and what's not complete. There is a presence of Love that is seeking to express itself through you. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
1387:That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1388:The evolution of our unique brains was locked into the evolution of our wide range of movement. Mental and physical agility run on the same track. ~ John J Ratey, #NFDB
1389:The real motivation was purely selfish. I was on a quest to help myself. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. ~ Alex Michaelides, #NFDB
1390:When you eat pure food that isn't genetically modified, your physical and mental state does improve and it's worth the effort to make that happen. ~ Laura Prepon, #NFDB
1391:All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current ~ Ben Horowitz, #NFDB
1392:As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1393:A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
1394:A well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
1395:Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
1396:From wearable sensors to video game treatments, everyone seems to be looking to technology as the next wave of innovation for mental health care. ~ Thomas R Insel, #NFDB
1397:Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion. ~ Etty Hillesum, #NFDB
1398:I don't need any bonus material to throw me over the edge later."
Or don a flight of stairs, under a bus, and straight back to the mental ward. ~ Myra McEntire,#NFDB
1399:I love being from a screwed up family. We have everything in my family: prescription drug abuse, mental illness, one of my uncles is a Mormon. ~ Christopher Titus, #NFDB
1400:I made a mental note never, ever to set foot in the backyard privy. Or even the backyard itself. I could feel my colon assuming a defensive posture. ~ Jodi Taylor, #NFDB
1401:[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1402:Mental Toughness: The ability to consistently perform toward the upper range of your talent and skill regardless of the competitive circumstances. ~ James E Loehr, #NFDB
1403:No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics. ~ Franz Boas, #NFDB
1404:Pense nos idiotas da mesma forma que em crianças ou animais domésticos - não são suficientemente importantes para afectar o sue equilíbrio mental. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1405:People can be committed to a mental institution only after judicial hearing, but people are committed to schools beyond the reach of Habeas Corpus. ~ Martin Mayer, #NFDB
1406:Rue gave a little mental sigh. No one would ever describe her as deadly attractive. She brightened a bit. Perhaps she could aspire to just deadly? ~ Gail Carriger, #NFDB
1407:Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes. ~ Deb Caletti, #NFDB
1408:The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1409:The purifications were nice, but they were just water, and didn't wash away sins; they didn't cure the mental thirst or allay his heart's anxiety. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1410:The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
1411:A Beautiful Mind”, was, he said, “helpful” in changing attitudes towards mental illness, albeit inaccurate: he had auditory, not visual hallucinations. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1412:All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1413:In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1414:I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health. ~ Charles Barron, #NFDB
1415:Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
1416:Mindfulness and mental effort would then be understood as a way of using attention to control brain state by means of the Quantum Zeno Effect. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1417:Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
1418:Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science. ~ Mary Somerville, #NFDB
1419:Physical pain comes and goes,” he said. “It’s inconsequential. A means to an end. But the mental pain you experienced will remain with you forever. ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
1420:Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
1421:Staying for your children is noble. However, staying with someone that teaches your children that "selective" evilness is okay is mental illness. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
1422:Teach people to let go of their superficial mental chatter and obsessions. Teach people to pay attention to the whole body's reaction to a situation. ~ John Heider, #NFDB
1423:The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
1424:Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
1425:The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1426:The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1427:The people who come to my shows have dollar signs drawn all over them. They have blue lipstick. I call them my animals because they just go totally mental. ~ Kesha, #NFDB
1428:Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
1429:We must distrust complicated experiments on the mind, which are not easy to make; they are often sufficient to upset the mental state we wish to study. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1430:We need to recognize that part our political problem is that we do not participate effectively, that we suffer from a kind of mental slumber. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1431:You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders. You can't do that, and they should not be held there. They need rehabilitative therapy. ~ Cecily McMillan, #NFDB
1432:Another piano falls, but this time it's me— or my lascivious loneliness, or my grab bag of mental instabilities and emotional shortcomings, or whatever. ~ Kris Kidd, #NFDB
1433:Another piano falls, but this time it’s me— or my lascivious loneliness, or my grab bag of mental instabilities and emotional shortcomings, or whatever. ~ Kris Kidd, #NFDB
1434:A peculiar feature – no doubt a weakness – of my mental make-up is that I find it difficult to concentrate twice on the same subject. Normally ~ Claude L vi Strauss, #NFDB
1435:College basketball was one of the hardest, most rewarding experiences of my life. Every single day on the court was a mental and physical challenge. ~ Ashley Graham, #NFDB
1436:Even now she can’t decide. She thinks about flipping a coin. Heads she goes, tails she stays. But isn’t indecisiveness an early sign of mental illness? ~ Judy Blume, #NFDB
1437:Getting through BUD/S and being a SEAL is more about mental toughness than anything else. Being stubborn and refusing to give in is the key to success. ~ Chris Kyle, #NFDB
1438:Great bosses avoid burdening their people. They invent, borrow, and implement ways to reduce the mental and emotional load they heap on followers. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
1439:it’s important for people to hear from [those] who have good fulfilling lives and manage chronic mental illness as part of those good fulfilling lives. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1440:It's so mental how I looked in the '90s. The fact that I thought my ponytail was a good thing - it was just terrible. Cutting it off was so monumental. ~ Andy Cohen, #NFDB
1441:I've seen many miracles take place in people's lives. Financial miracles, miracles of physical healing, mental healing, healing of relationships. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
1442:I yearned for mental tranquility, health, fresh air, good food. I was becoming a dreamer, and, like a dreamer, I did not know exactly what I wanted. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
1443:Lucidity of speech is unquestionably one of the surest tests of mental precision...In my experience a confused talker is never a clear thinker. ~ David Lloyd George, #NFDB
1444:Most people have two emergency modes. But Connor always knew he had three: Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally. It was a dangerous mental circuit. ~ Neal Shusterman, #NFDB
1445:Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude
from achieving his goal.
Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude. ~ Thomas Jefferson,#NFDB
1446:That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one’s mental state and, worse, the outcome of one’s life. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
1447:The atom cannot disobey the law. Whether it is the mental or the physical atom, it must obey the law. "What is the use of [external restraint]?" ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1448:The beauty of your mind depends on the "make-ups" you use to feed it. A "can-do-spirit" is the best cosmetic. It never fades your mental beauty! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
1449:The concept of recovery is rooted in the simple yet profound realization that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are human beings. ~ Patricia Deegan, #NFDB
1450:The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds. ~ Walter Bagehot, #NFDB
1451:The New Testament calls this “the peace that passes understanding,” because it goes beyond thinking—no amount of mental churning will get you there. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1452:There are so many cliches associated with mental health - such as the 'fine line between lunacy and genius' - which are, on the whole, a load of rubbish. ~ Jo Brand, #NFDB
1453:Thoughts of jealousy, fear, worry and anxiety tear down and destroy your nerves and glands bringing about mental and physical diseases of all kinds. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1454:When they get out of balance, and our inner selves become involved in intense conflict, then people can begin to experience mental-health problems. ~ Paul B Gilbert, #NFDB
1455:Why on earth don't they go to men's colleges and urge the students not to allow their manly natures to be crushed out by too much mental application? ~ Jean Webster, #NFDB
1456:YOU DO NOT need to be a victim of worry. Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
1457:You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
1458:Developing mental toughness isn’t just about being resilient – it’s about accessing your reserve tank when you think you just can’t go any further. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
1459:Each time you dip into the well of existence it changes you. Rapid mental development is that process. It is a process of escalating your evolution. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
1460:Everything you do, say, and understand is due to memory. It is your most important mental function and if you improve it, you will improve your life. ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
1461:Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
1462:I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1463:I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1464:My mental hands were empty, and I felt I must do something as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43. ~ Ian Fleming, #NFDB
1465:No man or woman alive, magical or not, has ever escaped some form of injury, whether physical, mental, or emotional. To hurt is as human as to breathe. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
1466:Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1467:Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
1468:Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
1469:Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses. ~ Elyn Saks, #NFDB
1470:primary mental abilities and perceptual and motor skills are the most influenced by heredity, while personality traits are the least influenced. If ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1471:Puffballs of vanity when they're not being absurdly violent; wretchedly unhappy in their mental prisons and too stubborn to open the door and escape. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1472:The best mental effort in the game of business is concentrated on the major problem of securing the consumer's dollar before the other fellow gets it. ~ Stuart Chase, #NFDB
1473:The clientele was good for the mental novel she was writing, anyway—she needed a fictional population and she certainly was exposed to it here. Control ~ J T Ellison, #NFDB
1474:The degree to which you feel in control of your time and your life is a major determinant of your level of inner peace, harmony, and mental well-being. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
1475:There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1476:. . . the sole aim of Okinawa Karate is to teach A person to handle violence and violent individuals; whether it is tactile, mental or spiritual ~ Soke Behzad Ahmadi, #NFDB
1477:When you've been locked up in a mental institution, people are going to ask questions. It was OK, because I didn't have to act perfect all the time. ~ Drew Barrymore, #NFDB
1478:also want you to go to an internist. Courtney says the mental degeneration has occurred so rapidly that it could be pathological. A tumor or something. ~ Carl Hiaasen, #NFDB
1479:Common sense" in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1480:Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, attention, concentration, life force, and volition. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
1481:I lived with a guy who had OCD and I used to put Rice Krispies in his slippers before I went out. He went mental, but not before he counted them all. ~ Russell Howard, #NFDB
1482:I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. ~ Jon Ronson, #NFDB
1483:The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into “rigid behaviors. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
1484:There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. ~ Dan Barker, #NFDB
1485:When you believe, or are led to believe, you are unable to act upon the greatest desires of the soul, the result is mental and spiritual enslavement. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
1486:Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what we are. By ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
1487:Guilt can interfere with our desires to move forward, to heal properly and to become a person who has the mental health and means of proper recompense. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
1488:I thought about my mother and wondered what she realized about her mental health, if she was even capable of engaging in serious introspection. Probably ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1489:It's impossible for 30 million black people to be violent against 170 million - we need a mental revolution, unity in coming together, and not physical. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
1490:Mental health is one of the biggest concerns, because now police are having to handle a lot of really difficult mental health problems on the street. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
1491:Mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Three Steps of Nature, #NFDB
1492:Mental perfection and moral are always closely allied to each other. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest, To N. K. Gogte, #NFDB
1493:Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience. ~ Norman Doidge, #NFDB
1494:Some "free" people are more imprisoned than those that are locked away. Trapped in narrow mindsets, they carry their mental prison with them day by day. ~ Joan Marques, #NFDB
1495:That is the definition of a true murderer. One that considers his actions, has the mental capacity to understand the consequences, and chooses to kill. ~ Destiny Booze, #NFDB
1496:The biological function of art, in other words, is that of a rehearsal, a training in mental gymnastics which increases our tolerance of the unexpected. ~ E H Gombrich, #NFDB
1497:The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1498:The message of the Gita is to be found in the second chapter of the Gita where Lord Krishna speaks of the balanced state of mind, of mental equipoise. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1499:We have but to look around us and see how the physical bodies of different men show the different degrees of development under mental control ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
1500:We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
1547 Integral Yoga
93 Occultism
69 Yoga
46 Fiction
33 Psychology
31 Philosophy
31 Christianity
18 Poetry
16 Hinduism
15 Education
10 Science
8 Theosophy
4 Integral Theory
4 Buddhism
2 Cybernetics
1 Thelema
1 Sufism
1 Mythology
1 Mysticism
1 Islam
1 Alchemy
921 Sri Aurobindo
783 The Mother
469 Satprem
222 Nolini Kanta Gupta
45 H P Lovecraft
37 Aleister Crowley
32 Carl Jung
28 A B Purani
26 Sri Ramakrishna
22 Swami Krishnananda
17 Swami Vivekananda
15 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
14 Franz Bardon
14 Aldous Huxley
12 Saint Augustine of Hippo
9 George Van Vrekhem
8 James George Frazer
7 Sri Ramana Maharshi
7 Peter J Carroll
6 Saint John of Climacus
6 Plato
6 Alice Bailey
5 Vyasa
5 Saint Teresa of Avila
5 Rudolf Steiner
5 Nirodbaran
4 Thubten Chodron
4 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
4 Plotinus
4 Patanjali
4 Jordan Peterson
4 Bokar Rinpoche
3 Paul Richard
3 Ken Wilber
3 John Keats
3 Henry David Thoreau
2 Norbert Wiener
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Lucretius
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 Friedrich Nietzsche
334 Record of Yoga
139 The Synthesis Of Yoga
60 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
55 The Life Divine
54 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
54 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
45 Lovecraft - Poems
45 Letters On Yoga IV
45 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
45 Agenda Vol 08
44 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
44 Agenda Vol 04
42 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
42 Letters On Yoga III
42 Letters On Yoga II
40 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
40 Agenda Vol 10
40 Agenda Vol 03
39 Agenda Vol 09
39 Agenda Vol 02
35 Agenda Vol 01
32 Questions And Answers 1956
32 Questions And Answers 1953
32 Agenda Vol 05
31 Questions And Answers 1955
31 Agenda Vol 06
30 Agenda Vol 07
28 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
28 Essays On The Gita
28 Agenda Vol 11
27 Questions And Answers 1954
26 Letters On Yoga I
25 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
23 Prayers And Meditations
22 The Study and Practice of Yoga
22 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
22 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
21 The Human Cycle
21 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
21 Liber ABA
20 Essays Divine And Human
19 Letters On Poetry And Art
19 Agenda Vol 12
17 Agenda Vol 13
16 Magick Without Tears
15 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
15 On the Way to Supermanhood
15 On Education
14 The Secret Of The Veda
14 The Perennial Philosophy
13 Some Answers From The Mother
13 Mysterium Coniunctionis
12 Talks
12 Isha Upanishad
11 Raja-Yoga
11 City of God
10 Words Of The Mother II
10 Words Of Long Ago
10 The Practice of Magical Evocation
10 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
9 The Integral Yoga
9 Preparing for the Miraculous
8 Vedic and Philological Studies
8 The Practice of Psycho therapy
8 The Golden Bough
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
7 The Future of Man
7 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
7 Liber Null
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
6 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
6 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
5 Words Of The Mother III
5 Vishnu Purana
5 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
4 The Way of Perfection
4 The Phenomenon of Man
4 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4 Tara - The Feminine Divine
4 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Kena and Other Upanishads
4 Initiation Into Hermetics
4 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
4 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
4 Amrita Gita
4 Aion
3 Walden
3 The Problems of Philosophy
3 The Blue Cliff Records
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Savitri
3 Let Me Explain
3 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
3 Keats - Poems
2 Words Of The Mother I
2 Twilight of the Idols
2 Theosophy
2 The Lotus Sutra
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
2 Of The Nature Of Things
2 Faust
2 Cybernetics
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The mystic forces are not only of immense potency but of a definite moral disposition and character, that is to say, they are of immense potency either for good or for evil. They are not mechanical and amoral forces like those that physical sciences deal with; they are forces of consciousness and they are conscious forces, they act with an aim and a purpose. The mystic forces are forces either of light or of darkness, either Divine or Titanic. And it is most often the powers of darkness that the naturally ignorant consciousness of man contacts when it seeks to cross the borderline without training or guidance, by the sheer arrogant self-sufficiency of Mental scientific reason.
Ignorance, certainly, is not man's ideal conditionit leads to death and dissolution. But knowledge also can be equally disastrous if it is not of the right kind. The knowledge that is born of spiritual disobedience, inspired by the Dark ones, leads to the soul's fall and its calvary through pain and suffering on earth. The seeker of true enlightenment has got to make a distinction, learn to separate the true and the right from the false and the wrong, unmask the luring Mra say clearly and unfalteringly to the dark light of Luciferapage Satana, if he is to come out into the true light and comm and the right forces. The search for knowledge alone, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the path of pure scientific inquiry and inquisitiveness, in relation to the mystic world, is a dangerous thing. For such a spirit serves only to encourage and enhance man's arrogance and in the end not only limits but warps and falsifies the knowledge itself. A knowledge based on and secured exclusively through the reason and Mental light can go only so far as that faculty can be reasonably stretched and not infinitelyto stretch it to infinity means to snap it. This is the warning that Yajnavalkya gave to Gargi when the latter started renewing her question ad infinitum Yajnavalkya said, "If you do not stop, your head will fall off."
The mystic truth has to be approached through the heart. "In the heart is established the Truth," says the Upanishad: it is there that is seated eternally the soul, the real being, who appears no bigger than the thumb. Even if the mind is utilised as an instrument of knowledge, the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot uplike "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaksthrough the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly.
00.02 - Mystic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man being an embodied soul, his external consciousness (what the Upanishad calls jgrat) is the milieu in which his soul-experiences naturally manifest and find their play. It is the forms and movements of that consciousness which clo the and give a concrete habitation and name to perceptions on the subtler ranges of the inner existence. If the experiences on these planes are to be presented to the conscious memory and to the brain-mind and made communicable to others through speech, this is the inevitable and natural process. Symbols are a translation in Mental and sensual (and vocal) terms of experiences that are beyond the mind and the sense and the speech and yet throw a kind of echoing vibrations upon these lesser levels.
***
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, before any explanation is attempted it is important to bear in mind that the Upanishads speak of things experiencednot merely thought, reasoned or argued and that these experiences belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to Mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered a methodeven a very well-defined and strict methodin the madness of that domain. It is an ordered, organised, significant world; but its terminology has to be understood, its code deciphered. It is not a jargon, but a foreign language that must be learnt and mastered.
In the same way, the world of spiritual experiences is also something methodical, well-organized, significant. It may not be and is not the rational world of the mind and the sense; but it need not, for that reason, be devoid of meaning, mere fancifulness or a child's imagination running riot. Here also the right key has to be found, the grammar and vocabulary of that language mastered. And as the best way to have complete mastery of a language is to live among the people who speak it, so, in the matter of spiritual language, the best and the only way to learn it is to go and live in its native country.
--
The Sun is the first and the most immediate source of light that man has and needs. He is the presiding deity of our waking consciousness and has his seat in the eyecakusa ditya, ditya caku bhtvakii prviat. The eye is the representative of the senses; it is the sense par excellence. In truth, sense-perception is the initial light with which we have to guide us, it is the light with which we start on the way. A developed stage comes when the Sun sets for us, that is to say, when we retire from the senses and rise into the mind, whose divinity is the Moon. It is the Mental knowledge, the light of reason and intelligence, of reflection and imagination that govern our consciousness. We have to proceed farther and get beyond the mind, exceed the derivative light of the Moon. So when the Moon sets, the Fire is kindled. It is the light of the ardent and aspiring heart, the glow of an inner urge, the instincts and inspirations of our secret life-will. Here we come into touch with a source of knowledge and realization, a guidance more direct than the mind and much deeper than the sense-perception. Still this light partakes more of heat than of pure luminosity; it is, one may say, incandescent feeling, but not vision. We must probe deeper, mount higherreach heights and profundities that are serene and transparent. The Fire is to be quieted and silenced, says the Upanishad. Then we come nearer, to the immediate vicinity of the Truth: an inner hearing opens, the direct voice of Truth the Wordreaches us to lead and guide. Even so, however, we have not come to the end of our journey; the Word of revelation is not the ultimate Light. The Word too is clothing, though a luminous clothinghiramayam ptram When this last veil dissolves and disappears, when utter silence, absolute calm and quietude reign in the entire consciousness, when no other lights trouble or distract our attention, there appears the Atman in its own body; we stand face to face with the source of all lights, the self of the Light, the light of the Self. We are that Light and we become that Light.
II. The Four Oblations
--
One is an ideal in and of the world, the other is an ideal transcending the world. The Path of the Fathers (Pityna) enjoins the right accomplishing of the dharma of Lifeit is the path of works, of Karma; it is the line of progressive evolution that, man follows through the experience of life after life on earth. The Path of the Gods (Devayna) runs above life's evolutionary course; it lifts man out of the terrestrial cycle and places him in a superior consciousness it is the path of knowledge, of Vidya.4 The Path of the Fathers is the soul's southern or inferior orbit (dakiyana, aparrdha); the Path of the Gods is the northern or superior orbit (uttaryaa, parrdha)The former is also called the Lunar Path and the latter the Solar Path.5 For the moon represents the mind,6 and is therefore, an emblem that befits man so long as he is a Mental being and pursues a dharma that is limited by the mind; the sun, on the other hand, is the knowledge and consciousness that is beyond the mindit is the eye of the Gods.7
Man has two aspects or natures; he dwells in two worlds. The first is the manifest world the world of the body, the life and the mind. The body has flowered into the mind through the life. The body gives the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune realitySat, Chit and Ananda.
The one, however, is not completely divorced from the other. The apparent, the inferior nature is only a preparation for the real, the superior nature. The Path of the Fathers concerns itself with man as a Mental being and seeks so to ordain and accomplish its duties and ideals as to lead him on to the Path of the Gods; the mind, the life, and the body consciousness should be so disciplined, educated, purified, they should develop along such a line and gradually rise to such a stage as to make them fit to receive the light which belongs to the higher level, so allowing the human soul imbedded in them to extricate itself and pass on to the Immortal Life.
And they who are thus lifted up into the Higher Orbit are freed from the bondage to the cycle of rebirth. They enjoy the supreme Liberation that is of the Spirit; and even when they descend into the Inferior Path, it is to work out as free agents, as vehicles of the Divine, a special purpose, to bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher.
--
Agni in the physical consciousness is calledghapati, for the body is the house in which the soul is lodged and he is its keeper, guardian and lord. The fire in the Mental consciousness is called daki; for it is that which gives discernment, the power to discriminate between the truth and the falsehood, it is that which by the pressure of its heat and light cleaves the wrong away from the right. And the fire in the life-force is called havanya; for pra is not only the plane of hunger and desire, but also of power and dynamism, it is that which calls forth forces, brings them into' play and it is that which is to be invoked for the progression of the Sacrifice, for an onward march on the spiritual path.
Of the three fires one is the upholderhe who gives the firm foundation, the stable house where the Sacrifice is performed and Truth realised; the second is the Knower, often called in the Veda jtaved, who guides and directs; and the third the Doer, the effective Power, the driving Energyvaivnara.
--
Apart from the question whether the biological phenomenon described is really a symbol and a cloak for another order of reality, and even taking it at its face value, what is to be noted here is the idea of a cosmic cycle, and a cosmic cycle that proceeds through the principle of sacrifice. If it is asked what there is wonderful or particularly spiritual in this rather naf description of a very commonplace happening that gives it an honoured place in the Upanishads, the answer is that it is wonderful to see how the Upanishadic Rishi takes from an event its local, temporal and personal colour and incorporates it in a global movement, a cosmic cycle, as a limb of the Universal Brahman. The Upanishads contain passages which a puritanical Mentality may perhaps describe as 'pornographic'; these have in fact been put by some on the Index expurgatorius. But the ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through another consciousness.
We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which otherwise, if they are repressed, exert an unhealthy influence on the mind and nature. The Upanishadic view runs on the same lines, but, with the unveiling and the natural and not merely naturalisticdelineation of these under-worlds (concerning sex and food), it endows them with a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The sexual function, for example, is easily equated to the double movement of ascent and descent that is secreted in nature, or to the combined action of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic Play, or again to the hidden fount of Delight that holds and moves the universe. In this view there is nothing merely secular and profane, but all is woven into the cosmic spiritual whole; and man is taught to consider and to mould all his movementsof soul and mind and bodyin the light and rhythm of that integral Reality.11
--
The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the Mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortalfor, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world, the Heaven of the immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and experiences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Immanent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the human being as the immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the Mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jtaveds, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.
The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.
But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge the knowledge of the Transcendent Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (reya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the superficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the Mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and permanent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness in the heart of all that is unstable and fleetingone has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.
Man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Impermanence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmoshe goes abroad,sa paryagt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.
0.00a - Introduction, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The age-old advice, "Know thyself," is more imperative than ever. The tempo of science has accelerated to such a degree that today's discoveries frequently make yesterday's equations obsolescent almost before they can be chalked up on a blackboard. Small wonder, then that every other hospital bed is occupied by a Mental patient. Man was not constructed to spend his life at a crossroads, one of which leads he knows not where, and the other to threatened annihilation of his species.
In view of this situation it is doubly reassuring to know that, even in the midst of chaotic concepts and conditions there still remains a door through which man, individually, can enter into a vast store-house of knowledge, knowledge as dependable and immutable as the measured tread of Eternity.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The Christian missionaries gave the finishing touch to the process of transformation. They ridiculed as relics of a barbarous age the images and rituals of the Hindu religion. They tried to persuade India that the teachings of her saints and seers were the cause of her downfall, that her Vedas, Puranas, and other scriptures were filled with superstition. Christianity, they maintained, had given the white races position and power in this world and assurance of happiness in the next; therefore Christianity was the best of all religions. Many intelligent young Hindus became converted. The man in the street was confused. The majority of the educated grew materialistic in their Mental outlook. Everyone living near Calcutta or the other strong-holds of Western culture, even those who attempted to cling to the orthodox traditions of Hindu society, became infected by the new uncertainties and the new beliefs.
But the soul of India was to be resuscitated through a spiritual awakening. We hear the first call of this renascence in the spirited retort of the young Gadadhar: "Brother, what shall I do with a mere bread-winning education?"
--
Mathur and Rani Rasmani began to ascribe the Mental ailment of Sri Ramakrishna in part, at least, to his observance of rigid continence. Thinking that a natural life would relax the tension of his nerves, they engineered a plan with two women of ill fame. But as soon as the women entered his room, Sri Ramakrishna beheld in them the manifestation of the Divine Mother of the Universe and went into samadhi uttering Her name.
--- HALADHARI
--
In 1878 a schism divided Keshab's Samaj. Some of his influential followers accused him of infringing the Brahmo principles by marrying his daughter to a wealthy man before she had attained the marriageable age approved by the Samaj. This group seceded and established the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Keshab remaining the leader of the Navavidhan. Keshab now began to be drawn more and more toward the Christ ideal, though under the influence of Sri Ramakrishna his devotion to the Divine Mother also deepened. His Mental oscillation between Christ and the Divine Mother of Hinduism found no position of rest. In Bengal and some other parts of India the Brahmo movement took the form of unitarian Christianity, scoffed at Hindu rituals, and preached a crusade against image worship. Influenced by Western culture, it declared the supremacy of reason, advocated the ideals of the French Revolution, abolished the caste-system among its own members, stood for the emancipation of women, agitated for the abolition of early marriage, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, and encouraged various educational and social-reform movements. The immediate effect of the Brahmo movement in Bengal was the checking of the proselytizing activities of the Christian missionaries. It also raised Indian culture in the estimation of its English masters. But it was an intellectual and eclectic religious ferment born of the necessity of the time. Unlike Hinduism, it was not founded on the deep inner experiences of sages and prophets. Its influence was confined to a comparatively few educated men and women of the country, and the vast masses of the Hindus remained outside it. It sounded monotonously only one of the notes in the rich gamut of the Eternal Religion of the Hindus.
--- ARYA SAMAJ
--
For the householders Sri Ramakrishna did not prescribe the hard path of total renunciation. He wanted them to discharge their obligations to their families. Their renunciation was to be Mental. Spiritual life could not be acquired by flying away from responsibilities. A married couple should live like brother and sister after the birth of one or two children, devoting their time to spiritual talk and contemplation. He encouraged the householders, saying that their life was, in a way, easier than that of the monk, since it was more advantageous to fight the enemy from inside a fortress than in an open field. He insisted, however, on their repairing into solitude every now and then to strengthen their devotion and faith in God through prayer, japa, and meditation. He prescribed for them the companionship of sadhus. He asked them to perform their worldly duties with one hand, while holding to God with the other, and to pray to God to make their duties fewer and fewer so that in the end they might cling to Him with both hands. He would discourage in both the householders and the celibate youths any lukewarmness in their spiritual struggles. He would not ask them to follow indiscriminately the ideal of non-resistance, which ultimately makes a coward of the unwary.
--- FUTURE MONKS
--
The first two householder devotees to come to Dakshineswar were Ramchandra Dutta and Manomohan Mitra. A medical practitioner and chemist, Ram was sceptical about God and religion and never enjoyed peace of soul. He wanted tangible proof of God's existence. The Master said to him: "God really" exists. You don't see the stars in the day-time, but that doesn't mean that the stars do not exist. There is butter in milk. But can anybody see it by merely looking at the milk? To get butter you must churn milk in a quiet and cool place. You cannot realize God by a mere wish; you must go through some Mental disciplines." By degrees the Master awakened Ram's spirituality and the latter became one of his foremost lay disciples. It was Ram who introduced Narendranath to Sri Ramakrishna. Narendra was a relative of Ram.
Manomohan at first met with considerable opposition from his wife and other relatives, who resented his visits to Dakshineswar. But in the end the unselfish love of the Master triumphed over worldly affection. It was Manomohan who brought Rakhal to the Master.
--
Suresh Mitra, a beloved disciple whom the Master often addressed as Surendra, had received an English education and held an important post in an English firm. Like many other educated young men of the time, he prided himself on his atheism and led a Bohemian life. He was addicted to drinking. He cherished an exaggerated notion about man's free will. A victim of Mental depression, he was brought to Sri Ramakrishna by Ramchandra chandra Dutta. When he heard the Master asking a disciple to practise the virtue of self-surrender to God, he was impressed. But though he tried thenceforth to do so, he was unable to give up his old associates and his drinking. One day the Master said in his presence, "Well, when a man goes to an undesirable place, why doesn't he take the Divine Mother with him?" And to Surendra himself Sri Ramakrishna said: "Why should you drink wine as wine? Offer it to Kali, and then take it as Her prasad, as consecrated drink
. But see that you don't become intoxicated; you must not reel and your thoughts must not wander. At first you will feel ordinary excitement, but soon you will experience spiritual exaltation." Gradually Surendra's entire life was changed. The Master designated him as one of those commissioned by the Divine Mother to defray a great part of his expenses. Surendra's purse was always open for the Master's comfort.
--
In a state of Mental conflict and torture of soul, Narendra came to Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. He was then eighteen years of age and had been in college two years. He entered the Master's room accompanied by some light-hearted friends. At Sri Ramakrishna's request he sang a few songs, pouring his whole soul into them, and the Master went into samadhi. A few minutes later Sri Ramakrishna suddenly left his seat, took Narendra by the hand, and led him to the screened verandah north of his room. They were alone. Addressing Narendra most tenderly, as if he were a friend of long acquaintance, the Master said: "Ah! You have come very late. Why have you been so unkind as to make me wait all these days? My ears are tired of hearing the futile words of worldly men. Oh, how I have longed to pour my spirit into the heart of someone fitted to receive my message!" He talked thus, sobbing all the time. Then, standing before Narendra with folded hands, he addressed him as Narayana, born on earth to remove the misery of humanity. Grasping Narendra's hand, he asked him to come again, alone, and very soon. Narendra was startled. "What is this I have come to see?" he said to himself. "He must be stark mad. Why, I am the son of Viswanath Dutta. How dare he speak this way to me?"
When they returned to the room and Narendra heard the Master speaking to others, he was surprised to find in his words an inner logic, a striking sincerity, and a convincing proof of his spiritual nature. In answer to Narendra's question, "Sir, have you seen God?" the Master said: "Yes, I have seen God. I have seen Him more tangibly than I see you. I have talked to Him more intimately than I am talking to you." Continuing, the Master said: "But, my child, who wants to see God? People shed jugs of tears for money, wife, and children. But if they would weep for God for only one day they would surely see Him." Narendra was amazed. These words he could not doubt. This was the first time he had ever heard a man saying that he had seen God. But he could not reconcile these words of the Master with the scene that had taken place on the verandah only a few minutes before. He concluded that Sri Ramakrishna was a monomaniac, and returned home rather puzzled in mind.
--
It was noticed at this time that some of the devotees were making an unbridled display of their emotions. A number of them, particularly among the householders, began to cultivate, though at first unconsciously, the art of shedding tears, shaking the body, contorting the face, and going into trances, attempting thereby to imitate the Master. They began openly to declare Sri Ramakrishna a Divine Incarnation and to regard themselves as his chosen people, who could neglect religious disciplines with impunity. Narendra's penetrating eye soon sized up the situation. He found out that some of these external manifestations were being carefully practised at home, while some were the outcome of malnutrition, Mental weakness, or nervous debility. He mercilessly exposed the devotees who were pretending to have visions, and asked all to develop a healthy religious spirit. Narendra sang inspiring songs for the younger devotees, read with them the Imitation of Christ and the Gita, and held before them the positive ideals of spirituality.
--- LAST DAYS AT COSSIPORE
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The title refers to the Mental attitude of the Master;
the avalanche does not fall because it is tired of staying
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
From the Mental depression of the modem Vysa, the world has obtained the Kathmrita (Bengali Edition) the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in English.
Sri Ramakrishna was a teacher for both the Orders of mankind, Sannysins and householders. His own life offered an ideal example for both, and he left behind disciples who followed the highest traditions he had set in respect of both these ways of life. M., along with Nag Mahashay, exemplified how a householder can rise to the highest level of sagehood. M. was married to Nikunja Devi, a distant relative of Keshab Chander Sen, even when he was reading at College, and he had four children, two sons and two daughters. The responsibility of the family, no doubt, made him dependent on his professional income, but the great devotee that he was, he never compromised with ideals and principles for this reason. Once when he was working as the headmaster in a school managed by the great Vidysgar, the results of the school at the public examination happened to be rather poor, and Vidysgar attri buted it to M's preoccupation with the Master and his consequent failure to attend adequately to the school work. M. at once resigned his post without any thought of the morrow. Within a fortnight the family was in poverty, and M. was one day pacing up and down the verandah of his house, musing how he would feed his children the next day. Just then a man came with a letter addressed to 'Mahendra Babu', and on opening it, M. found that it was a letter from his friend Sri Surendra Nath Banerjee, asking whether he would like to take up a professorship in the Ripon College. In this way three or four times he gave up the job that gave him the wherewithal to support the family, either for upholding principles or for practising spiritual Sadhanas in holy places, without any consideration of the possible dire worldly consequences; but he was always able to get over these difficulties somehow, and the interests of his family never suffered. In spite of his disregard for worldly goods, he was, towards the latter part of his life, in a fairly flourishing condition as the proprietor of the Morton School which he developed into a noted educational institution in the city. The Lord has said in the Bhagavad Git that in the case of those who think of nothing except Him, He Himself would take up all their material and spiritual responsibilities. M. was an example of the truth of the Lord's promise.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The Evening Talks collected here may afford to the outside world a glimpse of his external personality and give the seeker some idea of its richness, its many-sidedness, its uniqueness. One can also form some notion of Sri Aurobindo's personality from the books in which the height, the universal sweep and clear vision of his integral ideal and thought can be seen. His writings are, in a sense, the best representative of his Mental personality. The versatile nature of his genius, the penetrating power of his intellect, his extraordinary power of expression, his intense sincerity, his utter singleness of purpose all these can be easily felt by any earnest student of his works. He may discover even in the realm of mind that Sri Aurobindo brings the unlimited into the limited. Another side of his dynamic personality is represented by the Ashram as an institution. But the outer, if one may use the phrase, the human side of his personality, is unknown to the outside world because from 1910 to 1950 a span of forty years he led a life of outer retirement. No doubt, many knew about his staying at Pondicherry and practising some kind of very special Yoga to the mystery of which they had no access. To some, perhaps, he was living a life of enviable solitude enjoying the luxury of a spiritual endeavour. Many regretted his retirement as a great loss to the world because they could not see any external activity on his part which could be regarded as 'public', 'altruistic' or 'beneficial'. Even some of his admirers thought that he was after some kind of personal salvation which would have very little significance for mankind in general. His outward non-participation in public life was construed by many as lack of love for humanity.
But those who knew him during the days of the national awakening from 1900 to 1910 could not have these doubts. And even these initial misunderstandings and false notions of others began to evaporate with the growth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1927 onwards. The large number of books published by the Ashram also tended to remove the idea of the other-worldliness of his Yoga and the absence of any good by it to mankind.
--
The Gita in its chapters on the Vibhuti and the Avatar takes in general the same position. It shows that the present formula of our nature, and therefore the Mental personality of man, is not final. A Vibhuti embodies in a human manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary human personality. The Vibhuti the embodiment of a divine quality or power, and the Avatar the divine incarnation, are not to be looked upon as supraphysical miracles thrown at humanity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of human possibility, a sign that points to the goal of evolution.
In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
whole being, Mental, psychic, vital and physical, enters into a
complete state of rest made of perfect peace, absolute silence
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
avoided. Your Mental formation may be strong, but the contrary
formation is at least as strong as yours - and we must never
--
Is it because there is no Mental control in the dream state
and hence the vital being is free to act as it likes?
--
The concentration can be kept constantly but not by Mental
decision.
--
It is a Mental formation prompted by a desire of the vital,
which protests and rebels because it cannot be fulfilled. These
--
method easier and more certain than the Mental process
of reasoning which is based on acquired experience?
0.02 - The Three Steps of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Life-Energy which is our means of existence in a material body and the basis there even of our Mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a certain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in. She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of Mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed
The Three Steps of Nature
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If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our Mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil into a reposeful and recuperating obscurity, is her constant pursuit wherever she can get free from the trammels of her first vital and physical realisations. For here in man we have a distinction which is of the utmost importance. He has in him not a single Mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason. Mind in man is first emmeshed in the life of the body, where in the plant it is entirely involved and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and serves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the Manu, the Mental being who leads the life and the body,3 not the animal who is led by them. The true human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual Mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept rightly and rightly to use the life of the body. For freedom and not a skilful subjection is the true means of mastery. A free, not a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high human ideal. But beyond this intellectual Mentality is the divine.
The Mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a
manomayah. pran.asarraneta. Mundaka Upanishad II. 2. 8.
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Certainly, the Mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind.
Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not normally possess it.
Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense Mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those more puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution.
She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual Mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level.
Nor are the disturbances created by her process as great as is often represented. Some of them are the crude beginnings of new manifestations; others are an easily corrected movement of disintegration, often fruitful of fresh activities and always a small price to pay for the far-reaching results that she has in view.
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to this conclusion that Mental life, far from being a recent appearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous achievement from which the Energy in the race had undergone one of her deplorable recoils. The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefa ther of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation. For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem to need, in favourable circumstances, only a few generations to cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a Mental being is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution or else he already represents and with helpful conditions and in the right stimulating atmosphere can always display a high level of material capacity for the activities of the intellectual life.
It is not Mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness.
Moreover the whole trend of modern thought and modern endeavour reveals itself to the observant eye as a large conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the Mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in man's physical being and vital energies and in his material environment for his full Mental possibilities. By the spread of education, by the advance of the backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement
The Three Steps of Nature
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And when the preliminary conditions are satisfied, when the great endeavour has found its base, what will be the nature of that farther possibility which the activities of the intellectual life must serve? If Mind is indeed Nature's highest term, then the entire development of the rational and imaginative intellect and the harmonious satisfaction of the emotions and sensibilities must be to themselves sufficient. But if, on the contrary, man is more than a reasoning and emotional animal, if beyond that which is being evolved, there is something that has to be evolved, then it may well be that the fullness of the Mental life, the suppleness, flexibility and wide capacity of the intellect, the ordered richness of emotion and sensibility may be only a passage towards the development of a higher life and of more powerful faculties which are yet to manifest and to take possession of the lower instrument, just as mind itself has so taken possession of the body that the physical being no longer lives only for its own satisfaction but provides the foundation and the materials for a superior activity.
The assertion of a higher than the Mental life is the whole foundation of Indian philosophy and its acquisition and organisation is the veritable object served by the methods of Yoga.
Mind is not the last term of evolution, not an ultimate aim, but, like body, an instrument. It is even so termed in the language of
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The only approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our Mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or Mental vehicle,5 a third, supreme and divine status of supra- Mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle6 which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this knowledge is not a systematised result of Mental questionings and reasonings, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also selfexistent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence.
antah.karan.a.
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For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karan.a), as opposed to the two others which are instruments (karan.a), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our Mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our vital forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and
Consciousness. The evolution which we observe and of which
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So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and so absorbing its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily justified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. Even, by an opposite exaggeration to that which sees all things in Mind and the Mental life as an exclusive ideal, Mind comes to be regarded as an unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine intention.
The ultimate knowledge is that which perceives and accepts God in the universe as well as beyond the universe; the integral Yoga is that which, having found the Transcendent, can return upon the universe and possess it, retaining the power freely to descend
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We perceive, then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life which is the basis of our existence here in the material world, a Mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of the aim of Yoga.
0.03 - III - The Evening Sittings, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
These sittings, in fact, furnished Sri Aurobindo with an occasion to admit and feel the outer atmosphere and that of the group living with him. It brought to him the much-needed direct contact of the Mental and vital make-up of the disciples, enabling him to act on the atmosphere in general and on the individual in particular. He could thus help to remould their Mental make-up by removing the limitations of their minds and opinions, and correct tempera Mental tendencies and formations. Thus, these sittings contributed at least partly to the creation of an atmosphere amenable to the working of the Higher Consciousness. Far more important than the actual talk and its content was the personal contact, the influence of the Master, and the divine atmosphere he emanated; for through his outer personality it was the Divine Consciousness that he allowed to act. All along behind the outer manifestation that appeared human, there was the influence and presence of the Divine.
What was talked in the small group informally was not intended by Sri Aurobindo to be the independent expression of his views on the subjects, events or the persons discussed. Very often what he said was in answer to the spiritual need of the individual or of the collective atmosphere. It was like a spiritual remedy meant to produce certain spiritual results, not a philosophical or metaphysical pronouncement on questions, events or movements. The net result of some talks very often was to point out to the disciple the inherent incapacity of the human intellect and its secondary place in the search for the ultimate Reality.
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
changes and progresses. But the state of Mental peace you have
known is nothing compared to the one - much deeper and
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
NATURE, then, is an evolution or progressive self-manifestation of an eternal and secret existence, with three successive forms as her three steps of ascent. And we have consequently as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the Mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the Mental, it is Nature's aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the Mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily existence, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities.
For man, the head of terrestrial Nature, the sole earthly frame in which her full evolution is possible, is a triple birth. He has been given a living frame in which the body is the vessel and life the dynamic means of a divine manifestation. His activity is centred in a progressive mind which aims at perfecting itself as well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now concealed splendours.
Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of Mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.
In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.
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The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change, and the more our Mentality acquires elevation and organisation, the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect of a continual enlargement, improvement and better arrangement of its gains and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and selfimprovement are its proper instincts. Mind too moves in cycles, but these are ever-enlarging spirals. Its faith is perfectibility, its watchword is progress.
The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.
In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and nation or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the supreme group of all, our collective humanity. Man also may seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe, harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual, so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is neither to pursue egoistically his own material or Mental progress or spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake of the community to suppress or maim his proper development, but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.
It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live.
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Its higher manifestations, even the most splendid and puissant, either merely increase the number of souls drawn out of social life and so impoverish it or disturb the society for a while by a momentary elevation. The truth is that neither the Mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature.
She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary concessions.
The Mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential Mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman,1 is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old, is the very soul of pure Mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
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But if it is often difficult for the Mental life to accommodate itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and illusion, not of Love and Beauty but of an encompassing discord and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond where there is no world and no life. It separates itself inwardly, if not also physically, from the world's impurities; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals, sordid cares and egoistic self-content.
But the work in the world of so supreme a power as spiritual force cannot be thus limited. The spiritual life also can return upon the material and use it as a means of its own greater fullness. Refusing to be blinded by the dualities, the appearances, it can seek in all appearances whatsoever the vision of the same Lord, the same eternal Truth, Beauty, Love, Delight. The
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But the spiritual life, like the Mental, may thus make use of this outward existence for the benefit of the individual with a perfect indifference to any collective uplifting of the merely symbolic world which it uses. Since the Eternal is for ever the same in all things and all things the same to the Eternal, since the exact mode of action and the result are of no importance compared with the working out in oneself of the one great realisation, this spiritual indifference accepts no matter what environment, no matter what action, dispassionately, prepared to retire as soon as its own supreme end is realised. It is so that many have understood the ideal of the Gita. Or else the inner love and bliss may pour itself out on the world in good deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battlefield of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy and suffering.
But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of worldexistence and a progressive manifestation of the Divine the true sense of Nature, this limitation also is invalid. It is possible for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration. Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a Mental and moral change in humanity, but it may extend itself also to the alteration of the forms of our life and its institutions so that they too may be a better mould for the inpourings of the Spirit. These attempts have been the supreme landmarks in the progressive development of human ideals and the divine preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.
In India, for the last thousand years and more, the spiritual life and the material have existed side by side to the exclusion of the progressive mind. Spirituality has made terms for itself with Matter by renouncing the attempt at general progress. It has obtained from society the right of free spiritual development for all who assume some distinctive symbol, such as the garb of the Sannyasin, the recognition of that life as man's goal and those who live it as worthy of an absolute reverence, and the casting of society itself into such a religious mould that its most customary acts should be accompanied by a formal reminder of the spiritual symbolism of life and its ultimate destination. On the other hand, there was conceded to society the right of inertia and immobile self-conservation. The concession destroyed much of the value of the terms. The religious mould being fixed, the formal reminder tended to become a routine and to lose its living sense. The constant attempts to change the mould by new sects and religions ended only in a new routine or a modification of the old; for the saving element of the free and active mind had been exiled. The material life, handed over to the Ignorance, the purposeless and endless duality, became a leaden and dolorous yoke from which flight was the only escape.
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But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the Mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the Mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the Mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression.
The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita3 Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yet it is always through something which she has formed in her evolution that Nature thus overpasses her evolution. It is the individual heart that by sublimating its highest and purest emotions attains to the transcendent Bliss or the ineffable Nirvana, the individual mind that by converting its ordinary functionings into a knowledge beyond Mentality knows its oneness with the
Ineffable and merges its separate existence in that transcendent unity. And always it is the individual, the Self conditioned in its experience by Nature and working through her formations, that attains to the Self unconditioned, free and transcendent.
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those functionings which determine the state and the experiences of our nervous being; through the Mentality, whether by means of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind, or more largely by a general conversion of the Mental consciousness in all its activities. It may equally be accomplished through a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and
Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according to the point of contact that we choose will be the type of the Yoga that we practise.
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Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the Mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and of Knowledge uses some part of the Mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth,
Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life.
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The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this stupendous labour. The object of physical Nature, the preservation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weakness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes make so great a demand on the time and energy and impose so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this loss we gain another life in another world within, the Mental, the dynamic, these results could have been acquired through other systems, through Rajayoga, through Tantra, by much less laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youth, health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum of the world's activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose.
Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the Mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta, that stuff of Mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome
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Purusha who is the true lord of the Mental kingdom, a pure, glad, clear state of mind and heart is established.
This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery.
But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pran.ayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, typified in Yogic terminology by the kun.d.alin, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of Mental force by the successive stages which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state of the consciousness which is called Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure Mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra- Mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on
The Systems of Yoga
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We perceive that as Hathayoga, dealing with the life and body, aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and its capacities and goes beyond it into the domain of the Mental life, so Rajayoga, operating with the mind, aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the Mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence.
But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on abnormal states of trance. This limitation leads first to a certain aloofness from the physical life which is our foundation and the sphere into which we have to bring our Mental and spiritual gains. Especially is the spiritual life, in this system, too much associated with the state of Samadhi. Our object is to make the spiritual life and its experiences fully active and fully utilisable in the waking state and even in the normal use of the functions.
But in Rajayoga it tends to withdraw into a subliminal plane at the back of our normal experiences instead of descending and possessing our whole existence.
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Rajayoga in that it does not occupy itself with the elaborate training of the whole Mental system as the condition of perfection, but seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal operations by turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccupations and activities and concentrating them on the Divine. It
The Conditions of the Synthesis
differs also in this, - and here from the point of view of an integral Yoga there seems to be a defect, - that it is indifferent to Mental and bodily perfection and aims only at purity as a condition of the divine realisation. A second defect is that as actually practised it chooses one of the three parallel paths exclusively and almost in antagonism to the others instead of effecting a synthetic harmony of the intellect, the heart and the will in an integral divine realisation.
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method of intellectual reflection, vicara, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
of it, you should repeat, as often as possible, Mentally turning
to me: "You have put Peace in my heart; make me aware of its
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becomes more and more Mental and you lose contact with the
Series Five - To a Child
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Perfection includes perfection of mind and body, so that the highest results of Rajayoga and Hathayoga should be contained in the widest formula of the synthesis finally to be effected by mankind. At any rate a full development of the general Mental and physical faculties and experiences attainable by humanity through Yoga must be included in the scope of the integral method. Nor would these have any raison d'etre unless employed for an integral Mental and physical life. Such a Mental and physical life would be in its nature a translation of the spiritual existence into its right Mental and physical values. Thus we would arrive at a synthesis of the three degrees of Nature and of the three modes of human existence which she has evolved or is evolving. We would include in the scope of our liberated being and perfected modes of activity the material life, our base, and the Mental life, our intermediate instrument.
Nor would the integrality to which we aspire be real or even possible, if it were confined to the individual. Since our divine perfection embraces the realisation of ourselves in being, in life and in love through others as well as through ourselves, the extension of our liberty and of its results in others would be the inevitable outcome as well as the broadest utility of our liberation and perfection. And the constant and inherent attempt of such an extension would be towards its increasing and ultimately complete generalisation in mankind.
The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of Mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect
The Yoga of Divine Works
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
a Mental decision.
Certainly the Divine Grace is always at work, it is the material
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or of Mental imagination, it is a fact, absolutely concrete and
as real and tangible to the consciousness as the most material
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higher part of the Mental being, aspires for the Divine and suffers
when far from Him.
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Intellectual culture is indispensable for preparing a good Mental
instrument, large, supple and rich, but its action stops there.
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the western sense), a war on all fronts, the Mental, the
vital and the physical. But I am deeply sensible of your
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The best way to get to it is to refuse all Mental agitation when
it comes, also all vital desires and turmoils, and to keep the mind
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
may classify them generally into vital energies, Mental energies, spiritual energies. Modern science tells us that Matter is
ultimately nothing but energy condensed.
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of the superficial form of the Mental envelope"?
It means that the ghost one sees and wrongly takes for the
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a photographic imprint) left in the subtle physical by the superficial Mental form, an image that can become visible under
certain conditions. These images can move about (like cinema
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carry in ourselves in all our states of being, Mentally, vitally and
physically, is that which constitutes our life objectified in what
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passive as possible. And if, in the Mental silence, a part of the
being can take the attitude of the witness who observes without
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vital, Mental, over Mental, demands assiduous effort and a great
Series Eight - To a Young Captain
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is a vital nature, a Mental nature, and so on. It is this that, for
the ordinary consciousness, is Supernature.
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be expressed by a quaternary: the physical, the vital, the Mental
and the psychic or soul.
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Mental activities, and no Mental activity is fit to manifest the
Divine.
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo means that one should not mistake a Mental
ambition or a vital caprice for the spiritual call - for that alone
01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the resit is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, - that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a Mental mistranslation of the Truth - these things cannot be the first true object of spiritual seeking. We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or a means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforeh and by our limited Mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure Gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a Mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a Mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a halfway formation the truth growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an ourflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not by the working out of a Mental principle.
The realisation of the Divine is the one thing needful and the rest is desirable only in so far as it helps or leads towards that or when it is realised, extends and manifests the realisation. Manifestation and organisation of the whole life for the divine work, - first, the sadhana personal and collective necessary for the realisation and a common life of God-realised men, secondly, for help to the world to move towards that, and to live in the Light - is the whole meaning and purpose of my Yoga. But the realisation is the first need and it is that round which all the rest moves, for apart from it all the rest would have no meaning.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The course of evolution has not come to a stop with man and the next stage, Sri Aurobindo says, which Nature envisages and is labouring to bring out and establish is the life now superconscious to us, embodied in a still higher type of created being, that of the superman or god-man. The principle of consciousness which will determine the nature and build of this new, being is a spiritual principle beyond the Mental principle which man now incarnates: it may be called the Supermind or Gnosis.
For, till now Mind has been the last term of the evolutionary consciousness Mind as developed in man is the highest instrument built up and organised by Nature through which the self-conscious being can express itself. That is why the Buddha said: Mind is the first of all principles, Mind is the highest of all principles: indeed Mind is the constituent of all principlesmana puvvangam dhamm1. The consciousness beyond mind has not yet been made a patent and dynamic element in the life upon earth; it has been glimpsed or entered into in varying degrees and modes by saints and seers; it has cast its derivative illuminations in the creative activities of poets and artists, in the finer and nobler urges of heroes and great men of action. But the utmost that has been achieved, the summit reached in that direction, as exampled in spiritual disciplines, involves a withdrawal from the evolutionary cycle, a merging and an absorption into the static status that is altogether beyond it, that lies, as it were, at the other extreme the Spirit in itself, Atman, Brahman, Sachchidananda, Nirvana, the One without a second, the Zero without a first.
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But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processes of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brahman, as though one has to leap from the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind, not synthetic-analytic2 in knowledge like Overmind and the highest Mental intelligence, but inescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness Sachchidanandais ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in funda Mental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the Many and the Many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One; it develops the spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.
SRI AUROBINDO
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In the Supermind things exist in their perfect spiritual reality; each is consciously the divine reality in its transcendent essence, its cosmic extension, its, spiritual individuality; the diversity of a manifested existence is there, but the mutually exclusive separativeness has not yet arisen. The ego, the knot of separativity, appears at a later and lower stage of involution; what is here is indivisible nexus of individualising centres of the one eternal truth of being. Where Supermind and Overmind meet, one can see the multiple godheads, each distinct in his own truth and beauty and power and yet all together forming the one supreme consciousness infinitely composite and inalienably integral. But stepping back into Supermind one sees something moreOneness gathering into itself all diversity, not destroying it, but annulling and forbidding the separative consciousness that is the beginning of Ignorance. The first shadow of the Illusory Consciousness, the initial possibility of the movement of Ignorance comes in when the supra Mental light enters the penumbra of the Mental sphere. The movement of Supermind is the movement of light without obscurity, straight, unwavering, unswerving, absolute. The Force here contains and holds in their oneness of Reality the manifold but not separated lines of essential and unalloyed truth: its march is the inevitable progression of each one assured truth entering into and upholding every other and therefore its creation, play or action admits of no trial or stumble or groping or deviation; for each truth rests on all others and on that which harmonises them all and does not act as a Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supra Mental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there is a conscious underlying Unity but yet each Power, Truth, Aspect of that Unity is encouraged to work out its possibilities as if it were sufficient to itself and the others are used by it for its own enhancement until in the denser and darker reaches below Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends' towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual disclosure and deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakeningsMatter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit.
The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescienceof Involutionhas been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret truth and reality in Time itself as well as behind it, might be established and that the Divine might be possessed, or rather, possess itself not in one unvarying mode of the static consciousness, as it does even now behind the cosmic play, but in the play itself and in the multiple mode of the terrestrial existence.
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulsesit is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of Mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the Mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his au thentic followers the movement came to the forefront of human consciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.
Poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly"introvert", a modern mind would term it that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own au thenticity and self-sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the Mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more generally, the Mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem9 magnificently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and incompatible.
Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application,even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clo the with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now the centre of this energy, the matrix of creativity is the soul itself, one's own soul. If you want to createlive, grow and be real-find yourself, be yourself. The simple old wisdom still remains the eternal wisdom. It is because we fall off from our soul that we wander into side-paths, paths that do not belong to our real nature and hence that lead to imitation and repetition, decay and death. This is what happens to what we call common souls. The force of circumstances, the pressure of environment or simply the momentum of custom or habit compel them to choose the easiest and the readiest way that may lie before them. They do not consult the demand of the inner being but the requirement of the moment. Our bodily needs, our vital hungers and our Mental prejudices obsess and obscure the impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We hasten to gratify the immediate and forget the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let go the substance. We are carried away in the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed and collective whirla Weltgeist that moves and governs us. We are helpless straws drifting in the current. But manhood demands that we stop and pause, pull ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.
Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within him for self is Godand in the strength of the soul-divinity create his universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he- creates, so long as he creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created by a Napoleon, nor should they be the same. It does not prove anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what I am. If you have not the genius of a Shankara it does not mean that you have no genius at all. Be and become yourselfma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad. The fountain-head of creative genius lies there, in the free choice and the particular delight the self-determination of the spirit within you and not in the desire for your neighbours riches. The world has become dull and uniform and mechanical, since everybody endeavours to become not himself, but always somebody else. Imitation is servitude and servitude brings in grief.
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You must go inside yourself and enter into a complete dedication to the spiritual life. All clinging to Mental preferences must fall away from you, all insistence on vital aims and interests and attachments must be put away, all egoistic clinging to family, friends, country must disappear if you want to succeed in Yoga. Whatever has to come as outgoing energy or action, must proceed from the Truth once discovered and not from the lower Mental or vital motives, from the Divine Will and not from personal choice or the preferences of the ego.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his Mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian,atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the supra-sensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reactionit is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since thennot merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goe the is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardyindeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.
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The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imaginationremember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisationsof whatever order or world they may beexpressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistencea definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern Mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the sub Mental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a Mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing Mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the Mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the Mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the Mental to over- Mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher Mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
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This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human Mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and Mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
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Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and puritykatharsisnot trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses., man is gradually growing into the Mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of Mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsisinstead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fact is that Reason is a lower manifestation of knowledge, it is an attempt to express on the Mental level a power that exceeds it. It is the section of a vast and unitarian Consciousness-Power; the section may be necessary under certain conditions and circumstances, but unless it is viewed in its relation to the ensemble, unless it gives up its exclusive absolutism, it will be perforce arbitrary and misleading. It would still remain helpful and useful, but its help and use would be always limited in scope and temporary in effectivity.
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01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Morality is a part of the ordinary life; it is an attempt to govern the outward conduct by certain Mental rules or to form the character by these rules in the image of a certain Mental ideal. The spiritual life goes beyond the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit.
The principle of life which I seek to establish is spiritual.
01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by Mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."
The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and
01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the Mental and moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-Shakti).
The Supreme Spirit, Purushottama, who holds in himself the dual reality of Brahman and the world, is the master of action who acts but in actionlessness, the Lord in whom and through whom the universes and their creatures live and move and have their being. Karmayoga is union in mind and soul and body with the Lord of action in the execution of his cosmic purpose. And this union is effected through a transformation of the human nature, through the revelation of the Divine Prakriti and its descent upon and possession of the inferior human vehicle.
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and Mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, the Mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were draison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.
Now, the question is, what is the insufficiency of Reason? How does it limit man? And what is the Superman into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow?
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Certainly this does not go far enough into the motive of the change. The cosmic order does not mean Mentalised vitalism which is also in its turn a section of the integral reality. It means the order of the spirit, it means the transfiguration of the physical, the vital and the intellectual into the supernal Substance, Power and Light of that Spirit. The real transcendence of humanity is not the transcendence of one or other of its levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different status and the transmutation of humanity in the mould of that statusnot a Nietzschean Titan nor a Bergsonian Dionysus but the tranquil vision and delight and dynamism of the Spirit the incarnation of a god-head.
***
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the Mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness. In the average or normal man the consciousness is linked to or identified with the brain function, the rational intelligence and so we conclude that without this wakeful brain activity there can be no consciousness. But the fact is otherwise. The experiences of the mystic prove the point. The mystic is conscious on a level which we describe as higher than the mind and reason, he has what may be called the overhead consciousness. (Apart from the normal consciousness, which is named jagrat, waking, the Upanishad speaks of three other increasingly subtler states of consciousness, swapna, sushupti and turiya.)And then one can be quite unconscious, as in samadhi that can be sushupti or turiyaorpartially consciousin swapna, for example, the external behaviour may be like that of a child or a lunatic or even a goblin. One can also remain normally conscious and still be in the superconscience. Not only so, the mystic the Yogican be conscious on infraconscious levels also; that is to say, he can enter into and identify with the consciousness involved in life and even in Matter; he can feel and realise his oneness with the animal world, the plant world and finally the world of dead earth, of "stocks and stones" too. For all these strands of existence have each its own type of consciousness and all different from the mode of mind which is normally known as consciousness. When St. Francis addresses himself to the brother Sun or the sister Moon, or when the Upanishad speaks of the tree silhouetted against the sky, as if stilled in trance, we feel there is something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence.
I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal Mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's Mentalityhis ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-upserves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle worldWords-worth's "recollected in tranquillity"and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The Mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instru Mental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording Mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.
Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrumentnothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plateis illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.
--
But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the ele Mental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instru Mental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the Mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.
The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower downwe arrive at a predominantly Mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.
But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneouslyabove, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as it werethere is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirerin other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poits).
--
The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting, changing the conditions of our reactions, Mental or senti Mental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a Mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical Mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarm and constitutes almost the whole of Valry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.
The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness in fact, of all artistic consciousness has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern Mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful,ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Natureagainst God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the triflingtins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sicklehe is still a prophet, a violent one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and funda Mental qualitiessuch as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.
Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place. The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A modern idealist of the type of a reformer would not be satisfied with that role. If he is merely a moralist reformer, he will revolt against the "witness business", calling it a laissez-faire Mentality of bygone days. A spiritual reformer would ask for morea dynamic union with the Divine Will and Consciousness, not merely a passive enjoyment in the Bliss, so that he may be a luminous power or agent for the expression of divine values in things mundane.
Not the acceptance of the world as it is, not even a joyous acceptance, viewing it as an inexplicable and mysterious and magic play of, God, but the asp ration and endeavour to change it, mould it in the pattern of its inner divine realities for there are such realities which seek expression and embodiment in earthly life that is the great mission and labour of humanity and that is all the meaning of man's existence here below. And Tagore is one of the great prophets and labourers who had the vision of the shape of things to come and worked for it. Only it must be noted, as I have already said, that unlike mere moral reformists or scientific planners, Tagore grounded himself upon the eternal ancient truths that "age cannot wither nor custom stale"the divine truths of the Spirit.
01.07 - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Pascal's place in the evolution of European culture and consciousness is of considerable significance and importance. He came at a critical time, on the mounting tide of rationalism and scepticism, in an age when the tone and temper of human Mentality were influenced and fashioned by Montaigne and Rochefoucauld, by Bacon and Hobbes. Pascal himself, born in such an atmosphere of doubt and disbelief and disillusionment, had sucked in a full dose of that poison; yet he survived and found the Rock of Ages, became the clarion of Faith against Denial. What a spectacle it was! This is what one wrote just a quarter of a century after the death of Pascal:
"They can no longer tell us that it is only small minds that have piety. They are shown how it has grown best in one of the the greatest geometricians, one of the subtlest metaphysicians, one of the most penetrating minds that ever existed on earth. The piety of such a philosopher should make the unbeliever and the libertine declare what a certain Diocles said one day on seeing Epicurus in a temple: 'What a feast, what a spectacle for me to see Epicurus in a temple! All my doubts vainsh, piety takes its place again. I never saw Jupiter's greatness so well as now when I behold Epicurus kneeling down!"1
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Our ideals have been Mental constructions, rather than spiritual realitiesrealities of the deepest and highest being. And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the Mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the human adhara, it is the vital which holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is often much too exaggerated, even so the power of the body, that of physical and external rules and regulations. The Mental or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent law of the vital. If the demands of the Mental and the physical are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash and catastrophe is bound to come in the end.
This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeemability in human nature. And it, is this fact which a too hasty optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life. He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which is the basis of even this lower poise of the Mental and vital and physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not the pattern of Mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern of a supreme spiritual realism.
What then is required is a complete spiritual regeneration in man, a new structure of his soul and substancenot merely the realisation of the highest and supreme Truth in Mental and emotional consciousness, but the translation and application of the law of that truth in the power of the vital. It is here that failed all the great spiritual or rather religious movements of the past. They were content with evoking the divine in the Mental being, but left the vital becoming to be governed by the habitual un-divine or at the most to be just illumined by a distant and faint glow which served, however, more to distort than express the Divine.
The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can comm and the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any hope for mankind. But improbable or probable, that is the only way which man has to try and test, and there is none other.
01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the real meaning and sense of the moral struggle in man, the continuous endeavour towards a transvaluation of the primary and aboriginal instincts and impulses. Looked at from one end, from below up the ascending line, man's ethical and spiritual ideals are a dissimulation and sublimation of the animal impulsions. But this is becauseas we see, if we look from the other end, from above down the descending lineman is not all instinct, he is not a mere blind instrument in the hands of Nature forces. He has in him another source, an opposite pole of being from which other impulsions flow and continually modify the structure of the lower levels. If the animal is the foundation of his nature, the divine is its summit. If the bodily demands form his manifest reality, the demands of the spirit enshrine his higher reality. And if as regards the former he is a slave, as regards the latter he is the Master. It is by the interaction of these double forces that his whole nature has been and is being fashioned. Man does not and cannot give carte blanche to his vital, inclinations, since there is a pressure upon them of higher forces coming down from his Mental and spiritual levels. It is these latter which have deviated him from the direct line of the pure animal life.
Thus then we may distinguish three types of control on three levels. First, the natural control, secondly the conscious, i.e. to say the Mental the ethical and religious control, and thirdly the spiritual or divine control. Now the spirit is the ultimate truth and reality, behind the forces that act in the mind and in the body, so that the natural control and the ethical control are mere attempts to establish and realise the spiritual control. The animal impulses feel the hidden stress of the divine urges that are their real essence and thus there rises first an unconscious conflict in the natural life and then a conscious conflict in the higher ethical life. But when both of these are transcended and the conflict is carried on to a still higher level, then do we find their real significance and arrive at the consummation to which they move. Yoga is the ultimate transvaluation of physical (and of moral) values, it is the trans-substantiation of life-power into its spiritual substance.
***
01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed it is a divine creature that should be envisaged on the next level of evolution. The Mental and the moral, the psychical and the physical transfigurations which must follow the change in the basic substratum do imply such a mutation, the birth of a new species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of the gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be but a prophecy of the future actuality.
This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially human being, she has brought out the funda Mental possibilities of humanity and perfected it, so far as perfection may be attained within the cadre by which she chose to limit herself; she is now looking forward to another kind of experiment the evolving of another life, another being out of her entrails, that will be greater than the humanity we know today, that will be superior even to the supreme that has yet been actualised.
01.09 - William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion of our Mental habits must seek to impose its law. Thus, for example, in the matter of redeeming the senses by the influx of the higher light, our author seems to consider that the senses will remain more or less as they are, only they will be controlled, guided, used by the higher light. And he seems to think that even the sex relation (even the institution of marriage) may continue to remain, but sublimated, submitted to the laws of the Higher Order. This, according to us, is a dangerous compromise and is simply the imposition of the lower law upon the higher. Our view of the total transformation and divinisation of the Lower is altogether different. The Highest must come down wholly and inhabit in the Lowest, the Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form too of the Highest.
Viewed in this light, Blake's memorable mantra attains a deeper and more momentous significance. For it is not merely Earth the senses and life and Matter that are to be uplifted and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness, the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or transmuted as demanded by the law of that Supreme Will. That is the Hell that has to be recognised, not rejected and thrown away, but taken up purified and transubstantiated into the body of Heaven itself. The hand of the Highest Heaven must extend and touch the Lowest of the lowest elements, transmute it and set it in its rightful place of honour. A mortal body reconstituted into an immemorial fossil, a lump of coal revivified into a flashing carat of diamond-that shows something of the process underlying the nuptials of which we are speaking.
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
tamas in your mind, and the Mental acrobatics of the author
shakes up this tamas a little and awakens the mind. But this
--
impels you and His will that supports you - not just a Mental
knowledge, but the sincerity of a state of consciousness and the
--
I call that Mental fermentation. As soon as your waking consciousness falls asleep or leaves your body, the brain-cells you
have not taken the trouble to quiet down begin to fidget restlessly
--
But if one rises above the individual Mentality and enters
into the consciousness of Unity, then one can understand.
--
purely Mental. But if one makes a sincere and repeated effort, one
day the experience comes and one feels that the offering made is
--
you exceed, little by little, your present Mental limits.
The Supreme Lord can give his Ananda to whomever He
--
I was not speaking of external things and Mental faculties! True
love is in the soul (all the rest is vital attraction or Mental and
physical attachment, nothing else) and the soul (the psychic being) knows instinctively what the other needs to receive and is
--
To obtain Mental silence, one must learn to relax, to let
oneself float on the waves of the universal force as a plank floats
--
to establish Mental and moral and social Truth and justice on
human and egoistic lines. I have never promised to do anything
--
The real landmarks on the way are the spontaneous experiences, not those that come from a Mental formation and are
always unreliable.
--
for Mental and physical education, isn't there a similar
method to progress towards Sri Aurobindo's yoga? It
--
for physical, Mental and vital development; but this mechanical
"Experience in thy soul the truth of the Scripture; afterwards, if thou wilt, reason
--
am pleased. But it is true that I find you Mentally a bit lazy and
indifferent to the opportunity I give you each week to ask me
--
Are Mental indifference and lack of curiosity a sort
of Mental inertia?
Usually they are due to Mental inertia, unless one has obtained
this calm and indifference through a very intense sadhana resulting in a perfect equality for which good and bad, pleasant
and unpleasant no longer exist. But in that case, Mental activity
is replaced by an intuitive activity of a much higher kind.
--
How can one get out of this Mental laziness and
inertia?
By wanting to do so, with persistence and obstinacy. By doing every day a Mental exercise of reading, organisation and
development.
--
of Mental silence in concentration.
1 June 1966
--
Everything Mental is necessarily an opinion and expresses
only an infinitesimal fraction of the Truth.
--
because it is a Mental function of a rather inferior order.
Moreover, there is a very simple way of knowing. One has
--
in establishing Mental silence. But how can one fix this as
a constant experience? Because the moment one throws
oneself into activity, the Mental disturbance begins again!
One can have a quiet mind without being in a complete state
--
The ideal is to be able to act without coming out of the Mental
quietude.
--
What is usually called "conscience" is a Mental formation based
on the idea of good and evil, a moral entity or rather an element of goodwill which tries to keep the individual on what is
--
But all this is a Mental approximation of the Truth. It is not
the Truth itself.
--
and Mental, the physical relation seems more real and tangible.
(2) For those who have seriously begun the yoga in the body,
--
of it) but also a Mental and vital relation, which makes the outer
relation less indispensable.
--
memory; it is rarely the events that Mentally are considered
as the most memorable or most important in a lifetime, but
01.10 - Principle and Personality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We are quite familiar with this cry so rampant in our democratic ageprinciples and no personalities! And although we admit the justice of it, yet we cannot ignore the trenchant one-sidedness which it involves. It is perhaps only a reaction, a swing to the opposite extreme of a Mentality given too much to personalities, as the case generally has been in the past. It may be necessary, as a corrective, but it belongs only to a temporary stage. Since, however, we are after a universal ideal, we must also have an integral method. We shall have to curb many of our susceptibilities, diminish many of our apprehensions and soberly strike a balance between opposite extremes.
We do not speak like politicians or banias; but the very truth of the matter demands such a policy or line of action. It is very well to talk of principles and principles alone, but what are principles unless they take life and form in a particular individual? They are airy nothings, notions in the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit subjects for discussion in the academy, but they are devoid of that vital urge which makes them creative agencies. We have long lines of philosophers, especially European, who most scrupulously avoided all touch of personalities, whose utmost care was to keep principles pure and unsullied; and the upshot was that those principles remained principles only, barren and infructuous, some thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase of BaudelaireLa froide majest de la femme strile. And on the contrary, we have had other peoples, much addicted to personalitiesespecially in Asiawho did not care so much for abstract principles as for concrete embodiments; and what has been the result here? None can say that they did not produce anything or produced only still-born things. They produced living creaturesephemeral, some might say, but creatures that lived and moved and had their days.
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We fear Mr. Huxley has completely missed the point of the cryptic sentence. He seems to take it as meaning that human kindness and morality are a means to the recovery of the Lost Way-although codes of ethics and deliberate choices are not sufficient in themselves, they are only a second best, yet they mark the rise of self-consciousness and have to be utilised to pass on into the unitive knowledge that is Tao. This explanation or amplification seems to us somewhat confused and irrelevant to the idea expressed in the apophthegm. What is stated here is much simpler and transparent. It is this that when the Divine is absent and the divine Knowledge, then comes in man with his human Mental knowledge: it is man's humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the human values, all the moralities, sarva dharmn, seek only the Divine. The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great Way is beyond them and cannot be limited or measured by the relative standards. Especially in the modern age we see the decline and almost the disappearance of the Greater Light and instead a thousand smaller lights are lighted which vainly strive to dispel the gathering darkness. These do not help, they are false lights and men are apt to cling to them, shutting their eyes to the true one which is not that that one worships here and now, nedam yadidam upsate.
There is a beautiful quotation from the Chinese sage, Wu Ch'ng-n, regarding the doubtful utility of written Scriptures:
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this Mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified utility.
A modern people is a composite entity, especially with regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in its grain that fineness of temperament which appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one particular form.
--
Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion and Mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unitysince, at bottom, it means identityit is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.
Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a Mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a temperament which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary, but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which seem insuperable.
If religious toleration were enough, if that made up man's highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, but an ardent spiritual soul is different.
01.12 - Three Degrees of Social Organisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberration, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of Mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (Rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.
Indian wisdom has found this other, a fairer terma tertium quid,the mystic factor, sought for by so many philosophers on so many counts. That is the very well- known, the very familiar termDharma. What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature.
--
Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of Mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie imbedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel oneself, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's dutythere is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by Sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic, the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).
The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely and integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outerspontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or haltna me thate na tas thatuh but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the Mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but in a different way. Well, I he did not march into the day, it was the Day that marched I into him! Yes, the Divine Grace came and seized him from behind with violence. A modern, a modernist consciousness cannot expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many demands and conditions: the knots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.
The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it cannot assert and reject unilaterally and categorically, it wishes to go round an object and view all its sides; it asks for a synthesis and reconciliation of differences and contraries. Two major chords of life-experience that demand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the human consciousness. It has touched to the quick philosophers and sages in all ages and climes; it is the great question that confronts the spiritual seeker, the riddle that the Sphinx of life puts to the journeying soul for solution.
01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitivealmost aboriginalelement in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful the classic grace and aristocracyform one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a Mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.
All ele Mental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on earth are ele Mental and funda Mental, although apparently simple and commonplace.
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The radical method is to cut off all Mental and vital connection
with these people; but until you know how to do this, you
--
physical Purusha, the vital Purusha, the Mental Purusha
and the secret Purusha in the heart are projections of it.
--
This is one way of putting it. Mental definitions are never more
than approximations, ways of speaking.
--
vital and Mental).
4 December 1967
--
a Mental mind.
9 November 1968
--
Memory is a Mental faculty and helps the Mental consciousness.
But feeling and sensation must also participate.
0.12 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
is much slower than the vital desire for progress and the Mental
will for progress. And if the vital and the mind are left in charge
--
gives an exceptional control over all activities, Mental, vital and
physical.
--
Knowledge and intelligence are precisely the higher Mental qualities in man, those that differentiate him from the animal.
Series Twelve - To a Student
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
in the subtle physical or the Mental. There are any number of
different possibilities in dreams.
--
These are all Mental and vital, senti Mental or sexual activities, and nothing more.
Blessings.
--
If you watch Mentally, the interest is no longer the same;
instead of being moved or troubled, you can calmly judge the
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Communications from the psychic do not come in a Mental
form. They are not ideas or reasonings. They have their own
--
depths of your consciousness, beyond all Mental activity.
16 December 1971
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Yes, certainly had there been any receptivity when She came down and had She been able to manifest with the power with which She came But I can tell you one thing: even before Her coming, when, with Sri Aurobindo, I had begun going down (for the Yoga) from the Mental plane to the vital plane, when we brought our yoga down from the Mental plane into the vital plane, in less than a month (I was forty years old at the time I didnt seem very old, I looked less than forty, but I was forty anyway), after no more than a month of this yoga, I looked exactly like an 18 year old! And someone who knew me and had stayed with me in Japan5 came here, and when he saw me, he could scarcely believe his eyes! He said, But my god, is it you? I said, Of course!
Only when we went down from the vital plane into the physical plane, all this went awaybecause on the physical plane, the work is much harder and we had so much to do, so many things to change.
0 1956-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, two months ago I had a clear Mental perception of what was asked of me: to spend the rest of my life here. This is the source of my difficulties and of the inner hell I have been living through ever since. Each time I try to emerge, there is this image that rises up in me: your-whole-life and this casts me into a violent conflict. When I came here, I thought of staying for two or three years; for me the Ashram was a means of realization, not an end.
I understand now that as long as my whole being has not ACCEPTED that it must finish its life here, there is no way out nor any recovery possible. Through my Mental force alone, this acceptance is impossible; I have been turning infernally in circles these past two months, and the mind is in league with the vital. Therefore, a force greater than mine must help me accept that my way is here. I need you, Mother, for without you I am lost. I need you to tell me that the Truth of my being is indeed here and that I am truly ready to follow this path. Mother, I beseech you, help me to see the truth of my being, give me some sign that my way is here and not elsewhere. I beg of you, Mother, help me to know.
I also had a very clear sensation that you were abandoning me, that you had no further interest in me and I could just as well do as I pleased. Perhaps you cannot forgive some of my inner rebellions which have been so very violent? Am I totally guilty? Is it true that you are abandoning me?
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So to help you understand this enigma, let me tell you that the mother is physical Nature as she is, and the daughter is the new creation. The manageress is the worlds organizing Mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision.
Naturally, when I awoke, I immediately knew what could resolve this problem which appeared so absolutely insoluble. The vanishing of the manageress and her key was an obvious sign that she was altogether incapable of leading what could be called the creative consciousness of the new world to its true place.
--
Yet it is one of the most common types of human collectivityto group together, band together, unite around a common ideal, a common action, a common realization but in an absolutely artificial way. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true communitywhat he terms a gnostic or supra Mental communitycan be based only upon the INNER REALIZATION of each one of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and identity with all the other members of the community; that is, each one should not feel himself a member connected to all the others in an arbitrary way, but that all are one within himself. For each one, the others should be as much himself as his own bodynot in a Mental and artificial way, but through a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.
(silence)
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I found myself upon an immense ship, which is the symbolic representation of the place where this work is being carried out. This ship, as big as a city, is thoroughly organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for quite some time, for its organization was fully developed. It is the place where people destined for the supra Mental life are being trained. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supra Mental transformation because the ship itself and all that was aboard was neither material nor subtle-physical, neither vital nor Mental: it was a supra Mental substance. This substance itself was of the most material supra Mental, the supra Mental substance nearest the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a blend of red and gold, forming a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had this color, in varying shades, however, which enabled things to be distinguished from one another. The overall impression was of a shadowless world: there were shades, but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything worked smoothly and silently. At the same time, I could see all the details of the education, the training in all domains by which the people on board were being prepared.
This immense ship had just arrived at the shore of the supra Mental world, and a first batch of people destined to become the future inhabitants of the supra Mental world were about to disembark. Everything was arranged for this first landing. A certain number of very tall beings were posted on the wharf. They were not human beings and never before had they been men. Nor were they permanent inhabitants of the supra Mental world. They had been delegated from above and posted there to control and supervise the landing. I was in charge of all this since the beginning and throughout. I myself had prepared all the groups. I was standing on the bridge of the ship, calling the groups forward one by one and having them disembark on the shore. The tall beings posted there seemed to be reviewing those who were disembarking, allowing those who were ready to go ashore and sending back those who were not and who had to continue their training aboard the ship. While standing there watching everyone, that part of my consciousness coming from here became extremely interested: it wanted to see, to identify all the people, to see how they had changed and to find out who had been taken immediately as well as those who had to remain and continue their training. After awhile, as I was observing, I began to feel pulled backwards and that my body was being awakened by a consciousness or a person from here1and in my consciousness, I protested: No, no, not yet! Not yet! I want to see whos there! I was watching all this and noting it with intense interest It went on like that until, suddenly, the clock here began striking three, which violently jerked me back. There was the sensation of a sudden fall into my body. I came back with a shock, but since I had been called back very suddenly, all my memory was still intact. I remained quiet and still until I could bring back the whole experience and preserve it.
--
When I came back, along with the memory of the experience, I knew that the supra Mental world was permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link is needed to allow the consciousness and the substance to connectand it is this link that is being built. At that time, my impression (an impression which remained rather long, almost the whole day) was of an extreme relativityno, not exactly that, but an impression that the relationship between this world and the other completely changes the criterion by which things are to be evaluated or judged. This criterion had nothing Mental about it, and it gave the strange inner feeling that so many things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended upon the capacity of things and upon their ability to express the supra Mental world or be in relationship with it. It was so completely different, at times even so opposite to our ordinary way of looking at things! I recall one little thing that we usually consider bad actually how funny it was to see that it is something excellent! And other things that we consider important were really quite unimportant there! Whether it was like this or like that made no difference. What is very obvious is that our appreciation of what is divine or not divine is incorrect. I even laughed at certain things Our usual feeling about what is anti-divine seems artificial, based upon something untrue, unliving (besides, what we call life here appeared lifeless in comparison with that world); in any event, this feeling should be based upon our relationship between the two worlds and according to whether things make this relationship easier or more difficult. This would thus completely change our evaluation of what brings us nearer to the Divine or what takes us away from Him. With people, too, I saw that what helps them or prevents them from becoming supra Mental is very different from what our ordinary moral notions imagine. I felt just how ridiculous we are.
(Then Mother speaks to the children)
0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
To be able to see the problem as it is, it is absolutely indispensable, as a first step, to get out of the Mental consciousness, even out of a Mental transcription (in the highest mind) of the supra Mental vision and truth. A thing cannot be seen as it is, in its truth, except in the supra Mental consciousness, and if you try to explain, it immediately begins to escape you because you are obliged to give it a Mental formulation.
As for me, I saw the thing only at the time of this experience,4 and as a result of this experience. But it is impossible to formulate even the experience itself, and as soon as I endeavored to formulate it and the more I was able to formulate it, the more the thing faded, escaped.
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
In the first experience [of 1910], the consciousness was established in the psychic depths of the being, and from that poise issued the feeling of no longer doing anything but what the Divine wantedit was the consciousness that the divine Will was all-powerful and that there was no longer any personal will, although there was still some Mental activity and everything had to be made silent. In 1914, it was silenced, and the consciousness was established above the head. Here (the heart) and here (above the head), the connection is constant.
Does one exclude the other?
--
It is likely that the greatest resistance will be in the most conscious beings due to a lack of Mental receptivity, due to the mind itself which wants things to continue (as Sri Aurobindo has written) according to its own mode of ignorance. So-called inert matter is much more easily responsive, much moreit does not resist. And I am convinced that among plants, for example, or among animals, the response will be much quicker than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a very organized mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized Mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is unconscious will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle, the glass, the spongeit all had such an air of joy and consent! There is much less ego, you see, it is not a conscious ego.
The ego becomes more and more conscious and resistant as the being develops. Very primitive, very simple beings, little children will respond first, because they dont have an organized ego. But these big people! People who have worked on themselves, who have mastered themselves, who are organized, who have an ego made of steel, it will be difficult for them.
0 1958-07-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I am speaking of terrestrial Nature. Through their Mental power, men had the choice and the freedom to make pacts with these extraterrestrial vital forces. There is a whole vital world that has nothing to do with the earth, it is entirely independent or prior to earths existence, it is self-existentwell, they have brought that down here! They have made what we see! And such being the case This is what terrestrial Nature told me: It is beyond my control.
So considering all that, Sri Aurobindo came to the conclusion that only the supra Mental power (Mother brings down her hands) as he said, will be able to rule over everything. And when that happens, it will be all overincluding Nature. For a long time, Nature rebelled (I have written about it often). She used to say, Why are you in such a hurry? It will be done one day. But then last year, there was that extraordinary experience.5 And it was because of that experience that I told her, Well, now that we agree, give me some proof; I am asking you for some proofdo it for me. She didnt budge, absolutely nothing.
--
Perhaps it would not be necessary to have this power over all men, but in any event, it should be great enough to act upon the mass. It is likely that once a certain movement has been mastered to some degree, what the mass does or doesnt do (this whole human mass that has barely, barely emerged into even the Mental consciousness) will become quite irrelevant. You see, the mass is still under the great rule of Nature. I am referring to Mental humanity, predominantly Mental, which developed the mind but misused it and immediately set out on the wrong pathfirst thing.
There is nothing to say since the first thing done by the divine forces which emanated for the Creation was to take the wrong path!6 That is the origin, the seed of this marvelous spirit of independence the negation of surrender, in other words. Man said, I have the power to think; I will do with it what I want, and no one has the right to intervene. I am free, I am an independent being, IN-DE-PEN-DENT! So thats how things stand: we are all independent beings!
--
Asuras: the demons or dark forces of the Mental plane.
The experience of Nature's collaboration (November 8, 1957).
0 1958-07-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It is mans Mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery it brings. Animals are not at all unhappy in the way we are. Not at all, not at all, exceptas Sri Aurobindo saysthose that are corrupted. Those that are corrupted are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt, for their whole aspiration is to resemble man. Man is the god. Hence there is dissimulation, hypocrisy: dogs lie. But men admire that. They say, Oh! How intelligent they are!
They have lost their divinity.
--
The Divine is everywhere, in everything. We should never forget itnot for a second should we forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and in an unconscious but spontaneous, therefore sincere, way, all that exists below the Mental manifestation is divine, without mixture; in other words, it exists spontaneously and in harmony with its nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally, he is much more conscious! Theres no question about it, its a fact, although what we call consciousness (what we call it, that is, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and Mentalize things. It is not the true consciousness, but its what men call consciousness. So according to the human mode, it is obvious that man is much more conscious than the animal, but the human brings in sin and perversion which do not exist outside of this state we call consciouswhich in fact is not conscious but merely consists in Mentalizing things and in having the ability to objectify them.
It is an ascending curve, but a curve that swerves away from the Divine. So naturally, one has to climb much higher to find a higher Divine, since it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are divine spontaneously and instinctively, without being conscious of it. All our moral notions of good and evil, all of that, are what we have thrown over the creation with our distorted and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.
0 1958-09-16 - OM NAMO BHAGAVATEH, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So each one must find something that acts on himself, individually. I am only speaking of the action on the physical plane, because Mentally, vitally, in all the inner parts of the being, the aspiration is always, always spontaneous. I am referring only to the physical plane.
The physical seems to be more open to something that is repetitious for example, the music we play on Sundays, which has three series of combined mantras. The first is that of Chandi, addressed to the universal Mother:
--
Yes, they are long. And he2 has not given me any mantra of the Mother, so They exist, but he has not given me any I dont know, they dont have much effect on me. It is something very Mental.
Thats why it should spring forth from you.
0 1958-10-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As soon as I am alone, I enter into a very deep concentration,a state of consciousness, a kind of universal activity. Is it deep? What is it? It is far beyond all the Mental regions, far, far beyond, and it is constant. As soon as I am alone or resting somewhere, thats how it is.
The other day when I was in this state of concentration, I had the vision that I mentioned to you. I felt I was being pulled, that something was pulling me and trying to draw my attention. I felt it very strongly. So I opened my eyes, my Mental eyes (the physical eyes may remain opened or closed, it makes no difference either way; when I am concentrated, things on the physical plane no longer exist), I deliberately opened the minds eyes, for that is where I felt myself being pulled, and then I had this vision I told you of. Someone was trying to draw my attention, to tell me something. It takes someone really quite powerful, with a very great power of concentration, to do thatthere are certainly a great many people here and elsewhere who try to do this, yet I dont feel a thing.3
In the outer, practical domain, I might suddenly think of someone, so I know that this person is calling or thinking of me. When you left on your trip, I created a special link-up so that if ever, at any moment, you called me for anything, I would know it instantly, and I remained attentive and alert. But I do that only in exceptional cases. Generally speaking, when I havent made this special link-up, things keep coming in and coming in and coming in and coming in, and the answer goes out automatically, here or there or there or therehundreds and hundreds of things that I dont keep in my memory because then it would really be frightful. I dont keep these things in my consciousness; it is rather a work that is done automatically.
--
Before, I always had the negative experience of the disappearance of the ego, of the oneness of Creation, where everything implying separation disappearedan experience that, personally, I would call negative. Last Wednesday, while I was speaking (and thats why at the end I could no longer find my words), I seemed suddenly to have left this negative phenomenon and entered into the positive experience: the experience of BEING the Supreme Lord, the experience that nothing exists but the Supreme Lordall is the Supreme Lord, there is nothing else. And at that moment, the feeling of this infinite power that has no limit, that nothing can limit, was so overwhelming that all the functions of the body, of this Mental machine that summons up words, all this was I could no longer speak French. Perhaps the words could have come to me in Englishprobably, because it was easier for Sri Aurobindo to express himself in English, and thats how it must have happened: it was the part embodied in Sri Aurobindo (the part of the Supreme that was embodied in Sri Aurobindo for its manifestation) that had the experience. This is what joined back with the Origin and caused the experience I was well aware of it. And that is probably why its transcription through English words would have been easier than through French words (for at these moments, such activities are purely mechanical, rather like automatic machines). And naturally the experience left something behind. It left the sense of a power that can no longer be qualified,5 really. And it was there yesterday evening.
The difficultyits not even a difficulty, its just a kind of precaution that is taken (automatically, in fact) in order to For example, the volume of Force that was to be expressed in the voice was too great for the speech organ. So I had to be a little attentive that is, there had to be a kind of filtering in the outermost expression, otherwise the voice would have cracked. But this isnt done through the will and reason, its automatic. Yet I feel that the capacity of Matter to contain and express is increasing with phenomenal speed. But its progressive, it cant be done instantly. There have often been people whose outer form broke because the Force was too strong; well, I clearly see that it is being dosed out. After all, this is exclusively the concern of the Supreme Lord, I dont bother about itits not my concern and I dont bother about itHe makes the necessary adjustments. Thus it comes progressively, little by little, so that no funda Mental disequilibrium occurs. It gives the impression that ones head is swelling so tremendously it will burst! But then if there is a moment of stillness, it adapts; gradually, it adapts.
0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
object:0_1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - Mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams
author class:The Mother
--
However, you must have at least a little experience of these things to understand them. Otherwise, if you are convinced that all this is just human fancy or Mental formations, if you believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have imagined them to be like that, or that they have such and such defects or qualities because men have envisioned it that wayas with all those who say God is created in the image of man and exists only in human thoughtall such people wont understand, it will seem absolutely ridiculous to them, a kind of madness. You must live a little, touch the subject a little to know how concrete it is.
Naturally, children know a great dealif they have not been spoiled. There are many children who return to the same place night after night and continue living a life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoiled with age, they can be preserved within one. There was a time when I was especially interested in dreams, and I could return exactly to the same place and continue some work I had begun there, visit something, for example, or see to something, some work of organization or some discovery or exploration; you go to a certain place, just as you go somewhere in life, then you rest a while, then you go back and begin againyou take up your work just where you left it, and you continue. You also notice that there are things entirely independent of you, certain variations which were not at all created by you and which occurred automatically during your absence.
But then, you must LIVE these experiences yourself; you yourself must see, you must live them with enough sincerity to see (by being sincere and spontaneous) that they are independent of any Mental formations. Because one can take the opposite line and make an intensive study of the way Mental formations act upon eventswhich is very interesting. But thats another field. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you start noticing to what extent you can delude yourself. Therefore, both one and the other, the Mental formation and the occult reality, must be studied to see what the ESSENTIAL difference is between them. The one exists in itself, entirely independent of what we think about it, and the other
That was a grace. I was given every experience without knowing ANYTHING of what it was all aboutmy mind was absolutely blank. There was no active correspondence in the formative mind. I only knew about what had happened or the laws governing these happenings AFTERWARDS, when I was curious and inquired to find out what it related to. Then I found out. But otherwise, I didnt know. So that was the clear proof that these things existed entirely outside of my imagination or thought.
--
(Later, the disciple asks Mother for some clarification on the essential difference between the occult reality and Mental formations)
Once you have worked in this field, you realize that when you have studied a subject, when you have Mentally understood something, it gives a special tonality to the experience. The experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact of having known this subject and of having studied it gives a particular tonality; on the other hand, if you have learned nothing of the subject, if you know nothing at all, well, when the experience comes, the notation of it is entirely spontaneous and sincere. It can be more or less adequate, but it is not the result of a former Mental formation.
What happened in my life is that I never studied or knew things until AFTER having the experienceonly BECAUSE OF the experience and because I wanted to understand it would I study things related to it.
0 1958-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I found my message for the 1st of January It was quite unforeseen. Yesterday morning, I thought, All the same, I have to find my message, but what? I was absolutely like that, neutral, nothing. Then yesterday evening at the class (of Friday, November 7) I noticed that these children who had had a whole week to prepare their questions on the text had not found a single one! A terrible lethargy! A total lack of interest. And when I had finished speaking, I thought to myself, But what IS there in these people who are interested in nothing but their personal little affairs? So I began descending into their Mental atmosphere, in search of the little light, of that which responds And it literally pulled me downwards as into a hole, but in such a material way; my hand, which was on the arm of the chair, began slipping down, my other hand went like this (to the ground), my head, too! I thought it was going to touch my knees!
And I had the impression It was not an impression I saw it. I was descending into a crevasse between two steep rocks, rocks that appeared to be made of something harder than basalt, BLACK, but metallic at the same time, with such sharp edgesit seemed that a mere touch would lacerate you. It appeared endless and bottomless, and it kept getting narrower, narrower and narrower, narrower and narrower, like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no more roomnot even for the consciousness to pass through. And the bottom was invisible, a black hole. And it went down, down, down, like that, without air, without light, except for a sort of glimmer that enabled me to make out the rock edges. They seemed to be cut so steeply, so sharply Finally, when my head began touching my knees, I asked myself, But what is there at the bottom of this this hole?
--
At the time, I wondered what it meant. Later, of course, I found out, and finally this morning, I said to myself, Ah, so thats it! It came to give me my message for the new year! Then I transcribed the experienceit cant be described, of course, for it was indescribable; it was a psychological phenomenon and the form it took was only a way of describing the psychological state to oneself. Here is what I wrote down, obviously in a Mental way, and I am thinking of using it as my message.
There was a hesitation in the expression, so I brought the paper and I want us to decide upon the final text together.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There is no preliminary thought, preliminary knowledge, preliminary will: all those things do not exist. I am only like a mirror receiving the experience, the simplicity of a little child learning life. It is like that. And it is the gift of the Grace, truly the Grace: in the face of the experience, the simplicity of a little child just born. And it is spontaneously so, but deliberately too; in other words, during the experience I am very careful not to watch myself having the experience so that no previous knowledge intervenes. Only afterwards do I see. It is not a Mental construction, nor does it come from something higher than the mind (it is not even a knowledge by identity that makes me see things); no, the body (when the experience is in the body) is like that, what in English is called blank. As if it had just been born, as if just then it were being born with the experience.
And only little by little, little by little, is this experience put in the presence of any previous knowledge. Thus, its explanation and its evaluation come about progressively.
--
But as soon as you want to express it, it escapes like water running through your fingers; all the fluidity is lost, it evaporates. A rather vague, poetic or artistic expression is much truer, much nearer to the truth something hazy, nebulous, undefined. Something not concretized like a rigid Mental expressionthis rigidity that the mind has introduced right down into the Inconscient.
This vision of the Inconscient (Mother remains gazing for a moment) it was the Mental Inconscient. Because the starting point was Mental. A special Inconscientrigid, hard, resistantwith all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A Mentalized Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixitya FIXITYcomes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless the plasticity has gone.
It is a terrible image of the Minds action in the Inconscient.
--
Yes, thats it. It was not an original Inconscient. It was a Mentalized Inconscient. With all that the mind has brought in in the way of OPPOSITIONof resistance, hardness, rigidity.
It would be interesting to mention this.
Because the starting point, precisely, was to look into the Mental unconsciousness of these people. It was the Mental Inconscient. Well, the Mental Inconscient REFUSES to changewhich is not true of the other one; the other is nothing, it doesnt exist, it is not organized in any way, it has no way of being, whereas this one is an ORGANIZED Inconscientorganized by a beginning Mental influence. A hundred times worse!
This is a very interesting point to note.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But I always had a presentiment of the true thing: that only a VERY COURAGEOUS act of self-giving could efface the thingnot courageous or difficult from the material point of view, not that There is a certain zone of the vital in you, a Mentalized vital but still very material, which is very much under the influence of circumstances and which very much believes in the effectiveness of outer measuresthis is what is resisting.
That is all I know.
0 1958-12-15 - tantric mantra - 125,000, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, things are far from being what they were the first time in Rameswaram, and I am living through certain moments that are hell the enemy seems to have been unleashed with an extraordinary violence. It comes in waves, and after it recedes, I am literally SHATTEREDphysically, Mentally and vitally drained. This morning, while going to the temple, I lived through one of these moments. All this suffering that suddenly sweeps down upon me is horrible. Yes, I had the feeling of being BACKED UP AGAINST A WALL, exactly as in your vision I was up against a wall. I was walking among these immense arcades of sculptured granite and I could see myself walking, very small, all alone, alone, ravaged with pain, filled with a nameless despair, for nowhere was there a way out. The sea was nearby and I could have thrown myself into it; otherwise, there was only the sanctuary of Parvati but there was no more Africa to flee to, everything closed in all around me, and I kept repeating, Why? Why? This much suffering was truly inhuman, as if my last twenty years of nightmare were crashing down upon me. I gritted my teeth and went to the sanctuary to say my mantra. The pain in me was so strong that I broke into a cold sweat and almost fainted. Then it subsided. Yet even now I feel completely battered.
I clearly see that the hour has come: either I will perish right here, or else I will emerge from this COMPLETELY changed. But something has to change. Mother, you are with me, I know, and you are protecting me, you love me I have only you, only you, you are my Mother. If these moments of utter darkness return and they are bound to return for everything to be exorcised and conqueredprotect me in spite of myself. Mother, may your Grace not abandon me. I want to be done with all these old phantoms, I want to be born anew in your Light; it has to beotherwise I can no longer go on.
0 1959-01-27, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
By a special grace, X gave me both stages of the tantric initiation at the same time, although they are normally separated by several years; then if all goes well, he will give me the full initiation in 6 months. I have thus received a mantra, along with the power of realizing it. X told me that a realization should come at the beginning of the fifth month if I repeat the mantra strictly according to his instructions, but he again told me that the hostile forces would do all they could to prevent me from saying my mantra: Mental suggestions and even illness. X has understood that I have work at the Ashram, and he has exempted me from the outer forms (pujas and other rituals), but nevertheless I must repeat my mantra very accurately every day (3,333 times, that is, a little more than 3 hours uninterrupted in the mornings, and more than 2 hours in the evening). I must therefore organize myself in such a way as to get up very early in the morning in Pondicherry, for in no case will your work suffer.
Apart from this, he has not yet entirely finished the work of purging that he has been doing on me for over a month, but I believe that everything will be completed in a short time from now.
0 1959-04-07, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
1) The fact that I am plagued by a lack of time and, occasionally, a certain repugnance for Mental work. Then the ensuing suggestion: to have a hut in Rameswaram and devote myself exclusively to inner development.
2) I am very pullednot constantly, but periodicallyby the need to write (not Mental things) and exasperated by the fact that this Orpailleur is not published because I have not taken the time to carry out certain corrections. When I am in a good mood, I offer all this to you (is it perhaps a hidden ambition? But I am not so sure; it is rather a need, I believe) and when I am not in a good mood, I fume about not having the time to write something else.
Please, enlighten me, Sweet Mother.
0 1959-05-19 - Ascending and Descending paths, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The thing can still be brought down as far as the Mental and vital planes (although Sri Aurobindo said that thousands of lifetimes would be needed merely to bring it down to the Mental plane, unless one practiced a perfect surrender1). With Sri Aurobindo, we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even into the Inconscient. But after the descent comes the transformation, and when you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forwardoh, not even a real step, just a little step!everything starts grating; its like stepping on an anthill And yet the presence, the help of the supreme Mother, is there constantly; thus you realize that for ordinary men such a task is impossible, or else millions of lives would be needed but in truth, unless the work is done for them and the sadhana of the body done for the entire earth consciousness, they will never achieve the physical transformation, or else it will be so remote that it is better not even to speak of it. But if they open themselves, if they give themselves over in an integral surrender, the work can be done for themthey have only to let it be done.
The path is difficult. And yet this body is full of good will; it is filled with the psychic in every one of its cells. Its like a child. The other day, it cried out quite spontaneously, O my Sweet Lord, give me the time to realize You! It did not ask to hasten the process, it did not ask to lighten its work; it only asked for enough TIME to do the work. Give me the time!
0 1959-05-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
A love for you might have held me here. And indeed, for you I have devotion, veneration, respect, an attachment, but there has never been this marvelous thing, warm and full, that links one to a being in the same beating of a heart. Through love, I could do all, accept all, endure all, sacrifice all but I do not feel this love. You cannot give yourself with your head, through a Mental decision, yet that is what I have been doing for five years. I have tried to serve you as best I could. But I am at the end of my rope. I am suffocating.
I have no illusions, and I do not at all suppose that elsewhere my life may at last be fulfilled. No, I know that this whole life is cursed, but it may as well be truly cursed. If the Divine does not want to give me his Love, may he give me his curse. But not this life between two worlds. Or if I am too hardened, may he break me. But not this tepidness, this approximation.
0 1959-06-13a, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Lele: the tantric guru whom Sri Aurobindo met in 1908 and who gave him Mental silence and Nirvana.
***
0 1960-05-24 - supramental flood, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Words cannot express it. No translation, none, not even the most subtle Mental translation can express this. It was Even now the memory I have of it is inexpressible. You have to be in it to feel it, otherwise
However, to the consciousness it was very, very clear. It was neither mysterious nor incomprehensible, it was absolutely obviousthough untranslatable to our Mental consciousness. For they were contradictory, yet they existed simultaneously, indistinguishable: they were not stacked one upon anotherit was all simultaneous. How can you explain that?! Its too difficult. It must be experienced.
You see, when something goes beyond thought, a sort of conception of it, or superconception rather, remains behind. But in this case, in my experience, there was no question of thoughtit was a question of physical sensation. It was not beyond thought, it was beyond sensation. I was LIVING this thing. And there was no more I. There was nothing but this thing, and yet there was a sensation. I cant explain it!
0 1960-06-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There are two things to avoid: falling into a stupor of unconsciousness, with all those things coming up from the subconscious and the unconscious that invade and penetrate you, and a vital and Mental hyperactivity in which you pass your time literally fightingterrible battles. People come out of that black and blue, as if they had been beaten and they have been, it is not as if! And I see only one way outto change the nature of sleep.
Mother added:
0 1960-06-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But when a question is put to me, it comes coated with all the Mental atmosphere of whoever is asking the question. And this coating is often a mere reflectionmuch of the life has been removed.
The same thing occurs, there is the same difference, when I say something and when I see it (for example, when I look at one of those essential problems that will be solved only when the world changes). When I look at that in silence, there is a power of life and truthwhich evaporates when its put into words. It becomes diminished, impoverished and of course distorted. When you write or speak, the experience disintegrates, its inevitable.
0 1960-06-Undated, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Isnt this reason enough to be discouraged? In any case, these questions are stirring in meand the vital is not happy [nor the Mental, nor the physical].
Excuse me if I speak too frankly.
0 1960-07-26 - Mothers vision - looking up words in the subconscient, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Coming at the end of the night as it did, it means that its an exploration in some part or another of a subconscious Mental activity. And you can make so many discoveries there it is unbelievable! But its lovely. And rarely unpleasant. There was a time when it was very unpleasant, oppressive, full of effort and resistance. I would want to go somewhere, but it would be impossible; I toiled and struggled, but everything would go wrong the straight paths would suddenly plunge into an abyss, and Id have to cross the abyss. For years it was like that. Just recently, I looked back over this whole period But now it is over. Now its something its lovely, its enjoyable, its a little it has a childlike simplicity.
However, its not a personal subconscient, but a its more than the Ashram. For me, the Ashram is not a separate individualityexcept in that vision the other day,1 which is what surprised me. Its hardly that. Rather, it is still this Movement of everything, of everything that is included. So its like entering into the subconscient of the whole earth, and it takes on forms which are quite familiar images to me, but they are absolutely symbolic and very, very funny! It took a moment to see that vainquons is spelled q-u-o-n-s. And I wasnt sure! I meant to ask Pavitra for a dictionary which gives verb conjugations, for then if Im stuck on something while writing, I can look it up.
0 1960-08-10 - questions from center of Education - reading Sri Aurobindo, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I SEE this state of mind, this Mental attitude Oh! Its its so repugnant. People are so afraid of taking sides, so afraid of appearing biased; they are so afraid of appearing to have faith, so afraid Oh, its disgraceful.
And I will keep hammering that into your heads till I enter right into them.
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Actually, it was very different at that time because I was not even aware of any resistance or any difficulty in the outer being; it was automatic, the work was done automatically. Later on, when I had to do both thingswhat he had been doing as well as what I was doingit became rather complicated and I realized there were many what we could call gapsthings which had to be worked out, transformed, set right before the total work could be done without hindrance. So then I began. And several times I thought how unfortunate it was that I had never studied or pursued certain ancient Indian disciplines. Because, for example, when Sri Aurobindo and I were working to bring down the supra Mental forces, a descent from the Mental plane to the vital plane, he was always telling me that everything I did (when we meditated together, when we worked)all my movements, all my gestures, all my postures, all my reactionswas absolutely tantric, as if I had pursued a tantric discipline. But it was spontaneous, it did not correspond to any knowledge, any idea, any will, nothing, and I thought it was like that simply because, as He knew, naturally I followed.
Later on, when Sri Aurobindo left his body, I said to myself, If only I knew what he had known, it would be easier! So when Swami and later X came, I thought, I am going to take advantage of this opportunity. I had written to Swami that I was working on transforming the cells of the body and that I had noticed the work was going faster with Xs influence. So it was understood that X would help when he came thats how things began, and this idea has remained with X. But I have raced on I dont wait. Ive raced on, Ive gone like wildfire. And now the situation is reversed. What I wanted to find out, I found out. I experienced what I wanted to experience, but he is still He is very kind, actually, he wants really to help me. So, when I identified with him the other day during our meditation, I realized that he wanted to give silence, control and perfect peace to the physical mind. My own trick, if you will, is to have as little relationship with the physical mind as possible, to go up above and stay therethis (Mother indicates her forehead), silent, motionless, turned upwards, while That (gesture above the head) sees, acts, knows, decidesall is done from there. Only there can you feel at ease.
--
Oh, I had tried for years I had tried to catch silence in my head I never succeeded. I could detach myself from it, but it would keep on turning But at that moment, all the Mental constructions, all the Mental, speculative structures none of it remaineda big hole.
And such a peaceful, such a luminous hole!
--
This lasted about half an hour. I quietly remained there I heard the noise of their conversation, but I wasnt listening. And then when I got up, I no longer knew anything, I no longer thought anything, I no longer had any Mental constructioneverything was gone, absolutely gone, blank!as if I had just been born.
***
0 1960-10-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The Mental silence Sri Aurobindo gave you in 1914, about which you were speaking the other day
It has never left. I have always kept it. Like a smooth white surface turned upwards. And at any moment at all You see, we speak like a machine, but there nothing moves; at any moment at all it can turn towards the heights. Its ALWAYS turned like that, but we can become aware of it being like that. Then, if we listen, we can hear what comes from above. My active consciousness, which was here (Mother points to her forehead), has settled above, and it has never again moved from there.
--
I am just finishing The Synthesis of Yoga, and what Sri Aurobindo says is exactly what has happened to me throughout my life. And he explains how you can still make mistakes as long as you are not supra Mentalized. Sri Aurobindo describes all the ways by which images are sent to youand they are not always images or reflections of the truth of things past, present or future; there are also all the images that come from human Mental formations and all the various things that want to be considered. It is very, very interesting. And interestingly enough, in these few pages I have found a description of the work I have spent my whole life doing, trying to SIFT out all we see.
I can only be sure of something once a certain type of picture comes, and then the whole world could tell me, But things didnt happen like that; I would reply, Sorry, but I see it. And that type of picture is certain, for I have studied it, I have studied their differences in quality and the texture of the pictures. It is very interesting.
--
Mentally we say, Oh, that cant go. And even I am often inclined to say, Dont publish this, dont speak of something or other. Then I realize how silly it is! There is something that uses everything. Even what may seem useless to usor perhaps worse than useless, harmfulmight be just the thing to give someone the right shock.
Original English.
0 1960-10-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
All this took place in a realm which is constantly active, everywhere; it is like a permanent Mental transcription of everything that physically takes place They arent actually thoughts; when I see this, I dont really get the impression of thinking, but its a transcription its the result of thoughts on a certain Mental atmosphere which records things.
And I see it all the time now. If someone is speaking or if Im doing something, I see the two things at the same time I see the physical thing, his words or my action, and then this colored, luminous transcription at the same time. The two things are superimposed. For example, when someone speaks to me, it gets translated into some kind of picture, a play of light or color (which is not always so luminous!)this is why most of the time, in fact, I dont even know what has been said to me. I recall the first time this phenomenon happened, I said to myself, Ah, so thats what these modern artists see! Only, as they themselves arent very coherent, what they see is not very coherent either!
0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Even tiny, the tiniest Mental or vital reactionsso tiny that to our ordinary consciousness they dont appear to have the LEAST importanceact upon the bodys cells and can create disorders You see, when you observe carefully, you suddenly become aware of a very slight uneasiness, a mere nothing (when youre busy, you dont even notice it), and then if you follow this uneasiness to see what it is, you perceive that it comes from something quite imperceptible and insignificant to our active consciousness but its enough to create an uneasy feeling in the body.
Which is whyunless you are intentionally and constantly in what here is called the Brahmic consciousness it is practically impossible to control. And this is what gives the impression of certain things happening in the body independently of not only of our will but of our consciousness BUT IT IS NOT TRUE.
--
Asuras: demons of the Mental plane.
***
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its an approach which is not at all Mental nor intellectual nor (God knows!) moral in the leastno notion of Good or Evil nor any of those things, absolutely none of that. Theres a moment in life when you begin thinking a little and you see all this from an overall or universal point of view in which all moral notions completely disappearFOR ANOTHER REASON. This experience with Z reminded me of a certain way of approaching Beauty that enables you even to find it in what appears dirty and ugly to the common vision. It is She trying to express herself in this something which to the common vision is ugly, dirty, hypocritical. But of course, if you yourself have striven assiduously and have greatly held yourself in, then you look at it reprovingly.
From my earliest childhood, instinctively, I have never felt the slightest contempt or how should I say (well, well! I was thinking in English) shrinking or disapproval, severe criticism or disgust for the things people call vice.
0 1960-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Not last night but the night before, I touched at least one of the causes (at that time it felt like THE cause) of a certain powerlessness to act directly on Matter You see, when the Will and the Power come, they are extremely effective everywhere UP TO A CERTAIN REGION (in other words, whether people are receptive or not, open or not, makes no differencewhen the Will is applied it is all-powerful UP TO a certain region) but once it arrives here, at the most material material, its efficacy depends on many thingsand a power which depends on something is no power! For a long, long time I have been searching for the reasons behind this powerlessness. Ive located a few, one after another, and upon these points there was an immediate effect. But some things resisted (oh, quite a number, in a number of ways), for example it had difficulty acting on illnesses, on the cells, on doubt (not Mental doubt, but rather the doubt of the physical consciousness which cant accept certain things that seem impossible to itwhat Sri Aurobindo calls disbelief,1 not a Mental doubt, but the disbelief of the physical consciousness which cant accept what is contrary to its own nature and its own working). And as for illnesses, sometimes it has an immediate effect, but sometimes it drags on and has to follow its so-called normal course. On all these three points, I clearly felt that something was hampering it. These are the Enemys strongholds; all that doesnt want the Divine seizes upon it and even the working of the Power coming from above is obstructed, for when it must work here in the body, it is stopped or deformed or altered or diminished.
All this goes on in the subconscient; these are things that were pushed out of the physical consciousness down into the subconscient, so theyre there and they come back up whenever they please.
0 1960-12-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This disbelief is the bedrock of the consciousness. And it comes with a (thought is too big a word for such an ordinary thing) a Mental-physical activity which makes you (I am forced to use the word) think things and which always foresees, imagines or draws conclusions (depending on the case) in a way which I myself call DEFEATIST. In other words, it automatically leads you to imagine all the bad things that can happen. And this occurs in a realm which is absolutely run-of-the-mill, in the most ordinary, restricted, banal activities of lifesuch as eating, moving in short, the coarsest of things.
Its fairly easy to manage and control this in the realm of thought, but when it comes to those reactions that rise up from the very bottom theyre so petty that you can barely express them to yourself. For example, if someone mentions that so-and-so ate such-and-such a thing, immediately something somewhere starts stealing in: Ah, hes going to get a stomach-ache! Or you hear that someone is going somewhereOh, hes going to have an accident! And it applies to everything; its swarming down below. Nothing to do with thought as such!
0 1960-12-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Even stones are beautiful; they are always beautiful in one way or another. When life appeared, there were some forms that were a little difficult, but not to that extent, not like certain human Mental creations. Of course, there may have been some animal species which were rather but they were more monstrous than actually ugly. And most probably, it only seems like that to our consciousness. But the mind And its the same for all these ideas of sin, of wrong, of all thatits a falsehood. But it was man who invented falsehood, wasnt it? The mind invented falsehood: to deceive! to deceive! And its a curious fact that animals domesticated by man have also learned to lie!
The curve
--
And particularly, this sense of whats important and not important is something which vanishes, leaving no trace at all. You are left like that, with nothing. There is no SCALE in importance that is entirely our Mental imbecility. Either nothing is important or EVERYTHING is EQUALLY important.
The speck of dust, there, which you sweep away, or ecstatic contemplationits ALL THE SAME.
0 1960-12-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And now, all these different attitudes which individuals, groups and categories of men hold are coming from every direction (while Im walking upstairs) to assert their own points of view as the true thing. And I see that for myself, Im being forced to deal with a whole mass of things, most of which are quite futile from an ordinary point of viewnot to mention the things of which these moral or religious types disapprove. Quite interestingly, all kinds of Mental formations come like arrows while Im walking for my japa upstairs (Mother makes a gesture of little arrows in the air coming into her Mental atmosphere from every direction); and yet, Im entirely in what I could call the joy and happiness of my japa, full of the energy of walking (the purpose of walking is to give a material energy to the experience, in all the bodys cells). Yet in spite of this, one thing after another comes, like this, like that (Mother draws little arrows in the air): what I must do, what I must answer to this person, what I must say to that one, what has to be done All kinds of things, most of which might be considered most futile! And I see that all this is SITUATED in a totality, and this totality I could say that its nothing but the body of the Divine. I FEEL it, actually, I feel it as if I were touching it everywhere (Mother touches her arms, her hands, her body). And all these things neither veil nor destroy nor divert this feeling of being entirely this a movement, an action in the body of the Divine. And its increasing from day to day, for it seems that He is plunging me more and more into entirely material things with the will that THERE TOO it must be done that all these things must be consciously full of Him; they are full of Him, in actual fact, but it must become conscious, with the perception that it is all the very substance of His being which is moving in everything
It was quite beautiful on the balcony this morning
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When asked later about the meaning of this somewhat elliptical statement, Mother said: 'There are two stages. The first involves a Mental (and possibly intuitive) vision of what will be (perhaps in an immediate future), and this is what we call seeing things "as they should be." The other is an identification with the supreme Will and the perception that at each second everything is exactly as the Supreme wants it to be, that it is the precise expression of the Supreme. The first is a vision of what is coming and says, "That's how things should be." But we overlook the distance between what presently exists and what is coming. While if we go high above and become one with the Consciousness of the supreme Will, we see that at every instant, at every moment in the universe, all is exactly as it should beexactly as the Supreme wants it to be. That is Omnipotence.'
Saraswati represents the universal Mother's aspect of Knowledge and artistic creativity. On this occasion, Mother would go down to the Meditation Hall and the disciples would silently pass in front of her to receive a message. This year they would receive a folder containing five photographs of Mother.
0 1961-01-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This Mental habit of always cloaking everything with a favorable appearance, of giving all movements a favorable explanation, is at times so flagrant that it can fool nobody but oneself (although it may occasionally be subtle enough to create an illusion). It is a sort of habitual self-exoneration, the habit of giving a favorable Mental excuse, a favorable Mental explanation for all one does, all one says, all one feels. For example, someone with no self-control who strikes another in great indignation and is ready to call it divine wrath! Righteous2 is perfect, because righteous immediately introduces this element of puritanical moralitywonderful!
This power of self-deception, the minds craft in devising splendid justifications for any ignorance or folly whatsoever, is tremendous.
0 1961-01-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I must say that after this, when I read The Secret of the Veda as I do each evening. In fact, I am in very close contact with the entire Vedic world since Ive been reading that book: I see beings, hear phrases. It comes up in a sort of subliminal consciousness, a lot of things are from the ancient Vedic tradition. (By the way, I have even come to see that the pink marble bathtub I told you about last time, which Nature had offered me, belongs to the Vedic world, to a civilization of that epoch.3) There werethere are alwaysSanskrit words coming up, sentences, bits of dialogue. This is of interest, because I realized that what I had seen the other day (I told you about it) and then what I saw yesterday that whole domainwas connected to what the Vedas call the dasyus the panis and the dasyus4the enemies of the Light. And this Force that came was very clearly a power like Indras5 (though something far, far greater), and at war with darkness everywhere, like this (Mother sketches in space a whirling force touching points here and there throughout the world), this Force attacked all darkness: ideas, people, movements, events, whatever made stains, patches of shadow. And it kept on going, a formidable power, so great that my hands were like this (Mother clenches her fists). Later when I read (I happened to be reading just the chapter concerning the fight against the dasyus), this proximity to my own experience became interesting, for it was not at all intellectual or Mental there was no idea, no thought involved.
The remainder of the evening passed as usual. I went to bed, and at exactly a quarter to twelve I got up with the feeling that this presence in me had increased even further and really become rather formidable. I had to instill a great deal of peace and confidence into my body, which felt as though it wasnt so easy to bear. So I concentrated, I told my body to be calm and to let itself go completely.
--
Then, with the same precision, the same calm, the same deliberate, clear and concentrated consciousness (absolutely NOTHING Mental), I began to come back down. And as I was descending, I realized that all the difficulty I had been fighting the other day and which had created this illness was absolutely ended, ANNULLEDmastered. Actually, it was not even mastery but the non-existence of anything to be mastered: Simply THE vibration from top to bottom; yet there was neither high nor low nor any direction.
And it went on like that. After this, Slowly, Still WITHOUT MOVING, everything went back into each of the different centers of the being. (Ah, let me say parenthetically that it wasnt AT ALL the ascent of a force like the ascent of the Kundalini! It had absolutely nothing to do with the Kundalini movement and the centers, it wasnt that at all.) But while re-descending, it was as though WITHOUT LEAVING THIS STATE, without leaving this state which remained conscious ALL the time, this supreme Consciousness began to reactivate the different centers: first here (Mother points to the center above the head and then touches the crown of the head, the forehead, throat, chest, etc.) then there, there, there. At each there was a pause while this new realization organized everything. It organized and made the necessary decisions, sometimes down to the most minute details: what had to be done in this case or said in that case; and all of that TOGETHER, at once, not one by one but seen entirely as a whole. It kept on descending I noted many things, it was extremely interestingdown and down, farther and farther, right to the depths. Everything went on at the same time,7 simultaneously, and at the same time this supreme Consciousness was organizing everything separately.8
--
Indra represents the king of the gods, the master of Mental power freed from the limitations and obscurities of the physical consciousness.
The body-consciousness.
0 1961-01-31, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At the moment of my coming out of the trance, I had a very concrete, positive perception (not a Mental understanding, it didnt come from the beings intellectual part, the part that understands and explains everything and Is symbolized, I think, by Indra; it wasnt in any way conveyed through that higher intelligence, it wasnt Mental). A kind of perception (not really a sensation, it was more than a sensation) of the almost total unimportance of the external, material expression of the bodys condition: the consciousness OF THE BODY was absolutely indifferent to external, physical signs, whether they were like this or like that (the BODYS consciousness was what had experienced the identity). And this body-consciousness had the perception of the EXTREME RELATIVITY of the most material expression.
I am translating it to make myself understoodit wasnt like that at the time of the experience. Suppose, for example, that there was a disorder here or there in the body, not actually an illness (because illness implies some important inner factor such as an attack or the necessity for some transformation, many different things), but the outer expression of a disorder, such as swollen legs or a malfunctioning liver not an illness, a disorder, a functional disorder. Well, it was all utterly unimportant: IT IN NO WAY CHANGES THE BODYS TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS. Although we are in the habit of thinking that the body is very disturbed when its ill, when something is going wrong, its not so. It isnt disturbed in the way we understand it.
0 1961-02-04, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theon always told me that the true interpretation of the Biblical story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden is that humanity wanted to pass from a state of animal-like divinity to the state of conscious divinity by means of Mental development, symbolized by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And this serpent, which Theon always said was iridescent, reflecting all the colors of the prism, was not at all the spirit of evil, but the power of evolution the force, the power of evolution. And it was natural that this power of evolution would make them taste the fruit of knowledge.
Now, according to Theon, Jehovah was the chief of the Asuras,6 the supreme Asura, the egoistic God who wanted to dominate everything and keep everything under his control. And of course this act made him furious, for it enabled mankind to become gods through the power of an evolution of consciousness. And thats why he banished them from Paradise.
--
Asura: demon of the Mental plane embodying the forces of division and darkness.
Tlemcen: a town in northern Algeria.
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, no I know that! I tell you, it can only be one of two things: either a good kick from the Enemy who is still trying to find a support in someones Mentality, or else premonitory.
I certainly hope not!
--
For example, each time I have been able to master something, I mean find the true solution for an illness or a malfunctioning (the TRUE solution, not a Mental one, not some ordinary knowledge, but the spiritual solution: the vibration that will UNDO the wrong working or set you on your feet again), it has always been very easy for me to cure the same thing in others, through the emission of this vibration.
Thats how it works. Because all substance is ONE. All is onewe constantly forget that! We always have a sense of separation, and that is total, total falsehood; its because we rely on what our eyes see, on (Mother touches her hands and arms, as if to indicate a separate body, cut off from other bodies). That is truly Falsehood. As soon as your consciousness changes a little, you realize that what we see is like an image plastered over something. But its not true, NOT TRUE AT ALL. Even in the most material Matter, even a stoneeven in a stoneas soon as ones consciousness changes, all this separation, all this division, completely vanishes. These are (how to put it?) modes of concentration (something akin to yet not quite that), vibratory modes WITHIN THE SAME THING.8
0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The second sign is a sense of ABSOLUTENESS in knowledge. As I have already told you, I had this with my experience of January 24. This state CANNOT be obtained through any region of the mind, even the most illumined and exalted. Its not a certainty, its (Mother lowers both hands like an irresistible block descending), a kind of absoluteness, without even any possibility of hesitation (theres no question of doubt), or anything like that. Without (how to say it ?). All Mental knowledge, even the highest, is a conclusive knowledge, as it were: it comes as a conclusion of something elsean intuition, for instance (an intuition gives you a particular knowledge, and this knowledge is like the conclusion of the intuition). Even revelations are conclusions. Theyre all conclusions the word conclusion comes to me, but I dont know how to express it. This isnt the case, however, with the supra Mental experiencea kind of absolute. The feeling it gives is altogether uniquefar beyond certainty, it is (Mother again makes the same irresistible gesture) it is a FACT, things are FACTS. It is very, very difficult to explain. But with that one naturally has a complete power the two things always go together. (In my reply to this man I didnt speak of power because the power is almost a consequence and I didnt want to speak of consequences.) But the fact remains: a kind of absoluteness in knowledge springing from identityone is the thing one knows and experiences: one is it. One knows it because one is it.
When these two signs are present (both are necessary, one is incomplete without the other), when a person possesses both, then you can be sure he has been in contact with the Supermind. So people who speak about receiving the Light well, (laughing) its a lot of hot air! But when both signs are present, you can be sure of your perception.12
0 1961-02-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know this Mental habit (which people take for Mental superiority!) of lumping everything together on the same level: all the teachings, all the prophets, all the sects, all the religions. You know the habit: We are not prejudiced, we have no preferencesits all the SAME THING. A dreadful muddle!
Its one of the biggest Mental difficulties of this age.
Anyway, in reply to this nonsense, I have said: Your error, to be precise, is that you go to the Theosophical Society, for example, with the same opening as to the Christian religion or to the Buddhist doctrine or with which you read one of Sri Aurobindos booksand as a result, you are plunged into a confusion and a muddle and you dont understand anything about anything.
0 1961-03-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was certainly with the progress of evolution, the march of evolution, when the mind began to develop for and in itself, that ALL the complications, all the deformations began. Indeed, this story of Genesis that seems so childish does contain a truth. The old traditions like Genesis resembled the Vedas in that each letter6 was the symbol of a knowledge; it was the pictorial rsum of a traditional knowledge, just as the Veda contains a pictoral rsum of the knowledge of its time. But whats more, even the symbol had a reality in the sense that there was truly a period when life upon earth (the first manifestation of Mentalized Matter in human forms) was still in complete harmony with all that preceded it. It was only later that.
The tree of knowledge symbolizes this kind of knowledge a material knowledge, no longer divine because its origin was the sense of division and this is what began to spoil everything. How long did this period last? I am unable to say. (Because my recollection is of an almost immortal life; it seems that it was through some sort of evolutionary accident that the destruction of forms became necessary for progress.) And where did it take place? From certain impressions (but these are only impressions), it would seem that it was in the vicinity of either this side of Ceylon and India or the other, I dont know exactly (Mother indicates the Indian Ocean either west of Ceylon and India or to the east between Ceylon and Java), although certainly the place no longer exists; it must have been swallowed up by the sea. I have a very clear vision of the place and a consciousness of that life and its forms, but I cant give precise material details. Did it last for centuries, was it ? I dont know. To tell the truth, when I was reliving those moments I wasnt curious about such details (for one is in another Mental state where there is no curiosity about material details: all things turn into psychological facts). It was something so simple, luminous, harmonious, far removed from all our usual preoccupationsthose very preoccupations with time and space. It was a spontaneous life, extremely beautiful, and so close to Naturea natural flowering of animal life. There were no oppositions or contradictions, nothing of the kindeverything happened in the best way possible.
(silence)
A similar memory has recurred several times under different circumstancesnot exactly the same scene and the same images, because it wasnt something I was seeing but A LIFE I was living. During a certain period, at any time, night or day, I would experience a particular state of trance in which I was rediscovering a life I had lived. I was fully conscious that this life had to do with the first flowering of the human form upon earth, the first human forms able to incarnate the divine being from above. This was the first time I could manifest in a particular terrestrial form (not a general life but an individual form); that is, for the first time, through the Mentalization of this material substance, the junction between the higher Being and the lower being was made. I have lived that several times, and always in a similar setting and with quite a similar feeling of such joyous simplicity, without complexity, without problems, without all these questions. It was the blossoming of a joy of lifenothing but that; love and harmony prevailed: flowers, minerals, animals all got along together perfectly.
Things began to go wrong only a LONG time afterwards, long after (but this is a personal impression), probably because certain Mental crystallizations were necessary, inevitable, for the general evolution, so that the mind might prepare itself to move on to something else. That was when oh, it seems like a fall into a pitinto ugliness, darkness! Everything became so dark, so ugly, so difficult, so painful. Really really the sense of a fall.
(silence)
--
Of course, these things can always be explained symbolically. Theon explained mans exile like this: when the Being the hostile Beingassumed the position of the Lord Supreme in relation to the terrestrial realization, he didnt want humanity to progress Mentally and gain a knowledge permitting it to stop obeying him! That is Theons occult explanation.
According to Theon, the serpent wasnt the spirit of evil at all: it was the evolutionary Force. And Sri Aurobindo fully agreed; he used to tell me the same thing: the evolutionary power the Mental evolutionary poweris what drove man to gain knowledge, a knowledge of division. And its a fact that along with the sense of Good and Evil, man became conscious of himself. Naturally, this ruined everything and he couldnt stay: it was his own consciousness that drove him out of Paradisehe could no longer stay.
Then was man banished by Jehovah or by his own consciousness?
--
This enigmatic experience was actually very important, as Mother will later explain (on March 17): Mother was leaving behind the subjection to Mental functioning, symbolized by this place where Pavitra was working.
Salmon-colored hibiscus.
0 1961-03-17, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Man on earth1 is a transitional being and as a consequence, in the course of his evolution, he has had several successive natures following an ascending curve which they will continue to follow until he touches the threshold of the supra Mental nature and is transformed into a superman. This curve is the spiral of Mental development.
We tend to apply the word natural to all spontaneous manifestation not resulting from a choice or a preconceived decision that is, with no intrusion of Mental activity. Thats why a man with an only slightly Mentalized vital spontaneity seems more natural to us in his simplicity. But this naturalness bears a close resemblance to the animals and is quite low on the human evolutionary scale. Man will not recapture this spontaneity free of Mental intrusion until he attains the supra Mental level, until he goes beyond the mind and emerges into the higher Truth.
Up to that point, all his modes of being are naturally natural! But with the minds intrusion, evolution was, if not falsified, then deformed, because by its very nature the mind was open to perversion and it became perverted almost from the start (or to be more exact, it was perverted by the asuric forces). And what appears unnatural to us now is this state of perversion. At any rate, its a deformation.
--
Along with the mind came individualization, an acute sense of separation and a more or less precise feeling of a freedom of choiceall of that, all these psychological states, are the natural consequences of Mental life and open the door to everything we see now, from the worst aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Mans impression of being free to choose between one thing and another is the deformation of a true principle that will be totally realizable only when the soul or psychic being becomes conscious in him; were the soul to govern the being, mans life would truly be a conscious expression of the supreme Will translated individually. But in the normal human state, such a case is still extremely rare and doesnt seem at all natural to ordinary human consciousness it seems almost supernatural!
Man questions himself because the Mental instrument is made for seeing all possibilities and because the human being feels he has freedom of choice and the immediate consequences are the notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and all the ensuing miseries. This cant be called a bad thing: its an intermediate stagenot a very pleasant stage, but nevertheless it was certainly inevitable for a total development.
***
--
It was so sad to see how good-for-nothing we were that it woke me up, or rather I heard the clock strike (like the other day, I didnt count and leapt out of bed; but I quickly noticed that it was only 3 oclock and lay back down). Then I began looking and told myself, If we really have to emerge from all this infirmity before anything can truly be well done, then we have quite a long road to travel! It was pitiful, pitiful (first on the Mental, then on the material plane), absolutely pitiful. And I was depending on these people! (Sri Aurobindo was depending on me and therefore on them.) Good god, I said, if I only knew where things were kept! If they had just let me handle things, it could have been done quickly. But no! All those people had to be involved Oust as we always depend on intermediaries in real life).
It made me wonder.
--
When I told you last time about that experience [of March 11, with Pavitra] the night I met you and was saying good-bye, I neglected to mention one very important point, the most important, in fact: I was leaving the subjection to Mental functioning permanently behind That was the meaning of my departure.
For a very long time now I have been watching all the phases of the subjection to Mental functioning come undone, one after another for a very long time. That night was the end of it, the last phase: I was leaving this subjection behind and rising up into a realm of freedom. You had been very, very helpful, as I told you. Well, this latest experience was something else! It came to make me look squarely at the fact of our incapacity!
Can you imagine!
0 1961-03-21, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
First of all, on the Mental plane (the physical-mind, the material mind) I saw an individual. I am not entirely certain of his identity (when I saw him last night I didnt associate him with anyone in particular) but from his outer appearance he is evidently a sannyasi. He was pursuing me, blocking my way and trying to stop me from doing my work (it was a long, long affair). But I was very conscious and could foresee everything he was about to do, so it had no effect. After a long while I emerged from this I had something else to do and I leftand on my way home he was everywhere, hiding and trying to catch me; but he didnt succeed in doing anything. And I knew he had been acting in this manner for a long time.
Then I woke up (I always wake up three or four times during the night) and when I went back to bed I had an attack of what the doctor and I have taken to be filariasis but a strange type of filariasis, for as soon as I master it in one spot it appears in another, and when I master it there it reappears somewhere else. Last night it was in the arms (it lasted quite a while, between 2:30 and 4 a.m.); but I was fully conscious, and each time the attack came, I went like this (gestures over the arms, to drive away the attack) and my arms were not affected at all. When it was over, I consciously entered the most material subtle physical, just beyond the body. I was sitting in my room there (an immense, cubic room) reading or writing something, when I heard the door open and close, but I was busy and didnt pay attention, presuming it was one of the people usually around me. Then suddenly I had such an unpleasant sensation in my body that I raised my head and looked, and I saw someone there. Do you know how the magicians in Europe dress, in short satin breeches and a shirt? He was wearing something like that. He was Indian, tall and rather dark, with slicked-down hairwhat you would normally call a handsome young man. He seemed to have been drawn1 there becausehe was standing in front of me staring into space, not looking at me. And the moment I saw him, there was the same sensation in all my cells as I have with what Ive been calling filariasis (its a special, minute kind of pain) and simultaneously all the cells felt disgusta tremendous will of rejection. Then I sat up straight (I didnt stand up) and said to him as forcefully as possible, How do you dare to come in here! I said it so loudly that the noise woke me up! I dont know what happened then, but things went much better afterwards.
0 1961-03-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It seemed made of transparent alabasterhard, harder than stone. It was the result of an individualization that was my impressionan individualization that has become very hardened. It has tried to become entirely transparent but has no tangible contact with thingsthings enter only through the higher regions, through intellectual perceptions (not intellectual, a sort of Mental vision). And I began to bang on it!
It was mainly on your right side I banged on it. But strangely enough, it didnt break it became supple, but then it lost its beauty. (It was so beautiful, as though sculptured!) I tried to pass through it, but to do so (this is what I found interesting), instead of passing through at this level (the chest), the psychic plane the level of the souls vibration I had to climb up above and then descend; and finally, without even realizing it, I found myself inside I had entered through sheer force of concentration. There, at the vital level, the emotional vital (solar plexus), I put two flowers: one very large Endurance in the Most Material Vital [zinnia] and another flower like the one X just gave me [cosmos] but bigger and pure white (it concerns sexual movements, light in sexual movements). But curiously enough, I passed inside through a trance; I was quite busy trying to make it more fluid when all at once, poof! I found myself inside. But since I entered through a trance it became completely objective: no more thought, nothing. And I saw I had put these two flowers there (at the levels of the abdomen and chest), one more active, a very large, dark purple Endurance flower, and another much smaller, pure white, slightly lower down. While I was watching this I think the clock must have struck something pulled me and it all faded away.
0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On other occasions (as I have told you) I had difficulties with X on the Mental plane; now all that has cleared up, cleared up very well. But this present situation is on another plane, so lets wait. Perhaps probably it will clear up.
(silence)
--
Yes, its as if I were living, as if the BODY were living (despite all the illnesses and attacks, all the ill will besetting it), living in a bath of the divine vibrationbathing in something immenseimmense, immense limitless, and so stable! The body lives in it like this (gesture as if Mother were floating). So even when there is what we call physical pain, even when there are blows to morale (like having a cashier ask you for money and you have none to give him5), well, despite it all, despite all the possible complications (coming all at the same time), EVERYTHING, everything that happens now, even things which seem extremely unpleasant to our Mental conceptions or our Mental reactions, everything is a bath, a bath of the vibration of divine Love. So much so that if I didnt control my body, I would be smiling at everything all the time like an idiot. A beatific smile for everything (I dont show it because I control myself).
(silence, the clock strikes the hour)
--
X is sensitive Mentally, but to what degree? And to what degree do things crystallize differently for him because of all his ideas?
Well see.
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have never written or spoken to X about this, but through Mental contact I have told him I dont know how many times: Satprem has a work to accomplish that is INFINITELY more important than reciting mantras. If it can help him to discipline himself, fine, but its nothing more; he will not accomplish his work by reciting mantras. He has something to do and he will do it. I have hammered that into his head (Mother laughs).
So, petit, see you tomorrow.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have had this experience, and I remember it even went on for several days; I saw all material circumstances as an absolutean absolute that we perceive as an unfolding, but which is an eternally existing absolute. I had this experience, and at the same time I had a very clear perception of what falsehood is the lie; what, from the psychological, the Mental point of view, Sri Aurobindo, translating from the Sanskrit, called crookedness.3 We attribute the course of circumstances to our psychological reactionsand indeed, they are used momentarily because everything collaborates either consciously or unconsciously to make things be what they have to be but things could be what they have to be without the intervention of this falsehood. I lived in that consciousness for several days, and it became apparent that this was what separated falsehood from truth. In this state of knowledge-consciousness, the distinction can be made between falsehood and truth; and when seen in that truth-consciousness, material circumstances change character.
Now I no longer have the experience of that state except as a memory, so I cant formulate it accurately. But what was very clear and comes very oftenvery oftenis the perception of a superimposition of falsehood over a real fact. This brings us back to what I was telling you some time ago,4 that everything is very simple in its truth, that human consciousness is what complicates everything. But the former was an even more total experience of it.
--
I have had this particular consciousness in flashes. The difficulty is that in expressing it, we use all our Mental faculties, and they themselves are falseso we are cornered. Because when you follow through. Whatever you say,If this, if that, if the otheris all part of our general stupidity. Going right to the end of it, you are suddenly like this: Ah! (Mother remains suspended midway in her sentence) There is nothing more to do, not a move to make.
Only, as I have told you, practically speaking this experience can be dangerous. When it came, you see, one part of me was having the experience, and one part wasnt yet ready for it. Well, I was awake enough to tell myself, The part experiencing this prevails and keeps the rest calm, yet if the preparation had not been adequate, it could have produced an imbalance. And if by mischance someone without sufficient strength had the possibility of picking up something of that, well, he would lose his head.
--
Once during the night, I went exploring inside this head; some cells still had fresh imprints of things registered during the day for whatever reason they hadnt had time to be combined into the whole, so they showed up as tiny, very clear images, minuscule things utterly devoid of any Mental or psychological movementsimply like tiny photographic images. There were three or four images like that, and it was so shocking to see them in this Presence that all at once I said to myself, Am I going mad?! It was that shocking. And I had to bring in a peace, a peacenot to make the movement of possession stop, but to accompany it simultaneously with a mighty peace so I wouldnt tell myself, Youre losing your head. Thats how shocking it was.
A tiny, very tiny image, just like a little photograph, clear! Everything else was in a vibration of transformationsplendid!
--
But for those who are here, we can say, It is what the Supreme Lord is preparing for the earth. He sent Sri Aurobindo to prepare it; Sri Aurobindo called it the supra Mental realization, and to facilitate communication we can use the same words. Well, this movement (gesture of a rising flame) towards That must be constantconstant, total. All the rest is none of our business, and the less we meddle with it Mentally, the better. But THAT, that Flame, is indispensable. And when it goes out, light it again; when it falters, rekindle itall the time, all the time, ALL THE TIMEwhen sleeping, walking, reading, moving around, speaking all the time.
The rest doesnt matter, one can do anything (it depends on people and their ways of thinking). You can just ask people like X, they will tell you: You can do anything at allit doesnt matter in the least. Only you mustnt feel its you doing it, thats all. You have to feel that Nature does it. But I dont much approve of this system.
0 1961-04-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had a vision last night which lasted for a long timeit was rather interestingabout your work concerning Sri Aurobindo: the plane where its situated, what place Sri Aurobindo gives it and the HELP he is giving you. It was very, very interesting. I no longer recall all the details, but broad bands of a bluish-white light seemed to be spreading out in special forms (Mother sketches spirals in the air), showing how it would touch the earths Mental atmosphere. It was truly interesting.
And Sri Aurobindo spoke of it as my work with you. I told him that I myself was doing nothing! But he told me it was my work with you.
0 1961-04-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its especially this Mental paucity everywhere they say, Oh, they have the same ideas as we do! Oh, they teach the same thing! Oh!Deplorable.
(silence)
--
This paucity, this narrowness. Its relatively easy to get out of Mental paucity, Mental narrowness: one has only to pierce a hole, go beyond, and view things from above; and yes, immediately, it all widens. Thats relatively easy. But this vital and PHYSICAL paucity, material narrowness ohh!
For Mental narrowness, we know the meansone has only to go beyond itwe know the means. But this (Mother touches her body), however much one keeps bringing in, bringing in, bringing in the Light and the Force. Yes, for a few moments one can live a universal life, even in the sensations but in the body.
(silence)
--
Its a question of contagion. Spiritual vibrations are quite clearly contagious. Mental vibrations are contagious, and to a certain extent even vital vibrations are contagious (not often in their finer effects, but anyway, its cleara mans anger, for instance, spreads very easily). Well then, the quality of cellular vibrations should also be contagious.
But the difficulty. You see, so far as Mind is concerned, the whole yoga has been donelike a path blazed through the virgin forest. And since it has been done, its relatively simple: the landmarks are there and one follows them. But here, nothing has been done! One doesnt know which end to take hold ofno one has ever done it! [186] You meet all the same obstacles before which others have simply said, Its impossible. Sri Aurobindo explains that its not impossible, but nothing more. And he himself hadnt done it.
0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Those who say that are simpletons and dont even know what theyre talking about! It is enough to read everything Sri Aurobindo has written to know that it is IMPOSSIBLE (underlined) to found a religion upon his writings, since for each problem, for each question, he presents all aspects and, while demonstrating the truth contained in each approach, he explains that to attain the Truth a synthesis must be effected, overpassing all Mental notions and emerging in a transcendence beyond thought.
Your second question, therefore, makes no sense! Furthermore, if you had read what appeared in the last Bulletin,1 you could never have asked it.
--
Men are such fools (laughing: it doesnt get any better!) that they can change anything at all into a religion, so great is their need for a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They dont feel secure unless they can affirm: This is true and that is not but such an affirmation becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and yoga are not situated on the same plane of the being, and the spiritual life can exist in its purity only if it is free from all Mental dogma.
People must really be made to understand this.
--
At the age of eighteen, I remember having such an intense need in me to KNOW. Because I was having experiences I had all kinds of experiences but my surroundings offered me no chance to receive an intellectual knowledge which would have given me the meaning of it all: I couldnt even speak of them. I was having experience after experience. For years, I had experiences during the night (but I was very careful never to speak about them!)memories from past lives, all sorts of things, but without any base of intellectual knowledge. (Of course, the advantage of this was that my experiences were not Mentally contrived; they were entirely spontaneous.) But I had such a NEED in me to know! I remember living in a house (one of these houses with a lot of apartments), and in the apartment next door were some young Catholics whose faith was very they were very convinced. And seeing all that, I remember saying to myself one day while brushing my hair, These people are lucky to be born into a religion and believe unquestioningly! Its so easy! You have nothing to do but believehow simple that makes it. I was feeling like this, and then when I realized what I was thinking (laughing), well, I gave myself a good scolding: Lazybones!
To know, know, KNOW! You see, I knew nothing, really, nothing but the things of ordinary life: external knowledge. I had learned everything I had been given to learn. I not only learned what I was taught but also what my brother was taughthigher mathematics and all that! I learned and I learned and I learned and it was NOTHING. None of it explained anything to menothing. I couldnt understand a thing!
--
Rakshasa: demon of the vital plane, as opposed to an asura, a demon of the Mental world.
Math: monastery.
0 1961-05-19, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But this body is still much too open to peoples Mental formations, so it has to struggle against oh!
Thats my reproach to itwhy does it struggle? Why, suddenly, do I have a terrible fatigue falling over me and have to brace myself? The body, naturally, does only one thingit automatically repeats the mantra; then all becomes quiet, all is set in order. But why is this effort necessary? It should be done automatically [the sweeping away of bad vibrations]. Why is there a need to remember or to put up a struggle? Oh, a battle!
0 1961-05-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I try to be as tranquil as I can (Mother makes a gesture of Mental immobility), but when you do so, you become aware of oh, its like a swarm of flies comingfrom here, from there, from above, from below, oh coming and coming and coming!
Its probably worse for me than for others because of all these people around me, clinging like leeches. But even for an ordinary being it is a swarm; it keeps on coming and comingyou would need to spend all your time fanning it away!
0 1961-06-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Funda Mentally, I have noticed one thing: if you yourself are in the right state, the right atmosphere is immediately created. And in addition, I am always in a sort of not even a convictionan ABSOLUTE perception that all that happens is the Lords doing. When He makes me late going upstairs its because He wants me to be late, and consequently, if I take it wellif instead of closing myself and getting annoyed I say, Good, thats fineimmediately a very interesting atmosphere is created, because at the same time I see all the advantages of this change. But this movement must not be Mentalit has to be spontaneous.
Therefore, I have told her (to put it simply): provided you are sincere in your attitude, all is well.
0 1961-06-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
More and more I have the impression ofwhat? How can it be explained? A question of vibrations in Matter. Its incomprehensible, completely eluding all Mental law, all psychological law: a self-existent something.
So many question marks!
--
There is such a strong impression of facing something which completely escapes comprehension, reason, intelligence, everything Mental or intellectual (even the most elevated); its not that, its. And then truly, if you stand back from it and employ big words, you would say, All this (Mother tilts her hand to one side) is Truth, and all that (she tilts her hand to the other side) is Falsehood but its the SAME thing! In one case, you have the sense of being carriednot only the body but the entire world, all circumstancescarried, floating in a beatific light towards an eternal Realization; and in the other case, its like this (Mother makes a gesture of being burdened), deadening, heavy, sorrowfulexactly the same thing! Almost the same material vibrations.
And its so subtle, so incomprehensible theres a distinct impression of it TOTALLY eluding even the highest conscious will. What is it? What is it?
--
You see, all the things that have been told, even all the things Sri Aurobindo has said (he has said the most in Savitri), all that is necessarily (what can it be called?) Mental, the super-intellectual spiritualized mind. But it is not THAT! Its a form, its an image, its not the concrete fact.
(silence)
0 1961-06-20, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The tantric guru Sri Aurobindo met in 1907 and from whom he received Mental silence.
***
0 1961-06-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I will give you a concrete example, then youll understand. When I.B. was killed, I had to gather up all his states of being and activities, which had been dispersed by the violence of the accident2it was terrible, he was in a dreadful state of dispersion. For two or two and a half days the doctors fought in the hope of reviving him, but it was impossible. During those two days I gathered up all his consciousness, all of it; I collected it over his body, to the point where, when it had come and formed itself there, such vitality, such life was coming back into his body that after some hours the doctors believed he would be saved. But it couldnt last (it wasnt possiblea part of the brain had come out). Well, when not only his soul but his Mental being, his vital being, and all the rest had been properly collected and organized over his body and had realized that the body had become quite unusable, it was overthey gave up the body and it was over.
I was keeping I.B. near me because I already had the idea of putting him immediately back into another bodyhis soul was not satisfied, it had not finished its experience (there was a whole combination of circumstances) and it wanted to continue to live on earth. Then, that night, his inner being went to find V., lamenting, saying he was dead and hadnt wanted to die, that he had lost his body and wanted to continue to live. V. was very perplexed. He let me know about it in the morning: Heres what has happened. I sent word to him of what I was doing, that I was keeping I.B. in my atmosphere and that he should stay very calm and not get excited, for I was going to put him back into a body as soon as possible I already had something in view. The same evening I.B. again went to find V., with the same complaint. V. told him very clearly, Here is what Mother says, here is what she is going to do; come now, be calm and dont torment yourself. And he saw in I.B.s face that he had understood (the inner being was taking on I.B.s physical appearance, naturally); his face relaxed, he became content.
0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have had an oft repeated experience of reliving the past1 (its a phenomenon of consciousness, possible because everything is preserved and continues to exist somewhere), with a kind of willwhich would be the sign of a powerto change it. I dont know, but at the moment of reliving it, instead of reliving the past just as it had been preserved, a power to make it different was introduced. I am not speaking of the power to change the consequences of the past (that is obvious and functions all the time)it wasnt that; it was the power to change the circumstances themselves (circumstances not quite material but of the subtle physical, with a predominantly psychological content). And since the will was there, from the standpoint of consciousness it actually happened that is, instead of circumstances developing in one direction, they developed in another. So it must correspond to something real, otherwise I would not have had the experience. It wasnt a product of the imagination; it wasnt something one thinks of and would really like to be differentit wasnt that; it was a phenomenon of consciousness: my consciousness was reliving certain circumstances (which are still quite living and obviously continue to exist within their own domain), but reliving them with the power and the knowledge acquired between that past moment and the present, and with a power to change the past moment. A new power entered the scene and turned the circumstance being relived in a new direction. I have had this experience many times and it has always surprised meits not a phenomenon of Mental imagination, which is something else entirely.
It opens the door to everything.
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Actually, it springs from everything in material consciousness that can still be touched by the adverse forces; that is, not exactly the body-consciousness itself but, one could say, material substance as it has been organized by the mind the initial Mentalization of matter, the first stirrings of mind in life making the passage from animal to human. (The same complications would probably exist in animals, but as there is no question of trying to supra Mentalize animals, all goes well for them.) Well, something in there protests, and naturally this protest creates disorder. These past few days I have been seeing. No one has ever followed this path! Sri Aurobindo was the first, and he left without telling us what he was doing. I am literally hewing a path through a virgin forestits worse than a virgin forest.
For the past two days there has been the feeling of not knowing anythingNOTHING at all. I have had this feeling for a very long time, but now it has become extremely acute, as it always does at times of crisis, at times when things are on the verge of changingor of getting clarified, or of exploding, or. From the purely material standpointchemically, biologically, medically, therapeutically speaking I dont believe many people do know (there may be some). But it doesnt seem very clear to mein any case, I dont know. Yogically (I dont mean spiritually: that was the first stage of my sadhana), its very easy to be a saint! Oh, even to be a sage is very easy. I feel I was born with itits spontaneous and natural for me, and so simple! You know all that has to be done, and doing it is as easy as knowing it. Its nothing. But this transformation of Matter! What has to be done? How is it to be done? What is the path?
--
For example, as I was saying at the beginning, the bodys formation has a very minimal, a quite subordinate importance for a saint or a sage. But for this supra Mental work, the way the body is formed has an almost crucial importance, and not at all in relation to spiritual elements nor even to Mental power: these aspects have no importance AT ALL. The capacity to endure, to last is the important thing.
Well, in that respect, it is absolutely undeniable that my body has an infinitely greater capacity than Sri Aurobindos had.
--
Because evidently I cant say that my experiences are the result of a Mental aspiration or will or knowledge I dont know, I dont know at all. I dont know how it should be, nor what it should be, nor anything at all. I dont know what should be done, I dont know what should not be donenothing. Its truly a blind march (gesture of groping along), in a desert riddled with all possible traps and difficulties and obstaclesall this heaped together. Eyes blindfolded, knowing nothing (same gesture of groping blindly), one plods on.
The only thing to do is to be like this (Mother turns her hands towards the Heights in a gesture of abandonment). Provided you dont fall asleep! You mustnt enter into a beatific state where you. No, we must keep moving on.
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Have we ever really known how the first humans were formed, the first Mental realization? Were they isolated individuals, or were they in groupsdid the phenomenon take place in a collective milieu or in isolation? I dont know. It may be analogous to the case of the coming supra Mental creation.
It isnt difficult to conceive of an individual in the solitude of the Himalayas or in a virgin forest beginning to create around himself his miniature supra Mental worldthis is easy to imagine. But the same thing would be necessary: he would need to have attained such perfection that his power would act automatically to prevent any outside intrusion.
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Take the experience of Mind, for example: Mind, in the evolution of Nature, gradually emerging from its involution; well and this is a very concrete experience these initial Mentalized forms, if we can call them that, were necessarily incomplete and imperfect, because Natures evolution is slow and hesitant and complicated. Thus these forms inevitably had an aspiration towards a sort of perfection and a truly perfect Mental state, and this aspiration brought the descent of already fully conscious beings from the Mental world who united with terrestrial formsthis is a very, very concrete experience. What emerges from the Inconscient in this way is an almost impersonal possibility (yes, an impersonal possibility, and perhaps not altogether universal, since its connected with the history of the earth); but anyway its a general possibility, not personal. And the Response from above is what makes it concrete, so to speak, bringing in a sort of perfection of the state and an individual mastery of the new creation. These beings in corresponding worlds (like the gods of the overmind,4 or the beings of higher regions) came upon earth as soon as the corresponding element began to evolve out of its involution. This accelerates the action, first of all, but also makes it more perfectmore perfect, more powerful, more conscious. It gives a sort of sanction to the realization. Sri Aurobindo writes of this in SavitriSavitri lives always on earth, with the soul of the earth, to make the whole earth progress as quickly as possible. Well, when the time comes and things on earth are ready, then the divine Mother incarnates with her full powerwhen things are ready. Then will come the perfection of the realization. A splendor of creation exceeding all logic! It brings in a fullness and a power completely beyond the petty shallow logic of human Mentality.
People cant understand! To put oneself at the level of the general public may be all very well5 (personally I have never found it so, although its probably inevitable), but to hope that they will ever understand the splendor of the Thing. They have to live it first!
--
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the 'Overmind' represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled Mental man till now. in his gradations of the worlds, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two hemispheres, the upper hemisphere and the lower. The Overmind is the line between these two hemispheres, 'This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supra Mental Light, but in receiving it divides, distributes, breaks up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds.' In the words of the Upanishad, 'The face of the Truth is covered by a golden lid.'
Mother is referring to the book Satprem will write on Sri Aurobindo, which prompted the questions posed in this conversation.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, we are the first possible instruments for making the world progress. For example (this is one way of putting it), the transformation of the Inconscient into the Subconscient is probably far more rapid and complete now than it was before man appeared upon earth; man is one of the first transformative elements. Animals are obviously more conscious than plants, but WILLED (and thus more rapid) progress belongs to humanity. Likewise, what one hopes (more than hopes!), what one expects is that when the new supra Mental race comes upon earth, the work will go much more swiftly; and man will necessarily benefit from this. And since things will be done in true order instead of in Mental disorder, animals and everything else will probably benefit from it also. In other words, the whole earth, taken as one entity, will progress more and more rapidly. The Inconscient (oh, all this comes to me in English, thats the difficulty!) is meant to go and necessarily the Subconscient will go too.
Broadly speaking, does this mean that physical Matter will become conscious?
0 1961-08-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The subtle physical is right here (gesture on the surface of the skin). Some people are sensitive in the subtle physical; you move your hand near them and they feel it immediately. Others dont even noticeit depends on the subtle physicals sensitivity. And the circumconscient surrounds it like an envelope. If there are no tears in it, this envelope is a magnificent protection.4 And its not dependent on any spiritual or intellectual rationale, but on a harmony with Nature and life, a kind of stability in the material being. People with strong envelopes are almost always in good health and succeed in what they do. It isnt something Mentalwhen they do a work it comes out nicely, if they want to meet someone, they meet him. Things of this nature.
The circumconscient must be that.
0 1961-08-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have seen you there several times. You were wearing something similar to what you are wearing now [dhoti]: not European they wear the costume of no particular country. Its usually white, but not made of cloth. Its all on a VERY luminous, very orderly, very clear Mental plane-no objects lying around, only things like sheets of paper, which seem to be ideas or compositions of ideas, but no clutter. Its vast, vast, so vast you can see no end to it! And up above its wide open, and a light is constantly descending. What you walk on is a little more solid, but not much more. Its an interesting place.
I go there almost every night for half or three-quarters of an hour, and Sri Aurobindo shows it all to me. Some people are waiting for himin certain corners everything is ready and waiting and when he comes they show him what they have done. Then he explains: a word, a gesture, not much, and then, ah! It takes a form. Its an interesting place. I am putting you in touch with it all the time, all the time, every dayit doesnt matter if you dont remember, its not important.
0 1961-09-16, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As if there were too much Mental tension: something here at the temples.
(silence)
--
Whats terrible is this organizing mind. Its terrible! It has us so convinced that we cant do without it that its very difficult to resist. Indeed, it has convinced all humanity. The whole so-called elite of humanity has been convinced that nothing worthwhile can be achieved without this Mental organizing power.
But Sri Aurobindo wants us to have the same simple joy as a blossoming rose: Be simple, be simple, be simple. And when I hear it or see it, its like a rivulet of golden light, like a fragrant gardenall, all, all is open. Be simple.
0 1961-09-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What struck me is that he never wanted to write anything else. To write those articles for the Bulletin1 was really a heavy sacrifice for him. He had said he would complete certain parts of The Synthesis of Yoga,2 but when he was asked to do so, he replied, No, I dont want to go down to that Mental level!
Savitri comes from somewhere else altogether.
0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its very easy to explain: she was already more than half possessed, and of course this spirit of falsehood hardly felt comfortable! And the identification2 (not only Mental but sensory, vital) was so complete that she felt this love as a movement of hatred. When I saw the two phenomena, I also saw that this is exactly what happens in the world! Its exactly what EVERYONE is.
I must add that the experience came after I had been concentrating for three days (concentrating almost constantly) on finding an explanation for this: why has it become this way? It is impossible to find the why because its the reason asking and this goes beyond reason but what is the MECHANISM? Finding the mechanism would already be somethingto have the experience of the mechanism. And then came this CONCRETE superposition of the vibration of Love and the reception of hate. But this is exactly what happens! I said. The Lord is All-Love, All-Truth, All-Bliss, All-Deligh tHe is CONSTANTLY like thatand the world, especially the human world, constantly receives him in the other way. And the two things are superposed (Mother covers her left hand with her right).
0 1961-10-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first time you read your manuscript, I called Sri Aurobindo to hear it. He was in the subtle physical and he listened. Yesterday when I sat down to listen, I thought, It would be much better if he entered my brain because that way. In fact, I called him; he entered my brain. It took some time; all through the beginning of the reading we were still two; then he came in more and more, more and more, more and more. My headmy physical headseemed to be swelling up! There was no longer space for anyone but him. It was the light that dark blue light of Mental power (but true Mental power) in the physical the tantrics use it, you always see it with Xs action, but Ive never seen it this way before! My head was full, you knowfull, full, not an atom of space to spare I could feel it swelling up!
And this light was absolutely immobilevibrationless, totally compact and coherent. When I see Xs light, for example, there are always vibrations in it; it vibrates, vibrates, things are shifting about; out with this, not a single vibration, not one movement: a MASS that seemed eternally immobile but which was (how to put it?) attentive, listening. It was a volume with the form of the head, as if that had wholly taken over the head. It was full, so full, yet with no feeling of tension or of anything resisting, none at all; there was only a kind of immobile eternity and COMPACT, compact, absolutely coherent, no vibrations. And it increased, increased more and more, it became heavy, but with a very particular heavinessnot a weight, the feeling of a mass.
--
One sees glimpses of it. I told you Ive often seen it with X. I also saw it with another tantric who came here (someone said to be greatly renowned in the North)this sort of very well organized Mental power, a Mental-physical power. But it was always vibrating or intermittent or partial, passing flashes or fluctuating formations. Here it wasnt that; it was a feeling of eternity.
Normally one would have said that my body was in trance; yet it could move, it could speaksince I did speak to you; but nevertheless, it was a peculiar feeling (which I still have somewhat), like having a head too large for my body. Its not painful or disagreeable, but Im not used to it.
--
For a long, long time I have been asking for. When I would say, Lord, take possession of this brain, I expected something of the sort, but I was expecting it with the supra Mental light (which, partially and momentarily, I have had). But this! It was really. I dont know what he did with my brainnot brain, my Mental power. Probably during that period he absorbed it (I suppose thats what happened because there was no sense of difference). My impression was that as a result of this the physical cells were going to develop materially and be transformed (I think it will happen I had a sort of assurance that it will). Because now, as Im talking to you, Im looking at it and I see the effect is still there: no longer with the same overwhelming power, but the effect is there and it gives a sort of (it cant be compared to anything physical) a sort of warmth; its not heat, but warmth. Everything is seized by it, both ears (Mother touches her head), everythinghere, there, all around! Tremendous. And this immobility! As soon as one stops, it is immor (Mother cuts off her word), it is eternity.
It is truly bringing THAT down here [into Matter].
--
After speaking of the descent of the Supermind, he said that an INTERMEDIARY must be prepared between our present Mental state (even the most elevated higher mind) and the supra Mental region, because if one entered directly into Gnosis, well, it would produce such an abrupt change that our physical constitutions would be unable to support itan intermediary is needed. The experiences Ive had make me absolutely convinced of it; twice the supra Mental world took veritable possession of me and both times it was as if the bodytruly the physical bodywas going to completely disintegrate, due to what you could almost call the opposition of the two conditions.
And yesterday again I clearly saw (Mother touches this mass in her head). My eyes are full of it my eyes are full, you know, and I see that as it works to settle itself in here, it produces this little vibrationa twinkling of vibrationswhich seems to be indispensable for it to enter into this Matter.
--
You have to concretely feel that Sri Aurobindos full Power of expression is there (I dont mean the words, its not a question of words), but the power to transmit knowledge (not Mental knowledge, experience). Its constantly there. So an attentive silence but be very patient, because as soon as the Force comes, something begins to stir in the Mental regions. Then there is also a sort of eagerness to seize hold and it ruins the thing.
I have noticed that the true inspiration doesnt come when one is very, very anxious, nor even when you have a very intense aspiration, but (how to put it?) when you succumb in a smile, and it all goes blank. Then theres nothing; but if you know how to curb impatience (simply delighting in His beatitude, even if ages passdelighting in His beatitude), then suddenly, when you least expect itflash! Thats IT!
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But we have not yet reached the heart of the Vedic secret. The birth of Agni, the soul (and so many men are still unborn) is merely the start of the voyage. This inner flame seeks, it is the seeker within us, for it is a spark of the great primordial Fire and will never be satisfied until it has recovered its solar totality, the lost sun of which the Veda incessantly speaks. Yet even when we have risen from plane to plane and the Flame has taken successive births in the triple world of our lower existence (the physical, vital and Mental world), it will still remain unsatisfiedit wants to ascend, ascend further. And soon we reach a Mental frontier where there seems to be nothing to grasp any longer, nor even to see, and nothing remains but to abolish everything and leap into the ecstasy of a great Light. At this point, we feel almost painfully the imprisoning carapace of matter all around us, preventing that apotheosis of the Flame; then we understand the cry, My kingdom is not of this world, and the insistence of Indias Vedantic sagesand perhaps the sages of all worlds and all religions that we must abandon this body to embrace the Eternal. Will our flame thus forever be truncated here below and our quest always end in disappointment? Shall we always have to choose one or the other, to renounce earth to gain heaven?
Yet beyond the lower triple world, the Rishis had discovered a certain fourth, touryam svid; they found the vast dwelling place, the solar world, Swar: I have arisen from earth to the mid-world [life], I have arisen from the mid-world to heaven [mind], from the level of the firmament of heaven I have gone to the Sun-world, the Light (Yajur-veda 17.67). And it is said, Mortals, they achieved immortality (Rig-veda I.110.4). What then was their secret? How did they pass from a heaven of mind to the great heaven without leaving the body, without, as it were, going off into ecstasies?
0 1961-11-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is also what Theon and Madame Theon used to say. They never spoke of Supermind, but they said the same thing as the Vedas, that the world of Truth must incarnate on earth and create a new world. They even picked up the old phrase from the Gospels, new heavens and a new earth,1 which is the same thing the Vedas speak of. Madame Theon had this experience and she gave me the indication (she didnt actually teach me) of how it was to be done. She would go out of her body and become conscious in the vital world (there were many intermediary states, too, if one cared to explore them). After the vital came the Mental: you consciously went out of the vital body, you left it behind (you could see it) and you entered the Mental world. Then you left the Mental body and entered into. They used different words, another classification (I dont remember it), but even so, the experience was identical. And like that, she successively left twelve different bodies, one after another. She was extremely developed, you seeindividualized, organized. She could leave one body and enter the consciousness of the next plane, fully experience the surroundings and all that was there, describe it and so on, twelve times.
I learned to do the same thing, and with great dexterity; I could halt on any plane, do what I had to do there, move around freely, see, observe, and then speak about what I had seen. And my last stage, which Theon called pathtisme,2 a very barbaric but very expressive word, bordered on the Formlesshe sometimes used the Jewish terminology, calling the Supreme The Formless. (From this last stage one passed to the Formless there was no further body to leave behind, one was beyond all possible forms, even all thoughtforms.) In this domain [the last stage before the Formless] one experienced total unityunity in something that was the essence of Love; Love was a manifestation more dense, he would always say (there were all sorts of different densities); and Love was a denser expression of That, the sense of perfect Unityperfect unity, identitywith no longer any forms corresponding to those of the lower worlds. It was a Light! An almost immaculate white light, yet with something of a golden-rose in it (words are crude). This Light and this Experience were truly wonderful, inexpressible in words.
--
When I returned from Japan and we began to work together, Sri Aurobindo had already brought the supra Mental light into the Mental world and was trying to transform the Mind. Its strange, he said to me, its an endless work! Nothing seems to get doneeverything is done and then constantly has to be done all over again. Then I gave him my personal impression, which went back to the old days with Theon: It will be like that until we touch bottom. So instead of continuing to work in the Mind, both of us (I was the one who went through the experience how to put it? practically, objectively; he experienced it only in his consciousness, not in the body but my body has always participated), both of us descended almost immediately (it was done in a day or two) from the Mind into the Vital, and so on quite rapidly, leaving the Mind as it was, fully in the light but not permanently transformed.
Then a strange thing happened. When we were in the Vital, my body suddenly became young again, as it had been when I was eighteen years old! There was a young man named Pearson, a disciple of Tagore, who had lived with me in Japan for four years; he returned to India, and when he came to see me in Pondicherry, he was stupefied.4 What has happened to you! he exclaimed. He hardly recognized me. During that same period (it didnt last very long, only a few months), I received some old photographs from France and Sri Aurobindo saw one of me at the age of eighteen. There! he said, Thats how you are now! I wore my hair differently, but otherwise I was eighteen all over again.
--
I think the problem arises only when you try to see and understand with the Mental consciousness, even with the higher mind.
I am telling you this because, as soon as I got your letter, I replied with what Ill read to you now; then I was immediately faced with something I couldnt formulate, the kind of thing that gives you the feeling of the unknown (all I knew was my own experience). So I did the usual thingbecame blank, turned towards the Truth; and I questioned Sri Aurobindo and beyondasking, if there were something to be known, that it be told to me. Then I dropped it, I paid no more attention. And only as I was coming here today was I told I cant really use the word told, but anyway, what was communicated to me concerning your question was that the difference between the two processes [the Rishis and the present one] is purely subjective, depending upon the way the experience is registered. I dont know if I can make myself clear. There is something which is the experience and which will be the Realization; and what appears to be a different, if not opposite, process is simply a subjective Mental notation of one SINGLE experience. Do you follow?
Thats what I was told.
--
After reading your letter, I had a very strong feeling that you put the problem like that because you were considering it from a Mental plane, which is the only plane where it exists; if you go beyond, there are no more oppositions or problems. These things are subtle, you know, and as soon as you try to formulate them, they elude youformulation deforms.
What I mean is that its not necessarily in trance, in another world, that one gets the supra Mental consciousness.
0 1961-11-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But is it necessary to link up? I doubt it. It was an extremely Mental idea.
No, I dont really mean linking, rather. Take what came this morning, for instance; it showed me (I think) that something really had to be changed. I have that feeling.
--
It would be interesting, if it were possible thats precisely what I mean when I say: no links, no train of logic, no continuity; these are always, always Mental. An inspiration, an intuition, a revelation always comes, poff!, leaving a score of things unsaidgaps to be filled in with spiritual experience.
If you start to explain, it falls flattheres no help for it.
0 1961-12-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I can see from the publishers letter that he has been touched much more than he thinks. His outer Mentality may have responded the way it did, but something was vibrating within I felt it as soon as you read me his letter. And he is violently denying it of course! It would disturb him a good deal, so he defends himself violently; but this just might give him the idea of having others read itand it could touch someone. I dont know, I am giving you an explanation of what I saw, of the sensation it gave me: Wait, dont move. And then: You will be informed when it is necessary to act. So let the first of the year go by, and then we will see.
Well then. And you?
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This criterion had nothing Mental about it, and it gave the strange inner feeling that so many things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended upon the CAPACITY of things and upon their ABILITY to express the supra Mental world or be in relationship with it. It was so completely different, at times even so opposite to our ordinary way of looking at things!
Yes.
0 1962-01-12 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The question, of course, is the supra Mentalization of MATTER the consciousness, thats nothing at all. Most people who have had that experience had it on the Mental level, which is relatively easy. Its very easy: abolition of limits set by the ego, indefinite expansion with a movement following the rhythm of the Becoming. Mentally, its all very easy. Vitally. A few months after I withdrew to my room, I had the experience in the vitalwonderful, magnificent! Of course to have the experience there, the mind must have undergone a change, one must be in complete communion; without exception, any individual vital being that hasnt been prepared by what might be called a sufficient Mental foundation would be panic-stricken. All those poor people who get scared at the least little experience had better not dabble with thistheyd panic! But as it happensthrough divine grace, you might saymy vital, the vital being of this present incarnation, was born free and victorious. It has never been afraid of anything in the vital world; the most fantastic experiences were practically childs play. But when I had that experience, it was so interesting that for a few weeks I was tempted to stay in it; it was. I once told you a little about that experience (it was quite a while ago, at least two years).5 I told you that even during the day I seemed to be sitting on top of the Earth that was this realization in the vital world. And what fantastic nights it gave me! Nights I have never been able to describe to anyone and never mentioned but I would look forward to the night as a marvelous adventure.
I voluntarily renounced all that in order to go further. And when I did it, I understood what people here in India mean when they say: he surrendered his experience. I had never really understood what that meant. When I did it, I understood. No, I said, I dont want to stop there; I am giving it all to You, that I may go on to the end. Then I understood what it meant.
--
Another thing I didnt mention to you when I related the experience was that the ship had no engine. Everything was set in motion through will powerpeople, things (even the clothes people wore were a result of their will). And this gave all things and every persons shape a great suppleness, because there was an awareness of this willwhich is not a Mental will but a will of the Self, what could be called a spiritual will or a soul-will (to give the word soul that particular meaning). I have that experience right here when theres an absolute spontaneity in action, I mean when the action for instance, an utterance or a movementis not determined by the mind, and not even (not to mention thought or intellect), not even by the mind that usually sets us in motion. Generally, when we do something, we can perceive in ourselves a will to do it; when you watch yourself, you see this: there is always (it can happen in a flash) the will to do. When you are conscious and watch yourself doing something, you see in yourself the will to do itthis is where the mind intervenes, its normal intervention, the established order in which things happen. But the supra Mental action is decided by a leap over the mind. The action is direct, with no need to go through the mind. Something enters directly into contact with the vital centers and activates them without going through the mindyet in full consciousness. The consciousness doesnt function in the usual sequence, it functions from the center of spiritual will straight to matter.
And so long as you can keep that absolute immobility in the mind, the inspiration is absolutely pureit comes pure. When you can catch and hold onto this while youre speaking, then what comes to you is unmixed too, it stays pure.
This is an extremely delicate functioning, probably because were not used to it the slightest movement, the slightest Mental vibration disrupts everything. But as long as it lasts, its perfectly pure. And in a supra Mentalized life this has to be the CONSTANT state. Mentalized will should no longer intervene; because you may well have a spiritual will, your life may be the constant expression of spiritual will (its what happens to all who feel themselves guided by the Divine within), but it still comes through a Mental transcription. Well, as long as its that way, its not the supra Mental life. The supra Mental life NO LONGER goes through the mind the mind is an immobile zone of transmission. The least little twitch is enough to upset everything.
(silence)
0 1962-01-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Asura: demon of the Mental plane embodying the forces of division and darkness.
The reader will remember the formation of the Kuo-min-tang and the troubles in the Yangtze Valley which took place in October 1911 and led to the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912. Thus it was in October 1906, at Tlemcen, that Mother had the encounter she relates here. It was also in 1906 that Mao Tse-tung, at the age of fourteen, came into conflict with his father, a prelude to his revolutionary career.
0 1962-01-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This sort of will in people for purity, for Good (which in ordinary Mentality is expressed by a need to be virtuous) is actually the GREAT OBSTACLE to true self-giving. Its the root of Falsehood, the very source of hypocrisy: the refusal to take up ones share of the burden of difficulties. And thats what Sri Aurobindo has touched on in this aphorism, directly and very simply.
Do not try to be virtuous. See to what extent you are united, ONE with all that is antidivine. Take up your share of the burden; accept to be impure and false yourself, and in so doing you will be able to take up the Shadow and offer it. And insofar as you are able to take it and offer it, things will change.3
--
The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the degradation of a higher and true movement. It is this or something like it that is attempted crudely and improperly with a rudimentary and insufficient knowledge in the system of psycho-analysis. The process of raising up the lower movements into the full light of consciousness in order to know and deal with them is inevitable; for there can be no complete change without it. But it can truly succeed only when a higher light and force are sufficiently at work to overcome, sooner or later, the force of the tendency that is held up for change. Many, under the pretext of anubhava, not only raise up the adverse movement, but support it with their consent instead of rejecting it, find justifications for continuing or repeating it and so go on playing with it, indulging its return, eternising it; afterwards when they want to get rid of it, it has got such a hold that they find themselves helpless in its clutch and only a terrible struggle or an intervention of divine grace can liberate them.Some do this out of a vital twist or perversity, others out of sheer ignorance; but in yoga, as in life, ignorance is not accepted by Nature as a justifying excuse. This danger is there in all improper dealings with the ignorant parts of the nature; but none is more ignorant, more perilous, more unreasoning and obstinate in recurrence than the lower vital subconscious and its movements. To raise it up prematurely or improperly for anubhava is to risk suffusing the conscious parts also with its dark and dirty stuff and thus poisoning the whole vital and even the Mental nature. Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and eliminate them by the strength of the divine calm, light, force and knowledge. Even so, there will be enough of the lower stuff rising up of itself to give you as much of the anubhava as you will need for getting rid of the obstacles; but then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance.
***
0 1962-02-03, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the course of my observation, I also saw the position of X and people like him, who practically spend their lives doing japa, plus meditation, puja,4 ceremonies (I am talking only about sincere people, not fakers). Well, thats their way of working for the world, of serving the Divine, and it seems the best way to themperhaps even the only way but its a question of Mental belief. In any case, its obvious that even a bit of not exactly puja, but some sort of ceremony that you set yourself to dohabitual gestures symbolizing and expressing a particular inner statecan also be a help and a way of offering yourself and relating to the Divine and thus serving the Divine. I feel its important looked at in this waynot from the traditional viewpoint, I cant stand that traditional viewpoint; I understand it, but it seems to me like putting a brake on true self-giving to the Divine. I am speaking of SELF-IMPOSED japa and rules (or, if someone gives you the japa, rules you accept with all your heart and adhere to). These self-imposed rules should be followed as a gesture of love, as a way of saying to the Divine, I love You. Do you see what I mean? Like arranging flowers in a certain way, burning incense, dozens of little things like that, made beautiful because of what is put into themit is a form of self-giving.
Now, I think that doing japa with the will and the idea of getting something out of it spoils it a little. You spoil it. I dont much like it when somebody says, Do this and you will get that. Its trueits true, but its a bit like baiting a fish. I dont much like it.
0 1962-02-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All sorts of things. But quite often we are looking for things related to expression sometimes images, sometimes sentences, sometimes. I have told you I frequently meet you in a kind of library without books. Its very interesting. It is open on top, below too, and no walls; it is extremely spacious, certainly almost as vast as the earth. And there are pigeonholes that seem to hang in the air, with all kinds of things filed in them. We are often sorting through these pigeonholes to find certain txtsideas, I mean. Ideas, explanations, sometimes memories, all kinds of things. This world is Mental but very luminous and clear; full of clarity, perfectly ordered, without confusion, and all open. Wide open.
I frequently find you there.
0 1962-02-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What I mean by experience is something totally different from what people normally understand. Its something almost not new as such but assuming a new reality. It is not experiencing what one knows thats taken for granted, its banal but. We would need another word. Instead of knowing something (even a knowledge far superior to Mental knowledge, even a very integral knowledge), you become the power that makes it BE.
Essentially, it is becoming the tapas [energy] of things the tapas of the universe.
0 1962-02-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But as soon as you move into a subtler realm, like the vital (and the Mental even more so), there is a narrow margin of possibilities. You can see the rough outlines of what is going to take place, but in the details it can be this way or that way: it is possible for certain wills or influences to interfere and create discrepancies.
This is so because the original Will is reflected, as it were, in different realms, and in each realm the organization and relation of the images are changed. The world we live in is a world of imagesnot THE thing itself in its essence, but its reflection. We could say that in our material existence we are merely a reflection, an image of what we are in our essential reality. And the modalities of these reflections are what introduce all the errors and all the falsifications (what is seen in its essence is perfectly true and pure, existing from all eternity, while images are essentially variable). And according to the amount of falsehood introduced into the vibrations, the amount of distortion and alteration increases. Each circumstance, each event and each thing can be said to have one pure existenceits true existence and a considerable number of impure or distorted existences in the various realms of being. There is a substantial beginning of distortion, for instance, in the intellectual realm (indeed, the Mental realm holds a considerable amount of distortion), and it increases as all the emotional and censorial realms interfere. Arriving at the material plane, the vision is most often unrecognizable. Completely distorted. To such a point that its sometimes very hard to realize that this is the material expression of thattheres not much resemblance any longer!
This approach to the problem is rather new and can provide the key to many things.
--
Meanwhile, there are all sorts of ways to receive indications. That exact, precise and (whats the word?) habitual vision certain people have may stem from various sources. It may be a vision through identity with circumstances and things when you have learned to expand your consciousness. It may be an indication from some chatterbox of the invisible world, who has got it into his head to let you know whats going to happenthis is often the case. Then everything depends on your harbingers morals: if he is having fun at your expense, he spins stories for youthis almost always happens to those who receive their information from entities. To bait you, they may repeatedly tell you how things are going to turn out (for they have a universal vision in some vital or Mental realm); then, when they are sure you trust them, they may start telling you fibs and, as they say in English, you make a fool of yourself. This happens frequently! You have to be in a higher consciousness than these fellows, these entities (or these minor gods, as some call them) and able to check from above the value of their statements.
With a universal Mental vision, you can see (and this is very interesting) how the Mental world operates to get realized on the physical plane. You see the various Mental formations, how they converge, conflict, combine and relate to one another, which ones get the upper hand, exert a stronger influence and achieve a more total realization. Now, if you really want a higher vision, you must get out of the Mental world and see the original wills as they descend to take expression. In this case, you may not have all the details, but the central FACT, the fact in its central truth, is indisputable, undeniable, absolutely correct.
Some people also have the faculty of predicting things already existing on earth but at a distance, far from physical eyestheyre generally those who have the capacity to expand and extend their consciousness. Their vision is slightly more subtle than physical vision, and depends on an organ subtler than its purely material counterpart (what could be called the life of this organ). So, by projecting their consciousness, and having the will to see, they can clearly see things that already exist but are beyond our ordinary field of vision. Those who have this capacitysincere people who tell what they see, not blufferssee with perfect precision and exactness.
--
It can happen in different ways. Quite often I was informed by a small entity or some being or other. Sometimes the aura protected meall sorts of things. My life was rarely limited to the physical body. And this is useful, its good. Necessary alsoit enhances your capacities. Thon told me right from the start: You people deprive yourselves of the most useful kind of senses, EVEN FOR ORDINARY LIFE. If you develop your inner senses (he gave them fabulous names), you can. And its true, absolutely true, we can know infinitely more than we normally do, merely by using our own senses. And not only Mentally but vitally and even physically as well.
But what is the method?
--
Its easier with the mind because we are more used to concentrating there. When you want to reflect and find a solution to something, instead of using Mental deduction, you stop everything, focus on the idea or problem, and then concentrate, concentrate, intensifying the crux of the problem. You stop everything and wait until, through sheer intensity of concentration, a response comes. Learning that also demands a little time; but if you were ever a good student you have something of the aptitudeits not so very difficult.
Theres a kind of extension of the physical senses. In American Indians, for instance, the senses of hearing and smell are far more extended than ours (in dogs too!). When I was eight or ten years old, I had an Indian friend who came with Buffalo Bill in the days of the Hippodrome that was a long time ago, I was around eight. He was so sharp that he could put his ear to the ground and tell, from the intensity of the vibrations, how far the sound of footsteps was coming from. All the children immediately said, Id really like to know how to do that! And so you try.
--
"Hearing behind a sound," Mother explained, "means to make contact with the subtle reality behind the material fact: behind the word or the physical sound, or behind music, for example. You concentrate and then hear what is behind. It means contacting the vital reality behind appearances (there can also be a Mental reality, but usually what is immediately behind the physical noise is a vital reality)."
The studio on Rue Lemercier in Paris, in 1898.
0 1962-03-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Although sometimes, yes, all of a sudden. Take this example (it may seem a mere trifle, but when you have reached this point): the first sudden glimmer of conscious control over a bodily functioning, giving you a glimpse of the time when everything will function through the action of a conscious will. That has begun but its a tiny, tiny, tiny beginning. And the slightest Mental intrusion from the old movement spoils it all I mean the old way of behaving with your body: you want this and you want that and you want to make it do this and you want to make it The minute that pops up, everything stops. Progress comes to a standstill. One must be in a state of beatific union then one can feel the new functioning begin.
But it has become such a delicate play! A MINUTE thing, minute, can throw everything out of gearone simple ordinary movement. If through habit you slip back into the ordinary functioning (these are infinitesimal things, not easily seen, subtle, tenuous; one must be very, very, VERY alert), if this happens, the whole new thing stops. Then you have to wait. Wait until the ordinary functioning consents to stop, and that means meditating, entering into contemplationgoing over the whole path again. Then, when you have caught hold of That again and can stay there for a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes (its marvelous when it lasts a few minutes). And then it gets jammed again and everything has to be done over.
--
The trouble is, the Mental mechanism isnt there any more. Before, with the mind working, I would take up this thing or do that thing, but now I dont let it function, so theres nothing to make me move!
Absolutely. But its a big progress.
--
Its that old habit, the old fear of being lazy. It took me. But Sri Aurobindo cured me of that rather quickly. Thats how it was before I met him. And thats the first thing he did: he gave me a tap on the head, and all activity ceasedtotal silence, all Mental constructions and habits swept away in the blink of an eye.
I was very careful not to let it come back.
--
He mentions it when he explains Mental equality3that a state is reached where one is unable to initiate any activity; only the stimulus of an impulsion from above can move you. So you do nothing, you just stay like that, perfectly immobile in your mind (not only physicallyespecially in your mind): you dont initiate anything.
Before, the mind was always creating, setting actions, wills and movements into motion, producing consequences; and its very frightening when that stopsyou feel youre becoming an idiot. But its quite the opposite! No more ideas, no more will, no more impulsions, nothing. You act only when something makes you act, without knowing why or how.
0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are skies (not heavens) in the vital world that are truly paradises. Naturally the real divine element is lacking, but only spiritual purity and the true spiritual sense can show you the difference. All who remain within the vital or Mental worlds are completely deluded. They see marvelous things, miracles in profusion (thats where you find the most miracles!).
By neglecting to explain this aspect [in this Talk], I passed over a large part of the topic in silence. I usually dont speak of those things, or else mention them only in passingit terrifies people and they immediately start wondering, Oh, is it really a god? Is it this is it that? Could it be a devil in disguise? They panic.
Only its perfectly true that to deal with those realms one must either be fully protected by a guru, a real guru, a man with knowledge, or else have purity (not saintliness), an unmixed vital and Mental purity. Very, very often, bhaktas [devotees] of Sri Aurobindo or mewhen they are sincere, truly sincere, that is, people of great spiritual purityhave dozens of beings appear to them, saying, I am Sri Aurobindo. It happens all the time, with all the right external appearancesits very easy for such beings to put on a disguise. It takes the inner psychic purity not to be deceivedyou invariably FEEL something that makes it impossible for you to be duped. But otherwise, many, many people are taken in.
I dont like to talk about this because people here have no discrimination; they would be left with nothing but fear and would no longer believe in anything, forever asking me, Oh, isnt this a trick? Which paralyzes everything. Thats why I didnt speak about that in this Talk.
--
In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the Overmind represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled Mental man till now.
***
0 1962-05-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A link is missing. There (gesture above) one knows, here (gesture into Matter) one doesnt know, and theres always the feeling that a change of place or a change of physical conditions is going to establish the contact. It happenstrue, it does happen: suddenly, flash! But it happens under ANY circumstances. It doesnt depend on outer changes. I know very well that nothing in either the climate or the living conditions here is absolutely intolerableits only our ideas about it, our Mental reactions ( Mental and vital). But if there were just that joy, the joy of total opening, all the rest would be all right.
Yet it may also be that up there in the mountains, all alone with the mountains, it would suddenly come. It is possibleeverything is possible. There is nothing that doesnt hold a possibility of truth.
0 1962-05-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All Mental life is harsh, actually.
(silence)
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But that is a singular state: there is no Mental intervention at all; you live things POSITIVELY, just as you experience them physically, in the same way that this (Mother knocks on the table next to her) is physically a table. Its that kind of perception something positive. I positively said, I am going to my cousins place, and the relationship had an absolutely positive vibrationit wasnt at all something thought or even remembered: theres no remembering anything, its simply there, alive. A strange state. I have had it on several occasions, and when I have it I am aware that this must be the state people who know what is happening and make predictions are inin this state there is no possibility of doubt. No thoughts intervenenone at all, not one. Absolutely nothing intellectual: simply certain vital-physical vibrations, and then you know. And you dont even wonder how you know; its not that kind of thingits self-evident. And since I was in that state when I saw the reincarnation of the cousin, I am perfectly sure of what I saw. And god knows (Mother laughs), when I came out of it and began to look at it all with my usual consciousness, I said to myself, My word! I would never have thought of such a thing! It was millions of miles from any thought of mine. Besides, I never used to think of that cousin; he was a fine boy but I never paid much attention to him, he had no place in my active consciousness.
Its fun.
0 1962-06-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is a Mental interiorization.
Oh, yesits clear, very clear, very luminous a bit hard. But everything seems hard to me now! If you only knew. It has come to the point where as soon as I change states I get the feeling that the body is sitting on jagged chunks of wood and yet it is very comfortably ensconced on feather cushions!
0 1962-06-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But through that event I have been put in contact with a certain realm of Mental distortion which is a bit bewildering. Ive realized that I say something, something clear as crystal for me, and then.
(silence)
No, the Grace has made him an object of special attention, thrusting him into a world which, externally, was not his own. In a matter of a few years he has made a journey of several lifetimes, so it has been a little bit difficult. Truly, in a few years he has inwardly traveled many lifetimes. And he has had to face the necessity of an enormous progress, all the more difficult because he hadnt Mentally accepted or foreseen it. So he doesnt understand any more, poor man! If I could only take him in my arms like a baby and say to him, My poor little dear, my dear little child and make him feel good, then all would be well. But its not possible theres a whole spiritual construction. So I do it from a distance, wordlessly, in silence. But what gets through all that crust? I dont know! Over and over, I keep saying one thing: To divine Love, all human confusions and misunderstandings are unknown. There. Well, we will see. Wherever divine Love is present, human confusions and misunderstandings cannot exist, cannot enter.
Thats the only solution.
--
Yes, but if I may say so, thats exactly what Ive been working towards all these years. I had read in Sri Aurobindo: Mental silence, tranquillity, peace and so thats what Ive been striving for. I mean, I think Ive got it nowwhen I meditate, its tranquil.
Oh, yes! Certainly.
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Last night I said to myself, Now look, thats not so brilliantif we are still no farther than that. You see, I was having an experience of (it wasnt an experience, really, but quite a normal state that was continuing and, as far as I could see, was practically continuous) a recharging of batteries. But there was also a kind of receiving and observing devicedetestable! And I used to think it was excellent! For years before last April, everything was very calm, the mind was always turned this way (gesture above), silent, and there was a sort of functioning I thought it was very good! Well, I have realized that its worthless. Mind you, I wish everyone could have what I had! It was extremely handy, far beyond ordinary Mental methods but in fact, its not true. It is still a a gimmick. Not the TRUE thing. Its still one of the things that keep life from being divine, so its worthless!
But what in our present existence doesnt keep life from being divine? Nothing I know of! (Mother laughs) happily, Sri Aurobindo and I were the same on this point [a sense of humor]. Effortlessly, from a very young age, something in me has always laughed. It sees all the catastrophes, sees all the suffering, sees it all and cant help laughing the way one laughs at something that pretends to be but isnt.
0 1962-07-07, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But after this prologue, I intend to tackle the problem practically, to speak of the moment when people reach the limits of the mind, when they start going round in circles and find nothing; then I will tell them of zones beyond the mind, and of what can be discovered when one goes within: Mental silence. Ill talk about a practical discipline. That was my idea. My idea isnt to give an abstract explanation but to take up yoga from a practical angle: try to do this, and heres what you may expect Mental transformation, change in the vital, dreams, etc. All practical things. Id like to explore the psychological aspect.
Thats good. From the standpoint of the Work, of what you create, of course its very good, very interesting; it needs to be said, it MUST be said. But is the gentleman who wrote you that letter capable of understanding anything of it? Thats where I put a question mark.
0 1962-07-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As soon as something is translated into words, expressed Mentally, its funny how it falls flat. It all seems to fall flat.
Yes, its finished, flat, flatdrained.
--
Recently, for a short part of my nights, I suddenly find a certain task set before me dealing with this ones or that ones Mental constructions. And then I feel I am facing a tremendous, destructive falsehooda TOTAL contradiction, in fact, of this endlessly unfolding creative vibration.
Some of the people concerned are here, others elsewhere that is, its the Mental state (even the higher mind in some cases, not necessarily very down-to-earth) of this one or that one or. It comes individually (and the persons name along with it). And a kind of uneasiness takes hold of my body, as if I were in the presence of I dont know, in ordinary life I would say, Go away! (Mother brusquely shoos something away) But here it is presented for me to do a particular work (I know the people, some are here, others elsewhere; theyre people I am in touch with for the yoga). So I am faced with these Mental formations and each one is HELD like this (Mother grips the thing with both hands) so that I dont simply brush it aside. Then (its certainly a good opportunity to go completely crazy!) I slowly bring in the divine Vibration, and I hold it like this, without moving (Mother holds this vibration tight and drives it in like a sword of light), without moving until everything fades away into silence.
I havent had the chance (laughing) to ask them what happened to them!
--
This has never happened before, its brand-new. Before, there was always that Power transmitted through the higher mind (what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind); it was up there, dissolving, dispersing, changing, doing a whole lot of work, without any difficulty, effortlessly (gesture above the head showing the tranquil, irresistible flowing of a stream), nothing to it. That was my constant, second-to-second action, everywhere, all the time, for everything that came to me. But THIS is completely, completely new. Its a sort of imposition, almost like an imposition on the PHYSICAL brain (I presume it must be for changing the brain cells). And I am allowed to do only one thing (Mother grips the Mental construction presented to her); its right in front of me like this and wont leave me, it clings like a leech, stock-still. So I have to bring in the supreme, divine Vibration, the Vibration I experienced the other day [April 13], and hold it steadily (sometimes it takes quite a while) until all is hushed in a divine silence.
(silence)
0 1962-07-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have seen you very often in visions, symbolic visions in the Mental realm, but thats not what it was. It was in the subtle physical, this close (same gesture); you came deliberately, and you looked at me. Oh, I told you, how nice!
I had a dream about you, but I felt the subconscient made it up.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The old way of yoga failed to bring about the harmony or unity of Spirit and life: it instead dismissed the world as Maya [Illusion] or a transient Play. The result has been loss of life-power and the degeneration of India. As was said in the Gita, These peoples would perish if I did not do worksthese peoples of India have truly gone down to ruin. A few sannyasins and bairagis [renunciants] to be saintly and perfect and liberated, a few bhaktas [lovers of God] to dance in a mad ecstasy of love and sweet emotion and Ananda [Bliss], and a whole race to become lifeless, void of intelligence, sunk in deep tamas [inertia]is this the effect of true spirituality? No, we must first attain all the partial experiences possible on the Mental level and flood the mind with spiritual delight and illumine it with spiritual light, but afterwards we must rise above. If we cannot rise above, to the supra Mental level, that is, it is hardly possible to know the worlds final secret and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize Godto do what is said in the Gita, To know Me integrally. The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda these are the spirits five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman [Absolute] but in the body, in life, in the world. The integral being, the integral consciousness, the integral Ananda blossoms out and takes form in life. This is the central clue of my yoga, its funda Mental principle.
This is no easy change to make. After these fifteen years I am only now rising into the lowest of the three levels of the Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities. But when this siddhi will be complete, then I am absolutely certain that through me God will give to others the siddhi of the Supermind with less effort. Then my real work will begin. I am not impatient for success in the work. What is to happen will happen in Gods appointed time. I have no hasty or disorderly impulse to rush into the field of work in the strength of the little ego. Even if I did not succeed in my work I would not be shaken. This work is not mine but Gods. I will listen to no other call; when God moves me then I will move.
--
Now let me discuss some particular points of your letter. I do not want to say much in this letter about what you have written as regards your yoga. We shall have better occasion when we meet. To look upon the body as a corpse is a sign of Sannyasa, of the path of Nirvana. You cannot be of the world with this idea. You must have delight in all thingsin the Spirit as well as in the body. The body has consciousness, it is Gods form. When you see God in everything that is in the world, when you have this vision that all this is Brahman, Sarvamidam Brahma, that Vasudeva is all thisVasudevah sarvamiti then you have the universal delight. The flow of that delight precipitates and courses even through the body. When you are in such a state, full of the spiritual consciousness, you can lead a married life, a life in the world. In all your works you find the expression of Gods delight. So far I have been transforming all the objects and perceptions of the mind and the senses into delight on the Mental level. Now they are taking the form of the supra Mental delight. In this condition is the perfect vision and perception of Sachchidananda.
You write about the Deva Samgha and say, I am not a god, I am only a piece of much hammered and tempered iron. No one is a God but in each man there is a God and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do. I recognize that there are great and small adharas [vessels]. I do not accept, however, your description of yourself as accurate. Still whatever the nature of the vessel, once the touch of God is upon it, once the spirit is awake, great and small and all that does not make much difference. There may be more difficulties, more time may be taken, there may be a difference in the manifestation, but even about that there is no certainty. The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my failings a small one? Were there less obstacles in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something. That is sufficient, since God wanted to build it. It is the same as regards everyone. Not our strength but the Shakti of God is the sadhaka [worker] of this yoga.
--
Lele, a tantric guru Sri Aurobindo met in 1908, who gave him the realization of Mental silence and Nirvana.
Rama, the divine Avatar who killed the demon Ravana with the help of Hanuman and the other monkeys.
0 1962-07-25, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother listens to Satprem read a passage on Mental silence from his manuscript on Sri Aurobindo.)
Its very good.
--
In fact, if I look at the order my own yoga took. When I was five years old (I must have begun earlier, but the memory is a bit vague and imprecise) but from five onwards, in my consciousness (not a Mental memory buthow can I put it?its noted, a notation in my consciousness) well, I began with consciousness. Of course I had no idea what it was. But my first experience was of the consciousness here (gesture above the head), which I felt like a Light and a Force; and I felt it there (same gesture) at the age of five.
It was a very pleasant sensation. I would sit in a little armchair made especially for me, all alone in my room, and I (I didnt know what it was, you see, not a thing, nothing Mentally zero) and I had a VERY PLEASANT feeling of something very strong, very luminous, and it was here (above the head). Consciousness. And I felt, Thats what I have to live, what I have to be. Not with all those words, naturally, but (Mother makes a gesture of aspiration Upward). Then I would pull it down, for it was it was truly my raison dtre.
--
Next came the period of learning and developing, but on an ordinary Mental levelschool years.1 Curiosity made me want to learn to read. Did I tell you how it happened? When I was around seven, just under seven, my brother, who was eighteen months older, used to bring big pictures home from school with him (you know, pictures for children with captions at the bottom; theyre still used nowadays) and he gave me one of them. Whats written there? I asked. Read it! he said. Dont know how, I replied. Then learn! All right, I told him, show me the letters. He brought me an A-B-C book. I knew it within two days and on the third day I started reading. Thats how I learned. Oh-oh, they used to say, this child is backward! Seven years old and she still cant readdisgraceful! The whole family fretted about it. And then lo and behold, in about a week I knew what should have taken me years to learnit made them think twice!
Then, school years. I was a very bright student, always for the same reason: I wanted to understand. I wasnt interested in learning things by heart like the others did I wanted to understand them. And what a memory I had, a fantastic memory for sounds and images! I had only to read a poem aloud at night, and the next morning I knew it. And after I had studied or read a book and someone mentioned a passage to me, I would say, Ah, yes thats on page so and so. I would find the page. Nothing had faded, it was all still fresh. But this is the ordinary period of development.
--
Then, a period of intensive Mental development, Mental development of the most complete type: a study of all the philosophies, all the conceptual juggling, in minute detaildelving into systems, getting a grasp on them. Ten years of intensive Mental studies leading me to Sri Aurobindo.
So I had all this preparation. And I am giving you these details simply to tell you it all began with consciousness (I knew very well what consciousness was, even before I had any word or idea to explain it), consciousness and its forceits force of action, its force of execution. Next, a detailed study and thorough development of the vital. After that, Mental development taken to its uppermost limit, where you can juggle with all ideas; a develop Mental stage where its already understood that all ideas are true and that theres a synthesis to be made, and that beyond the synthesis lies something luminous and true. And behind it all, a continual consciousness. Such was my state when I came here: Id had a world of experiences and had already attained conscious union with the Divine above and withinall of it consciously realized, carefully noted and so forthwhen I came to Sri Aurobindo.
From the standpoint of shakti, this is the normal course: consciousness, vital, Mental and spiritual.
Is it different for men? I dont know. Sri Aurobindos case was quite special, and apart from him I dont see any convincing example. But generally speaking, what is most developed in a man, along with the mind, is the physical consciousness; the vital is very impulsive, practically ungoverned. Thats my experience of the hundreds and hundreds of men I have met. Theres normally a physical strength built up through games and exercises, and side by side a more or less advanced, but primarily Mental development, very Mental. The vital is terribly impulsive and barely organized, except in artists, and even there. I lived among artists for ten years and found this ground to be mostly fallow. I mingled with all the great artists of the time, I was like a kid sister to them (it was at the turn of the century, with the Universal Exposition in 1900; and these were the leading artists of the epoch); so I was by far the youngest, much younger than any of themthey were all thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, while I was nineteen or twenty. Well I was much more advanced in their own fieldnot in what I was producing (I was a perfectly ordinary artist), but from the viewpoint of consciousness: observations, experiences, studies.
I am not sure, but it seems to me that the problem of consciousness ought to come first.
--
Many, many things in my life have completely vanished I dont remember them any more, theyre gone from my consciousness everything that was useless. But there is a very clear vision of everything that was preparing the jiva for its action here. Even before coming and meeting Sri Aurobindo, I had realized everything needed to begin his yoga. It was all ready, classified, organized. Magnificent! A superb Mental construction which he demolished within five minutes!
How happy I was! Aah! It was really the reward for all my efforts.
--
I had tried to get complete Mental silenceyou know, what you just described,3 this kind of Mental stillness he speaks of (when you have it, anything can pass through your head without causing the least ripple), but I had never succeeded. I had tried, but couldnt do it. I could be silent when I wanted to, but as soon as I stopped thinking solely of that, stopped wanting only that, the invasion resumed and the work had to be done all over again.
Thats all I had told him (not in great detail, in a few words). Then I sat down near him and he began talking with Richard, about the world, yoga, the futureall kinds of thingswhat was going to happen (he already knew the war would break out; this was 1914, war broke out in August, and he knew it towards the end of March or early April). So the two of them talked and talked and talkedgreat speculations. It didnt interest me in the least, I didnt listen. All these things belonged to the past, I had seen it all (I too had had my visions and revelations). I was simply sitting beside him on the floor (he was sitting in a chair with Richard facing him across a table, and they were talking). I was just sitting there, not listening. I dont know how long they went on, but all at once I felt a great Force come into mea peace, a silence, something massive! It came, did this (Mother sweeps her hand across her forehead), descended and stopped here (gesture at the chest).4 When they finished talking, I got up and left. And then I noticed that not a thought remained I no longer knew anything or understood anything, I was absolutely BLANK. So I gave thanks to the Lord and thanked Sri Aurobindo in my heart.
--
Mother is referring to a letter of Sri Aurobindo's which Satprem had quoted in his manuscript: "... in the calm mind, it is the substance of the Mental being that is still, so still that nothing disturbs it. If thoughts or activities come, they do not rise at all out of the mind, but they come from outside and cross the mind as a flight of birds crosses the sky in a windless air. It passes, disturbs nothing, leaving no trace. Even if a thousand images or the most violent events pass across it, the calm stillness remains as if the very texture of the mind were a substance of eternal and indestructible peace. A mind that has achieved this calmness can begin to act, even intensely and powerfully, but it will keep its funda Mental stillnessoriginating nothing from itself but receiving from Above and giving it a Mental form without adding anything of its own, calmly, dispassionately, though with the joy of the Truth and the happy power and light of its passage."
Cent. Ed., XXIII. 637.
Mother specified: "It encompassed the three active Mental centers [the forehead, between the eyebrows, and the throat]."
The former governor of "French India" with whom Satprem came to work in the Pondicherry government. Actually, Satprem most probably saw Sri Aurobindo in 1946 and not in '48.
0 1962-07-28, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have seen that the different stages of my development occurred in twelve-year periods, though I dont recall the exact dates. The first period, from the age of five (I cant start earlier than five!) to about eighteen, dealt with consciousness. Then came all the artistic and vital development, culminating in the occult development with Thon (I met Thon around 1905 or 06, I think1). Then right around this time an intensive Mental development beganfrom 1908 to 1920, or a little before; but it was especially intense before coming here in 1914.
And 1920 marked the beginning of full development. Not spiritual development that had been going on from the very start but ACTION, the action with Sri Aurobindo. That was clearly from 1920 on; I had met Sri Aurobindo earlier, but it really began in 1920.2
--
From 1911 or 12, up to 1914, there was the whole series of inner experiences, psychic experiences, preparing me to meet Sri Aurobindo (so this ran parallel to my Mental development).
In practice, these periods overlap, but approximately every twelve years a particular type of development predominated, in this order: consciousness first, then the vital (mainly from the aesthetic point of view, but a study of sensations as well), then the mind, then spiritual realization. And in between the vital and Mental phases came the brief period of occultism, serving both as a transition and a basis for spiritual development.
In fact, Mother met Theon for the first time one day in 1904, in Paris. Then she went to Tlemcen in 1905 and again in 1906.
0 1962-08-04, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive been observing all this in a neuro-physical realm, subtle-physical, that is but its still physical and in a complete Mental silence where all judgments (you know, judgments) have disappeared, along with a certain way of observing things. Thats why I cant talk about it.
These vibrations have various qualities; if they were expressed through a Mental observation, it would be done through such things as taste, color, and so forth, everything Ive just mentioned1but thats not how theyre expressed. They come almost exclusively as sensations, but those sensations some, I mean some vibrations, have rounded edges. Some come horizontally (I was in fact studying everything that comes horizontally), others result from the state of consciousness (vertical gesture from top to bottom). While at the same time, others are. Yes, its like looking through a high-powered microscope: some are rounded, others pointed; some are darker, some brighter. Some are very upsetting to the body, and some even feel dangerous. On the other hand, certain ones make the body receptive to the vibration, which we might call the Lords Vibration, the supreme Vibration. You see, all this is the outcome of a discipline, a tapasya, for preparing the body to receive the Lords Vibrations (the first step is receiving, being able to receive them; afterwards you have to hold on to and then manifest them). Those vibrations are unmistakable, they are something else entirely. But other vibrations are helpful, beneficial, while still others are disruptive, contradictory.
And each one is beginning to reveal its own particular nature. There are those stemming from peoples thoughts (I sense them in my body, not in the mind: the material consequence of peoples psychological state, and even their state of health). Some things are general and last a bit longer; others are momentary, lasting only a few seconds. The first step is to study the different vibrational qualitiesyou could practically draw diagrams: if we had a machine sensitive enough to record these things, it would produce all kinds of zigs and zags.2 Certain vibrations immediately stop or change or are dissolved or repelled. Others are adopted, as it were, and transformed. The majority are simply pushed back and worked on from a distancequite a distance! I keep them at a fair distance (Mother laughs). Very few are let in. But some are let in for the sake of the experience, to see how much they upset the body. Theres also the effect of peoples permanent auras: I know a certain person is arriving by his auras effect on the body; because (laughing) each vibration has its particular effect on the bodyperfectly prosaic things, maybe, but by studying them you realize that each thing has its own law.
0 1962-08-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am making some interesting discoveries. They arent really discoveries, but nowadays none of these things are theoretical, not the least bit Mental (the mind is in a quiet ease)theyre essentially practical. And they take unexpected forms. The other day as I was walking, an old formation suddenly popped up, some. thing that had already tried to materialize when Sri Aurobindo was still here, but which he had stopped. It was one possibility among innumerable others, trying to manifest in this bodys existence I wont say what it is.
It was one of the very saddest things that could manifest physically in association with a spiritual life.
--
And I have noticed that now. You see, the body used to be like a little child, complaining when things werent right; it wouldnt revolt, but it moaned. But this time its only reaction was, Why am I not transformed? Why am I not transformed? I want to be transformed, I want to be transformed. Not with words, because there was nothing Mental about it, but simply with a kind of tension the tension you feel when the door to the psychic being is shut and you push, push, push to get to the other side. The same thing, the same kind of tension: pushing, pushing, pushing towards what? I dont know. We call it the transformation because we dont know what it isif we did know, it would mean we had already begun to realize it. Theres a faint impression of what that state could be (but its very, very faint). And theres this feeling of tension, of pushingpleading and imploring. That was the bodys only reaction this time, nothing else, not even any sorrow. Because at one time something like fifty years agoit used to say, Why do I deserve this? and similar stupidities; thats been gone for more than fifty years. Then for a long while after, something disordered, unharmonious or nasty could bring me sorrow; thats gone too. But thats recent, it disappeared with the experience of April 13. And now: transformation, transformation, transformation; thats the only idea left, the only will.
(silence)
--
I have had other similar experienceson Durgas day, for instance, when Sri Aurobindo was still here (you know, thats the day when Durga masters an asura; she doesnt kill him, she masters him). Well, each year one particular type of thing was undermined (and my experiences were never Mental: the experience would suddenly come, and AFTERWARDS I would realize it was Durgas day), and each time I used to tell Sri Aurobindo, Looktoday this (or that) thing has been cut off at the roots. Thats how it works with the adverse forcesyes, like something being uprooted from the world. Whatever has already spread out keeps going and follows its karma, but the SOURCE is dried up. Thats also what happened (it was in 1904, I believe) when the Asura of Consciousness and Darkness made his surrender and was converted; he told me, I have millions and millions of emanations, and these will keep on living, but their source has now run dry.4 How much time will it take to exhaust it all? We cant say, but the source has dried up and that is something extremely important. In 1920, that terror was trying to spread all over the world and to become really catastrophic; and then in my inner vision I could see that a whole movement had dried up at its source. This means that little by little, little by little, little by little the karma is being exhausted.
The same goes for these little physical movements. Things dont seem to be initiated any more, I mean theyre no longer being generated. But everything thats already present in the world has to be exhausted.
0 1962-08-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Dont decide anything Mentally.
You must learn to be immobile, silent, and let the Lord speak through you; its much better than deciding in advance, much better. Personally, the Lord has never failed me. I have found myself hundreds of times in very difficult situations; I wouldnt do anything, I would say, All right, lets see what happens! And of course, what happened was always for the best. And I had nothing to do with itit wasnt me, it was the Lord.
--
For all the states of being, the Mental, the vital, and even the subtle physical, that sense of separation has long been gone. But now I am speaking of the body. I say I, of course but what says I is its something as vast as the universe. And it CANNOT be otherwise. Its not that I want it this way, or because I insist on it, its not the result of a tapasya or not at all: it CANNOT BE OTHERWISE, thats how it is. Its my spontaneous way of being. The experience has become completely (how to put it?) externalized.
And thats what makes the ESSENTIAL difference for this body. Thats why it feels different from other bodies. Its (Mother shakes her head) no, its not the same thing, it distinctly feels its not the samebecause its reactions are different!
--
It seems he said that if we could make it to 1964, afterwards the difficulties would disappear. (But this is a very strong formationwhat did he pick up? Is it Sri Aurobindos formation? Is it the boys thought, or what?) But hes a wonderful mind-reader; he must have a marvelous power of vision in the Mental world.
It really amused me. If you asked if you asked people here, not too many would have such a clear idea: They have come to do something entirely new and very difficult.
0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With very few exceptions, these illnesses are not found to originate from germs, microbes or bacteria. They are frequently classified as Mental illnesses, nervous disorders, etc., and they result from that inner discrepancy.
***
--
Its more like part of the kundalini method. Its not an exteriorization, but the Mental opening to higher realms.
Sometimes it happens just when Im falling asleep.
--
For a long, long time, that was also the one thing I felt was worth living forConsciousness. When I met Thon and came to understand the mechanism, I also understood why I wasnt conscious at a certain level. I think Ive told you how I spent ten months one year working to connect two layerstwo layers of consciousness; the contact wasnt established and so I couldnt have the spontaneous experience of a whole spectrum of things. Madame Thon told me, Its because theres an undeveloped layer between this part and that part. I was very conscious of all the gradations: Thon had explained it all in the simplest terms, so you didnt need to be, as I said, a genius to understand. He had made a quadruple division, and each of them was divided into four, and then again into four, making innumerable divisions of the being; but with that Mental simplification you could make in-depth psychological studies of your own being. And so by observation and elimination I eventually discovered that between this and that (gesture indicating two levels of Mothers consciousness), there was an undeveloped layerit wasnt conscious. So I worked for ten months on nothing but that: absolutely no results. I didnt care, I kept right on, telling myself, Well, it may take me fifty years to get anywhere, who knows. And then I left for the country (I was living in Paris at the time). I lay down on the grass, and all at once, with the contact of earth and grass, poof! There was a sort of inner explosion the link was established, and full consciousness came, along with all the ensuing experiences. Well, I said to myself, it was worth all the trouble!
And I am sure thats how the work is done, slowly, imperceptibly, like a chick being formed in the egg: you see the shell, you see only the shell, you dont know whats inside, whether its just an egg or a chick (normally, I meanof course, you could see through with special instruments) and then the beak goes peck-peck! And then cheep! Out comes the chick, just like that. Its the same thing exactly for the contact with the psychic being. For months on end, sometimes years, you may be sitting before a closed door, push, push, pushing, and feeling, feeling the pressure (it hurts!), and theres nothing, no results. Then all at once, you dont know why or how, you sit down and poof! Everything bursts wide open, everything is ready, everything is doneits over, you emerge into a full psychic consciousness and become intimate with your psychic being. Then everything changeseverything changesyour life completely changes, its a total reversal of your whole existence.
0 1962-09-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is quite evident that X and I are not on the same plane. His power and his action are on a Mental-physical plane (gesture below), and this may bring me some complications by making me do a work I usually have nothing to do with.
You have often told me that each time he comes it stirs up lower things.
--
No, its not! I tell you, he cant understand. To him, sadhana. I sent him word that I was fully engrossed in sadhana, and then I immediately saw his Mental image of me sitting cross-legged doing a perpetual puja! You get the idea. For him, sadhana means certain fixed rules, and if you let the rules go, you let go of the sadhana. But it doesnt matter, dont worry about it.
He is ill because something is trying to make him go through several lifetimes in one. If it succeeds, well, he will eventually understand; if it doesnt succeed, we will have done what we could, he will have done what he could, and everything will be for the best. Thats all.
0 1962-09-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because its something else altogether. Untranslatable, not the same Mentality! Like French humor and English humortheyre far, far apart so far apart that theyre usually impervious to each other!
***
0 1962-09-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am not doing it to show it to people or to have anyone read it, but to remain in Savitris atmosphere, for I love that atmosphere. It will give me an hour of concentration, and Ill see if by chance. I have no gift for poetry, but Ill see if it comes! (It surely wont come from a Mentality developed in this present existence theres no poetic gift!) So its interesting, Ill see if anything comes. I am going to give it a try.
I know that light. I am immediately plunged into it each time I read Savitri. It is a very, very beautiful light.
0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive had conscious contacts with all the beings of the tradition Theon made known to me, and with all the beings described in Indian tradition; in fact, as far as I know Ive had contacts with all the deities of all the religions. Theres a gradation (gesture of levels). These beings are found all the way from there are even some in the vital; in the Mental realm, man has deified many things: he has readily made gods out of whatever didnt seem exactly like him. If you are eclectic, you can have contacts with them all. And they all have their own reality and existence.
This region just overlooks the earth and the mind (including the very highest mind). But evolution I mean TERRESTRIAL evolution, with its particular rhythm which is more condensed, more concentrated and, you could say, more focused than universal evolution as a wholethis terrestrial evolution has, with the human species, created a kind of higher intellectuality capable of passing through the over Mental region, the region of the gods, and reaching a higher Principle directly.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And mind you, I knew nothing of all those worlds, I hadnt the slightest knowledge; but all my experiences came that wayunexpectedly, without my seeking anything. When I looked at a painting, same thing: something would suddenly open up inside my head and I would see the origin of the painting and such colors! One can get to that world directly from the vital, without going through all the Mental gradations.
***
0 1962-10-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like that famous Nirvanayou can find it behind everything. Theres a psychic nirvana, a Mental nirvana, even a vital nirvana. I think I already told you about the experience I had with Tagore in Japan. Tagore always used to say that as soon as he started meditating he entered Nirvana, and he asked me to meditate with him. We sat together in meditation. I was expecting to make a very steep ascent, but he simply went into his MIND, and there (what I do, you see, is tune in to the person I am meditating with, identify with him thats how I know what happens). Well, he started meditating, and everything quite rapidly came to a halt, became absolutely immobile (this he did very well), and from there he sort of fell backwards, and it was Nothingness. And he could remain in that state indefinitely! We did in fact stay like that for a rather long time; I dont remember how long, three quarters of an hour or an hour, but anyway it was long enough. I was keeping alert the whole time to see if, by chance, he would go on into something else, but there he stayedhe stayed there nice and calm, without stirring. Then he came back, his mind started up again, and that was that.
I said nothing to him.
--
It is the state of Mental tranquillity.
Nothing exists for you any more?
--
You probably enter into the state of pure Existence. First Mental silence, then pure Existence, Existence outside of the Manifestation: the state of Sat.
It is pure Existence, outside of the Manifestation.
0 1962-11-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And whats more, this morning Sri Aurobindo said to me, Today he will tell you something that will explain your experiences to you. So thats what has happened. Its not a Mental explanation, you understand these things are SEEN.
He was here again just now and told me (how shall I put it?) something like: he receives well, as though he were dictating a lot of things to you.
--
In the Alipore jail: "I was Mentally subjected to all sorts of torture for fifteen days. I had to look upon scenes of all sorts of suffering...." (See A.B. Purani, Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 122.)
***
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Xs case, his personal contact rises to the heights, but its purely personal. While his overall vision (I am not saying universal: overall) stops at the vital-physical plane, with a touch of the Mental, and THATS ALL. Theres a contradiction between his personal possibility, which reaches very high (although on quite a tenuous peak), and his overall vision. When his attention turns outward, it is very limited; it may be terrestrial, but its its crusted over, so to speak.
So thats the explanation I gave. But the truth.
0 1962-11-20, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And all night long (or a good part of it in any case), Indira Gandhis thought was here, clinging to me (Indira Gandhi is Nehrus daughter), and the jewelry was sent to her.3 It was handed over to Nehru, who passed it on to Indira.4 And she wrote me a letter I received yesterdaya very (Mother searches for the proper word) a very amicable letter; a letter from someone who has understood that this gift was an important elementnot on a worldwide level (!), but because it was important that people know I have made a gesture of collaboration. But it didnt end there. The letter came yesterday; generally, of course, when I see a letter coming, I see it BEFORE receiving it; but here it was SHE, she herself, thinking [of Mother], thinking, thinking, thinking over and over again. (With Nehru, its always very blurred: he doesnt have sufficient Mental power for his position, he lacks the required strength of mind, so its always hazy; when you tune in to him, thats the impression you getblurred gesturenot solid.) But with her, it kept coming and coming and coming. They must be feeling or beginning to feel that something other than what they have is required.
We shall see.
0 1962-11-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The habit of not understanding something unless it can be Mentally explained is disastrous, for instance. This feeling we have that we dont understand something unless we can explain it thats really disastrous. That half-hours experience was something absolute, you see, not for one second was there any concern to know what was going on (naturally!); it was absolute. And only when the time was up and I had to come out of it did I start wondering, What happened? What does it mean? It wasnt even that pronounced. Its simply an old habit, what we call understanding.
A bad habit.
--
A time will come when it will all be done automatically, but right now that would be impossible. As it is, the way the Force acts is already making people here a little disorientedits verging on being unintelligible to them. In other words, its beginning to obey another law. For instance, to know at the exact moment what needs to be done or said, whats going to happenif theres the slightest bit of concern or concentration to know, it doesnt come. But if I am just like that, simply in a kind of inner immobility, then for all the little details of life, I know at the exact moment. What needs to be said comes: you say this. And not like an order from outside: it just comes, there it is. What needs to be said is there, the reply that needs to be sent is there; the person who enters, entersyoure not forewarned. You do things in a kind of automatic way. In the Mental world, you think of something before doing it (it may happen very fast, but both movements are distinct); here it isnt like that.
This is beginning to be a rather constant occurrence. Its already very baffling for all those who live with me, but if I were as I should be, I think it would be quite intolerable.
0 1962-12-04, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Spiritually, you have that experience as soon as you come into contact with the Divine within; Mentally, you have the experience as soon as the mind is purified; vitally, you have it as soon as you get out of the ego. But its the consciousness of the BODYthe consciousness of the cellswhich had the experience at that moment. Everything else had had it long before and was constantly aware of it, but the body. It had been told about it and believed in it, but it didnt have the experience in such a concrete, total and absolute manner that it cant be forgotten for a single second.
At that moment, the physical being and the individual, personal body had the experience once and for all.
0 1962-12-19, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Even if I speak to someone more intelligent or better informed. Once or twice I said something to Pavitra, to see what would happen: he immediately dogmatizes, makes a Mental principle out of it (consistent with Sri Aurobindos teaching, of course!). And it becomes something rigid, like a box. And he tries! He tries, he KNOWS he shouldnt do that, but. Which means one cannot understand unless one has the experienceyou must have the experience of all this somewhere, mon petit, otherwise you couldnt write about it!
But its Sri Aurobindo!
0 1962-12-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But for instance, if this had happened with people who know nothing of my outer life, they would have said, But Mother went outside, I saw her. I had experiences like that in Paris (it happened to someone else, not me personally). Someone swore that another person (who, by the way, was with me at the time) had come to him, spoken to him and even clapped him on the shoulderall the typical phenomena of ubiquity which in this case were explained by Mental concentration. But this person had no idea that it was impossible (according to material logic) for the other one to have come to him, you see. So he quite simply and naturally said, But look, I saw him, I spoke to him, he clapped me on the shoulder!
So one doesnt say anything because. You see, when people are in Ignorance their immediate explanation is always the same:
0 1962-12-28, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Evolution does not move higher and higher, into an ever more heavenly heaven, but deeper and deeper; and each cycle or evolutionary round comes to completion a little further down, a little nearer the Center where the Supreme High and Low, heaven and earth, will finally join. Thus for the two poles to actually meet, the pioneer must cleanse the Mental, vital, and material middle ground. When the junction is made, not merely Mentally and vitally but materially, Spirit will emerge in Matter, in a total supra Mental being and supra Mental body, and
All earth shall be the Spirits manifest home.1
This cleansing of the middle ground is the whole story of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I had been dredging, dredging, dredging the mire of the subconscious. The supra Mental light was coming down before November,2 but afterwards all the mud arose and it stopped.3 Once again Sri Aurobindo verified, not individually this time but collectively, that if one pulls down too strong a light, the violated darkness below is made to moan. It is noteworthy that each time Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had some new experience marking a progress in the transformation, this progress automatically materialized in the consciousness of the disciples, without their even knowing anything about it, as a period of increased difficulties, sometimes even revolts or illnesses, as though everything were grating and grinding. But then, one begins to understand the mechanism. If a pygmy were abruptly subjected to the simple Mental light of a cultivated man, we would probably see the poor fellow traumatized and driven mad by the subterranean revolutions within him. There is still too much jungle beneath the surface. The world is still full of jungle, thats the crux of the matter in a word; our Mental colonization is a minuscule crust plastered over a barely dry quaternary. And the battle seems endless; one digs and digs, said the Rishis, and the deeper one digs, the more the bottom seems to recede: I have been digging, digging. Many autumns have I been toiling night and day, the dawns aging me. Age is diminishing the glory of our bodies. Thus, thousands of years ago, lamented Lopamudra, wife of Rishi Agastya, who was also seeking transformation. But Agastya doesnt lose heart, and his reply is magnificently characteristic of the conquerors the Rishis were: Not in vain is the labor which the gods protect. Let us relish all the contesting forces, let us conquer indeed even here, let us run this battle race of a hundred leadings.
(Rig-Veda I.179)
0 1963-01-12, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For instance, two or three nights ago (I dont remember), I was with Sri Aurobindo, we were doing a certain work (it was in a Mental zone with certain vital reactions mixed in), well, a general work. I was with Sri Aurobindo and we were doing the work together. He wanted to explain to me how a particular movement is turned into a distorted movement; he was explaining this to me (but theres nothing Mental or intellectual about it, nothing to do with theories). And without even (how can I put it?) without even a thought or an explanation to forewarn you, a true movement is changed into a movement that is not false but distorted. I was speaking to Sri Aurobindo and he was answering, then I turn my head away like this (not physicallyall this is an inner life, naturally), I turned my head as if to see the [vibratory] effect. Then I turn back and send Sri Aurobindo the movement necessary to carry on with the experience, and I receive a reply which surprises me because of the quality of its vibration (it was a reply of ignorance and weakness). So I turn my attention back again, and as a matter of fact in Sri Aurobindos place I saw the doctor. Then I understood! Superficially, one may say, So, Sri Aurobindo and the doctor are the same! (To people who would see such a thing it would occur that they are the sameof course its all, all the same! All is one, people just dont understand this complete oneness.) Naturally it didnt surprise me for the thousandth of a second, there wasnt any surprise, but oh, I understood! This way (Mother slightly tilts her hand to the left), its Sri Aurobindo, and that way (slightly to the right), its the doctor. This way its the Lord, and that way its a man!!
Really interesting.5
0 1963-01-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So I made a resolve (because its neither to be published nor to be shown, but its a marvelous delight): I will simply keep it the way I keep the Agenda. I have a feeling that, later, perhaps (how can I put it?) when people can be less Mental in their activity, it will put them in touch with that light [of Savitri]you know, immediately I enter something purely white and silent, light and alive: a sort of beatitude.
This other passage is what I translated the first time:
0 1963-03-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
People only call miracles things they cant explain clearly, in Mental terms. From that point of view, innumerable things that happen can be said to be miracles, because you cant explain the why or the how.
What would a real miracle be, then?
--
If what belongs to the supra Mental world materialized abruptly, rather than through a slow evolution that would be something which man, as a Mental being, even if his Mentality, his Mental domain, were brought to perfection, could call a miracle, for it is the intervention in his conscious life of something he doesnt consciously carry within him. The taste for miracles, which is very strong (much stronger in children or in hearts that have remained childlike than in highly Mentalized beings), is basically the faith that the aspiration for the Marvelous will come true, that things beyond all that we may expect of normal life will come true.
In fact, for education, people should always encourage both tendencies side by side: the thirst for the Marvelous, the seemingly unrealizable, for something that fills you with a sense of divinity, while at the same time encouraging, in the perception of the world as it is, an exact, correct and sincere observation, the abolition of all imaginings, a constant control, and a most practical and meticulous feeling for exactness in details. Both tendencies should go side by side. Generally, people kill one with the idea that its necessary in order to develop the otherwhich is totally erroneous. The two can coexist, and as knowledge grows, a moment comes when you understand that they are two aspects of the same thing, namely, a clear vision, a superior discernment. But instead of the vision and discernment being limited and narrow, they become absolutely sincere, correct, exactAND immense, embracing an entire field thats not yet part of the concrete Manifestation.
0 1963-03-09, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That was when he brought the supra Mental Force into the Mental consciousness. He would bring into the Mental consciousness (the Mental consciousness that governs all material movements1) a supra Mental formation, or power, or force, that instantly altered the organization. With immediate results that appear illogical because the process doesnt follow the course set by Mental logic.
He said it himself: it happened when he was in possession or in conscious comm and of the supra Mental Force and Power and when he put it on a particular spot for a particular purpose. It was irrevocable, inevitable: the effect was absolute.
--
Take the example of someone ill, even feeling pain. When Sri Aurobindo was in possession of this supra Mental Power (at certain times he said it was totally under his control, he could do whatever he wanted with it and apply it wherever he wanted), then he would put this Will on some disorder or other, physical or vital, say (or Mental, of course), he would put this Force of a superior harmony, a superior, supra Mental order, keep it there, and it would act instantly. And it was an orderit created an order and harmony superior to natural harmony. Which means that if the object was to cure, for example, the cure was more perfect and total than a cure brought about by the ordinary physical and Mental methods.
There were hosts of instances. But people are so blind, you know, so bogged down in their ordinary consciousness, that they always have ready explanations. They can always explain it away. Only those who had faith and aspiration and something very pure in them, that is, those who really wanted to know, were aware of it.
--
Interestingly there was nothing Mental about it: I didnt know the existence of those things, I didnt know what meditation was I meditated without the least idea of what it was. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, my mother had kept it all completely taboo: those matters are not to be touched, they drive you crazy!
Later, the memories came back.
0 1963-03-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I had a feeling he hadnt completed his revision. When I read this, I felt it wasnt the end, just as when I read the last chapter of the Yoga of Self-Perfection,2 I felt it was unfinished. He left it unfinished. And he said so. He said, No, I will not go down to this Mental level any more.
But in Savitris case (I didnt look after it, you know), he had around him Purani, that Chinmayi, and (whats his name?) Nirodthey all swarmed around him. So I didnt look after Savitri. I read Savitri two years ago, I had never read it before. And I am so glad! Because I read it at the time I could understand itand I realized that none of those people had understood ONE BIT of it. Both things at the same time.
0 1963-03-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So the body thought, Oh, I havent got beyond that. If I have to do the right thing in the right way and right on the dot to keep my balance You understand, a sense of insecurity! And very strong, very strong. Of course, there is something like reason (not quite ordinary reason), something like reason that says, When you automatically and always do exactly what should be done, it will vanish. (Mother laughs) Thank you very much! But as it cannot be a Mental decision, then how? You see, you can learn only through experience, and since everything is in perpetual motion, the experience of the past cannot help for the future: its a matter of every minute. So how can you know? It means well know that we are free from error only when we are all the time, all the time in perfect harmony! But then there will be no point in knowing it, it will be done! Thats the situation. If the body is transformed and lives naturally in the divine rhythm, why would I need to know it! (Laughing) It will be immaterial to me, because it will BE. We want to know things when they arent yet.
The body is like a child who needs encouragement, you know, Come on now, dont get in a state, things are fine, youre making progress, you need not worry. Oh, ridiculous!
0 1963-03-27, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am inundated by a horde of Mental questions flat, superficialeverybody asks me questions in order to publish my answers! So I refuse. K.G. sent me five or six questions for his journal, each one more stupidly Mental than the other, in connection with the supermind. I am asked to say whether its this way or whether its that way the kind of questions you ask a good pupil to see if he has learned his lesson well!
It turns out that he had already sent me his questions, at the same time last year, and that I had already sent them back. But they put it all down to my so-called illness, so he sends the same questions again, now that I am in a fit state to answer! So again I return them with the same answer: not possible. We were joking the other day: Nolini was reading me the questions, and to every question I answered (tone of a pupil at fault), Dont know, dont know!
0 1963-04-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My only method is a kind of shield of Mental silence (in the ordinary mind), so that all the peoples thoughts do not come and pester me all the time, without letup. But they creep underneath! With some people, the moment they enter the room, I feel exhausted, because of their attitude. It doesnt work through thought at all: its a special vibration in my body.
With others, on the contrary, its fine.
0 1963-04-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is always a vibration subtler than his vibration of peace, and that one must remain free, without getting enclosed in the other. For example, if something pulls and causes a Mental tension in the head, just keep in contact with that peace (oh, he does have a capacity of Mental immobility), and let it penetrate you, but without concentrating all your being on it: allow the rest of your activity to unfold as usual in an infinity. Its only the vibrations of the physical mind that you should keep in that stability.
Its difficult to put it into words. But if you are able to do that, it could do you good, it could be restful.
My experience, you see, is that his Mental silence is rigidrigid, closed but the Mental substance, the brains physical substance really rests, his silence can rid you of a headache, for instance.
Its a very, very material vibration, he has some mastery there.
0 1963-04-22, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On the material level, the conditions are as wretched as possiblein a word, complete barrenness in complete squalor. My body isnt too brilliant, but I hope it will get better. On the Mental and affective level = NIL. That leaves the one Thing without which all would collapse.
I need you terribly.
0 1963-04-25, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I received your card of the 23rd yesterday, and it coincided with an improvement in the atmosphere and even a physical improvement. I have rarely felt your Force and your Presence so concretely, continuously and powerfully as since I arrived here. To say that it is the only reality is almost superfluousThat alone really LIVES. All the rest is a false show. I am anxious to leave this place, but X said he wants to make certain changes in my japa, so I have to wait for the right moment. It is difficult to hurry X, as you know. I will wire you as soon as the time comes. Otherwise, I am experiencing Xs power of Mental stillness, which is quite remarkable. All the rest I find rather poor.
More and more I feel, live and see that That alone is real. It is a very engrossing experience.
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The deeper significance of figures There are countless traditions, countless scriptures which I took great care not to follow. But the deeper significance of figures came to me in Tlemcen, when I was in the Overmind. I dont remember the names Thon used to give to those various worlds, but it was a world that corresponded to the highest and most luminous regions of Sri Aurobindos Overmind. It was above, just above the gods region. And it was something in accord with the Overmind creation the earth under the gods influence. That was where figures took on a living meaning for menot a Mental speculation: a living meaning. That was where Madame Thon recognized me, because of the formation of twelve pearls she saw above my head; and she told me, You are that because you have this. Only that can have this! (Mother laughs) It hadnt even remotely occurred to me, thank God!
But figures are alive for me. They have a concrete reality.
0 1963-06-15, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He is not a great mind; he doesnt go beyond the idealistic intellect. But thats more than enough for people, because true spiritual power is completely above their headsof course, they are very sensitive to a little bit of vital power, Mental-vital.
Hes a man who could have practiced some Tantrism in the way Woodroffe did; I cant say. There are also many people of that kind who were converted to Sufism they are very easily converted to Sufism. But true spiritual life, there arent many.
--
But Mentally, you know (Mother makes a gesture: completely obtuse). There is a prince of Kashmir who came here once, a young man3; he went to England, and there he wrote a thesis on Sri Aurobindos political life, Sri Aurobindo, Prophet of Indian Nationalism, with a preface by Jawaharlal Nehru. I read the preface, but afterwards, the day after I saw Nehruits awful! Understands nothing, he understands nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely obtuse. Its very kind, but written by someone who understands nothing. I will tell you the thing: between my first and second visits here, while I was away in Japan and Gandhi was starting his campaign,4 he sent a telegram, then a messenger, to Sri Aurobindo here, asking him to be president of the Congressto which Sri Aurobindo answered No.
Those people never forgave him.
--
Theyd rather have a Mental and political domination than wage war. They arent bent on slaughtering people, you understand.
It seems (its what I heard, I dont know) that all the prisoners (they had plenty of themmany of the Indians, unfortunately and most of them were released), they all said they had been admirably treated. I heard that from all quarters.
0 1963-06-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Im not giving you all the details, but all sorts of people were there, with all their plans, all their ideas; one would come (what Ive just said was only at the end, but before that plenty of people had come) and say, Oh, look how cleverly Ive organized this! Then another one would come with another plan, then they would confer among themselves, then It was just life, you see! A whole Mental domain of life.
And my experience did not REACH there; there was no contact, I was powerless. What little light that turned on because of my presence and was considered as a dazzling sun was to me a mere street lamp. It was painful.
--
It is evidently a Mental domain. A Mental subconscient. But its horrible. Horrible.
Then in the morning, I asked myself, What? Is there still a lot like that? A world! A whole world, a mass of things. And that powerlessness in which you find yourself; which means that unless I am given the key, there is no way. That funny little old man, oh, he almost made me angry (I cannot get angry, but I was almost angry and thats what woke me up), I was indignant. Aah, aah (Mother takes the old mans rasping tone), so you want to get out of here?! But no one gets out of this place! And why do you want to get out? Theres no way to get out, cant you see that theres no getting out of here and why do you want to get out?! Anyway, I came to tell you, I only came to tell you to put out that sun! That dazzling sun, you know!
--
In that Mental domain.
Mother often said that each of the Ashram disciples was the symbol of a particular difficulty to be conquered.
0 1963-06-29, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told you, didnt I, that I saw the death of Pope [John XXIII] without even knowing he was ill? One night, I suddenly saw in the Mental atmosphere of the EARTH quite an awesome movement, that is to say, quite global: there were great Mental waves (nothing but Mental), great waves of anxiety, as though all human thought were very upset; but it wasnt the anxiety of the believers, it was a very global movement the earths Mental atmosphere was stirring with great movements of upheaval and anxiety (Mother draws waves in the air). I thought, Whats happening? Whats happening that can so upset men? (as would happen, for instance, with a world war or events of that kind), Whats happening that can draw the attention of the whole earths atmosphere, its Mental atmosphere? And the next day, I was told that just at that time, the Pope died. So I thought, Indeed!
Afterwards (because I am not concerned with all those things), I learned what he was doing: his Ecumenical Council and all his reforms, his attempt, in short, to bring everyone together as much as he could (all the Christians, at least), and the fact that he had become a friend of the Russians, etc. So then, I concentrated, because according to natural logic (the logic of Natures actions), the next Pope should be a horrible reactionaryin a word, it didnt bode well. I concentrated and tried to make things work out for the best. And I see that Sri Aurobindo did find the thing important, since he concentrated over there.
0 1963-07-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not spiritual! Not spiritual: power. Powerwhich means a somewhat higher Mental capacity along with a vital realization. Hes a man who, were he not the Pope, would have no scruples. But he happens (laughing) to be obliged at least to appear good!
I get a sense of hardness.
--
Its a bit outdated [the papacy]. But not so much as one may think. I saw that when the other one died, oh, how it stirred the earths Mental atmosphere, it was considerable. Which means that many, many human beings are still governed by that.
But I never concerned myself with that domain. Even when I saw the Pope, the one before the last one [Pius XII], who came to offer me the Keys (I told you the story, didnt I?), even with him, who had a SPIRITUAL rapport with the universal Mother, I never concerned myself. I never did anything for him, I never concerned myself with him. This time, for whatever reason, there is something that keeps pulling and pulling me in that direction.
--
But isnt it chiefly Mental? You feel the battle of ideas.
Yes, but almost in the way of those monks of old who went about preaching I dont see myself preaching (!), but I see myself fighting them through speech.
0 1963-07-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the Power I would have to tell a mountain of experiences. For years and years and years, the Power was like this (gesture above the head): the Consciousness is there and the Power acts from there (same gesture). But it takes a long time to materialize (it depends on the person, but anyway, it always takes some time to materialize), and it gets distorted on the way, so that whats left is a rather ineffective residue. And I was wondering within me, But for all that to change, a DIRECT power is needed! A power that would make itself felt directly, in other words, that would pass from cell to cell: vibrations of the same quality. Its beginning to come. But I was also wondering why it didnt come faster. Although I know very well: its because we distort everything; we are so accustomed to living in a MentalIZED consciousness that we distort everything, and naturally the Power cannot come just to get distorted. So now, the lesson is this: the Power comes for a specific action, for instance, to act on someone the Power is here, it actsand at the same time, I am given the opportunity to observe, really to VISUALIZE the (how should I put it?) Sri Aurobindo uses the word accretion (outgrowth isnt the word, it gives the feeling of something growing from within out thats not it, its something that comes from outside and is added on). I visualize how deformation sets in and is automatically added on to the Powerwhich spoils everything. So the Power stops short, everything reverts to its place and it starts all over again.
It takes a very sharp, attentive, and above all impersonal observation (impersonal in the sense of objective, without any reaction) to see those things.
0 1963-07-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the remarkable thing with him was the silence. The Mental silence.
The other times, I told you, I more or less followed him to see what happened. The first time I saw him here [in the upper room], his aspiration rose in a cone, but a cone that was a little rigid and with a spiritual silver light that gave a feeling of (what shall I say?) a commonplace light, I dont know how to explain something very common, nothing exceptional. It was like a cone, tapering to a pointed tip, a very pointed tip ending in a nonexistent pointa nonexistence. It wasnt very satisfying. But this time As a matter of fact, that was why I wanted to prepare the atmosphere, I wanted to see. It was good.
0 1963-07-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had decided I would study the thing very carefully, absolutely objectively, in order to be surebecause I had around me all the waves of all the impressions, well-disposed as well as ill-disposed, and I found all that whirl ridiculous. I conducted my observation in a most scientific and objective way: the whole, entire effect is purely Mental. The whole whirl Mental.
There you have it.
--
The body had based its sort of sense of good health on a certain number of vibrations, and whenever those vibrations were present, it felt in good health; when something came and disturbed them, it felt that it was about to fall ill or that it was ill, depending on the intensity. All that has changed now: those basic vibrations have simply been removed, they no longer exist; the vibrations on which the body based its sense of good or ill healthremoved. They are replaced by something else, and something else of such a nature that good health and illness have lost all meaning! Now, there is the sense of an established harmony among the cells, increasingly established among the cells, which represents the right functioning, whatever that may be: its no longer a question of a stomach or a heart or this or that. And the slightest thing that comes and disturbs that harmony is VERY painful, but at the same time there is the knowledge of what to do to reestablish the harmony instantly; and if the harmony is reestablished, the functioning isnt affected. But if out of curiosity, for instance (its a Mental illness in humans), you start asking yourself, Whats that? What effect will it have? Whats going to happen? (what the body calls the desire to learn), if you are unlucky enough to be that way, you can be sure (laughing) that youll have something very unpleasant which, according to the doctor (according to ignoramuses), becomes an illness or disrupts the bodys functioning. While if you dont have that unhealthy curiosity and, on the contrary, will the harmony not to be disrupted, you only have to, we could say poetically, bring one drop of the Lord on the troubled spot for everything to be fine again.
The body is unable to know things in the way it did formerly.
--
No, its no fun. Its interesting only for someone who finds interest in EVERYTHING, to whom EVERYTHING is interesting, that is to say, who has the sort of will for perfection that neglects no detailo therwise, it isnt As soon as you enter the Mental realm, of course, the mind says, Ah, no! No, its a waste of time. It isnt, but the mind regards all that as twaddle.
(silence)
--
So all that must be having repercussions on the others, like Pavitra, when he told me the other day he was seeking me up above and could no longer find me! This very down-to-earth state (we can really call it down-to-earth), this very down-to-earth state of things may also create not an increased heaviness (because God knows it isnt heavy! Its so luminous, vibrant, luminous, so vibrant, vibrant), thats not it, but its really at ground level. At ground level. It has none of the flights and enthusiasms of Mental things, visions and all that. So it appears a little monotonous and very much at ground level.
Yes, but we dont have the sense of participating in something. You are conscious, while were not.
0 1963-07-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The importance of the body is obvious; it is because he has developed or been given a body and brain capable of receiving and serving a progressive Mental illumination that man has risen above the animal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body or at least a functioning of the physical instrument capable of receiving and serving a still higher illumination that he will rise above himself and realise, not merely in thought and in his internal being but in life, a perfectly divine manhood. Otherwise either the promise of Life is cancelled, its meaning annulled and earthly being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing itself, by shedding from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined limit to the consciously progressive power which distinguishes him from all other terrestrial existences and as he has replaced them in the front of things, so another must eventually replace him and assume his heritage.
(The Life Divine, XVIII.231)
0 1963-07-27, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told you the story of the other one who came to be operated on and died2 (that makes two in a row, among our best workers). The other one had an important government position and did us some incredible services (he was a very intelligent man and had been chief justice for a very long time), he was very helpful and full of faith and devotion. This one [M.] had even promised to lend some money, but he died just beforea few days before he was due to give it!3 But the first one was a conscious, highly Mentalized being, with a very well-formed Mental being; he knew a lot and he told me, I am very conscious and now I know that I am fully alive and fully conscious, so I dont want an impotent body that constantly requires someone to nurse it or move it around. I prefer to change. He asked me to find him a good one (!) This one didnt ask to take a new body, but the last thing he said (afterwards, he was paralyzed) was: I must live, because I want to give ten lakhs of rupees to the Mother. And he left with thatso an appropriate body has to be found.
But this one [M.] knew very little, he wasnt an intellectual, he was a man of action, very psychicvery much so! Lovely, oh, lovely! He was like a little child, naked, of course, a baby this big, with small arms, small legsdancing about, he was glad, laughing and laughing, he was happy. And all luminous. I immediately told his son (he did a pranam and rose with his eyes full of tears), I told him, Dont weep, he is now where he wants to be and perfectly at rest. I didnt tell him the storyhe wouldnt have understood a thing!
--
If we follow that (Mother draws a great curve towards the future), he foresaw that one day the earth would be a supra Mental creation the entire earth entirely changed. That means a long, long way ahead. In other words, later, among the supra Mental race, they will say, Thats all very well, but its only the beginning. Now, the entire earth has to become a supra Mental manifestation. Just as from Mental man the supra Mental being was born, so also from the supra Mental being will be born the powers that will transform the earth.
Do you see it?! Its interesting.
--
It isnt final, mind you, only a first contact: the experience recurs on another occasion and for another reason (they arent Mental reasons, they are occasions), it recurs, but there is already a beginning of collaboration: the cells have LEARNED that with That, the state changed (very interestingly, they remember), so they begin to collaborate, and the Action is even more rapid. Then a third time, a few hours away, it recurs once again; but then THE CELLS THEMSELVES call and ask for the divine Action, because they remember. And then That comes in, gloriously, like something established.
Now Ive got it Ive got the knack! Its for training the cells, you understand! Its not just like a sick person who has to be cured once and for all: no, its a training of the cells, to teach them to live.
--
Thats why with all the consciousness and force, I tell people, You make yourselves sick with your idiotic fear! (A subconscious fear sometimes Mental, but then its utterly stupidat any rate a fear in the cells, a subconscious fear.) You make yourselves sick. Stop being afraid and you wont get sick. And I can say that with absolute assurance.
Its interesting.
0 1963-08-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That consciousness feels a sort of anxiety towards Mental force; the moment a Mental force manifests, it goes like this (gesture of recoil): Oh, no! Enough of that, enough, enough! As though Mental force were the cause of all its torment. It feels Mental force as something so hard, dry, rigid, ruthless, above all drydry, emptyempty of the true Vibration.
Thats becoming quite clear. For example, whenever there is no need to do anything outwardly and all activity stops, then theres rest, and there comes that thirst and aspiration for a luminous Peace. It comes, and not only does it come, it seems to be firmly established. But if in that rest something suddenly flags and the old Mental activity starts up (an activity of the mind of the cells, the most material mind), immediately that consciousness comes out of its rest with a jerk: Ah, no! Not that, not that, not that! Instantly the Mental activity is stopped, and there is an aspiration for the PresenceNot that, not that!
This morning, I had the experience twice; a very slight Mental activity, and almost instantly: Ah, no, no! Not that. That consciousness prefers to act or move or do anything rather than fall into that conditionwhich it seems to regard as the Enemy.
(silence)
--
Because it doesnt want to be Mentalized!
You shouldnt worry.
--
Yes, imagine, make use of the Mental element.
But thats quite On the contrary, Ive had to struggle against that, not in myself but everywhere, against that mania for imagining. Thats what gives me such a (how can I put it?) both restful and pleasant impression [with you], everything stays still. If one wants to receive the Truth, all that must come to a stop.
0 1963-08-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We have the Mental habit of wanting to order, classify and regulate everything: we always want to have ordera Mental order. But thats For example, in those places untouched by men, such as virgin forests, there is a beauty you dont find in life, and its a vital, unruly beauty which doesnt satisfy Mental reason, yet contains a far greater wealth than anything the mind conceives and organizes.
But in the meantime, life is beleaguered by thousands of insectsmillions of insects
--
There is the whole gamut, you see, right from the most material. In the most material, its really like that: elements that are perpetually clashing and clashing and clashing everything is clashing, as though it were the only way to exist. In the vital realm, its violence. And in the Mental realm, its mainly that crookedness. Thats why I said to myself, Truly, we are poor things!
There is clearly in us the Remembrance that gives birth to the aspiration for something divineif that werent there, latent, we could never we could not even imagine! That aspiration couldnt exist, it would be meaningless. But still, what a long path this is.
0 1963-08-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its true that the doctor himself said ([laughing], the doctor1 symbolizes Doubt with a capital D) that if you teach your body to bear pain, it grows more and more enduring and doesnt get disrupted so fast thats a concrete result. People who know how not to be thoroughly upset as soon as they have a pain here or there, who are able to bear quietly and keep their balance, it seems that in their case the bodys capacity to bear disorder without breaking down increases. Thats very important. You remember, in a previous Agenda I asked myself the question from a purely practical and physical point of view, and it does seem to be true. Inwardly, I have been told many a timetold and shown with all sorts of little experiences that the body can bear far more than people think, provided they dont add fear or anxiety to the pain; if you can get rid of that Mental factor, the body, left to itself, without either fear or fright or anxiety for what will happenwithout anguishcan bear a great deal.
The second step is that once the body has decided to bear pain (it really takes the decision to do so), instantly the acuteness, the acute sensation in the pain vanishes. I am speaking on an absolutely material level.
--
At the time, there was still a lot of Mental activity, and those experiences took all the forms the mind gives to thingsvery nice, very literary! Now, all that is overhappily, thank God! A complete silence I dont make speeches on the thing. But the experience of last night! And to think that when an experience lasts half an hour, three quarters of an hour, one hour, its considered extraordinaryit lasted from 8:30 till 2:15, nonstop.
A sort of ubiquity in the cells?
--
Theres something I SENSE there, without being able to express or understand it Mentally. There must be some difference, even in the behavior of the cells, when you leave your body.
It must be another phenomenon that takes place.
0 1963-08-21, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, its something I had never experienced [that absence of meaning]; even in my earliest childhood, when there was no development, I always had a perception (not a Mentalized but a vibrant perception) of a Power behind all things which is the Raison dtre of all thingsa Power, a Force, a kind of warmth.
It isnt the experience of THIS bodys cells: its an identification with the world in general, with the Earth as a whole. Its an absolutely frightful and hopeless condition: something meaningless, aimless, without raison dtre, without any joy in itself or and worse than disagreeablemeaningless, insensate. Something that has no raison dtre and yet is. It was it is a frightful situation.
--
Yesterday, it was like that almost the whole day long. But all at once something came (I dont know from where or how neither from above nor from within nor from I dont know): there is only ONE Raison dtre, only ONE Reality, only ONE Life, and there is nothing other than THAT. It was THAT (not in the least Mentally, there was no intellectual formulation, nothing), it was Something that was Light (far more than Light), Power (far more than power), Omnipotence (far more than Omnipotence), and also an intensity of sweetness, of warmth, of plenitudeall that togetheralong with that Something, which naturally words cannot describe. And That came all at once, like that, when there was such a frightful state of anguish, because it was nothinga nothing you couldnt get out of. There was no way of getting out of that nothing, because it was nothing.
You know, all those who seek Nirvana, all their disgust of life, all that is almost enjoyable in comparison! Thats not it. Thats not it, it was a thousand times, a million times worse. It was nothing, and because it was nothing it was impossible to get out of itthere was no no solution.
0 1963-08-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At times For the body its a constant worka constant laborvery tiny, of every instant, an unceasing effort, with, so to say, an imperceptible result (externally at any rate, quite nonexistent), so for someone who doesnt have my consciousness, its perfectly obvious that the body appears to wear out and age, to be slowly heading for decomposition: thats in everyones atmosphere and consciousness (Mother laughs), its the kind of appreciation and vibration thats being thrown all the time on this poor body, which besides is quite conscious of its infirmityit doesnt entertain any illusions! But that quiet, peaceful, but UNCEASING endurance in the effort of transformation makes it sometimes yearn for a little ecstasynot as an abolition or annihilation, not at all, but it seems to be saying, Oh, Lord, I beg you, let me be You in all tranquillity. In fact, thats its prayer every evening when people are supposed to leave it in peace (unfortunately they leave it in peace physically, but Mentally they dont). But that I could cut off, I learned to cut off long, long ago, I could cut off, but something, I mean somewhere, someone doesnt approve! (Mother laughs) Obviously what the Someone the great Someonewants to see realized is perfect peace, perfect rest, and joy, a passive joy (not too active; a passive joy is enough), a passive, constant joy, WITHOUT forsaking the work. In other words, the individual experience isnt regarded as all-importantvery far from it: the help given to the whole, the leaven which makes the whole rise, is AT LEAST equally important. Ultimately, thats probably the major reason for persisting in this body.
Nothing inside asks any questions, there are no problems there; all the problems I am talking about are posed by the body, for the body; otherwise, inside, everything is perfect, everything is exactly as it should be. And totally so: what people call good, what they call evil, the beautiful, the ugly, the all that is a small immensity (not a big immensity), a small immensity that is moving more and more towards a progressive realization thats the correct phrasewithin an integral Consciousness which integrally (how should I put it?) enjoys, or I could say, feels the plenitude of what He doesdoes, is and so forth (its all the same thing). But this poor body
--
Now, of course, when I say that, people imagine its a psychic or Mental vision thats not it, I dont mean that! I mean a PHYSICAL vision, with these very eyes (Mother touches her eyes). But a TRUE physical vision, instead of the distorted vision we have now.
This means, basically, that the true reality is far more marvelous than we can imagine, because all that we can imagine is always a transformation or glorification of what we see but thats not it. Thats not it!
0 1963-08-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had already told you about my misgivings.1 As to the motives for the decision, it always boils down to the same point: a sincere (though ambiguous) will of ecumenism, a broad rather than deep intellectual curiosity, permit Mentalities such as those that give our firm its orientation and public image to pay some attention to academic essays regarded (wrongly so in the present instance) as dealing with the famous Eastern spirituality. But as soon as the essays are lived from within, the goodwill withdraws into its shell. The reaction is even worse if the author is a renegade, a Westerner who has gone over to the enemy side. (I can vouch for that!2) I must emphasize that this whole process is not only unintentional but, more than that, unconscious (which is not an excuse but an aggravating circumstance). The opposition put up against your first manuscript3 rather hardened with the second, a much more personal book, I mean less detached, still less objective than the firstand more ample. Through the medium of literature, you were able to convey whatever you liked. Through a direct essay, you will reach and so much the worse, or so much the betteronly those who seek. Our firm and its public do not belong, for that matter, to the category of those who seek.
Hes conscious!
--
Mentally.
Its not Mentally that you can make them yield.
Then how? Its either by forceviolent forceor else by a miracle (what they call a miracle) that will leave them dumbfounded.
--
Of course, theres the rule that its not good to speak of yourself that goes without saying. But what can I talk about now, if not about my experience? Because nothing exists any moreall the so-called objective knowledge is to me a useless Mental activity.
So lets just leave it at that.
0 1963-08-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The same goes for a teaching, in the sense that you have a certain power, which acts with a view to a result on those who, naturally, are receptivea certain power intended to produce a certain result or effectand owing to the worlds condition, which is almost exclusively Mental, there is a need to add words (what people call a teaching) to that power. And thats where there should be an exact proportion between the sentence and the power: the sentence shouldnt express more or less than the power, it should be an exact expression of the powersay neither too much nor too little but say exactly the appropriate words that will clo the the power (in a Mentally receivable way), that will be a vehicle of the power. And the proportion between the two gives the exact measure of the sincerity.
I dont know if I can make myself understood, but for two days I was engrossed in that work of establishing an absolutely true ratiowhich in fact can be true only in a complete simplicity and complete sincerity. I saw the power that acts in the words and the power that acts without words, and the proportion between the two powers must be exact, entirely correct, to have a complete sincerity. You follow?
0 1963-09-04, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But things are rather complex. For the body in its ordinary consciousness, its absolutely normal state is when it doesnt feel itself living. When the body doesnt feel itself living, that means its functioning normally; as soon as it feels itself living in some part of itself, it means that something isnt quite normal, and instinctively (I dont mean the vital or Mental consciousness), but its primal consciousness is alarmed, because its not normal (not what it calls normal); and then that sort of alarm (an alarm thats not formulated in thoughts) brings it into contact with a whole world of adverse and defeatist suggestionsoh, there is an INTENSE atmosphere of pessimistic, defeatist, adverse suggestions in which human lives are bathed, as it were. Its even very strong here, very strong I mean in the Ashramvery strong. People who are very sensitive and whose consciousness isnt firmly rooted in faith are very (what shall I say?) very deeply not deeply but intimately attacked by that atmosphere.
And it makes bodies very ill-at-ease.
0 1963-09-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For them, all the experiences men have are the result of a Mental phenomenon: we have reached a progressive Mental development (they are at a loss to explain why or how!), anyhow it was Matter that developed Life, Life that developed Mind, and all of mens so-called spiritual experiences are Mental constructions (they use other words, but I believe thats their idea). It is, at any rate, a denial of all spiritual existence in itself and of a Being or Force or Something superior which governs everything.
As I said, I dont know what their position is today, what point they have reached, but I was in the presence of a conviction of that type.
Then I said, But its very simple! I accept your point of view, there is nothing other than what we see, than mankind as it is; all the so-called inner phenomena are due to a Mental, cerebral action; and when you die, you diein other words, the phenomenon of agglomeration comes to the end of its existence, and it dissolves, everything dissolves. Thats all very well.
(Quite likely, had things been that way, I would have found life so disgusting that I would have left it long ago. But I must add right away that its not for any moral or even spiritual reason that I disapprove of suicide, its because to me its an act of cowardice and something in me doesnt like cowardice, so I did not I would never have fled from the problem.)
--
But for instance, I told you I spoke with the Pope for quite a long time the day of his election, and the conversation was abruptly interrupted by a reaction he had. (It was really a Mental conversation we were having: I spoke, he replied, I heard his reply I dont know whether he was conscious of something probably not, but anyway; it wasnt at all a formation of my own mind because I received quite unexpected replies.) But the conversation was interrupted abruptly by a reaction he had when I told him that God is everywhere and in all things; that everything is He; and then a great Force came down into me and I added, Even when you descend into Hell, He is there too.
Then everything stopped dead.
0 1963-09-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had several hours of concentration regarding that decrease of energy in your body; not an illness: a decrease of energy in your body2 (you add Mental things to it, but thats your affair, mon petit, you will correct that). I had several hours of concentration, and I even reproached the Lord, telling Him that really if thats the effect I have on people, (laughing) its not worth mentioning, Id better leave! (There was a conjunction of a good number of things.) I dont believe a word of my complaint! But anyway (laughing) I make it just like that.
Immediately, there came a massive descent, and everything was blissful I said to myself, Lord, its up to You. Its up to You to have me here, its up to You to have me act; I dont act, You are the one who acts. The result is up to You, but as far as I can see, if I am allowed to see, I dont find that logical!
--
A little change in your Mental attitude is necessary; what in fact we could call a little cure of a pessimismor a big cure of a little pessimism! Voil somewhere: its for you to know where.
But its a transition, nothing other than a transition.
0 1963-09-25, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But a swarm, you know! Its certainly some Mental world or other.
(silence)
0 1963-09-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Everything is possible to me, you know, absolutely everything, even the seemingly most contradictory thingsreally, I am totally unable to raise a Mental or logical or reasonable objection either to this or to that. But the question (Mother leaves her sentence unfinished). That is to say, the Lords Will is very clear to Him, and (laughing) the whole thing is to unite with that Will and know it.
It had always seemed to me that way [the earth as a symbolic point of concentration], but I am so convinced that Sri Aurobindo saw things more truly and totally than anyone did that, naturally, when he says something, you tend to consider the problem!
--
We can conceive it was a particular necessity within the whole, of course. But these are all conceptions, its still something Mental I recently had in my hands a quotation from Sri Aurobindo in which he said that there is no problem the human mind cannot solve if it wants to. (Laughing) There is no problem that the mind cannot solve if it applies itself to it! But I dont care, I have no need of Mental logicno need. And it would have no effect on my action thats not what I want, not at all! Its only because there is that increasingly acute contradiction between the Truth and what is. Its becoming painfully acute. You know, that suffering, that general misery is becoming almost unbearable.
There was a time when I looked at all that with a smilea long time. For years and years it was a smile, the way you smile at a childish question. Now, I dont know why it has come it has been THRUST on me like a sort of acute anguishwhich certainly is necessary to get out of the problem.
0 1963-10-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here is what happened: I do my usual bath of the Lord and it is arranged that, after a time, Champaklal opens the doorwhich signals to me the end of the visit. So I looked at X, just to see (I had looked at him several times before, but there was nothing particular), I looked at him and saw in front of him a sort of mass of substance, not material but responsive to a Mental formation, which means that Mental thought and will can make this substance take different shapes I know it (Mother makes a gesture of fingering the substance), its very like the sort of substance mediums use for their apparitions (less material, more Mental, but anyway the same kind). There was a sort of mass in front of him, which was hiding him; it wasnt luminous, not black either, but dark enough. So I looked at it, STARED at it to see what it was, and as I was staring, I saw that there was a will or an effort to give that mass of substance a shape. It was exactly in front of Xs head and shoulders. And there was a will to give it a shape (gesture of molding). As I stared very carefully, it took the shape of Sri Aurobindos head as it appears in newspapers and magazines (what I call the popular Sri Aurobindo, as he is shown in books), the substance took that form. Immediately I thought (ironic tone), Oh, its the popular form, that doesnt resemble him! And instantly, the substance rearranged itself and took the form of Cartier-Bressons Sri Aurobindo1 (the three-quarter face photo, where he is seated in his armchair). That was better! (Mother holds back a chuckle) It wasnt yet quite good, but anyway it was better (although, mind you, it had neither light nor life: it was mattera subtle matter, of courseput into shape by a Mental will). So I began to wonder: Whatever is this?! Does he want me to believe that Sri Aurobindo is in him, or what? Because Xs head and shoulders had completely disappeared, there was nothing left but that. And I thought (not a strong thought, just a reflection): No, its not very good, really not very lifelike! (Mother laughs) Then there was a last attempt and it became very like the photo that was taken when he left his body (that photo which we stood on end and called Meditation), it was very like the photo, (in an ironic tone) a very good likeness. And it stayed. So I thought, Oh yes! This is the photo.
Then I concentrated just a little and thought, Lets see, now. Whom is he trying to delude? And instantly, everything vanished. And I saw X, his head.
--
You understand, I know those things, I have seen thousands of them! Only, as it happens, for more than half a century I have sensed the difference in a most sharp way. I think I told you already that when I returned here from Japan, there were difficulties: once, I was in danger and I called Sri Aurobindo; he appeared, and the danger went away2he appeared, meaning, he came, something from him came, an EMANATION of him came, living, absolutely concrete. The next day (or rather later the same day), I told him my experience and how I saw him; that worried him (it was an unceasing danger, you see), and he very strongly thought that he should concentrate on me to protect me. And the next day, I saw him but it was an image, a Mental formation! I told him, Yes, you came in a Mental formation, it wasnt the same thing. Then he told me that this capacity of discernment is an extremely rare thing. But I always had it, even when I was small. Its a sensitiveness in the perception. And indeed I believe that very few people can sense the difference. So with X, my first impression was, My goodness, to do this to me! Well, really, I have some experience of the world, I cant be so easily made to believe that the moon is made of green cheese!
And yesterday, it was all very peaceful: X was there all the time with nobody in front of him, not pretending anything. But the first time, as he expected some result, he stayed on for ten minutesprobably he was expecting some reaction (I never told him that Sri Aurobindo is with me all the time, that we talk to each other every night). Anyhow, he was probably expecting some enthusiasm on my part (!) There you are.
--
Mentally, I know. When I am with him, if I happen to listen to what he says for just two minutes, I get a headache, I cant bear it. I can stay with him only when I am above or outside, then its quite all right. But if I listen to him Mentally, I get a headache.
Yes, I told you, the day when I entered his mind, it was frightful!
--
He clearly knows how to put Mental substance into shape but this handling of Mental matter to give it a shape, everybody does it unknowingly, automatically; you only have to think a little strongly for it to be done. Only, people dont see it because they dont have the Mental vision. And here, it was so funny [Xs Mental formation], because it responded so well (thats what made me think it was he who was doing it, not someone else), it responded so well to my immediate thought (and I didnt think strongly). I looked at the thing, and spontaneously, within myself, I thought, Oh, no! Almost as if Sri Aurobindo were saying, Oh, no! Thats my popular portrait, its no good! Voil.4
***
--
Its still there; even in those who have developed their higher mind, who are able to emerge from that darkness and ignorance, its still there its still there in a sort of Mental or vital subconscient. And its so dark! Thoroughly stupid, you know: it can be given hundreds and thousands of proofs, it remains unaffecteda kind of incapacity to understand. And then it constantly rises to the surface, and I am constantly obliged (gesture of offering to the Heights) to present it: This is still there, that is still there, that And I see very well that the distinction between what goes on in this body and its atmosphere, and what goes on in all other bodies is I dont know if the distinction still exists, but its imperceptible. And the consciousness is aware of all those movements as if they were personal to the physical person. But the physical person (Mother touches her body) isnt just this body I am not yet sure whether the physical person isnt the whole earth (for certain things, it is the whole earth), or whether the physical person is the entirety of all the bodies of the people I am in contact with. During the last hours of the night, that is, between 2 and 4, I see precise forms; but those precise forms are themselves representative, meaning there are TYPES and those types take on the image of someone I am in contact with or was in personal contact with. But to me they are types: Oh, its such and such a type but that can be thousands of people. And the action (its always for an action), the action on the person-type has repercussions on all that he represents.
And thats a labor which seems infiniteendless, at any rate.
--
Listen, the night before, in the middle of the night, someone came to me (someone who was dark blue, which means a Mental formation) with a plan of action, and told me, Its all arranged: on such and such a day and at such and such a time (it was meant for next year), you will have this work to do, you will have to come downstairs, and here is how everything will be arranged for you to come downthis, that, that. And I played the game very well, I answered, Oh, no! That wont do, you have to arrange it this way and that way. Then when it was all over, something suddenly made me go within (gesture of return inward), I looked at the whole thing, saw the person, saw the plan, saw everything (I was in the midst of an action), and said, Yes, all this is very well, but you see, the snag is that I am not going downstairs! And at one stroke, frrt! goneit was a construction, as if there were an entire organization, even a govern Mental one (!), to make me come downstairs. And when I woke up (that is, in the morning when I came out of my activity of the night), I thought, Could it be what showed itself (it was a Mental formationfrom whom, from where? I didnt bother about that), could it be what showed itself to X and made him declare with the authority of a clairvoyant: Mother will come downstairs next year? I found it very amusing.
Things are increasingly AS THEY ARE: exact, without complications. I have noticed that with people, even the most sincere and straightforward, there is always a kind of coating, an emotive coating (even with the coldest and driest), something that belongs to the vital; an emotive coating that makes things fuzzy, uncertain and allows a game that gives them a feeling of all sorts of mysterious forces at playthings are very clear, very simple, very, oh, very simple, and that coating brings along a sort of confusion. Its not sentiment, not emotion either, its something something that LOVES uncertainty, the unknown, the unexpectednot positively chance (its not so strong), but which loves to live in that, in in fact, in Ignorance! Which loves not to know whats going to happen. Even the simplest things, the most obvious, have all that coating over them.
0 1963-10-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The big difficulty is that tamasic stupidity. Yesterday, in this connection, I had the experience of a young couple who came to see me. (It has become a custom nowadays that young people who are going to marry and whose families I know, or who live here, come to receive my blessings before marrying! Thats the new fashion.) So they came. The girl was educated here and the boy stayed here for quite a long time, working here; anyway, they want to marry. The boy went searching for a job; he had trust [in Mother] and found one. He is I cant say conscious because it isnt like consciousness, I would call it rather superstition (!) but its a superstition on the right target! The movement is ignorant, but well directed, so it works; not that he has an enlightened faith, but he has faith. All right. Things are fine and he does very well. So they came yesterday to receive my blessings. Then they went. And they left behind in the room a vital formation, very bubbly, absolutely ignorant, very bubbly with a joie de vivre, a joie de vivre so blissfully ignorant of all possible difficulties, all possible miseries, and not only for oneself but for everyone! You know, that joie de vivre that says, Oh, it doesnt matter to me if we are born and dielife is short, well, let it be good, thats enough. No Mental curiosity, no urge to know the why of the worldall that is nonsense, we neednt bother about it! Lets be happy, have some fun, and do as well as we can. Thats all. That formation was so strong, you know, in the room that I saw it and had to find a place for it. It put me in contact with a whole domain of the earth, of mankind, and I had to put it in its proper place, put it in order and organize it. It took me a little time (long enough, maybe three quarters of an hour or an hour), I had to order and organize everything. Then I saw how widespread it is on earth. (Note that these young people belong to the top of society, they are regarded as very intelligent, they are very well educated, in a word, its about the best you can find in mankind! Not the dregs, far from it.) And I wondered if it isnt even more widespread in Western countries than here I think it is. At that moment I came into contact with everywhere, and, well, the everywhere was really quite extensive.
Afterwards, I asked myself, But what the devil can be done with all this? Disturb these people? They are quite incapable of getting out of their condition in this life and will probably need many, many, many lives to awaken to the NEED TO KNOWas long as they can move about, you know (laughing), as long as they can move about and things arent too painful, theyre quite contented! And then, in addition, there is, all the way down, that whole inert mass, you know, of men who are very close to the animalwhat can be done with that? If that too has to be ready, it seems to me impossible. Because that young couple, according to human opinion, are very fine people!
0 1963-10-26, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Of course, one can imitate this Mentally, but its only an imitation. What I mean is something else, which has nothing to do with Mental will(laughing) maybe its a gift from the Lord, I dont know!
***
0 1963-11-04, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
An example: yesterday, for at least a quarter of an hour, I was filled with a sort of marvelousmarvelingadmiration for Natures fantastic imagination in inventing the animals. I saw all the animals in all their details that is, the prehuman age. Consequently, there was no mind. And without the mind, how wonderful that imagination was, you know! It was as though I lived in it: there was no man, no thought, but that imaginative power making one species emerge out of another, and then another; and all those details Everything is becoming like that, as if it were SEEN for the first time and from an altogether different angle; everything, everything: peoples character, circumstances, even the motion of the earth and the stars, everything is like that, everything has become entirely new and unexpected, in the sense that all the human Mental visionis completely gone! So things are much better! (Laughing) Much better without the human mind. (I dont mean they are better without man, I mean that seen from another viewpoint than the human, Mental viewpoint, everything is far more wonderful.) And then, all the details of every minute, all the people, all the things, all The trees (Mother looks at the coconut tree in front of her window) that were stripped by the cyclone; this one held up so marvelously and it has a new flowerit has old leaves damaged by the cyclone, but it has grown a new flower. So lovely, so fresh! Everything is like that.
Me too. Me too, I saw myself (laughing) from a new angle! And the things that in the past were, not positively problems, but anyway questions to be resolved (certain actions, certain relationships), all gone! And there is something that thoroughly enjoys itself I dont know what that something is, but it thoroughly enjoys itself.
--
If we look at it from a psychological standpoint On the Mental plane, its very easy; on the vital plane, its not too difficult; on the physical plane, its a little heavier, because desires are passed off as needs. But there too, there has been a field of experience these last few days: the study of medical and scientific conceptions on the bodys makeup, its needs, and whats good or bad for it. And all this, in its essence, again boils down to the same question of vibrations. It was quite interesting: there was an appearance (because all things as the ordinary consciousness sees them are nothing but appearances), there was an appearance of food poisoning (mushrooms that are thought to have been bad). It was the object of a particular study to find out whether there was something absolute about the poisoning, or whether it was relative, that is, based on ignorance, a wrong reaction and the absence of the true Vibration. And the conclusion was as follows: its a question of proportion between the amount, the sum of the vibrations that belong to the Supreme, and the sum of the vibrations that still belong to darkness. Depending on the proportion, the poisoning appears as something concrete, real, or else as something that can be eliminated, in other words, that doesnt resist the influence of the Vibration of Truth. And it was very interesting, because, immediately, as soon as the consciousness became aware of the cause of the trouble in the bodys functioning (the consciousness perceived where it came from and what it was), immediately the observation began, with the idea: Lets see what happens. First set the body perfectly at rest with the certainty (which is always there) that nothing happens except by the Lords Will and that the effect too is the Lords Will, all the consequences are the Lords Will, and consequently one should be very still. So the body is very still: untroubled, not agitated, it doesnt vibrate, nothingvery still. Once this is achieved, to what extent are the effects unavoidable? Because a certain quantity of matter that contained an element unfavorable to the bodys elements and life was absorbed, what is the proportion between the favorable and the unfavorable elements, or between the favorable and the unfavorable vibrations? And I saw very clearly: the proportion varies according to the amount of cells in the body that are under the direct Influence, that respond to the supreme Vibration alone, and the amount of other cells that still belong to the ordinary way of vibrating. It was very clear, because I could see all the possibilities, from the ordinary mass [of cells], which is completely upset by that intrusion and where you have to fight with all the ordinary methods to get rid of the undesirable element, to the totality of the cellular response to the supreme Force, which renders the intrusion perfectly innocuous. But this is still a dream for tomorrowwere on the way. But the proportion has become rather favorable (I cant say all-powerful, far from it, but rather favorable), so that the consequences of the ill-being didnt last very long and the damage was, so to say, minimal.
But all the experiences nowadays, one after the otherall the PHYSICAL experiences, of the bodypoint to the same conclusion: everything depends on the proportion between the elements that respond exclusively to the Supremes Influence, the half-and-half elements, on the road to transformation, and the elements that still follow Matters old vibratory process. The latter appear to be decreasing in number, to a great extent, but there are still enough of them to bring about unpleasant effects or unpleasant reactionsthings that are untransformed, that still belong to ordinary life. But all problems, whether psychological or purely material or chemical, all problems boil down to this: they are nothing but questions of vibrations. And there is the perception of that totality of vibrations and of what we could call (in a very rough and approximative way) the difference between the constructive and the destructive vibrations. We can say (to put it very simply) that all the vibrations that come from the One and express Oneness are constructive, while all the complications of the ordinary, separative consciousness lead to destruction.
--
This can be seen for everything. Take, for example, an external field of action, in the outer world and with outer things (naturally, to say it is outer is simply to put yourself in a false position), but, for example, if in the highest consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, you tell someone, Go (I am giving one example among millions), Go and see so-and-so, tell him this to obtain that. If the person is receptive, inwardly immobile and surrendered, he goes, sees the other person, tells him, and the thing happenswithout the SLIGHTEST complication, just like that. If the person has an active Mental consciousness, doesnt have total faith and has all the mixture of ego and ignorance, he sees the difficulties, sees the problems to be resolved, sees all the complicationsnaturally, they all occur! So according to the proportion (everything is a question of proportion, always), according to the proportion, it creates complications, it takes time, the thing is delayed, or, a little worse, it is distorted, it doesnt occur exactly as it should, it is changed, diminished, distorted, or, finally, it doesnt occur at allthere are many, many degrees, but it all belongs to the domain of complications ( Mental complications) and desire. Whereas the other way is immediate. Examples of those cases (of all cases) are innumerable, so also are the examples of the immediate case. Then people tell you, Oh, youve worked a miracle! No miracle was worked: it should always be that way. Its because the intermediary did not add himself to the action.
I dont know if thats clear, but anyway
0 1963-11-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not that way, not the way we understand compliments. I was looking into the way the Truth has to make use of Mental capacities to express itself. (Because youre asked to silence the mind, and when you succeed in doing so, you really do succeed, but but thats not the aim; its only a means, its to change your way of functioning.) So I was looking at the way the mind has to function in the true life (the supra Mental life, since Sri Aurobindo said he called supra Mental the manifestation of Truth and Light). Anyway, I was looking. I was conducting a kind of terrestrial survey, wondering, Are there on earth Mentalities that are ready to receive and manifestespecially manifest that vibration properly? And I heard the Lord answer me something (I am translating, naturally): But why are you looking so far afield? You have the fitting instrument with you. And it was you. So I thought, Thats fine.
I didnt voice any doubt on His judgment!
But since you protest and chafe And He showed me how the drop of Light came, burst, sent forth radiation and went through your Mentality without being dimmedit was a very lovely thing to see.
I didnt tell you because is it necessary to pay compliments? The fact itself was more important than saying it. But since youre unhappy, I am telling you: thats how it is. Maybe its a habit of inner revoltyou arent a rebel by nature, by any chance?
--
Whats you is this (gesture above the head), its there: what sparkles in the light thats you. This [the body] isnt you, its the sediment. You still have your bodys self-esteem! You should feel: this isnt me, it isnt me. It is yes, what was put together more or less clumsily and ignorantly by father, mother, maybe with the influence of grandparents. That discovery I made at the age of about fifteen or sixteen, or seventeen. I began to see clearly all the gifts (if we can call them that) that came from father, mother, parents, grandparents, education, people who looked after me, that whole mudhole, as it were, into which you fall headfirst. And then, the quality of the vibration, the quality of the sensation, of the so-called thoughts (which arent thoughts, but are almost automatic Mental reflexes of sorts) and of the feelings (if you can call them feelings: they are kinds of reactions to the milieu and to all that comes from outside)it all swarms, swarms like worms in the mud.
When you see it all and you begin to say, But this isnt me! and you feel it isnt you: It isnt me! Nome is what looks on; me is what wills; me is what knows.
--
But you cant imagine, its wonderful! Immediately there comesclear, simple, effortlessly, without seeking for itexactly what has to be done or said or written: the whole tension stops, its over. And then, if you need paper, the paper is there; if you need a fountain pen, you find just the one you need; if you need (theres no seeking: above all dont seek, dont try to seek, youll just make another mess)its there. And thats a fact of EVERY MINUTE. You have the field of experience every second. For instance, youre dealing with a servant who doesnt do things properly or as you think they should be done, or youre dealing with a stomach that doesnt work the way youd like it to and it hurts: its the same method, there is no other. You know, at times situations get so tense that you feel as if youre about to faint, the body cant stand it any more, its so tense; or else theres a pain, something wrong, things arent sorting themselves out, and theres a tension; so immediately you stop everything: Lord, You, its up to You. At first there comes a peace, as if you were entirely outside existence, and then its gone the pain goes, the dizziness disappears. And what is to happen happens automatically. And, you see, its not in meditation, not in actions of terrestrial importance: its the field of experience you have ALL the time, without interruptionwhen you know how to put it to use. And for everything: when something hurts, for instance, when things resist or grate or howl inside there, instead of your saying, Oh, how it hurts! you call the Lord in there: Come in here, and then you stay calm, not thinking of anythingyou simply stay still in your sensation. And more than a thousand times, you know, I was almost bewildered: Look! The pain is gone! You didnt even notice how it went. So people who want to lead a special life or have a special organization to have experiences, thats quite silly the greatest possible diversity of experiences is at your disposal every minute, every minute. Only you must learn not to have a Mental ambition for great things. Just the other day, I was shown in such a clear way a very small thing I had done (I, its the body speaking), a very small things that had been done by the Lord in this body (thats a long sentence!), and I was shown the terrestrial consequence of that very small thingit was visible, I mean, as my hand is visible to my eyesand the terrestrial correspondence. Then I understood.
We are given everythingEVERYTHING. All the difficulties that have to be overcome, all of them (and the more capable we are, that is, the more complex the instrument is, the more numerous the difficulties are), all the difficulties, all the opportunities to overcome them, all the possible experiences, and limited in time and space so they can be innumerable. And it has repercussions and consequences all over the earth (I am not concerned with what goes on in the universe because, for the time being, that isnt my work). But it is certain (because it has been said so and I know it) that what goes on on the earth has repercussions throughout the universe. Sitting there, you live the everyday life with its usual insignificance, its unimportance, its lack of interest and its a WONDERFUL field of experiences, of innumerable experiences, not only innumerable but as varied as can be, from the most subtle to the most material, without leaving your body. Only, you should have RETURNED to it. You cannot have authority over your body without having left it.
0 1963-11-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Recently, I was following the thing down to the smallest detail, in everybodys Mentality. Even in those who have read Sri Aurobindo, who have studied Sri Aurobindo, who have understood, who have come into contact with that region of light, its still there its still there. Its very yes, its very tightly woven into the most outward and material part of the consciousness. Its a kind of submissiveness, which may be quite rebellious, but which gives a sense, as you said, of something hanging over your head and shoulders: a sort of Fate, of Destiny.
So there is the good destiny and the bad destiny; there is a divine force which one regards as something entirely beyond understanding, whose designs and aims are perfectly inexplicable, and the submission, the surrender consists in acceptingblindlyall that happens. Ones nature revolts, but revolts against an Absolute against which it is helpless. And all of that is Ignorance. Not one of all those movements is truefrom the most intense revolt to the blindest submission, its all false, not one true movement.
0 1963-11-27, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It stays, but not as a Mental memory, not at all: as the feeling of an atmospherevery interesting.
There was something about China, something about America, something about all the time, everywhere, everywhere. As though he had realized a certain thing through my experience on earth; and there is an action which he does accordingly, and then the result everywhere.
0 1963-12-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, he came in as a big industrial person with a remarkable power of Mental creation that organizes events thats what entered the room and then it melted. And I didnt put the full charge: I simply put some power like this (Mother lowers her hand), and I was looking him in the face. Then I felt something going on lower down; I looked: his hand was tightly clenched. So I stopped.
But the remarkable thing is that he was CORRECTLY conscious.
0 1963-12-07 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And thats the only thing: all the rest, all moral notions, everything, everything, even the notion of Ignorance it all becomes Mental chatter. But this, this experience, is marvelous. Far from Thee.
Mother means structures, not cells in the biological sense.
0 1963-12-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is equally ignorant and one thousand miles away from my teaching to find it in your relations with human beings or in the nobility of the human character or an idea that we are here to establish Mental and moral and social Truth and justice on human and egoistic lines. I have never promised to do anything of the kind. Human nature is made up of imperfections, even its righteousness and virtue are pretensions, imperfections and prancings of a self-approbatory egoism. What is aimed at by us is a spiritual truth as the basis of life, the first words of which are surrender and union with the Divine and the transcendence of ego. So long as that basis is not established, a sadhak is only an ignorant and imperfect human being struggling with the evils of the lower nature.
I want to offer it to an American admiral who is here and who needs to know this.
0 1963-12-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, in Savitri, Sri Aurobindo went through all the worlds, and it so happens that I am following that without knowing it (because I never rememberthank God, I really thank heaven!I asked the Lord to take away my Mental memory and He took it away entirely, so I am not weighed down), but I follow that description in Savitri without Mentally knowing the sequence of the worlds, and these last few days I was in that Muddle of Falsehood (I told you last time), it was really painful, and I was tracking it down to the most tenuous vibrations, those that go back to the origin, to the moment when Truth could turn into Falsehoodhow it all happened. And it is so tenuous, almost imperceptible, that deformation, the original Deformation, that you tend to lose heart and you think, Its still really quite easy to topple over the slightest thing and you can still topple over into Falsehood, into Deformation. And yesterday, I had in my hands a passage from Savitri that was brought to meits a marvel, but its so sad, so miserable, oh, I could have cried (I dont easily cry).
The world grew full of menacing Energies,
0 1964-01-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Asura, Rakshasa: demons of the Mental and vital planes; Pisacha: depraved beings.
***
0 1964-01-15, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a curious transitional state in the most material consciousness, the body consciousness. A transition from the state of subjugation, of helplessness, in which one is constantly at the mercy of forces, vibrations, unexpected movements, all sorts of impulsesto the Power. The Power that asserts and realizes itself. Its the transition between the two; and there is almost a swarm of experiences of all types, from the most Mental part of that consciousness down to the darkest, most material part.
And when I want to say something, there immediately comes from all corners a swarm of things that want to be said and rush in all at the same timewhich, naturally, prevents me from speaking.
--
And this field of experience also includes the physical mindall the Mental constructions that have a direct action on life and on the body; there is there an almost unlimited field of experiences. And everything takes the form not of a speculation or a thought, but of an experience. Ill give you an example to make myself understood. I wont tell you the thing as it occurred, but as I now know it to be. There is in France someone very devoted, born Catholic, and who was seriously ill. He wrote to me asking what he should do; he said that people around him naturally wanted him to receive extreme unction (they thought he was about to die), and he wrote to ask me if it had any influence on the progress of his inner being and whether he should refuse categorically. I knew none of this [as Mother had not yet received the letter], but I had an experience here, in which a priest and altar boys came to give me extreme unction! (Thats how it presented itself to me.) They wanted to give me extreme unction, so I watched I watched, I wanted to see; I thought, Well, before dismissing them abruptly, lets see what it is. (I had no idea why they had come, you understand; someone had sent them to give me extreme unctionnot that I felt particularly sick! But anyhow thats how it was.) So before dismissing them, I watched carefully to find out if really it had a power of action, if extreme unction had the power to disturb the progress of the soul and tie it down to old religious formations. I watched and I saw how thin and tenuous it was, without force; I saw clearly that it could have some force only if the priest who performed it was a conscious soul and did it consciously, in relationship with an inner power or force (vital or other), but that if it was an ordinary man doing his job and giving the sacraments with the ordinary belief and nothing more, it was perfectly harmless.
Once I had seen that, suddenly (it was as if on a screen) the whole story vanished and it was over. It had come only to make me see it, thats all. But it presented itself in that way in order to make me watch intently, seriously, not as a Mental consideration: a vision and an experience.
Immediately afterwards, I had a visit from the Pope! The Pope [Paul VI] had come to Pondicherry (he does intend to visit India), he had come to Pondicherry and asked to see me (quite impossible things materially, of course, but they were perfectly simple and straightforward). So I saw him. He came, we met each other over there (in the music room), and we actually did speak to each other. I really felt the man in front of me (gesture of feeling), felt what he was. And he was very worried at the thought of what I was going to say to people about his visit: the revelation I would give of his visit. I saw that, but I didnt say anything. Finally he said (we were speaking in French, he had an Italian accent; but all this, you see, doesnt correspond to any thought: its like pictures in a film), he said, What will you tell people about my visit? So I looked at him (inner contacts are more concrete than pictures or words) and I simply answered him, after staring at him intently, I will tell them that we have been in communion in our love for the Lord. And there was in it the warmth of a golden lightextraordinary! Then I saw something relax in him, as if an anxiety were leaving him, and he left like that, in a great concentration.
--
Its not a Mental contact that lets you know he has written and so on; no, it was the experienceit always takes the form of an experience, an ACTION: something that has to be done and gets done, or that has to be known and becomes known. It is never the Mental transcription of ordinary life.
The Pope I wonder why: what happened? What does it mean? Why did it happen? But I still see the scene; it was a very living reality: he was tall, in the room over there (the music room), and there was a somewhat gloomy atmosphere around him, with a kind of worry. But the inner contact was very strong, very strong, very intense, and it went beyond the manbeyond the man, beyond the physical Supreme Pontiffquite beyond. It touched something. Yet I had never thought of him, of course, nothing.
0 1964-01-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And yet, difficulties pour in from everywhere, not only with regard to health (which is still linked to moral things: the mood, the state of consciousness, the thoughts and Mental formations, etc.), but to money, the paper money which refuses to come! And in this connection, lately I have seen in a fairly interesting way the difference in the material Mental atmosphere: there was a sort of certainty that all that was necessary would come somehowit was impossible for it not to come (I am referring to the general atmosphere); then it was replaced by you know, like when you bang your nose against a wall! That sort of very childlike, carefree trustvanished! It just vanished So I had to look deeply at it, at what was behind, and thats how I saw this change in the Inertia (how is it going to express itself? I dont know; in what way?), which I had never seen before.
It is something there, down below. Before, it was here (gesture to the level of the forehead), like this, in the atmosphere; now, its there (gesture at ground level), that is to say, very low.
0 1964-02-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this connection, I have noticed another thing, that I no longer know in the same way the languages I know! Its very peculiar, especially for English. There is a sort of instinct based on the rhythm of the words (I dont know where it comes from, maybe from the superconscient of the language) that lets you know whether a sentence is correct or notits not at all a Mental knowledge, not at all (thats all gone, even the knowledge of spelling is completely gone!), but its a sort of sense or feeling of the inner rhythm. I noticed this a few days ago: in the birthday cards, we put quotations (someone types the quotations, sometimes he makes mistakes), and there was a quotation from me (I didnt at all remember having written it or having thought it either). I saw itit was in English I saw it, and in one place it was as if you tripped: it wasnt correct. Then there came to me clearly, Put this way and that way, the sentence would be correct. (To say this Mentalizes it too much: its a sort of sensation, not a thought, but a sensation, like a sensation of the sound.) With the sentence written this way, the sound is correct; with the sentence written that other way, using the same words but reversing their order (as was the case), the sentence isnt correct, and to correct that sentence where the order of the words had been reversed, it was necessary to add a little word (in that case it was it), and then, with the sound it, the sentence became correct. All sorts of thingsif I were asked Mentally, I would say, I havent the faintest idea! It doesnt correspond to any knowledge. But so precise! Extraordinary.
And I understood that this is the way of knowing a language. I always had it in French when I wrotein the past it was less precise, more hazy, but there was the sense of the rhythm of a sentence: if the sentence has this rhythm, its correct; if its incorrect, the rhythm is missing. It was very vague, I had never tried to go deeper into it or make it more precise, but these last few days it has become very accurate. In English I find it more interesting, because, of course, English is less subconscious in my brain than French is (not much less, but a little less), and now its instantaneous! And then so obvious, you know, that if the greatest scholar were to tell me, No, I would answer him, You are wrong, its like this.
0 1964-02-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a feeling, a vague feeling that it will give someone, somewhere, very far away physically, a coup de grace, because I had that feeling while having the experiencewhat I told you and what you noted down was only the memory of the experience, but while I was having the experience and responding (gesture of Mental communication), I had the feeling that, somewhere, someone was touched in a radical way, and that it was important for the intellectual atmosphere of the earth. Who is it? I dont know.
Thats why I let that article be published, because otherwise You see, when I read something or when, for instance, Nolini reads me a translation, I read with the others consciousness how flat it had become! Flat, flat: all the Power was gone.
--
They feel correctly, they Mentalize less.
(Mother goes into contemplation)
0 1964-03-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your vision obviously its Mental constructions standing in the way of the takeoff thats obvious. But it isnt an individual experience: its a collective thing.
It was very black, and it was a church like a church steeple. But the gold ciborium, what is that? It was very pretty, besides; it was beautiful, but hidden.
0 1964-03-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It wasnt a permeation into the Mind: it was a permeation into Lifeinto Life, into the material, earthly substance, which had become alive. Even plants participated in last nights experience: it isnt something that was the privilege of the Mental being, its the whole vital substance (vitalized material substance) of the earth that received this ananda of the power of progressit was triumphant. Triumphant.
And when I came back (it took me perhaps five or six minutes to come back), it was with a sort of quiet certainty that the return was a necessity, and that something else would occur thanks to which it wont be necessary to leave one state for the other (thats the trouble, we still have to leave one state for the other). It hasnt left, but its in the backgroundit should be in the front.
--
It was luminousluminous the whole time. That diamond-like sparkling turning into something much more compact, but less intense, that is, less brightfar more powerful. There was, above all, that sense of power: a power that can crush everything and rebuild everything. And in such an Ananda! But with nothing, absolutely nothing that had the slightest excitement, nothing of that bubbling which comes from the mind the mind was like this (gesture, both hands open towards the Eternal), peaceful, peaceful, quiet, absolutely quiet. And while the experience went on, I knew (because the consciousness above was watching it all), I knew that only when the flash the dazzlingly intense flash of the Mental transformation through the supra Mental descentonly when the Light, the burst of Light, joins the ananda of Power will there occur things that will be a bit indisputable.
Because in an experience of this type, only the one who has it can be sure. The effects are visible in tiny details that can be observed only by those who are already well-disposed, that is (to translate), by those who have faiththose who have faith can see. And I know that because they tell me: they see examples of those tiny miracles of every minute (they arent miracles) multiply; theyre everywhere, all the time, all the timelittle facts, harmonies, realizations, concords all of which are quite unusual in this world of Disorder. But while the experience was there, I knew there would be another one, which is yet to come (God knows when!), and which would join with this one to form a third. And it is that junction that will then probably cause something to be changed in the appearances.
0 1964-03-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It concerns an American who came here full of all the American ideas, who did a survey of everything (the way the services are organized and so on), and who sent me his report in which he says that everything lacks organization, a Mental structure. I didnt intend to answer him, but the day before yesterday, just when I was going to retire for the night, Sri Aurobindo told me insistentlyhe came and told me, Here is what you must say to T. And he insisted until I had written it down I was forced to write it!
Sri Aurobindo has told us (its he himself who said it) and we are convinced by experience that above the mind there is a consciousness much wiser than the Mental wisdom, and in the depths of things there is a will much more powerful than the human will.
All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action and organise all our activities. It is the way in which the Ashram has been created. Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created not by any artificial planning but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. The present difficulties come chiefly from psychological resistances in the disciples who have not been able to follow the rather rapid pace of the sadhana and the yielding to the intrusion of Mental methods which have corrupted the initial working.
A growth and purification of the consciousness is the only remedy.
0 1964-03-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As soon as it concerns Mental things, he understands perfectly well; as soon as it concerns material things, he doesnt understand anymore. But who can understand?
I cant say I understand, but
--
I transpose. I transpose a truth that I understand Mentally. I tell myself its the same in your body.
Yes, thats closer, but (laughing) its not quite it!
--
Its only when the experience becomes Mental and psychological that people understand it.
Perhaps the modern scientific mind that has studied atoms would understand better. Its the same kind of understanding as that of the scientist who analyzes the constitution of Matter. I distinctly feel it is an extension of that study and that its the only true approach for the most material part of Matter. Any psychological explanation is meaningless.1
--
And the light and warmth were expressed, that intensity of Ananda, that bliss You understand, it wasnt in opposition to but like a COMPLEMENT of this vibratory knowledge, which was I cant say a coldly scientific knowledge because that introduces Mental notions, but it was of such a wisdom! A knowledge so wise, so calm, so imperturbably quiet, absolutely free from any notion of good and evil, of divine, of positive and negative, absolutely independent of all of thatpurely material. And with an absolute power. Then in these same cells, which were fully conscious of this knowledge of vibrations as being the supreme means of control for their harmony, suddenly there arose in them a sort of not a flame (a flame is dark in comparison), a luminous Ananda: Love in its perfect reality.
And it was translated like this: Its so much more marvelous when we know its You!
0 1964-04-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, mon petit, yesterday or the day before, I heard something I dont exactly know what it isit isnt music, I mean it isnt the notation of some musical instrument: its the notation of a vibration of I cant say, I didnt understand.2 But in it At first, you feel exactly as if you had entered a madhouse: its completely incoherent, disjointed, and everything is unexpected because there is no logicabsolutely nothing Mental. So you go from one sound to another, without any transition, and your first impression is exactly like its madness. But if you listen, now and then theres a sound, which isnt the sound of a musical instrument absolutely wonderful! But it lasts one second. You would like it to continuepfft! gone. And now and then there is a voice, quite like the human voice, you can almost hear words, there seem to be wordswhich made me think that the sound of our voice has its origin elsewhere (below or above, I dont know; where those vibrations come from I cannot say). And after a while, I saw that something in the being [Mothers being] was I cant say interested, it was something that enjoyed it, that didnt exactly have a pleasant sensation, but almost felt a need for the unforeseen, an unforeseen beyond all that we can imagine: disjointed, no logic, no sense, nothing. It SOUNDS like chaos, but all of a sudden I felt it wasnt chaos, it responded to another law. And when it came towards the end, I really wanted it to go on for a long time.
At first, you start laughing, you make fun of it, you giggle as if you were faced with something absolutely farcical. But now and then, oh! And youve hardly had the time to appreciate it when its already gonea marvel. A marvel: a sound the like of which I have never heard, which no instrument can produce.
You go through all kinds of states, but curiously enough, I discovered in the being, somewhere in the consciousness, a sort of joy or intense interest in the absolutely unexpected the unexpected, which to the Mentality is unspeakably farcical.
Interesting.
0 1964-06-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There you are! Since my last letter, I have seen you several times, often, evenevery time that I go to the place where the moves of nations (their next move) are being worked out. It is a terrestrial Mental region, open to the higher influences. It seems to interest you, especially in certain details.
Last night, it involved the countries of the Far East, particularly China and Japan. You were there with me. We were trying to do some good work and to bring about a rapprochement. The details were picturesque and interesting but too long to narrate.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
People who are quite shut up in their bag of skin, in their vital and Mental ego, give you the feeling of something totally artificial, hardhard, dry and artificial. And exact. Thats troublesome, you feel like taking a hammer and bashing themit happens!
We publish below the letter in full.
0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So once and for all, Ive given up all hope of anyone at all understanding why and how I act. Because its true, now I can say (it has come about progressively), I can say in an absolute way, after looking at it for several months, that my actions are not the result of a reactionnei ther an intellectual reaction nor a Mental reaction, nor a vital reaction, nor, of course, an emotional reaction, nor even a physical reaction. Now, even the body instantly refers all that comes to it to the Supreme, automatically.
This experience came regarding a simply personal question, to make me understand how things happen and how useless it is to hope that people will ever understand; it was on the occasion of a host of silly little events that occur constantly and make people repeat, Mother said, Mother felt, Mother did, Mother and so on and all the squabbles. And I was put forcibly into that whole muddle. For a time, I used to worry, I wondered, Cant I make them understand? Well, I have seen that its impossible, so I dont bother about it anymore. I simply said to those who have goodwill, Dont listen to what people tell you; when they come and tell you, Mother said, Mother wanted, dont believe a word of it, thats all; let them say what they like, it doesnt matter.
--
It is said that divine Love doesnt manifest because, in the worlds present state of imperfection, the result would be a catastrophe thats a human vision. Divine Love manifests, has manifested eternally, will manifest eternally, and its the incapacity of the material world not only of the material world, but of the vital world and the Mental world, and of many other worlds that arent ready, that are incapable but HE is there, He is there, right there! He is there permanently: its THE Permanence. The Permanence Buddha sought is there. He claims he found it in Nirvanait is there, in Love.
(silence)
--
But the remarkable thing is that you are the only person to whom I can speaknot that I didnt try [during Satprems trip to France], because I had the feeling that if certain things went away, it might be a pity. I tried with Nolini and Pavitra: nothing comes out, except a sort of Mental transcription.
When I called you Satprem, thats what I meant: you must certainly have the capacity to come into contact with That.
--
And the physical world is made to express Beauty; if it became harmonious instead of being the ignoble thing it is, if it became harmonious, it would have an exceptional vibratory quality! Its rather curious: the vital world is magnificent, the Mental world has its splendors, the over Mental world with all its gods (who are existing beings, I know them well) is truly very beautiful; but I tell you, since I had that Contact, I have found all that hollowhollow and lacking the essential.
And that essential thing, in its principle, is here, on earth.
0 1964-08-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
People cannot live without reducing things to a Mental system.
They need a mechanism.
0 1964-08-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The strange thing is that (I was very conscious, perfectly conscious; the Witness consciousness is never canceled, but it isnt in the way) is that I knew, I saw (yet my eyes were closed, I was lying in my bed), I saw my body movingit had movements of such a Rhythm! You see, every movement, every gesture, every finger, every attitude was a thing that was being realized. Then what I studied, what I saw during the half-hour that followed (with my eyes closed, seeing much more clearly than with my ordinary eyes) was the difference in the body the difference in the bodys movements between that moment [during the experience] and after [when Mother returned to the personal consciousness]. At that moment, the movements were it was creation! And with an EXACTNESS, a majesty! (Mother stretches out her arms and moves them slowly in a vast Rhythm.) I dont know what other people might have seen, I have no idea, but as for me, I saw myself; I saw especially the arms because it was the arms that acted: they were like the realizing intermediaries I dont know how to put it. But it was as vast as the world. It was the earth (its always the earth consciousness), not the universe: the earth, the earth consciousness. But I was conscious then of the universe and of the action on the earth (both things), of the earth as a very small thing in the universe (Mother holds a small ball in her hands). I dont know, its hard to say, but when it expressed itself, there was also the perception of the difference in vision between that moment [during the experience] and afterwards. But all this is inexpressible. Yet it is an absolute knowledgeits another way of knowing. Sri Aurobindo explained this, that all Mental knowledge is a seeking: you seek; while this knowledge has another quality, another flavor. And then the power of the Harmony is so wonderful! (Mother again depicts a great Rhythm, her arms outstretched) So wonderful, so spontaneous, so SIMPLE. And It stays there, as if It supported the entire world as it is; it is a kind of inner support of the world the world leans on it.
But outwardly, that sort of film its like a thin film of difficulties, of complications, added on by the human consciousness (its much stronger with man than with the animal; the animal doesnt have that, very littleit has it more and more because of man, but very little; its something specific to man and the Mental function), its something very thinas thin as an onion skin, as dry as an onion skinyet it spoils everything. It spoils everything ONLY FOR THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS. At the time [of the experience], it was unimportant. Unimportant, in the sense that it takes away all the Beauty, all the Power, all the Magnificence of the thing for the human consciousness. For man, it is of paramount importance. But for the Action, its almost negligible. Basically, its rather that it makes it difficult for man to become conscious and PARTICIPATE; otherwise, my feeling is that truly the time has come for things to get done: that experience was a NEW descent, that is, something new entering the terrestrial manifestation; it wasnt that I became conscious of how the world is: I WAS the Lords Will coming into the world to change it. Thats what it was. And that action was only very slightly affected (assuming it was affected at all) by that stupid onion skin of human Mentality.
In fact, that was the interesting point: when you come back to the other side (its not even coming back to the other side, its a curious thing that happens..), I remember, when I became conscious again of this body, its gestures had become dry, sterile, thinstupid. And yet it was still in an intense Bliss and a total self-giving: it was at the height of its joy; and yet what it was doing, its appearance, oh, it all seemed so silly!
0 1964-08-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, one is very, very active. To succeed in having a part of the night still (not only Mentally: a supreme Stillness in that great universal Movement) requires a whole lot of work, a lot of work.
As a matter of fact, these last few nights Ive been conducting a sort of review of all the stages my nights went through before being what they areits fantastic! I started working on my nights at the beginning of the century, exactly in 1900, sixty-four years ago now, and the number of nights when I didnt continue my training is absolutely minimalminimal. There had to be something unexpected or I had to be ill; and even then, there was another kind of study going on. I remember (Sri Aurobindo was here), I caught a sort of fever like influenza from contact with the workers, one of those fevers that take hold of you brutally, instantly, and in the night I had a temperature of more than 105. Anyway, it was And then I spent my night studying what people call delirium(laughing) it was very interesting! I was explaining it to Sri Aurobindo (he was there: I was lying on the bed and he was sitting by the bedside), I told him, This is whats going on, that is whats going on and that (such and such and such a thing) is what gives people what doctors call delirium. It isnt delirium. I remember having been assailed for hours by little entities, vital forms that were hideous, vile, and so vicious! An unequaled cruelty. They rushed at me in a troop, I had to fight to repel them: they retreated, moved forward, retreated, moved forward. And for hours like that. Naturally, at that time I had Sri Aurobindos full power and presence, and yet it lasted three or four hours. So I thought, How terrible it must be for the poor devils who have neither the knowledge I have, nor the power I have, nor Sri Aurobindos protective presenceall the best conditions. It must be frightful, oh! I have never in my life seen anything so disgusting.
0 1964-08-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its true on the Mental or vital level, but on the physical level its not true.
On the physical level, its a pure waste. The mind and vital are another affair, thats not interesting: we have known for a very long time that their life doesnt depend on the body it depends on the body only in order to manifest. Thats another affair. I am speaking of the body, thats what interests me: the bodys cells. Well, death is a waste and thats that.
--
Every passing year brings me closer to a certainty that we know nothing; and yet, the consciousness keeps growing and growing and growing. Everything is becoming a LIVING consciousness, each thing emanates its own consciousness and EXISTS because of it. For instance, as I have already told you, knowing in ones consciousness just a second or a minute beforehand: The clock is going to strike, someone is going to enter, someone is going to move. And those things arent Mental, they are part of the mechanism of things, yet they are all phenomena of consciousness. The things themselves LIVE (I say live, but thats not it), they let you know where they are, where youll find them; other things suddenly go OUT of the consciousness and disappear. Its a whole worlda world of tiny, microscopic phenomena that are another way of living, a world that seems to be the result of consciousness WITHOUT the intervention of what we call knowledge: its something that has nothing to do with knowledge or thought.
There are ups and downs, moments when its more present and moments where its less so; to be exact: moments when its active and moments when it isnt. And whenever there is a period during which it isnt active, when it starts again it does so on a higher rung, that is, more intensely and clearly. The whole thing is obviously following a process of development. Its a sort of the word awareness might be the nearest; it isnt a perception, which still belongs to the mind, its a sort of phenomenon of vision. And it has an absolute character. For instance, from time to time, when I hear people speak of something or other and say, It will be like this and like that, instantly there comes a sort of tactile vision how can I explain this? It resembles touch and sight (yet its neither touch nor sight, but both together): its the thing as it is, thats IT; and they may say what they like, thats IT and it is irrefutable. And so far, there has never been any contradiction.
Its a consciousness in which the Mental element is absent. It comes just on its own, and its so clear! Its like an immediate contact with the thing as it is.
It is another way of living.
And I am aware that when I am in that state, I look very absent I must have the appearance of an automaton; yet, on the contrary, the consciousness is so acute, its the exact opposite of absence! The consciousness is so awake, so awakeawake but not Mentalized, without Mental interference.
(silence)
0 1964-08-29, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In your case, I had known it from the beginning. From the beginning, I had seen the proportion between what agreed with the truth and what was the product (how should I put it?) of the Mental hope you placed on X, but I didnt say anything. I knew that his passage through our life here, that contact of a moment, was necessary for certain things to be realized and I let him enter and exit.
Its so amusing every minute when you can discern the TRUE THING from whats added on by the Mental functioning, by Mental creation and activity the two things stand out so clearly! But Wisdom lets you know that it would be pointless to want to make an arbitrary purification, that circumstances should be left to unfold as they have to so your knowledge may be TRUE, not arbitraryat the appropriate time, in the appropriate conditions and with the appropriate receptivity.
One must learn how to wait.
0 1964-09-12, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it is an entire reconstruction of the Mental functioning.
***
0 1964-09-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And for Sri Aurobindos writings (not all), its the same; there are certain things I had truly understood, in the sense that they were already understood far more deeply and truly than even an enlightened Mentality understands themthey were already felt and lived and now, they take on a completely different meaning.
I read some of those sentences or ideas that are expressed in few words, three or four words, m which he doesnt say things fully: he simply seems to let them fall like drops of water; when I read them at the time (sometimes not long ago; sometimes only two or three years ago), I had an experience which was already far deeper or vaster than that of intelligence, but now a spark of Light suddenly appears in them, and I say, Oh, but I hadnt seen that! And its a whole understanding or CONTACT with things that I had never had before.
0 1964-09-23, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, on the Mental level, it isnt a problem, all that has been solved and its very fine. But its HERE, inside here I cant even say in the sensation because I dont live in the sensations. Its a problem of consciousness, of the consciousness of this body.
And I clearly feel that the problem could disappear only if the supreme Consciousness truly took possession of the cells and made them live, act, move, like that, so they had the sense of the Omnipotence taking hold of them; then it would be over, they would no longer be responsible for anything. This seems to be the only solution. Then comes the prayer, When will it come?
--
The problem is made worse by the fact that the goodwill of the cells (a necessarily ignorant goodwill) doesnt know if one attitude is better than the other, if it should choose between the two, if both should be accepted they dont know! And as it isnt Mentalized or formulated or with words, its very difficult. Oh, as soon as the words are there all that has been said comes back, and its over. Its not that, its not that anymore. Even if strong sensations or a vital force come up, its not a problem anymore. The problem is only HERE, in this (Mother strikes her body).
Nights, for instance, are a long awareness, a great action, a discovery of all kinds of things, a taking stock of the situation as it is but there arent any problems! But the minute the body (I cant say wakes up because it isnt asleep: its only in a state of rest sufficiently complete for its personal difficulties not to interfere), but from time to time, what well call waking up takes place, that is to say, the purely physical consciousness comes back and the whole problem comes back instantly. Instantly the problem is there. And without your remembering it: the problem doesnt come back because you remember it, its that the problem is there, in the very cells.
0 1964-09-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Obviously, there could be only one solution: to lose the Mental consciousness that gives you the perception or sensation that you are telling a lie or a truth; and you can obtain that only when you get to the higher state in which our notion of falsehood and truth disappears. Because when we speak from the ordinary Mental consciousness, even when we are convinced that we are telling the whole truth, we are not doing so; and even when we think we are telling a lie, sometimes it isnt one. We do not have the capacity to discern whats true and what isntbecause we live in a false consciousness.
But there is a state in which, first, you no longer make personal decisions, and then you are like a mirror reflecting the exact NEED, the true (spiritual, that is) need of the patient, for instance, and exactly what he needs to know so that the rest of his life (whatever time he has left to live) brings him the maximum possibilities of progress.
--
Oh, what a beautiful realization to achieve! A beautiful work can be done in that way. To be able to feel and SEE the thing to be said, and THATS what should be saidnot with the thought, This man is going to die, I shouldnt make him too unhappy, I should, all that is perfectly useless. Perfectly useless, and you put yourself in a kind of Mental muddle; besides, it doesnt really help, it doesnt have the expected effect. While this inner vision to see why that being is ill and what that physical disorder expresses in the destiny of the soul of that man or this womanits magnificent, magnificent!
And ultimately, saying, You will be cured, is just as useless as saying, You wont be cured, both are equally incorrect from the point of view of the true Truth, and unsatisfactory for someone who has had a first contact with a life other than physical life.
--
Thats the first step. You see, he puts the problem from a purely Mental standpoint: to tell whats conventionally called the truth (which isnt true), or to tell whats conventionally called a lie (which may not at all be what you think it is: it isnt a lie, but simply the contradiction or opposite of what you consider to be the truthsame thing). But in order to find the solution, you have to climb up therewhere you SEE, where you can see in a totally concrete way that that truth isnt absolute and that lie isnt absolute, that there is something elseano ther way of seeingin which things are no longer like that.
And then then if you could speak the True Thing, the right word (word or sentence), have the thought which is the TRUE thought in every casewhat marvelous power you would have over your patient! It would be magnificent.
--
It is something I have observed on the level of the bodys cells hundreds and hundreds of times. And then, you no longer have at all that Mental impression of one disorder added to another, which makes the problem more difficult thats not it at all, its if you get to the center, all the rest will be naturally restored to order. And thats a fact: if order is restored at the center of disorder, everything follows naturally, without your paying it any special attention.
From the human standpoint, from the standpoint of revolutions, from the standpoint of fights, from the standpoint of wars, its extraordinarily accurate and precise.
0 1964-09-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It had rather seemed to me that they should be kept at a distance. With Thon, the adverse forces and hostile beings were often mentioned, they occupied a big place in self-development and in action. As for Sri Aurobindo, he used to say that that notion was useful mostly from the psychological and personal standpoint, because struggling with difficulties is easier when you see them as coming from outside, as an attack from outside, than if you think they are part of your own nature. Not that he denied their existence, far from it, but the path depends a lot on the attitude you take and on the Mental construction you have, naturally.
Sri Aurobindo insisted rather on Oneness: he used to say that even what we consider to be the worst adversaries are still a form of the Supreme, which, deliberately or not, consciously or not, helps in the general transformation. This seems to me vaster, deeper, more comprehensive.
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The best one can do is not to have any prejudices or preconceived ideas or principlesoh, moral principles, fixed codes of conduct, what must be done and what must not be done, and preconceived ideas with regard to morals, with regard to progress, and then all the social and Mental conventions theres no obstacle worse than that. I know people who wasted dozens of years trying to overcome one of those Mental constructions!
If one can be like this, opentruly open in a simplicity you know, the simplicity of ignorance that knows its ignorant like this (gesture, hands open), ready to receive all that comes then, perhaps, something will happen.
0 1964-10-10, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On the material level, japa is very good for that. When your head is tired and you are a little weary of forever contradicting that pessimism, you just have to repeat your japa, and automatically you make contact. To make contact. Thats something the cells value a lot. A lot. Its a very good way, because its a way that isnt Mental, its a mechanical way, its a question of vibration.
There, mon petit, we must endure.
0 1964-10-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These last few nights, an experience has been developing. There is a sort of objectification, like scenes unfolding in which I am one of the characters; but it isnt me, it is some character or other that I play in order to have the double consciousness, the ordinary consciousness and the true consciousness at the same time. There was a whole series of experiences to show simultaneously the True Thing and the sort of half-death (its his word that makes me think of this I am too dead), the half-death of the mind. In those experiences, the state of ordinary Mentality is something dry (not exactly hard because its crumbly), lifeless, without vibrationdry, cold; and as a color, its always grayish. And then, there is a maximum tension, an effort to understand and remember and knowknow what you should do; when you go somewhere, know how you should go there; know what people are going to do, know Everything, you see, is a perpetual question of the mind (its subconscious in the mindsome are conscious of it, but even in those who are apparently quiet, its there constantly that tension to know). And its a sort of superficial thing, shallow, cold and dry, WITHOUT VIBRATION. At the same time, as if in gusts, the true consciousness comes, as a contrast. And it happens in almost cinematographic circumstances (there is always a story, to make it more living). For instance, last night (its one story among many, many others), the I that was conscious then (which isnt me, you understand), the I that was playing had to go somewhere: it was with other people in a certain place and had to go through the town to another place. And she knew nothing, neither the way nor the name of the place she was going to, nor the person she had to seeshe knew nothing. She knew nothing, but she knew she had to go. So then, that tension: how, how can you know? How can you know? And questioning people, asking questions, trying to explain, You know, its like this and like that, innumerable details (it lasts for hours). And now and then, a flood of lighta warm, golden, living, comfortable lightand the feeling that everything is prearranged, that all that will have to be known will be known, that the way has been prepared beforeh and that all you have to do is let yourself live! It comes like that, in gusts. But then, there is an intensity of contrast between that constant effort of the mind, which is an enormous effort of tension and concentrated will, and then and then that glory. That comfortable glory, you know, in which you let yourself go in trusting happiness: But everything is ready, everything is luminous, everything is known! All you have to do is let yourself live. All you have to do is let yourself live.
Its as if a play were performed to make it more living, more realone subject, another subject, this, that. If you enter a certain state, then another time enter the other state, you can remember the difference and its useful, but in this form of a play, with the double consciousness, the opposition becomes so real, so concrete that you come out of it wondering, How can you go on living in this aberration when you have once TOUCHEDtouched, experienced the True Thing?
0 1964-10-24a, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I replaced the future tense with the present, deliberately too, because it isnt something new: it has always been that way; it isnt that I now announce they will be disappointed they have always been disappointed. And asserting this fact is what had the power of dispelling a whole mass of formations: not only formations of beings of the vital or hostile beings, but the false Mental formations of human beings.
And here, I wrote: Je ne dtiens pas de pouvoirs [I possess no powers], which is better than Je ne dispose pas de pouvoirs [I have no powers at my disposal]. I had chosen the word dispose in French (chosen, I mean, not Mentally), but the word dispose came along with the meaning that the power wasnt at my disposal there is a nuance. I mean that if, by some aberration (it would really be an aberration), if by some aberration I had the desire to work a miracle, I wouldnt be able toit would be contrary to the supreme Will. It isnt that I am deliberately making the choice, No, I wont work miracles I cant, thats not the way, it MUST NOT be like that.
Youll have a lot of difficulty driving that into peoples heads!
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So that doesnt help, because the Mental atmosphere isnt favorable. Mentally, you look at it and smile; but the body feels it a little bit, it feels a little the pressure of defeatist formations around. But it knows why those around are like thatfrom the material point of view, those around are just what is needed, just what is needed; the body needs such an atmosphere so that material difficulties arent made worse. So its perfectly happy, only it dare not be joyous; it immediately says, Oh, its still too beautiful a thing for life as it is!
I dont know how long it will last.
--
Its amusing: all the Mental constructions men have tried to live and realize on earth come to me, like this, from every side, to be ordered, clarified, put in their own place, arranged, organized, synthesized. So all those supposedly great problems come to me, and immediately there is an indulgent smile, as at a childs fumblings; but not at all with a sense of superiority, nothing like that, theres only the feeling that an instrument is used that cannot solve the problem. And a kind of certainty, deep down in Matter, that the solution lies THEREthis is very strong, very strong. Oh, what fuss, what fuss, how vainly you have tried!go deep enough within, stay quiet enough, and then THAT will be. And you cannot understand it: it only has to BE.
You cannot understand it, because you are using instruments that cannot understand. But it cannot be understood: it has to BE.
0 1964-11-12, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I noticefrom letters I receive, from remarks made to me that the Action is becoming truly general all over the earth, and with SIMILAR effects (a slight coloration according to each individual, but thats nothing), similar effects. And its a whole discipline, a sadhana of the bodynot a Mental one: of the body. So it is concrete.
(silence)
--
I mentioned (not with so many details) the fact to the doctor, not in the hope that he would know, but because (its amusing) when I speak to him, he tries to understand, of course, and then there is the mirror of his Mental knowledge, and in that mirror, sometimes I find the key! (Laughing) You understand, the scientific key of whats going on.
As a matter of fact, it was after I spoke to him (I mentioned it to him as a sort of dizzy spell) that I was able to perceive precisely those routes. I wondered if it wasnt the projection on a magnifying screen of phenomena taking place between different brain cells? Because those sorts of dizzy spells always follow (today there hasnt been anything at all), they always follow a moment or a day of intense aspiration for the transformation of the brain. It may be that. You know, all those brain cells in there are hitched together, and if those hitchings are disturbed, generally people become deranged; and it gave me the impression of a magnifying projection enabling me to follow the connections established between certain brain cells, so that the functioning may not be the automatic, semiconscious functioning of the old state anymore and the brain may truly become the instrument of the higher Force. Because the formula of my aspiration is always, Lord, take possession of this brain, and its always after this intense aspiration that those kinds of phenomena occur. So it is to prepare the brain to be the direct expression of the higher Force.
--
I was on the threshold of an understanding (an understanding: I am not talking about a Mental understanding, I am talking about the experience of the fact). The experience of the fact is the experience of the coexistence of the static state and the state of developmentof the eternal static state and the state of eternal unfolding (indefinite, rather, not to use the same word). Then, at that point, there was this vision (Mother holds out a note):
When the truth manifests,
--
Only, I am not speaking here of a Mental conception of some vague and general state: I am referring to that state of infinitesimal vibration (which they discovered when they tried to find the makeup of Matter: thats what they are trying to reduce Matter to), it is that state of vibration, it is THERE, its in that state of vibration that, for the concrete world, imperfection must be replaced by perfection. Do you understand what I am saying? Or does it make no sense?
I dont see. You mean its at that stage, at that level that
Yes, its at that level that the change must take place. At the Mental or even vital level, its a psychological question, its nothing, its not really THE THING (its the thing expressed in a HUMAN consciousness). Because the other day the other day, suddenly I went out of humanity. My consciousness went right out of the human consciousness. And then I said to myself, But all that they say, all that they know, all that they have attempted, all that so-called knowledge which has been accumulated on earth, its nothing! Its something that belongs only to MANeliminate man and everything exists! And all the explanations man has given about things are like zero. Thats it: everything exists.
I had the experience of the universe outside the human perception of that experience; and then the vanity of that human experience was so obvious, you know, that at that point a door began to open onto something else.
0 1964-11-21, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mon petit, thats because what you call aspiration is a movement of your psychic consciousness, Mentally formulated and supported by the vital but it ISNT YOUR BODY. And its only if you are very attentive to the vibration of the cells, if you are accustomed to observing them and feeling them that you can see. Well, I dont know, but I cant complain about my bodys cells. You know, it isnt a perception, it isnt a sensation, it is a LIVED FAITH in the existence of the Supreme aloneyou know, a faith that its the only Reality and the only Existence. Just that, and everything seems to swell up, as if all these cells were swelling up with such joy! Only, it doesnt take the form of a feeling, not even of a sensation, even less of a thought; so if you arent very attentive, you dont notice it. But, for instance, when I repeat the mantra, its repeated by that famous physical mind, which is so stupid (the mantra is the only thing that can keep a rein on it), and now it has become so identified that the mantra is its whole life, it is like a pulsation of its being; but then when I come to the invocation (there is a series of invocations: each one has its own effect on the body), when I come to Manifest Your Love, I see a sort of twinkling of a golden light, which represents an intense joy in all the cells.
It isnt easy to observe, you must be very, very, very detached from the movement of thought, otherwise you dont notice it. But if you see it, you see that even those cells are there waiting for the Thing.
0 1964-11-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And at the same time the understanding comes of all the people I met in my life and with whom I lived for a certain time: for what reasons, with what aim, for what purpose they were there and what action they had and how they did the Lords work (unknowingly, God knows!) to lead this body to prepare itself and be ready for the transformation. Its astonishingly perfect in its conception! Its wonderful! And so inhuman! Opposed to all moral and Mental notions of human wisdomall the things that appeared the most insane, the most absurd, the most irrational, the most unreasonable and the most hostile, all that combined, oh, so WONDERFULLY to compel this body to transform itself.
And with such a clear vision of the whywhy it isnt transformed yet. Oh, theres work to be done.
--
But its double: there is Inertia on one hand, and on the other vital perversion the NERVOUS perversion of the vital world, of the vital influence. There isnt just Inertia: there is a sort of perverted ill will. You can easily (relatively easily) drive it out and eliminate it entirely from conscious Mental and vital life; that work, which in the past was considered as, oh, a tremendously difficult thingchanging an individuals natureis relatively easy; all in the nature that depends on the vital or the mind is relatively easy to change, very easy. I am not saying very easy for the ordinary man, but very easy in comparison with the work in Matter, in the cells of the body. Because, as I told you last time, their goodwill is undeniable and their thrust towards the Divine has become absolutely spontaneous: all that is conscious is luminous but the trouble is all that isnt yet conscious! Its the mass of all that isnt yet conscious and is, then, tossed between two influences, one as odious as the other: the influence of Inertia (gesture of dazed sluggishness), of the MASS that stops you from moving forward, and the influence of vital perversion and ill willits this influence that makes everything crooked, that distorts everything.
And it has become very subtle, very hidden, difficult to ferret out. When almost everything was like that, it was visible, it was conspicuous; but that state changed very fast: the difficulty is whats hidden underneath and isnt voluminous enough to draw attention to itself. And, oh, those habits, those habits. For instance (magnifying it to make it more easily visible), the habit of foreseeing catastrophes.
--
So you understand how long the way is. All that goes on in the mind is childs play in comparison; all their Mental difficulties are to me its theatera drama, you know, a drama to interest the public.
Well, I dont know, but there is a long, long way to goa long wayto change this into a substance plastic enough, receptive enough, strong enough to express the supreme Power. There is a lot to be done, a whole lot.
--
And I am obliged to keep regular hours because the entire life of others depends on it. That was why people wanted to withdraw into solitude there is an advantage and a drawback; the advantage is that I try to make things very automatic, that is, quite outside a conscious will: they should work by themselves. On the Mental level, its very easy, you can detach yourself completely and nothing matters; but for the body, its difficult, because its rhythm The whole rhythm of ordinary life is a Mentalized one; even people who live in vital freedom are at odds with the whole social organizationits a Mentalized life: there are clocks that strike the hour and it is agreed that things must be that way. Mentally, you can be perfectly free: you leave your body in the cogwheels and stop bothering about it; but when its this poor body itself that has to find its own rhythm, how difficult it is! How difficult. Sometimes, all of a sudden, it feels a discomfort; then I look and I see that there is something that could be an experience, but that would necessitate certain conditions of isolation, of quietness and independence, and it isnt possible. Then, very well as far as I can, I go within and do the minimum (the maximum of what can be done, which is a minimum compared to what could be done).
But of course, Sri Aurobindo always said: For the Work to be complete, it must be generalone cannot give up. An individual attempt is only a very partial attempt. But the fact that the Work is general delays the results considerablywell, we have to put up with it. Thats how it is, so thats how it is.
0 1964-12-02, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Letters are piling up in fantastic numbers, and I havent answered. People should learn to receive: I answer very forcefully, very clearly, even with words, a precise sentence. If they learned to receive Mentally, it would be good. I always answer. And when its something important and I have some peace, when I have no external action, I even repeat my answer by making a very precise Mental formation they should receive it.
(Mother picks up at random a letter from a Western disciple who asks to change her work or stop her external work, because, she says, it doesnt correspond to her nature. She also complains about her relationship with others and their hostility. She feels the need for a new way of being and acting.)
--
Ive had some very precise memorieslived memoriesof a human life on earth, quite primitive (I mean outside any Mental civilization), a human life on earth that wasnt an evolutionary life, but the manifestation of beings from another world. I lived in that way for a timea lived memory. I still see it, I still have the image of it in my memory. It had nothing to do with civilization and Mental development: it was a blossoming of force, of beauty, in a NATURAL, spontaneous life, like animal life, but with a perfection of consciousness and power that far surpasses the one we have now; and indeed with a power over all surrounding Nature, animal nature and vegetable nature and mineral nature, a DIRECT handling of Matter, which men do not havethey need intermediaries, material instruments, whereas this was direct. And there were no thoughts or reasoning: it was spontaneous (gesture indicating the direct radiating action of will on Matter). I have the lived memory of this. It must have existed on earth because it wasnt premonitory: it wasnt a vision of the future, it was a past memory. So there must have been a moment It was limited to two beings: I dont have the feeling there were many. And there was no childbirth or anything animal, absolutely not; it was a life, yes, a truly higher life in a natural setting, but with an extraordinary beauty and harmony! And I dont have the feeling it was (how can I explain?) something known; the relationships with vegetable life and animal life were spontaneous ones, absolutely harmonious, and with the sensation of an undisputed power (you didnt even feel it was possible for it not to be), undisputed, but without any idea that there were other beings on earth and that it was necessary to look after them or make a demonstrationnothing of the sort, absolutely nothing of Mental life, nothing. A life just like that, like a beautiful plant or a beautiful animal, but with an inner knowledge of things, perfectly spontaneous and effortlessan effortless life, perfectly spontaneous. I dont even have the feeling that there was any question of food, not that I remember; but there was the joy of Life, the joy of Beauty: there were flowers, there was water, there were trees, there were animals, and all that was friendly, but spontaneously so. And there were no problems! No problems to be solved, nothing at allone just lived!
An uncomplicated life, definitely.
--
The Pope announced he was going to publish a message for non-Christians; I have asked to see it. Because in my Mental conversations with him, two things have remained very precise. He has a sort of political attachment. He is a very political man, in the sense that he does things for a reason, with a precise goal calculated according to his own understanding so as to make him most effective towards that goala political man.
He has a political attachment to the dogma. For instance, after one of my conversations (I had a good number of conversations with him, three or four, on the Mental level, and perfectly objective because his reactions were unexpected; to me they were very spontaneous, in the sense that I received answers that werent at all those I might have expectedwhich proves it was genuine), but for example, before his election, I met him once (there is a part of his Mental being, a higher intelligence, thats very well formed, conscious, individualized), and I had a spontaneous conversation that I hadnt sought and which was very interesting. But at one point, I replied to something he said, and I told him with the force I have there [on that higher plane], The Lord is everywhereeven in hell the Lord is there. And then it caused such a violent reaction in him that, pfft! he vanished. I found it very striking. I dont know the dogma, but it seems that in hell, according to the Catholics, whats worse than suffering, the fire and all that, is the absence of the Lord. It seems its a dogma that the Lord is absent from hell; and me, I was speaking of universal Oneness and I told him that.
There is another thing I remember very clearly, which struck me. It was after his election (but long before his trip to India was decided upon): he had come to India and he came to Pondicherry to meet me (not to meet me: he had come to Pondicherry, then he came and met me). Once in Pondicherry, he came and I saw him there, in the room where I receive people. We had a long conversation, a very long and interesting conversation, and suddenly (it was towards the end, it was time for him to go), when he rose, he was preoccupied by something. He told me, When you speak to your children about me, what will you tell them? You understand, the ego showing itself. So I looked at him (Mother smiles) and said, I will only tell them that we have been in communion in our love for the Supreme. Then he relaxed and left. It struck me. These things are very objective.
0 1965-01-09, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
However in the consciousness up above, even in the Mental consciousness, there are no consequences (I mean that the fierceness of the struggle doesnt change anything, the phenomenon is simply witnessed), but its this poor body that receives the blows.
The main thing is for it to last.
0 1965-02-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But as I told you in the beginning, the slightest Mental activity lessens the power; there must be a thrust of the whole being, with as little thought as possible.
I can give you this (Mother gives her note to Satprem). You can keep it.
--
No one can know it, the mind cannot understand those things (while I had known it for so many years), because people see only outer things, the outer form, outer movements and reactions, but they dont see the inner possibility. Well, anyway, I immediately told him to look after the defense (besides, he hadnt asked me, he had started looking after it), and I told everybody, Do what he tells you to do. He organized everything. You know, its something which is like this (gesture with closed fists, unshakable), which PHYSICALLY DOES NOT BUDGE. Mentally, its nothing, its easy.
It is like a physical magnet for the true physical vibrations. It doesnt go through the mind or through intelligence or even through the vital: its physically a sort of magnet that attracts physical Truth.
0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know, problems of illness, problems of possession (vital and Mental possession), problems of egos that refuse to yield (and this results in circumstances which, humanly, are described in the ordinary way: such and such a thing has happened to so-and-so but thats not how it comes into the consciousness), well, if you look at things in a sufficiently general way, those problems REMAIN problems. There is indeed something, but a something that is still elusive (elusive in its essence): it has to do with feeling, with sensation, with perception, also with aspirationit has to do with all that, and it is what we habitually call divine Love (that is, essential Love, that which is expressed by Love and seems to be beyond the Manifestation and Nonmanifestation, which, naturally, becomes Love in the Manifestation). And That would be the ALL-POWERFUL expression. In other words, That is what would have the power to transform into divine consciousness and substance all the chaos we now call world.
There was the experience of That [the experience of the great pulsations], but it was an experience (how can I put it?) of a drop that would be an infinite, or of a second that would be an eternity. While the experience is there, there is absolute certitude; but outwardly, everything starts up again as it was one minute beforeThat (gesture of pulsation for a second), puff! everything is changed; then everything starts up again, with perhaps a slight change thats perceptible only to a consciousness (perceptible to the consciousness, but not concretely perceptible), and with, generally, violent reactions in the Disorder: something that revolts.
--
And its rather strange: all these cells have in their aspiration an Ananda of Light, of Truth, but that doesnt satisfy them completely, that is, they still have a sensation of helplessness. Of course, its all the Darkness, all the Falsehood, all the Disorder, all the Disharmony of the world that you constantly absorb every time you brea the (not to speak of all that you absorb with food, and all the rest the worst of all that you absorb Mentally through contact with others, Mentally and vitally). And all that has to be changed, transformed, constantly. Well, the cells feel their helplessness to face the work if That, that Vibration, isnt there. They find that Vibration irresistible, they find its the only irresistible one.
Naturally, there is a progress (a work that can be noted, discerned) in the consciousness of the cells, in their receptivity and their resistance to Disorder; but its just a progress, meaning that the possibility, and even the recurrence of disorder, decomposition, disharmony, wrong functioning, none of that is conquered at all, not at all. There is a growing feeling of being the docile instrument of the supreme Will, to such a point that the cells feel that whatever they may be asked to do they can do, but there is at the same time the very clear perception that the field of what is asked of them is still very limitedvery limited and that they would be unable to do better or more. And thats what gives weight to the notion of wear and tear, of agingnot that they feel like that, but in material fact, what is asked of them is very limited.
0 1965-04-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Basically, once there is a body formed, precisely, by an ideal and an increasing development, a body with sufficient stuff and capacities, sufficient potential, there may very well be a rapid Descent of a supra Mental form, just as there was one with the human form. Because I know that (I know it from having lived it), I know that when the transitiona very obscure transitionfrom the animal to man (of which they have found fairly convincing traces) was sufficient, when the result was plastic enough, there was a Descent there was a Mental descent of the human creation. And they were beings (there was a double descent; it was in fact particular in that it was double, male and female: it wasnt the descent of a single being, it was the descent of two beings), they were beings who lived in Nature an animal life, but with a Mental consciousness; but there was no conflict with the general harmony. All the memories are absolutely clear of a spontaneous, animal life, perfectly natural, in Nature. A marvelously beautiful Nature that strangely resembles the nature in Ceylon and tropical countries: water, trees, fruits, flowers. And a life in harmony with animals: there was no sense of fear or difference. It was a very luminous, very harmonious, and very NATURAL life, in Nature.
And strangely, the story of Paradise would seem to be a Mental distortion of what really happened. Of course, it all became ridiculous, and also with a tendency it gives you the feeling that a hostile will or an Asuric being tried to use that to make it the basis for a religion and to keep man under his thumb. But thats another matter.
But that spontaneous, natural, harmonious lifevery harmonious, extremely beautiful and luminous and easy! A harmonious rhythm in Nature. A luminous animality, in fact.
Thats how we began, and it began that way because there was a descent of the higher human Mental consciousness into the form that existed. The phenomenon may recur in the same way, with the difference that it can be more conscious and willed there may be the intervention of a conscious will. It would, or it could happen through an occult processwell, I dont know, there are all sorts of possibilities, one of which could be the conscious passage of a being who has used the old human body for his development and his yoga, and who would leave that form once it became unnecessary in order to enter a form capable of adapting to the new growth.
Here, the two possibilities meet.
0 1965-04-28, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What I was wondering about today (not wonderingwords are always wrongbecause it isnt Mental, I wasnt wondering Mentally), but suddenly there came in front of me, like this (gesture indicating a cinema screen): could what is called death be by chance a multitude of different things? We say life, death, and we oppose that death to lifecould it be, by chance, that what people call death is a multitude of different things, of different possibilities?
(silence)
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw the other dayit was very interesting, the very day he was on his way here (I wasnt thinking of him I never think of people), suddenly I saw all that the knowledge of the pundits and those who profess to follow a spiritual life (the whole class of sannyasins, pundits, purohits,1 etc.), all that that represents. (I am not referring to religions in other countries: its specific to India.) And they are people who have a knowledge, a Mental knowledge, of course, but very precise and very exact, of the movements in relation to the Overmind: all the gods and godheads and their ways of being and the relationships between men and gods; and they have tried to organize and formulate the relationships men have with gods so that, as was said in the past, men would not be the cattle of the godsthey have tried to change the human position with regard to deities. Its interesting, its a whole interesting field which to me does not represent the true thing. They on their part think that is spiritual lifeits not spiritual life, but it is a higher Mental region which borders on the Overmind, which even enters into the Overmind, and which is completely organized; its a sort of legislation of the relationships between men and gods. From that point of view, its interesting.
I saw that very clearly: the place it has in the universal organization. And if its in its place, then its quite all rightwhen a thing is in its place it becomes very good.
--
"After all India with her Mentality and method has done a hundred times more in the spiritual field than Europe with her intellectual doubts and questionings. Even when a European overcomes the doubt and questioning, he does not find it as easy to go as fast and far as an Indian with the same force of personality because the stir of mind is still greater. It is only when he can get beyond that that he arrives, but for him it is not so easy.
"On the other hand however your statement is correct. It is 'natural considering the times' and the occidental Mentality prevalent everywhere. It is also probably necessary that this should be faced and overcome before any supra Mental realisation is possible in the earth-consciousness for it is the attitude of the physical mind to spiritual things and as it is in the physical that the resistance has to be overcome before the mind can be overpassed in the way required for this yoga, the strongest possible representation of its difficulties was indispensable."
Bulletin, August 1965
0 1965-06-02, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What struck me the most is sight. Hearing for a very, very long timeyears Ive had the feeling that when people dont think very clearly, I cant hear. But thats not quite the point: its when their consciousness isnt ALIVE in what theyre sayingits not so much a question of thought, its their consciousness that isnt ALIVE in what theyre saying; its a Mental machine; then I dont understand anything at allnothing. When their consciousness is alive, it reaches me. And I have noticed, for instance, that people whom I dont hear think its because I am deaf in the ordinary way, so they start shoutingwhich is even worse! Then its as if they were throwing stones in my face.1
There must be an action on the organs.
0 1965-06-05, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, this is a message I sent Mentally to the Government of India! They wanted to lend money to the Lake estate1 and they asked for guarantees, all sorts of dreadful things, as if they really were dealing with a gang of bandits. I refused. I told them, Keep your money, I dont want it at such a price. But I wrote this and for a long time kept it here, on my table (thats my method, I do that for my work). I was very angry and I wrote:
You leave free hand to the bandits
0 1965-06-09, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a whole mantra [besides the main Mantra], I told you, for years now, and it is extremely complete: it applies to all necessities and all occasions, its a long series. But for some time it has become very spontaneous, too, and very self-living: when I want to see quite concretely where someone stands (someone meditating in front of me, for instance), I recite the mantra (within, of course) and I watch the reactions, because the mantra deals with the surrender of all the parts of the being and all the modes of life: its very complete. So according to the reactions [in Mothers centers], I see very clearly. The other day, when X came, I did it (it was the first time I had done it with him), I did it, and when I came to a certain point (Mother smiles) he couldnt bear it! He sort of stiffened, bowed to me and got up. Before that, he had remained very silent, very quiet. But that (Mother laughs) You see, I invoke the Lord and ask Him to manifest His various ways of being or realizations (its not taken in a Mental sense, not at all), but when I said I say many things, but up to that point he had been quiet, silent, still, and at one point (because it comes in a logical succession), I said, Manifest Your Knowledgehe felt uneasy, as if he felt he was being thrown out of himself! So I tried to calm that down, but he couldnt bear itafter five minutes, he got up and left. A real unease; because, as for me, I am inside people (I am everywhere, of course), I feel just as if it took place in my own body.
***
--
This is advice to childlike Mentalities (childlike not in terms of age), the same thing as, You say that you cant love the Lord because you have never seen Him. Its the same kind of level. But I like it because at least they dont pretend to be intelligent. And yesterday a child announced to me that it was his birthday and that there were two questions he wanted to ask me, in English: Where does God live? or Where is the house of God? (something of the sort) and Can I ever see Him? So I replied to him just as one replies to a child, with the childs simplicity:
God lives everywhere and in everything,
0 1965-06-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For snakes, for instance, its quite remarkable. Some, when they dream of snakes, have the feeling theyre going to meet with catastrophes; I myself have had all sorts of dreams with snakes: I had to go through gardens full of snakes everywhereon the ground, in the trees, everywhere and not kindly snakes! But I knew very well what it meant; during the dream itself I knew it: it depended on certain Mental conditions around me and ill will Mental ill will.2 But if you have Mental control and power, you can go through, they cannot touch you. And other people, when they see a snake, think it is the universal consciousness. So we cant say. Thon used to say that the serpent is the symbol of evolution, and those who were with him always saw rainbow-colored serpents, with all the colors, and it was the symbol of universal evolution Basically, to tell the truth, everyone has his own symbolism And for myself, I have seen that it depended on the periods in my life, on the activities, on the degree of development. There are things I see again now in which I see another meaning, which was behind the meaning I had seen.
Its very interesting, but it belongs entirely to the domain of relativity.
Its very Mental.
I remember, for instance, there was a time when I used to see people in the form of animals! It was the indication of the type of nature they belonged to. And I remember, when I was still in France, having one day seen (I was sitting in a large room) hosts of small animals coming, especially rabbits, cats, dogs, all kinds of animals, birds; they kept coming and coming, all of them onto my knees! And there were hosts and hosts of them. And there suddenly entered the room a big tiger, which rushed at them all and vrff! sent them scurrying off in all directions! (Mother laughs) But the animals were people and the tiger, too, was someone.
0 1965-06-18 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I remember, I still have the image in which he is demonstrating things with his test tubes. There was a man who looked like a scientist (a man about forty years old, between forty and fifty, young but not very young) and very thoughtful-looking. He was sitting. I dont know what his nationality was, I dont remember, but he was modern; he was modern, with modern clothes, and Sri Aurobindo showed him his test tubes with things in them and the effect on a totality of matter. I was there, looking on (I was looking with great interest), and I understood everything then. And I still see the image, but the Mental knowledge, the Mental translation that would have enabled me to say, Now I know, prrt! taken away. Its the same thing every time.
Which means it must be given to people other than me for them to use it, because they have a brain better prepared than mine, and better conditions of research.
0 1965-07-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Well, yes, its a disorder. But disorder is everywhere! If its any consolation to you, my body too is in disorder. It isnt clearly a disorder but an almost total lack of harmonyits the constant condition of life; its the result of effort, of resistance, of enduring, and also of that tension of being in search of something you hope to reach, but which always eludes you the something that eludes you is That, its that Harmony (a Harmony which, in its perfection, is Ananda, thats obvious). And the constant state is like that. In fact, thats what causes fatigue, tension and so on. Last night, I spent the whole night looking at that, and I was wondering, Why is that so? We are constantly in that state, straining after something that eludes us. And then the senses, the whole realm of the senses seems to be in a constantly false state, and they use that state of tension to give you the feeling that this is going wrong, that is going wrong, and this and that. And if by ill luck there is a vague hint of Mental collaboration (from that famous physical mind), then things go awry, they become something really unpleasant.
But its not inescapable. Its not inescapable and its not realwhat I call real is something that comes from the supreme Will directly. That is true; the rest isnt true, its the product of all the confusion (zigzag gesture downward) and of all the disorder of the human consciousness illness isnt true. I dont think that one illness in a hundred (oh, maybe in a thousand) is true. Some are the expression of a Will for something wrong to be well shaken, demolished, so that, in that chaos, something truer may take form but thats an exceptional state.
I have a very extensive field of experience. I receive a flood of letters from just about everyone, writing about their little disorder, their little illness, their little trouble, and naturally asking for all that to be set right. So that puts me in contact with the vibration (all the people here: that makes a lot), and, well, I can truly say that there isnt, oh, there isnt one case in a hundred that is the expression of the direct Willits something (gesture of a zigzag fall) which goes like this and which in the human consciousness gets into a tangle like a wire thats so twisted that you cant untangle it anymore. And because of that state, you are on the verge, yes, of a discomfort (thats almost constant), of an illness, a disorder. And it is the defeatist Mental collaboration (because a special characteristic of this mind is to be defeatist), the collaboration of the defeatist mind and the false senses that make for us the life we live, which is no fun.
For two hours last night I saw that, with proof to back it up, examples. I looked, and I was almost horrified to see the extent to which senses distortand they distort (I dont know, there may be people who distort for the better, [laughing] Im not one of them! But they must be marvelous optimists), the senses distort all the vibrations and constantly turn them into disagreeable things, unpleasant ones at any rate, or even indications of danger, warnings of catastrophe. It was fairly repugnant. But I gave free rein to that whole movement in order to see clearly, and all the cellular and other organizations started moaning and groaning, as if saying, But this life is in-tol-er-a-ble, its intolerable. And I listened to that a little while to see; and here, there and everywhere, there was a general groan. And in the end (gesture of descent of the Will), in one second it all went away! It was a whole act those senses were putting on for themselves. We are ri-dic-u-lous beings, thats all (Mother laughs). That was my observation of last night.
--
I can tell you that doctors Mental distortions are frightful: they stick in your brain, remain there, and return after ten years. I know it from personal experience, it comes back all the time: The doctor said it was this, the doctor said it was that, the doctor said Not with words, but it comes.
But that doesnt matter, we can tackle the disorder from that angle and then see.
0 1965-07-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This morning I was in a sort of zonea zone or a vein. You know, the veins of gold inside the earth? It was like that. In the Mental banality of the world, there was a sort of luminous vein going past and in which I found myself plungedit felt pleasant, it felt very comfortable. And I started noting things down, when those people came with all the usual ineptitudes, each one asking something, each one shut in like this (gesture with blinkers), so it went away.
I called it, A few definitions.
--
And it brought me (what I have just said is nothing, it was the end) a clear vision of whats necessary for the world, the necessary transformations in the Mental atmosphere of the earth to put an end to wars, for instance. The end to wars was one of the consequences. And each thing was in its place in relation to the other (Mother draws a sort of chessboard), and there was such a clear, clear vision of all the relationships, of all the positions, of all that.
Its great fun.
--
And it doesnt depend on me, I dont make an effort: it just comes. Its something that comes, then I seem to be plunged in a bath and I only have to look. It comes ready-made, effortlessly. Its a STATE in which I find myself, with, for example, the vision of the terrestrial Mental progress, of the way in which the human Mentality is organized (same gesture as if indicating a chessboard); and its very interesting because living conditions are conditioned by thought-states, and so I see how the thought-state must be changed in order for life to be changed (Mother draws currents of force on the chessboard). And I sit there, as if in a theater, and I watch, and it works.
If I had some peace I would write it down (because it comes all formulated) and it could be interesting. It must belong to the realm of revelation. Its like a luminous strip passing by, but it is all organized. But one needs peace (I scribbled the last note here while they were preparing my breakfast, and after that ). But anyway, its not of transcendent interest; its only because its very clear, very precise, and it obviously doesnt have the character of ordinary human thought: its ready-made, it comes ready-made.
0 1965-07-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We speak of transformation, even of transfiguration, but there is the passage from the old movement to the new movement, from the old status to the new status, which is a break in equilibrium; and always, for what still belongs to the old creation, a dangerous break in equilibrium is what gives you the feeling that everything eludes you, that you have lost your foothold. And thats when you need unwavering faith. But a faith that isnt like Mental faith, which is self-supporting: it is a faith in the sensation. And that (Mother shakes her head) is very difficult.
(silence)
0 1965-07-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was dinner time; there had been (there always is) a fatigue, a tension, the need for more harmony in the atmosphere its becoming a little heavy going; and there I was, sitting, when all of a sudden, all this straightened up like a flame, oh, in a great intensity, and then it was as if this body-mind, on behalf of the body (it was the body beginning to be Mentalized), were saying a prayer (Mother looks for a note) And it very much has the sense of the oneness of Matter (this has been very strong for a long, long time, but its becoming very conscious: a sort of identity); so there was the sense of the totality of Matterterrestrial, human Matter, human Matter and it said:
I am tired of our unworthiness. But it is not to rest that this body aspires
--
Everything that was Mental I remember very clearly the state I was in when I wrote those Prayers and Meditations, especially when I wrote them here (all those I wrote here in 1914): it seems to me cold and dry yes, dry, lifeless. Its luminous, its lovely, pleasant, but its cold, lifeless. Whereas this aspiration here [in the cellular mind], oh, it has a powera power of realizationquite an extraordinary power. If this becomes organized, it will be possible to do something. There is an accumulated power there.
(silence)
0 1965-08-07, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am not saying it is final, far from it, but its much more under control. The cessation lasted perhaps an hour or two, I dont remember, but its activity isnt so mechanical anymore. You know that sort of Mental silence in which everything falls flat (immobile, horizontal gesture); well, it can now be done with this material mindit falls flat, turned upward.
But it is a beginning, just the beginning.
--
Yes, but I have never tried to explain it to myself Mentally.
No, no, I am asking you if you KNOW it.
--
But they understand only when it becomes Mental chatter.
So, if you like, I propose one thing (they wont be happy, but itll do them good!), thats to tell them, Here is what I can say in answer to your question, and thats all. And it will be one sentence, two sentences, half a page, thats all. You wont have told them no, and at the same time you wont have yielded to their ignorant insistence.
0 1965-08-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The cells, the whole material consciousness, used to obey the inner individual consciousness the psychic consciousness most of the time, or the Mental (but the mind had been silent for a long time). But now this material mind is organizing itself like the other one, or the other ones, rather, like the mind of all the states of beingdo you know, it is educating itself. It is learning things and organizing the ordinary science of the material world. When I write, for instance, I have noticed that it takes great care not to make spelling errors; and it doesnt know, so it inquires, it learns, it looks up in the dictionary or it asks. Thats very interesting. It wants to know. You see, all the memory that came from Mental knowledge went away a long, long time ago, and I used to receive indications only like this (gesture from above). But now its a sort of memory being built from below, and with the care of a little child who educates himself but who wants to know, who doesnt want to make errorswho is perfectly conscious of his ignorance, and who wants to know. And the truly interesting thing is that it knows this knowledge to be quite more than relative, simply conventional, but it is like an instrument that would like to be free of defects, like a machine that would like to be perfect.
It is a rather recent awakening. There has been a sort of reversal of consciousness.
0 1965-08-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That isnt the physical mind. The physical mind, its a long time since It is the material mindnot even the material mind: the mind OF MATTER.1 It is the Mental substance that belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. Thats what was formerly called the spirit of the form, when it was said that mummies kept their bodies intact as long as the spirit of the form persisted.2 Thats the mind I mean, that completely material mind. The other one, the physical mind, has been organized for a long time.
So what is the difference between this material mind and the physical mind? How would you define the physical mind in contrast with this material mind?
The physical mind is the mind of the physical personality formed by the body. It grows with the body, but it isnt the mind of Matter: it is the mind of the physical being. For instance, it is the mind that makes ones character: the bodily, physical character, which is in large part formed by atavism and education. What is called physical mind is all that. Yes, its the result of atavism, of education and of the formation of the body; thats what makes the physical character. For example, some people are patient, some are strong and so onphysically, I mean, not for vital or Mental reasons, but purely physically everyone has a character. Thats the physical mind. And it is part of any integral yoga: you discipline this physical mind. I have done it for more than sixty years.
But then, that mind, for instance, which is spontaneously defeatist, which has all sorts of fears and worries, which sees the worst, repeats the same things forever, is that the physical mind or the material mind?
--
This cellular mind exists in animals, and there is even a faint beginning (but very faint, like a promise) in plants: they respond to a Mental action. They respond. As soon as Life manifests, there is already the beginning, like a promise of mind, of Mental movement. And in animals, its very clear. Whereas that physical mind really began to exist only in man. Thats what a very small child already has: it already has a physical mind; so that no two very small children are alike, with identical reactions: there is already a difference. And it is especially what is given you with the special FORM of your body, by atavism, and then fully developed by education.
No, the physical mind, as soon as you do an integral yoga, you are obliged to deal with it, while this material, cellular mind, I can assure you that its absolutely new! Absolutely new.
--
But there is increasingly a sort of certitude in the cells that everything that happens is with a view to this transformation and this transfer of the directing power. And at the very moment when things are materially painful (not even physically: materially painful), the cells keep that certitude. And so they withstand, they endure the suffering without being depressed or affected in the least, with that certitude that it is to prepare for the transformation, that it is even the process of transformation and of the transfer of the directing power. As I said, its in the nerves that the experience is the most painful (naturally, since they are the most sensitive cells, those with the sharpest sensation). But they have a very great receptivity, and very spontaneous, a spontaneously strong receptivity and effortlessto the harmonious physical vibration (which is very rare, but still it exists in some individuals), and that physical vibration what we could call a physical FORCE, a harmonious physical vibration (spontaneously harmonious, of course, without the need for Mental interventionlike the vibrations of a flower, for instance; there are physical vibrations that are like that, that carry in themselves a harmonious force), and the nerves are extremely sensitive and receptive to that vibration, which immediately puts them right again.
Its very interesting, it explains many, many things. A day will come when all this will be explained and put in its proper place. Now isnt the time to reveal it yet, but its very interesting.
--
Naturally, care must be taken to avoid letting a Mental organization intervene, which is why I am not trying to explain things too much. The mind comes, and then thats not it anymore.
Mother insisted on and specified this point later.
0 1965-09-15a, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And when I got out of it (it was 3 in the morning), I said to myself, All right, let me look after something else now, and I made a special concentration to get out of it. And I found myself in a place I know very well, which is like a replicaa Mental replicaof what I might call certain Ashram rooms (its not exactly that, but it corresponds). And there was a gentleman there I knew very well, a Frenchman, who had come to see me. He had a big desk, he was sitting at the desk, waiting for you: you were expected (thats why I am telling you the story). But I myself wanted to see him before he saw you. There was something I wanted to tell him. Then, instead of going through the usual door, I went by another way and arrived before you. I saw him (we didnt speak to each other I never speak to people), but he was very warm, very enthusiastic, very friendly and full of a sort of rather pleasant fervorignorant, but pleasant. A rather tall man, I think, dressed in an ordinary European suit. I cant describe him very well; if I saw him, I could say, Yes, thats him. And he said two words to me that were like that didnt mean anything at all, but that were like the expression of his feeling. I dont exactly recall the word, but it was nothing, it was Oh! something. So I put my message into his head and left, and as I was leaving (Mother laughs), I almost bumped into youyou were rushing in! And I told you, Dont worry, dont worry, everything is fine! And I left.
Maybe its one of the publishers, or maybe the man to whom you sent your article.1
0 1965-09-22, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Their common ground is petty schemes and petty biases, preconceived and MICROSCOPIC ideas on the usefulness of divisions among countries so that no one country may dominate the othersnothing but absolutely superficial things, and completely false, moreover. And no sincerity, no Mental honesty, no sincere goodwillnothing. They decided in advance that Pakistan was right and India was wrong.
Unfortunately, those phantoms seem to strike terror into the people in Delhi.
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Mentality there will be hard to change. The Indians have missed the opportunity.
Yes. Ah, yes, this was the opportunity.
--
And its precisely to make you see. I am translating Mentally, but He seems to be saying, You see, things are like that because if they werent like that, you wouldnt have understood. And its so true that there is nothing to say.
You [the body] need this to understand.
0 1965-10-16, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So that means I cant say its hypocrisy, but its a purely Mental attitude that doesnt correspond to the consciousness of the being. Because for me there is a very sure indication: when I dont say anything to someone (that is, I dont use the intermediary of the mind) but see that his sensation, his feeling, his state of consciousness are in harmony with mine, I know its going well. And when that person tells me, Yes, I want what you want, its true. But when its simply a purely Mental, superficial attitude and when because I say, Its like that, outwardly they repeat, Its like that, but inwardly everything seethes because they feel differently
For instance, for precise problems, a decision to be made, the problem is put to me; I dont answer materially right away, I send the answer like this (gesture of inner communication), then I wait. Well, it has happened (rather rarely, but anyway it has happened) that the person wrote to me, I have received the answer, its this and that. Then I say, Thats good. But when I write words and because I write words, they say the same thing, it doesnt prove anything. Its an artificial obedience.
--
No, I am not speaking of the enormous mass of those who imagine I am wrong all the time, but still who say, Oh, the poor old lady, we shouldnt cross her, I am not even speaking of those. I am speaking of those who Mentally have goodwill they have put on a mask of goodwill. But the inner vibrations still belong to the world of Falsehood.
***
0 1965-11-03, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So it seems to me. And theres no reason for it not to get later still. See, I have all this (Mother shows a stack of letters), which is work yet to be done, and it was supposed to be done this morning. Every day its like that. Now its a mountain of letters, and some letters havent even been opened. So some write to me (but that frees me), I have already sent you two letters and you havent answered, I am unluckytoo bad for them. But there are those who are very patient, who ask for things that are important to them, and whom I dont have time to answer. When I hear the letter (there are some letters I havent even opened, I dont know what they have written), but when I hear, I answer inwardly; if they had the Mental perception they would receive my answer; unfortunately they dont have it. Some letters are important, from people who ask for something reasonable, and a word or a gesture would greatly help them to move onits not possible. And it keeps increasing and increasing. Previously, I used to rest (rest, that is to say, concentrate) regularly, at a fixed time, but now thats finished, I cant do it anymore. It cuts into the rest, too, and thats bad.
Its the world in a rush. Its not just from a small number of individuals, its from everywhere: from the United Nations, the Government of India, from people here, there and everywhere who ask for a directive, an indication. They ought to be able to receive Mentally; that way I could do all the work, because it doesnt take any time, its immediate, but they arent there yet, they cant. You know, requests for messages, for something to start an action there are dozens of them every day. And its a good sign, I cant complain. Its a good sign, it means the world is growing receptive. But
The secretaries.
0 1965-11-06, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Very aggressive snakes. And Mentally, too, I receive very violent things.
What do you mean?
--
A disciple who was a friend of Satprem's; he had died insane seven or eight years earlier and Satprem had assisted him in a Japanese Mental hospital.
***
0 1965-11-13, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it isnt Mental. For the time being, it has nothing to do with thought.
***
0 1965-11-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Pulling down is always an egoistic movement. Its a distortion of aspiration. True aspiration involves a givinga self-givingwhile pulling down is wanting for oneself. Even if you have in your thought a vaster aspiration the earth, the universeit makes no difference, those are Mental activities.
(long silence)
When things are put Mentally, all those who have tried to explain things Mentally have made an opposition, and so people imagine that one is the very opposite of the other [the True Thing and its distortion]; in that case it would be so easy to discern. But thats not at all how it is! I am now studying the way in which Matter, the body, can be in constant harmony with the divine Presence. And its so interesting: its not at all an opposition, its a tiny little microscopic distortion. For instance, there is this frequent experience (and generally people dont know why it is sonow I know): on some days or at certain times all the gestures you make are harmonious, all the things you touch seem to respond harmoniously to the will that touches them, everything works out (I am talking about the very small things of lifeof everyday life), each thing seems to be in its place or to find its place naturally: if you fold a paper, it folds itself as though spontaneously, as it should; if you look for something, you seem to spontaneously find the thing you need; you never knock against anything, never upset anythingeverything seems harmonious. And then, without any appreciable difference in the overall state of consciousness, at other times, its the exact opposite: if you want to fold a paper, you fold it the wrong way; if you want to touch some object, you drop iteverything seems disharmonized or off balance or bad-willed. You are yourself more or less in the same state. But now, with the present keen and fine observation, I see that in one case, there is a sort of inner silence in the cells, a PROFOUND quietude, which doesnt prevent movement, even rapid movement, but the movement seems to be founded on an eternal vibration; and in the other case, there is that inner precipitation (gesture of tremor), that inner vibration, that inner restlessness, that haste to go from one moment to the next, that constant hurry (why? Theres no knowing why), always, always hurrying and scurrying; and everything you do is wrong. And in the other case, with that inner serenity and peace, everything is done harmoniously, and MUCH FASTER in material time: there is no time lost.
And thats why its so difficult to know how one should be. Because in thought you can be in the same constant state, even in aspiration you can be in the same constant state, in the general goodwill, even in surrender to the Divine, it all can be the same thing, in the same stateits in here (Mother touches her body), and this makes the whole difference. I can very well conceive that there may be people in whom this opposition persists in the mind and the vital, but there its so obvious. But I am talking of something absolutely material. Some people say and think, How come? I have such goodwill, such a desire to do the right thing, and then nothing works, everything jarswhy? I am so good (!) and yet things dont respond. Or those who say, Oh, I have made my surrender, I have such goodwill, I have an aspiration, I want nothing but the Truth and the Good, and yet I am ill all the timewhy am I ill? And naturally, one small step more, and you begin to doubt the Justice that rules the world, and so on. Then you fall into a hole. But thats not it, thats not what I mean. Its much simpler and much more difficult at the same time, because it isnt blatant, it isnt evident, its not an opposition from which you can choose, its truly, totally and integrally leaving the entire responsibility to the Lord.
--
It may have the power to convey the experience ( Mentally thats indisputable: it has a Mental effect), but what I am talking about is the work here, in the cells of the body. You give yourself a nice little Mental explanation, but thats not it! While when you have had the vibration, ah, its obvious.
You know, you are in considerable discomfort, out of sorts, unable to breathe, you have a feeling of nausea, of helplessness, you cant even move, or think or do anything in a word, quite out of sorts; and then suddenly the Consciousness the bodily consciousness of the Vibration of Love, which is the very essence of the creation, just one second: everything lights up, pfft! gone, its all gone. Then you look at yourself, amazedits all gone. You were in considerable discomfortits all gone.
0 1965-11-27, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was the whole humanity that isnt quite animal anymore, that has benefited from Mental development and created a certain harmony in its lifea vital, artistic, literary harmony and the vast majority of which live satisfied with life. They have caught a sort of harmony and live in it a life as it exists in a civilized milieu, that is to say, somewhat cultured, with refinement in taste, refinement in habits. And this whole life has a sort of harmony in which they find themselves at ease, and unless something catastrophic happens to them, they live happy and content, satisfied with life. Those may be attracted (because they have taste, they are intellectually developed), they may be attracted to the new forces, the new things, the future life; for instance, they may Mentally, intellectually become disciples of Sri Aurobindo. But they dont at all feel the need to change materially, and if they were to be forced to, it would be first of all premature and unjust, and it would quite simply create a great disorder and would upset their lives quite unnecessarily.
It was very clear.
--
It came after a vision of plants and the spontaneous beauty of plants (which is something so wonderful!), then of the animal with such a harmonious life (when men dont interfere), and all that was quite in its own place. Then true humanity seen as such, that is to say, the summit of what a balanced mind can produce in beauty, in harmony, in charm, in elegance in life, in taste for lifetaste to live in beautywhile eliminating, naturally, all that is ugly and low and vulgar. That was a lovely humanity. Humanity at its highest, but lovely. And perfectly satisfied as such, because it lives harmoniously. And it may also be like a promise of what almost the totality of humanity will become under the influence of the new creation: as I saw it, it was what the supra Mental consciousness can do with humanity. There was even a comparison with what humanity has done with animal kind (something extremely mixed, of course, but there have been improvements, betterments, more complete utilizations). Animality under the Mental influence has become something else, which naturally has been mixed because the mind is incomplete; similarly there are examples of a harmonious humanity among the well-balanced people, and it appeared to be what humanity could become under the supra Mental influence.
Only, its very far ahead; we shouldnt expect it to come about immediatelyits very far ahead.
There is clearly, even now, a transitional period, which may last a rather long time and is rather painful. But the sometimes painful effort (often painful) is made up for by a clear vision of the goal to be reached, of the goal that WILL be reachedan assurance, you know, a certitude. But it1 would be something that had the power to eliminate all the errors, all the distortions and ugliness of Mental life, and then a very happy humanity, quite satisfied with being human, feeling no need whatsoever to be anything but human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony.
It was very charming, it was as though I were living in it. Contradictions had disappeared. As though I lived in that perfection. And it was almost like the ideal conceived by the supra Mental consciousness of a humanity that had become as perfect as it can be. It was very good.
--
Those who have touched the higher regions of intelligence but havent mastered in themselves the Mental faculties have an ingenuous need for everyone to think as they do and to be able to understand as they understand, and when they realize that others cannot, dont understand, their first reflex is to be horribly shocked; they say, What a fool! But fool isnt the point at allthey are different, they live in another region. You dont go and tell an animal, Youre a fool, you say, Its an animal. Well, you say, Its a man. Its a man. Only, there are those who arent men anymore and arent gods yet, and those are in a very in English they say, a very awkward position.
But it was so soothing, so sweet, so marvelous, that visioneach thing expressing its own kind, quite naturally.
0 1965-12-15, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But this king1 is a remarkable man. He has a remarkable history, but it would be too long to tell. I was in contact with him before (gesture of Mental communication), and I had said, I wont speak and I didnt speak. When he came he looked at me, then suddenly (he was standing), he remained standing in meditation, he closed his eyes and remained motionless. And then he asked me his questions Mentally I received them. And the answer came from up above, magnificent. An answer with a golden, superb force, and a power telling him that he had a great role to play and had to be strong and so on.
A very, very intelligent man.
0 1965-12-18, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ultimately, the whole difficulty comes from the amount of unconsciousness left in the Matter we are made of. Thats thats terrible. And then, thats what it takes to pull this Matter out of its unconsciousness: all the suffering, all the disorder, all the pummeling. Thats what I see every day. And the degree of stupidity To us its stupidity, we call it stupidity, but You know, the intermediary to which this unconsciousness responds is the Mentality of the cell, the material Mentality, but then, when this material Mentality is seized with an idea, it is actually possessed by the idea and its almost impossible (not impossible but extremely difficult) for it to free itselfit takes an intervention from another domain.
Diseases are just that. Its the same thing with the doctors illness: this tremor is the possession by an idea, its what in the conscious intelligence is expressed as the possession by an idea, a hypnosisa sort of hypnosis accompanied by a fear in matter. The two things together: possession and fear, a sort of fearfulness. And a sense of helplessness in all that. The possession by an idea and a helplessness to reject it, and a fear, a helplessness to resist. And then a sort of fearfulness that is translated in us by, Oh, its going to be that way oh, its going to be a disease.
0 1965-12-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But if you follow the experience farther and deeper, if you concentrate on this vibration, you realize it is the original Vibration of the creation and that this Vibration is what has been transformed, distorted in everything that is. So then, there is a sort of understanding warmth (we cant exactly call it sweetness, but its a sweetness that would be strong), an understanding warmth in which there is as much smile as sorrowmuch more smile than sorrow. Its not to legitimize the distortion, but its mostly a reaction against the choice that human Mentality (and especially human morality) has made between one particular type of distortion and another. There is a whole series of distortions that have been labeled bad and there is a whole series of distortions towards which people are full of leniency, almost compliments. And yet, from the essential standpoint, this distortion is hardly better than that distortionits a question of choice.
Ultimately, whats necessary would be first to perceive THE central Vibration, then to appreciate its UNIQUE and marvelous quality to such a point that you automatically and spontaneously move away from all distortions, whether virtuous distortions or evil distortions.
0 1965-12-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Have you received my answer? (Mother makes a gesture of Mental communication) No? I talked to you a great deal, a very great deal.
I have a feeling of having seen you several times these last two nights, but I was always trying to set up the tape recorder to record what you were telling me, but it wasnt working!
--
But thats wonderful, mon petit! It means you have emerged from Mental formations.
Its Mental formations that say, You are on this road or You are at that point of the realization or For me, thats deplorable! When one is in that, one is still buried in Mentality.
Yes, but insofar as one is going somewhere
0 1966-01-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But those who got hold of this experience for some reason or other without having all the philosophical and Mental preparation I had (the saints, or at any rate all the people who led a spiritual life) had instead a very acute impression of the unreality of life and the illusion of life. But thats only a narrow way of looking at it. Thats not it thats not it, EVERYTHING is a choice! Everything, everything. The Lords choice, but IN US; not there (gesture above): here. And we are unaware of it, its deep down in ourselves. But when we are aware of it, we can choosewe can choose our choice, thats wonderful!
For instance, when that state was there, I told my body, But see, you clumsy fool, why do you choose to be dramatic? To have pain, to be this and that? And that sort of fate and bond and hardness of existenceall that had vanished. All vanished. It was light blue, light pink, all luminous and clear and (same dancing gesture) buoyant.
--
Recently (for some time), there was that same difficulty of the body, which isnt limited and shut inside a shell as is generally the case, and which freely receives not even with the feeling of receivingwhich HAS the vibrations of everything around it; and then, when everything around it is, Mentally or morally, closed, unwilling to understand, its a bit difficult, which means that the elements that come have to be transformed. Its a sort of totalitya very manifold and unsteady totalityrepresenting your field of consciousness and action and on which you must work constantly to reestablish a harmony (a minimum of harmony), and when something around you goes wrong according to the ordinary idea, it makes the work a bit difficult. Its subtle, persistent, and obstinate at the same time. I remember, last night when I stretched out on my bed, there was in the body an aspiration for Harmony, for Light, for a sort of smiling peace; the body aspired above all for harmony because of all those things that grate and scrape. And the experience was probably the result of that aspiration: I went there and met a pink and light-blue Purani (!)what a blue! The pretty, very pretty light blue of Sri Aurobindo.
Only, I have noticed that in this bodys life, Ive never had the same experience twice I may have the same type of experience to a higher degree or to a much vaster degree, but never identically the same. And I dont retain the experience: I am constantly, constantly (gesture forward), constantly forging ahead; you know, the work of transformation of the consciousness is so rapid, it must be done so fast that you dont have time to enjoy or dwell upon an experience or draw long-lasting satisfaction from it, its impossible. It comes powerfully, very powerfully, it changes everything, then something else comes. Its the same thing with the transformation of the cells: all kinds of little disorders come, but to the consciousness they are clearly disorders related to the transformation, so you see to that particular point, you want order to be restored; at the same time, something knows full well that the disorder came to make the transition from the ordinary automatic functioning to the conscious functioning under the direct Direction and the direct Influence of the Supreme. And the body itself knows this (still, its no fun to have a pain here or a pain there, or this or that being disorganized, but it KNOWS). And when that point has reached a certain stage of transformation, you move on to another point, then on to another, and on to another again. So nothing is done, no work is definitively done until everything is ready. So you have to do the same work again, but on a higher or a vaster level, or with more intensity or in greater detail (it depends on the case), until EVERYTHING has been brought to a homogeneous point and is ready in the same way.
0 1966-02-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats interesting is that now that this mind of the cells has been organized, it appears to be going with dizzying speed through the process of human Mental development all over again, in order to reach the key, precisely. There is of course the sense that the state we are in is a false unreality, but there is a sort of need or aspiration to find, not a Mental or moral why, nothing of the sort, but a HOWhow it got twisted this way (Mother bends her wrist in one direction), in order to straighten it out (gesture in the opposite direction).
The pure sensation has the experience of the two vibrations [the false and the true, the twisted and the straight vibrations], but the transition from one to the other is still a mystery. Its a mystery, because it cannot be explained: neither when it goes this way (gesture to the false direction) nor when it goes that way (gesture to the true direction).
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The curve showed itself along with an adage: What begins must end. That seems to be one of those human Mental constructions that arent necessarily true.
But the interesting point subjectively is that the problem loses its acuteness as you look at it from a higher and higher standpoint (or a more central point, to tell the truth).
0 1966-03-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For a very long time, more than two years, I saw the world like this (ascending gesture, from one level to a higher level), and now I see it like this (descending gesture). I dont know how to explain it because theres nothing Mentalized about it, and non- Mentalized sensations have a certain haziness thats hard to define. But words and thought were a certain distance away (gesture around the head), like something that watches and appreciates, in other words, that tells what it sees something around. And today, it has been extremely strong two or three times (I mean that that state dominated the whole consciousness): a sort of impression (or sensation or perception, but its nothing like all that) of, I am a dead person living on earth.
How can I explain that?
0 1966-03-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats another interesting point, because I was an outright atheist: till the age of twenty, the very idea of God made me furious. Therefore I had the most solid baseno imaginings, no mystic atavism; my mother was very much an unbeliever and so was my father. So from the point of view of atavism it was very good: positivism, materialism. Only one thing: since I was very small, a will for perfection in any field whatever; a will for perfection and the sense of a limitless consciousness no limits to ones progress or to ones power or to ones scope. And that, since I was very small. But Mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a God: I believed only in what I could touch and see. And the whole faculty for experiences was already there (they didnt manifest because the time hadnt come). Only, the sense of a Light here (gesture above the head), which began when I was very small, I was five, along with a will for perfection. A will for perfection: oh, whatever I did always had to be the best I could do. And then, a limitless consciousness. These two things. And my return to the Divine came about through Thons teaching, when I was told for the first time, The Divine is within, there (Mother strikes her breast). Then I felt at once, Yes, this is it. Then I did all the work thats taught to find Him again; and through here (gesture to the heart center) I went there (gesture of junction above with the Supreme). But outwardly, Mentally, no religiona horror of religions.
And I see now that it was the most solid base possible for this experience: there was no danger of imaginings.
0 1966-03-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The same Consciousness as this consciousness I had in what we can call the material Mental (that is, the collective consciousness of the cells), but this morning it was in the cells themselves, this Consciousness [the eternal Consciousness Mother speaks of in the conversation of March 4], the same Consciousness. And it was truly miraculous. With the impression that with THAT there [in the cells], there is nothing impossible.
It comes, it stays in spite of everything, whatever I do, even if I speak, and it goes. And when its gone its gone, I can make an effort, it doesnt come back. But so long as it is there, it is all-powerful, it dominates everything and yes, the whole world seems to change. And yet everything is the same. You remember this sentence of Sri Aurobindo: All was changed and yet everything was the same? That is exactly that.
--
It becomes quite material, you see, no more Mental at all (it is very difficult to express because of that). It becomes a living experience of just what makes the individual and how this individual can remain individual although it is united perfectly, united in perfect consciousness with the Supreme.
It lasted about fifteen to twenty minutes in complete stability and I continued doing my normal activities (it was during the time of my toilet I wash my mouth and gargle), purposely it comes at that time to show that it is absolutely independent from the activity. And it comes more often at that time than when I sit in meditation. When I sit in meditation generally begins a kind of all-around-the-earth activity or even universal activity, it becomes conscious of that, but this bodys experiences are not thereto have the body experience you must live in your body! It is why the ancient sages or saints didnt know what to do with the body, because they went out of it and sat, and then the body is no more concerned. But when you remain active, then its the body that has the experience.
0 1966-04-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I still see that vision I had.1 Strangely, it was one of the most unexpected visions, in the sense that I had no Mental preparation: all of a sudden I saw that Sannyasin, with his back to a wall and a sort of hurricane approaching. It was a hurricane of noise, of clamor. Nothing could be seen; nothing could be seen but the force of the vibrations coming up like a storm: he had his back to the wall, there was a sort of gale, and a chasm in front.
And that vision of mine struck such a deep chord that every time I hear Sannyasin, I see it. Its strange. With his back to a wall: here, the sky; here, a chasm; and here, the clamor and the wind and the stormlike whirlwinds gathered over the earth by a storm. That and the wind blowing the robe and he throws himself into the void.
0 1966-04-13, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I would like it to have a sort of absoluteness. Because the decision to intervene isnt Mental at all: suddenly the hand is simply compelled to do it, so it does it. Well, in that case, it should be absolute. There is still the influence of the others thought and all that, what a useless jumble!
***
0 1966-05-18, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Just now, while listening to you, it relaxed all at once, it rested in a satisfaction: Ah, at last. And it isnt at all Mental: its (how can I explain?) the harmony of form.
Music does it an enormous lot of good but not classical music, not a music that follows Mental rules. Something that expresses an inner rhythm, the harmony of an inner rhythm. One rarely comes across a music like that.
And its the same thing with words. The sound of words is immediately restful.
0 1966-06-02, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But at any rate, it seems (I had already been told this), it seems it has somewhat deflated their Mental arrogance (laughing) they no longer think they are the superior beings of the creation!
Ah, lets work on Savitri a little (Mother reads the first line):
--
Fatigue is a great sign of weakness; when something tires you or bores you, its really a sign of weakness. It doesnt happen to me very often anymore; I dont even think it happens at all: theres just, somewhere in the Mental consciousness (and it doesnt come from me, it comes from others, rather), a suggestion that its really a bit too much. Otherwise
What about your book? How is it going?
0 1966-06-11, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its because when one starts writing, one enters the Mental atmosphere, the human Mental atmosphere. And the passage is almost imperceptible, theres such a habit of thinking, of expressing oneself, of feeling within a human Mental atmosphere which is nevertheless, in comparison with the human individual, something very vast, very complex, very supple (and those who move about in it already have the sense of a higher intelligence, an exceptional understanding and so on), but from the standpoint of the Truth, its so artificial and CONVENTIONAL! Its a very durable convention, which undergoes slight changes, alterations according to the times, the ages, but which has some sort of permanence. I feel it as (Mother makes a circular gesture around her head) a globe one is inside, luminous but so artificial!
This morning, I had, for instance, a whole series of experiences regarding the notion of selfishness. I remember that the first time someone said to Sri Aurobindo in my presence (many years ago) about someone else, Oh, he is selfish, Sri Aurobindo smiled and answered, Selfish? But the most selfish of all is the Divine, since everything belongs to Him and He sees everything in relation to Himself! I found it rather daring! And this morning (strangely, just this morning; its not the first time, either), I suddenly felt how false that notion of selfishness is and that sort of reprobation of the selfish, with, at the same time, all the shades of leniency, understanding, how false all that is, that whole world, how rigid and outside the Truth. Outside the Truth, not that its opposite would be true, no, thats not the point! Its that sort of moral- Mental notion, which is such a self-evident affair that nobody questions ithow far, far away it is from the Truth.
0 1966-06-15, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He is Mentally very limp.
But I too feel Mentally in a limp state! I get the feeling of a complete numbness.
Then thats perfect.
0 1966-07-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But not just a brain, precisely. That Power can express itself, as in the past, in a Mental or over Mental way; it can express itself vitally through force; it can express itself through muscles; but how can it express itself physically (because you often speak of a material power), purely, directly? Whats the difference between the Action up above and true Action here?
Every time I have been conscious of the Power, the experience has been similar. The Will from above is expressed by a vibration, which certainly gets clothed in vital power but acts in a subtle physical. There is a perception of a certain quality of vibration, which is difficult to describe but gives a sense of something coagulated (not broken up), something that feels denser than air, extremely homogeneous, with a golden luminosity, an AWESOME power of propulsion, and which expresses a certain willit doesnt have the nature of human will but more the nature of vision than that of thought: its like a vision imposing itself in order to be realized, in a domain very close to material Matter, but invisible except to the inner vision. And That, that Vibration, exerts a pressure on people, on things, on circumstances, in order to fashion them according to its vision. And its irresistible. Even people who think the opposite, who want the opposite, do what is willed without wanting it; even things that are opposed in their very nature are turned around.
--
There immediately comes the why and the how. But that belongs to the realm of Mental curiosity, because the important fact is to put a stop to the resistance. Thats the important thing, putting a stop to the resistance so the universe may become what it must be: the expression of a harmonious, luminous, marvelous power, incomparably beautiful. Afterwards, once the resistance has ceased, if out of curiosity we want to know why it occurred it will no longer matter. But right now, its not by looking for the why that we will be able to bring about the remedy: its by taking the true position. Thats the only thing that matters.
Putting a stop to the resistance through complete surrender, complete self-giving, in all the cells if one can do it.
0 1966-07-27, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If they knew too soon, if they were able to see the opposition between what is and what must be, they wouldnt have the courage. One must one must truly be heroicheroic. I assure you, I see these cells, they are heroicheroic. As for them, they dont know in that Mental way: its only their adoration that saves them. That is, What You will, Lord, what You will, what You will , with the simplicity of a childs ingenuous heart: What You will, what You will, what You will only what You will and nothing but what You will exists. Then its all right. But without that, its not possible. Its not possible to know what they know and to continue to be if That isnt there. You know, the feeling is, At Your service, what You will, what You will whatever You will , without discussion, without anything, without even a sensation, nothing: What You will, what You will.
This is the only strength, there is no other.
0 1966-08-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At the same time, I am little by little learning from demonstration the true use that must be made of Mental activity. Its purpose is easy to understand: it has been used to educate, awaken and so on; but its not something that after having done its duty and fulfilled its purpose will disappear. It will be used in its own manner, but in its true manner and true place. And it becomes wonderfully interesting. For instance, the idea that you are what you think, that your knowledge is your power, well, it seems to be a necessity of the transition, of the passage from one state of consciousness to another, but its not, as I said, something that will disappear when something else is reached: it will be used, but in its own place. Because when you experience union, the mind appears unnecessary: the direct contact, the direct action, do without it. But in its true place, acting in the true way, sticking to its place (a place not of necessity or even usefulness, but of refinement in action), it becomes quite interesting. When you see the Whole as a growing self-awareness, the mind enrichesit enriches the Whole. And when each thing is in its own place, it all becomes so harmonious and simple, but with such full and complete and perfect simplicity that everything is used.
And with all this, there is (it almost seems to be the key to the problem, to the understanding), there is a special concentration on the why, the how of death. Years and years ago, when Sri Aurobindo was still here, there came one day a sort of dazzling, imperious revelation: One dies only when one chooses to die. I told Sri Aurobindo, This is what I saw and KNEW. He said to me, It is true. Then I asked him, Always, in every case? He said, Always. Only, one isnt conscious, human beings arent conscious, but thats how it is. But now I am beginning to understand! Some experiences, some examples are given in the details of the bodys inner vibrations, and I see that there is a choice, a choice generally unconscious, but which, in some individuals, can be conscious. I am not talking about senti Mental cases, I am talking about the body, the cells accepting disintegration. There is a will like this (Mother raises a finger upward) or a will like that (Mother lowers her finger). The origin of that will lies in the truth of the being, but it seems (and that is something marvelous), it seems that the final decision is left to the choice of the cells themselves.
0 1966-08-13, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know that scores of people have come for Auroville. Instead of working, they spend their time talking and chatting! And they send me letters. Their whole Mental ego is bubbling with excitement, all of them. Have you seen them?
No. I am afraid they may summon me!
--
I told him many things (Mother makes a gesture of Mental communication), but above all, I insisted a lot on the fact that it would be better to build the city first! And that we would see afterwards. Because he told me it was important for him that we should remain in the democratic system until something better has been found. I felt like answering him, How do you know that something better hasnt been found? But I didnt say anything.
Then I also wrote something for J. He had asked me for a message for his school (Mother hands another note):
0 1966-08-31, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It wasnt personal. I told you how the true movement gets distorted, and I gave you examples. Very interesting examples because they dont look like much, but its something funda Mental, in the sense that thats how Truth is turned into falsehood. And its so subtle that unless one has experienced it, Mentally one cannot understand. What I explained to you was the experience, and there were two examples, which I told you in a very precise way now I dont remember the words.
You dont remember?
0 1966-09-17, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a new activity. At times I find myself (I catch myself doing something, to be precise) talking with people whom most of the time I dont know, then describing a scene: they can get such and such a thing done, they can be advised to do this or that thing, and it will end with such and such a thing. They are kinds of scenes from a book or scenes from a movie. Then, the same day or the next, someone suddenly tells me, I received a message from you and you told me to write to so-and-so and tell him such and such a thing! And I am not doing it Mentally, its not that I think, A letter must be sent to so-and-so and such and such a thing must be done, not at all: I live I live a scene or narrate a scene, and its received by someone else (and I am not at all thinking of that someone else), its received by someone, this or that or this person, as a message in which I tell him to do this or that thing. And its happening here, in France, in America, everywhere. Its becoming amusing!
Someone writes to me, You told me this, and its one of my scenes! One of the scenes I livednot lived, lived and created at the same time! I dont know how to explain it. Its like a work of (Mother seems to feet an invisible substance between her fingers, as if fashioning it).
--
And this simplicity, this lack of complication and sophistication, is what gives these things great value, in the sense that it gives them perfect sincerity and simplicity. In anything expressed Mentally, vitally, intellectually, there is always MORE in the form, in the word, in the expression, MORE than in the experienceit gets enlarged and rounded out (!) What is said is more than what is meant to be said. While here, its the perfectly pure experience, which feels the words as a sort of shrinking, a diminishing, and at the same time as bringing in a complication that doesnt exist in the experience the experience is very simple, very simple: it is truly pure. And anything one says is like adding something that lessens its purity and simplicity.
So, saying these things is good for oneself, its good for someone who is in the same state of heart, but for the public (Mother shakes her head) its doomed to incomprehension.
0 1966-09-28, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am referring here to physical suffering, because all the other kinds of sufferingvital, Mental, emotive sufferingarise from a wrong functioning of the mind, and those we can easily rank them in the Falsehood, thats all. But physical suffering is to me like a child being beaten, because here in Matter, Falsehood turned into ignorance, which means there is no bad willthere is no bad will in Matter, everything is inertia and ignorance: total ignorance of the Truth, ignorance of the Origin, ignorance of the Possibility, even ignorance of what needs to be done so as not to suffer materially. This ignorance is everywhere in the cells, and only the experience and the experience of what, in this rudimentary consciousness, is translated as sufferingcan awaken, arouse the need to know and be cured, and the aspiration to be transformed.
This has become a certitude because the aspiration has been born in all these cells, and its growing more and more intense and is surprised at the resistance. But they have observed that when something is upset in the functioning (which means that instead of being supple, spontaneous, natural, the functioning becomes a painful effort, a struggle with something that takes on the appearance of a bad will but is only a reluctance devoid of understanding), at such times the intensity of the aspiration, of the call, grows tenfold: it becomes constant. The difficulty is to keep up this state of intensity; generally it all falls back into, I cant say drowsiness, but its a sort of slackening: you take things easy. And its only when the inner disorder becomes hard to bear that the intensity grows and becomes permanent. For hourshourswithout flagging, the call, the aspiration, the will to unite with the Divine, to become the Divine, is kept up at its peakwhy? Because there was whats outwardly called a physical disorder, a suffering. Otherwise, when there isnt any suffering, there is now and then an upsurge, then it flags and falls back; then at some other time, another upsurge It never ends! It lasts for eternities. If we want things to go fast (fast relatively to the rhythm of our lives), the whiplash is necessary. I am convinced of this, because as soon as you are in your inner being, you treat this with contempt (for yourself).
--
All this is like microscopic studies of the phenomena of consciousness independent of Mental intervention. The need to use words to express ourselves brings in that Mental intervention, but in the experience it doesnt exist. And its very interesting because the pure experience holds a content of truth, of reality, which disappears as soon as the mind intervenes. There is a flavor of true reality which totally eludes expression for that reason. Its the same difference as between an individual and his portrait, between a fact and the story told about it. Thats how it is. But its far more subtle.
So then, to return to the letter, when you are conscious of this Forcethis Force, this Compassion in its essential reality and see how it can be exerted through a conscious individual, you have the key to the problem.
0 1966-10-05, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I cant say that I worry (I never do), but I was wondering sometimes I wonder, Is it going to go on, or I am not quite sure of whats going to happen, because I never try to know nor do I desire to know, but I dont feel I am told. (I think this is another Mental stupidity and when nothing is formulated, it means things are all right and as they should be.) But, of course, there is a childishness that would like to be told, Do this this way and that that way, and this But it doesnt work! Its not like that!
I dont receive any command: when I have something to say, I receive the exact word or sentence, in an absolute way; but for action, I dont receive any command, because I dont think I have any hesitation, I never wonder, Should I do this or should I do that? Never. My whole effort is to live from minute to minute. I mean, to do every minute exactly what should be done, without making plans, without thinking, without because it all becomes Mental; as soon as you start thinking something out, thats no longer it. But quite instinctively and spontaneously, I do what needs to be done: this, that, this. When something needs a response, it comes. As for money, its the same thing; the only thing I am led to do is to say, So-and-so has asked for so much, such-and-such Service needs so much, like that (not a long time in advance, but when it becomes imperative). And thats all. Its like that. So I dont know what will happen tomorrow; I dont at all seek to know whats going to happen. But on that day, I seemed to be asking, Well, give me proof that You are interested.Poff! it came just at the right time. So I laughed, I said to myself, What a baby I must still be!
And for two days, just when I needed to give some money, it came. So I said, All right, thats fine. But now its no longer so amusing! It was really amusing.
0 1966-10-29, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To tell the truth, I dont like Mental activity I have never liked it. I worked a lot in the mind for a time: it was a phase, the phase of Mental development when I did philosophyall philosophies, comparative philosophiesin order to make the intellect more supple. But to tell the truth, it doesnt interest me. While states of consciousness movements of consciousness, states of consciousness thats tremendously interesting! And going on at the moment there is a very keen, that is, very painstaking study of the relationship between states of consciousness and the phenomenon of death.
Ultimately, all beliefs people have about what happens after death Human beings have long tried to know, of course, and some religions thought they had found an explanation. Ive had personal experiences. And now the problem is put in a new way, as if (I say as if because I havent come to the end and I dont know), as if what is perpetuated from life to life werent personalities but STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, which are immortal and in constant transformation at the same time, and whats transformed through ones lives is the state of consciousness. Some have only one state of consciousness, others have many (there are even certain people who have two nearly opposite states of consciousness, which results in that double personality and those contradictions in life). Some are very simple and have only one, and that results in almost primitive individuals; but they sometimes have a wonderful development in their state of consciousness. That explains many contradictions. Thats what I am clearly shown at the moment: states of consciousness passing through numerous aggregates. And then, there is, there too, a secret to be found for the prolongation of an aggregate, that is, what gives the character not of immortality (which is something very different), but of the indefinite duration of lifeof the FORM, rather (life never stops), of the form. So then, once this study has been done in depth, another secret will have been found.
0 1966-11-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A proof what they want is a scientifically demonstrated proof. But in the first place, are they really referring to the soul? You understand, they are all in a terrible confusion: for them, the soul is just anything. Do they want to prove the existence of the soul, which is eternal, immortal, or the existence of an afterlife? The two things are different. Afterlife has been scientifically proved by cases: there have been quite a few cases of people who in their present life carried on with their previous life. There was the story of that father who died, and the child of a neighboring family gave extraordinary details, things that the dead father alone knew. He alone knew them, and as soon as the child was able to move independently, that is, at the age of five or six, he started trying to lead his former life again; he would say, My children are waiting for me in that house, I must go and look after them! He was a child, yet he said, My children are waiting for me over there. And that house was where he had died. There were quite precise details that the dead father alone knew: he would say, But I put that here, why did it go? All kinds of things like that. This is a fairly recent case. There have been at least four or five recorded cases, therefore there is an afterlife. But what is it that lives after? Of course, in the case of that child, its not the soul, it has nothing to do with the soul: its beings of the Vital1 (the Mentalized vital) that remained intact and, because of some special circumstance, reincarnated immediately. So their previous life was still quite fresh. The case of that child seems to me scientifically indisputable because they cant say, He is mad, or Its a hallucinationhe is a child and he speaks of his children. There have been other cases as convincing as this one (I dont remember them). But is this what they want to know? Or do they want to know whether there is a soul and whether it is immortal and In reality, they dont know anything. Its a question put by ignorant people. They should be told in the first place, Excuse me! Before asking questions, you should study the problem.
There was the story of Ford, who had sent word to Sri Aurobindo and me that he was coming here to ask us the question that tormented him: What happens after death? And he said he was ready to give his fortune to whoever could answer him. Someone had told him, Yes, Sri Aurobindo can answer you. So Ford had sent word that he was preparing to come and ask us his question. And then he died!
--
The number of memories of this kind Ive had is almost incalculable. But it doesnt have the same character as the memories of the higher consciousness (then its not a memory: its a sort of vision the higher beings2 have of life; but thats something else). The memories I speak of are memories of the psychic being, they have a different character: a rather personal character, I mean there is the sense of a PERSON remembering something. While the others, the visions from above, are memories of an acting consciousness. But the memories of the psychic being arent Mentalized, that is, if for instance at the time of the recollection you werent paying attention to the way you were dressed or the surroundings, you dont remember them. You only remember what took place and especially what took place from the point of view of the consciousness and the feelings and the inner movements.
Its generally fragmentsfragments of life that were individualized, and when in the present life you follow a normal development with the [various beings] gathering around the central consciousness, all those elements come back to gather together. They come back, each with its own memories. For instance, I had a memory like that (I tell you, Ive had hundreds of them) when I was very young (I must have been twenty or so). It wasnt at night, but I was lying down, resting: suddenly I felt myself riding a horse, with tremendous warlike power and the sense a will for victory and the POWER of victory. And I felt as if I was riding a horse: I saw a white horse, I saw my legs, with riding breeches, you understand, and a red velvet costume. And there I was, at a gallop. I couldnt tell what the head was like or anything, naturally! And also, the crowd, the armies, and the rising sun. It was so strong, the sense that it was the sense of the will for victory and the POWER of victory. It came just like that. Then, sometime later, I read somewhere the story of Murat (I forget I think his victory was Magenta3 I no longer remember all that), and I immediately understood that my vision was at the moment of launching the battle: he had an inner call to a Power, so there was an identification [with Mothers power], and thats what I remembered and what came back. If I said (as the Theosophists tell you), I was Murat, it would be stupid. But it was a consciousness coming back. It was so strong! The impression lasted long enough, with the sense of the battle but above all the sense of that POWER making you invincible. It was interesting, because at the time (it was just in the beginning, I was beginning to take interest in these things and I had just come across the Cosmic teaching), I was convinced that a womans psychic being was always reincarnated in a woman and a mans psychic being was always reincarnated in a man (many schools teach that; Thon too believed so, he insisted on it). So it came as a surprise, because it wasnt in conformity with what I thought (!). Afterwards (long afterwards), I realized that naturally all those dogmas were nonsense, but
0 1966-11-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In reality, its a threefold movement: the creation, which was the flight from the Divine (according, of course, to the ordinary conception which says that the creation fell, it wandered away from the Divine and men wandered away from the Divine); that was the first movement. But thats because he sees it too closely; he doesnt see that the Divine plunged to the very bottom of the Inconscient. (And thats the question: Why did He plunge to the very bottom of the Inconscient? Thats to be investigated [Mother laughs], one doesnt yet know how to explain it: everyone explains it differently.) He plunged to the very bottom (as for me, I think I know why, but that will be for later). He plunged to the very bottom of the Inconscient: beneath the stone (Mother makes a gesture of immutability, at the very bottom), beneath the mineral; the mineral is already a first awakening of the consciousness. But you have to see it as a whole to understand that its an ascent. If you see human life as it is, the impression is that men become lost in the fall, but thats the result of the Mind; the Mind needed to go through the whole experience, to go down to the very bottom in order to understand everything and bring everything back towards the ascent. For plants, its really an ascent. Thus, according to this vision, there are three movements. But if you see the whole simultaneously, there are only two movements: the first movement is the descent of the Lord into the Inconscient (we cant say anything about that for the moment; once we have emerged from it, well be able to say); the second (the first we can conceive of) is, very, very slowly, through all possible experiences, even the most complete Mental denials of the Divine, the ascent towards the Divine. And then, once we have climbed up (Mother makes a gesture of descent), Come, come here: change this prison into the mansion of the Divine.
That will be very good, a very good message for 4.5.67.
0 1966-11-19, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yet, of all factors, Mental arrogance is the most unfavorable to the action of the divine Grace.
This notation, you know, was purely and simply a question of vibration; it was the vibration of Mental arrogance (which is perceptible, clear, absolutely clear). It came and took up the whole space (Mother makes a gesture of puffing up), it took up a lot of space! It took up the whole space, and then, this very tranquil, very calm Action, so noiseless, without ado, unassuming; it goes like this (gesture of imperturbable descent), with perfect simplicity and it was absolutely blocked, it couldnt get through! So I wrote this note.
They know what should not be done
--
"...Of all factors, Mental arrogance is the most unfavorable to the action of the divine Grace." Some words express a vibration perfectly. That's yet another experience: there is the word translating the vibration perfectly, and the others giving a hazy and uncertain effect. Some words fit perfectly together: "Unfavorable to the action of the divine Grace..."
Satprem thought of en cachette for "unseen" (literally, "on the sly" or "stealthily").
0 1966-11-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There, the problem comes up again. Because there are various detailed experiences (in tiny details), detailed experiences of different attitudes of consciousness to find out which of them is effective. Its a whole field of study. Its microscopic, of course, but extremely interesting. And then, the answer is always the same; its so lovely: When you forget that you are, when there only remains the Lord, all difficulties instantly disappear. Instantly: the previous second, the difficulty was there; the next second, gone. But its not something that can be done artificially; its not some Mental or personal will to take this attitude: it must be spontaneous. And when its spontaneous, then all difficulties INSTANTLY disappear.
Stop existing the Lord alone exists.
0 1966-12-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Exactly You know how there always is a vagueness. I say this because every day, and quite often several times a day, I receive something direct (gesture from above). Well, if I write it down just when I receive it, it has a certain form, and then if I remain very, very silent, very still, a word or a form often gets changed; then it becomes more precise, more exact, sometimes more harmonious. Therefore its something that comes from above and takes on a clothing in the Mental region.
I dont hear words. I receive something, which is always direct and imperative (and I clearly feel its from there [gesture above], somewhere around there). But it may, for instance, be expressed almost simultaneously, almost at the same time, in English and in French. And I am convinced that if I knew other languages, if I were familiar with other languages, it could be expressed in several languages. Its the same thing as what in the past used to be called the gift of tongues. There were prophets who spoke, and everyone heard in his native tonguehe spoke in any particular language, but each of those present heard in his native tongue. I had that experience a very long time ago (I didnt do it purposely, I knew nothing about it): I spoke at a Bahai gathering, and people from different countries came and congratulated me because I knew their language (which I didnt know at all!): they had heard in their language.
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But I understand what you mean. You want to know if its something ready-made, ready-prepared, which you pull down as it is. (Mother remains silent). That exists in a realm far higher than words. For example, I have often received something like that (gesture from above), direct, then I translate it; I dont try to find it (the more silent I am, the more powerful and concrete it growspowerfully concrete), but I often see, as coming from Sri Aurobindo, something that adds a correction, a precision (rarely an addition, its not that: its only in the form, especially in the line of precision); the first expression is a little hazy, then it becomes more precise. And I dont try to find it, I dont strive, there isnt any Mental activity: its always like this (even, still gesture to the forehead), and its always in this [stillness] that it comes: suddenly it comesplop! plop! I say, Oh! and note it down.
This is my experience.
I dont know, there may exist somewhere in the Mental region something ready-made, but I think it would then be like some of those things Sri Aurobindo wrote,2 which came ready-made, as they were; there were even things that didnt conform to his own view: it came imperatively. But now I dont have that experience at all. Or else, it would be like what happened the other day: for two or three minutes, as I told you, there was someone playing. It must have been the same phenomenon. But then, the feeling is quite different: you no longer exist, you are hardly conscious of what goes on. And that would be incorrigible, I may say, in the sense that it would come ready-made and you couldnt change anything in it, or else it would no longer be the same thing, it would be something you did actively. As soon as the mind becomes active, its finished. Finished. It may come from your supraconscient, but it becomes a quite personal thing.
But that inspiration comes from the highest region, the region beyond all individualizations. Thats why its something we find difficult to formulate and explain. Its complete, perfect in itself, but it doesnt have anything of the character of our Mental formulation, not at all; it doesnt even have the character of a formulated idea. And its absolutely imperative, absolutely. But then, as soon as it touches the Mental zone, it seems to attract words. My impression is that the more silent I am, the more precise it is; in other words, the more inactive the mind is, the more precise the expression. So thats what it is, its that force coming down and attracting words. Its not even ideas (it doesnt come through the region of ideas): its an experience, its something living which comes and which, to take expression, catches hold of words. What came on Sunday was like that: I was asked that question on the Grace, then I was seized by a concentrated, extremely strong silence for maybe a minute (not even that long), and it came. Then I spoke. I heard myself speaking. But then it clearly came through Sri Aurobindo.
If it were already written, fully ready somewhere, you couldnt change anything in it; when it was there you would feel its perfect in itself and you cant change anything in it.
0 1966-12-17, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I saw it was clearly that. I saw how it had happened (because his question made me look at it, so I saw). There is an interesting point, its that the Mental initiative in swimming across that pond was P.s and anothersso, humanly speaking, they are the ones who are responsible (but thats not true, its not like that!). But anyway, they were outside the group, it was an action that had nothing to do with the group, and they did it because they were to rejoin the group at a precise time and they were late. So it was clearly an individual outgrowth. Walking round the pond would have taken three hours while there were hardly two hours left before nightfall, and they were in a jungle, without any light or anything. That was another impossibility. So with his reason and human common sense, he said, The best is to swim across. But he hadnt foreseen (that was the reckless part) that the water would be icy.
(Sujata:) But P. had already swum across the water once, because he wasnt part of the group that had the accident: they called him from the camp, he came and swam through that water, and the accident took place on the way back. The others were on the other side.
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Its not even a Mental question: one should FEEL here (gesture to the heart), be convinced that it [Mothers presence] is really active, that its something real, that it really does protect. Not a thought just like that, a metaphysical thought: a feeling. He didnt have that.
If he had remained in the group, he would have shared in the protection over the group. Once he had a separate individual action, everything depended on his inner statethis is something they should all understand.
0 1966-12-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats how it is. So then, once its objectified on paper, you can become aware of the relationship between the pressure you received and the things you wrote, which have varying qualities. When, for instance, you read me those few pages, with certain things I saw the Light behind; with others, it was like a horizontal origin or will (horizontal gesture at forehead level), and it was very pretty, very fine (you understand, I am not looking at it from the literary standpoint at all, or even the standpoint of the beauty of the form, thats not it). Its the quality of the vibration in whats written. And while you were reading to me, I felt the two origins, and I felt a sort of conflict between what came like this (gesture from above) and what came out of habit, like that (horizontal gesture to the forehead): it was especially an old habit, something that came from the past and belonged to a Mental, artistic, literary region (all that likes the form, likes certain emotions, certain expressions, all that). And it all constituted a horizontal world that exerted a pressure to be expressed, mostly out of habit, but also with a sort of will to be, a will to last. The other way was a Light falling and expressing itself quite naturallyspontaneously, effortlessly, and UNCONCERNED WITH THE EXTERNAL FORM. And that was much more direct in its expression. But of course, the distinction isnt clear-cut, its not easy to say, Oh, this comes from here (gesture to a particular level), oh, that comes from there (gesture to another level). But there is a movement above and another below.
So I think the sadhana would consist in sifting it out, or rather in developing a sensitivity such that the difference would become clear, quite perceptible, so it would no longer be the mind that chose and said, This is all right, that isnt. There would be a spontaneous adherence to what is clothed in this light from above and a rejection of what isnt. The sadhana would consist in developing this sensitivity by separating yourself from the old movement, by taking the old movement outside you.
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Yes, I think its better to correct it. It may not be very enjoyable, but from the point of view of Mental discipline its very useful.
I really feel your letter as a grace, because as for me Id toss everything out.
0 1966-12-24, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
They want a Mental definition of the Truth.
Truth cannot be expressed in the minds terms. Thats the point. And all the questions they ask are Mental ones.
Truth cannot be formulated, it cannot be defined, but it can be LIVED.
--- Overview of adj mental
The adj mental has 5 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (12) mental ::: (involving the mind or an intellectual process; "mental images of happy times"; "mental calculations"; "in a terrible mental state"; "mental suffering"; "free from mental defects")
2. (4) mental ::: (of or relating to the mind; "mental powers"; "mental development"; "mental hygiene")
3. mental ::: (of or relating to the chin- or liplike structure in insects and certain mollusks)
4. genial, mental ::: (of or relating to the chin or median part of the lower jaw)
5. mental ::: (affected by a disorder of the mind; "a mental patient"; "mental illness")
--- Similarity of adj mental
5 senses of mental
Sense 1
mental (vs. physical)
=> intellectual, rational, noetic
=> moral
=> psychic, psychical
=> psychogenic
=> psychological
Sense 2
mental
Sense 3
mental
Sense 4
genial, mental
Sense 5
mental
=> unhealthy (vs. healthy)
--- Antonyms of adj mental
2 of 5 senses of mental
Sense 1
mental (vs. physical)
physical (vs. mental)
=> animal(prenominal), carnal, fleshly, sensual
=> bodily, corporal, corporeal, somatic
=> material
=> personal
=> physiologic, physiological
=> somatogenic, somatogenetic
Sense 5
mental
INDIRECT (VIA unhealthy) -> healthy
--- Pertainyms of adj mental
5 senses of mental
Sense 1
mental (vs. physical)
Sense 2
mental
Pertains to noun mind (Sense 1)
=>mind, head, brain, psyche, nous
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
Sense 3
mental
Pertains to noun mentum (Sense 3)
=>mentum
=> body part
Sense 4
genial, mental
Pertains to noun mentum (Sense 3)
=>mentum
=> body part
Sense 5
mental
--- Derived Forms of adj mental
2 of 5 senses of mental
Sense 1
mental (vs. physical)
RELATED TO->(noun) mentality#1
=> mentality, outlook, mindset, mind-set
RELATED TO->(noun) mentality#2
=> brain, brainpower, learning ability, mental capacity, mentality, wit
Sense 2
mental
RELATED TO->(noun) mentality#1
=> mentality, outlook, mindset, mind-set
RELATED TO->(noun) mentality#2
=> brain, brainpower, learning ability, mental capacity, mentality, wit
--- Grep of noun mental
creating by mental acts
emmental
fundamental
mental ability
mental abnormality
mental age
mental anguish
mental attitude
mental balance
mental block
mental capacity
mental case
mental condition
mental confusion
mental defectiveness
mental deficiency
mental dexterity
mental disease
mental disorder
mental disturbance
mental energy
mental exhaustion
mental faculty
mental health
mental home
mental hospital
mental hygiene
mental illness
mental image
mental imagery
mental institution
mental lexicon
mental measurement
mental note
mental object
mental picture
mental process
mental quickness
mental rejection
mental representation
mental reservation
mental retardation
mental soundness
mental state
mental strain
mental synthesis
mental telepathist
mental test
mental testing
mental unsoundness
mentalism
mentality
mentally retarded
ornamental