classes ::: Gods, the Gods,
children :::
branches ::: Mahasaraswati, Saraswati

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object:Saraswati
class:Gods
class:the Gods
Goddess of inspiration

see also :::

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Amrita_Gita
God_Exists
Guru_Bhakti_Yoga
Infinite_Library
Letters_On_Yoga
Letters_On_Yoga_III
Mind_-_Its_Mysteries_and_Control
Philosophy_of_Dreams
Questions_And_Answers_1950-1951
Questions_And_Answers_1954
Self_Knowledge
The_Secret_Of_The_Veda
Thought_Power
Thus_Awakens_Swami_Sivananda
Vedic_and_Philological_Studies
Words_Of_The_Mother_III

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.09_-_Saraswati_and_Her_Consorts
1951-05-12_-_Mahalakshmi_and_beauty_in_life_-_Mahasaraswati_-_conscious_hand_-_Riches_and_poverty
1954-08-18_-_Mahalakshmi_-_Maheshwari_-_Mahasaraswati_-_Determinism_and_freedom_-_Suffering_and_knowledge_-_Aspects_of_the_Mother
35.05_-_Hymn_To_Saraswati

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
01.04_-_The_Poetry_in_the_Making
0_1958-11-04_-_Myths_are_True_and_Gods_exist_-_mental_formation_and_occult_faculties_-_exteriorization_-_work_in_dreams
0_1959-01-31
0_1961-01-12
0_1961-01-22
0_1961-01-27
0_1961-01-31
0_1962-10-27
0_1963-05-11
0_1964-01-04
0_1967-05-06
0_1968-02-03
0_1972-01-12
02.02_-_Lines_of_the_Descent_of_Consciousness
04.08_-_To_the_Heights_VIII_(Mahalakshmi)
04.09_-_To_the_Heights-I_(Mahasarswati)
04.10_-_To_the_Heights-X
05.01_-_Man_and_the_Gods
05.12_-_The_Soul_and_its_Journey
06.05_-_The_Story_of_Creation
10.04_-_Transfiguration
1.01_-_Foreward
1.01_-_Hatha_Yoga
1.028_-_Bringing_About_Whole-Souled_Dedication
1.02_-_Karma_Yoga
1.02_-_The_Doctrine_of_the_Mystics
1.02_-_The_Eternal_Law
1.03_-_Hymns_of_Gritsamada
1.03_-_Japa_Yoga
1.03_-_The_Gods,_Superior_Beings_and_Adverse_Forces
1.04_-_Nada_Yoga
1.04_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda
1.05_-_Bhakti_Yoga
1.06_-_Raja_Yoga
1.06_-_The_Four_Powers_of_the_Mother
1.07_-_Incarnate_Human_Gods
1.07_-_Jnana_Yoga
1.07_-_Note_on_the_word_Go
1.08_-_Adhyatma_Yoga
1.08_-_The_Gods_of_the_Veda_-_The_Secret_of_the_Veda
1.09_-_Kundalini_Yoga
1.09_-_Saraswati_and_Her_Consorts
1.10_-_Mantra_Yoga
1.10_-_The_Image_of_the_Oceans_and_the_Rivers
1.19_-_The_Victory_of_the_Fathers
1.20_-_The_Hound_of_Heaven
17.02_-_Hymn_to_the_Sun
1951-05-11_-_Mahakali_and_Kali_-_Avatar_and_Vibhuti_-_Sachchidananda_behind_all_states_of_being_-_The_power_of_will_-_receiving_the_Divine_Will
1951-05-12_-_Mahalakshmi_and_beauty_in_life_-_Mahasaraswati_-_conscious_hand_-_Riches_and_poverty
1954-08-11_-_Division_and_creation_-_The_gods_and_human_formations_-_People_carry_their_desires_around_them
1954-08-18_-_Mahalakshmi_-_Maheshwari_-_Mahasaraswati_-_Determinism_and_freedom_-_Suffering_and_knowledge_-_Aspects_of_the_Mother
1.kbr_-_Poem_9
2.01_-_Mandala_One
2.02_-_The_Ishavasyopanishad_with_a_commentary_in_English
2.08_-_ALICE_IN_WONDERLAND
2.08_-_On_Non-Violence
2.09_-_SEVEN_REASONS_WHY_A_SCIENTIST_BELIEVES_IN_GOD
2.15_-_On_the_Gods_and_Asuras
27.03_-_The_Great_Holocaust_-_Chhinnamasta
2_-_Other_Hymns_to_Agni
30.07_-_The_Poet_and_the_Yogi
33.14_-_I_Played_Football
34.02_-_Hymn_To_All-Gods
34.06_-_Hymn_to_Sindhu
35.04_-_Hymn_To_Surya
35.05_-_Hymn_To_Saraswati
35.06_-_Who_Seeks_Holy_Places?
36.07_-_An_Introduction_To_The_Vedas
36.08_-_A_Commentary_on_the_First_Six_Suktas_of_Rigveda
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.18_-_Faith_and_shakti
4.3.2.09_-_Overmind_Experiences_and_the_Supermind
5.1.02_-_The_Gods
Bhagavad_Gita
r1912_07_16
r1912_07_22
r1912_12_16
r1912_12_31
r1913_01_13
r1913_01_18
r1913_02_06
r1913_09_13
r1913_09_29
r1913_11_17
r1913_11_18
r1913_11_28
r1913_12_04
r1913_12_11
r1913_12_16
r1913_12_19
r1913_12_24
r1913_12_31
r1914_03_24
r1914_04_07
r1914_04_10
r1914_04_11
r1914_04_14
r1914_04_15
r1914_04_16
r1914_05_12
r1914_06_15
r1914_06_21
r1914_07_13
r1914_07_15
r1914_08_06
r1914_08_14
r1914_10_03
r1914_11_19
r1914_11_21
r1915_01_02
r1915_01_10
r1915_01_22
r1915_05_27
r1915_06_19
r1915_07_11
r1915_08_02
r1917_01_20
r1917_01_23a
r1917_01_23b
r1917_02_18
r1917_03_03
r1917_03_04
r1917_03_18
r1917_09_21
r1918_04_20
r1918_05_15
Sayings_of_Sri_Ramakrishna_(text)
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1

PRIMARY CLASS

Gods
the_Gods
SIMILAR TITLES
Mahasaraswati
Saraswati
Swami Sivananda Saraswati

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

saraswati. ::: goddess of speech, wisdom, learning and the arts

saraswati ::: n. --> The sakti or wife of Brahma; the Hindoo goddess of learning, music, and poetry.


TERMS ANYWHERE

akali-Mahasarasvati bhava (Mahakali-Mahasaraswati bhava) ::: the Mahakali-Mahasarasvati temperament, a combination of Mahakali bhava and Mahasarasvati bhava.Mah Mahakali-Mahasarasvati akali-Mahasarasvati prakr.ti-aṁsa (Mahakali-Mahasaraswati

akali-Mahasarasvati (Mahakali-Mahasaraswati; Mahakali Mahasaraswati) ::: the combination of Mahakali (bhava) and Mahasarasvati (bhava), in which Mahakali "imparts to the slow and difficult labour after perfection an impetus that multiplies the power and shortens the long way". For Sri Aurobindo"s sadhana as documented in the Record of Yoga, this was the most important of the various

alaks.mi-Mahasarasvati (Mahalakshmi-Mahasaraswati; Mahalaxmi-; Mahaluxmi-) ::: the combination of Mahalaks.mi (bhava) and Mahasarasvati (bhava), divine harmony and divine perfection, in which Mahalaks.mi "casts on perfection the charm that makes it endure for ever".

asarasvati-Mahakali (Mahasaraswati-Mahakali) ::: same as Mahakali-Mahasarasvati.Mah Mahasarasvati-Mahesvari

asarasvati (Maheshwari-Mahasaraswati) ::: the combination of Mahesvari (bhava) and Mahasarasvati (bhava), characterised by a "slow and regular unhasting pressure" favourable to luminous and effective vijñana, but lacking in the intensity of the Mahakali energy.Mahesvari-Mah Mahesvari-Mahasarasvati asarasvati ssanti anti (Maheshwari-Mahasaraswati shanti)

asarasvati-Mahesvari (Mahasaraswati-Maheshwari) ::: same as Mahesvari-Mahasarasvati.

asarasvati tapas (Mahasaraswati tapas) ::: the patient and laborious force of Mahasarasvati.Mah Mahasarasvati asarasvati vibhuti

bhava (Saraswati bhava) ::: same as Mahasarasvati bhava.

Lakshmi ::: “Lakshmi is usually golden, not white. Saraswati is white.” Letters on Yoga

Mahakali Mahasarasvati tapas (Mahakali Mahasaraswati tapas) —Mahakali the force of Mahakali-Mahasarasvati, a reconciliation of active and passive tapas in which the swiftness of Mahakali is one with the perfection of Mahasarasvati.Mah Mahakali akali pravr pravrtti

Mahasarasvati bhava (Mahasaraswati bhava) ::: the MahasarasvatiMahasarasvati aspect of devibhava; the temperament of Mahasarasvati, the personality of the sakti or devi who "is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things".Mah Mahasarasvati-Mahakali

Mahasarasvati (Mahasaraswati) ::: one of the four personalities of the sakti or devi: the goddess of skill and work, whose manifestation in the temperament (Mahasarasvati bhava) is the "continent" occupied by the force of Mahakali in the intended combination of the aspects of daivi prakr.ti; sometimes short for Mahasarasvati bhava.

Mahasarasvati (Mahasaraswati) ::: the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit; the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order; one of the four leading Powers and Personalities of the Mother.

Mahasarasvati prakr.ti (Mahasaraswati prakriti) ::: the MahasarasMahasarasvati vati nature; prakr.ti expressing the Mahasarasvati aspect of the divine sakti.Mah Mahasarasvati

MAHASARASWATI ::: the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit, and hers is the Yoga that is skill in works, yogah karmasu kausalam, and the utilities of divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit to life and the happiness of its harmonies.

(Maheshwari-MahaluxmiMahasaraswati) ::: the combination of Mahesvari (bhava), Mahalaks.mi (bhava) and Mahasarasvati (bhava), three of the four aspects of daivi prakr.ti or devibhava, with Mahakali (bhava), the aspect of strength and swiftness, "contained and dominated" by the others.Mahesvari-Mah Mahesvari-Mahasarasvati

"method chosen for preparation" was that of Mahasarasvati ::: "the method chosen for fulfilment" was "Mahakali"s in the Mahasaraswati mould", on "the basis of hidden calm & self-possession" provided by Mahesvari and strongly coloured by Mahalaks.mi.Mah Mahakali-Mahasarasvati

Sarasvati, Saraswati (Sanskrit) Sarasvatī The ethereal, the elegant one; the divine consort or wife of Brahma, his feminine alter ego, a later form or aspect of Vach (voice or the Word), a title of the Third Logos in Greece as well as in India. This parallels the Bath Qol (daughter of the voice, daughter of the Word) of mystical Hebrew thought, which can be taken either as the feminine aspect of the Logos itself, or as its daughter — the inspiration flowing forth from, or the feminine or vehicular side of, the Logos. The goddess of hidden learning and esoteric wisdom, Sarasvati is usually shown riding on a peacock with its tail spread. She is similar to the Gnostic Sophia, to the Sephirah of the Hebrew Qabbalah, and to the Holy Ghost of the Christians.

Sarasvati (Saraswati) ::: "she of the stream, of the flowing movement"; [Ved.]: the streaming current and the word of inspiration of the Truth; the goddess of the Word; [Puranas]: the Muse and goddess of wisdom, learning and the arts and crafts.

Sarasvati (Saraswati) ::: "she of the stream, the flowing movement",Sarasvati a Vedic goddess who "represents the truth-audition, sruti, which gives the inspired word"; in later Hinduism, "the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry"; same as Mahasarasvati.SarasvatiSarasvati bhava

saraswati. ::: goddess of speech, wisdom, learning and the arts

saraswati ::: n. --> The sakti or wife of Brahma; the Hindoo goddess of learning, music, and poetry.

&

Sri Aurobindo: "Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be a female form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in the Purana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors, — we have Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledge and sometimes almost identified with Usha, the divine Dawn, who is the bringer of illumination. I shall suggest that Dakshina like the more famous Ila, Saraswati and Sarama, is one of four goddesses representing the four faculties of the Ritam or Truth-consciousness, — Ila representing truth-vision or revelation, Saraswati truth-audition, inspiration, the divine word, Sarama intuition, Dakshina the separative intuitional discrimination.” *The Secret of the Veda

:::   Sri Aurobindo: "Lakshmi is usually golden, not white. Saraswati is white.” Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: “Lakshmi is usually golden, not white. Saraswati is white.” Letters on Yoga

Uma-kanya (Sanskrit) Umā-kanyā [from u-mā O [child], do not [practice austerities] — the exclamation addressed to Pārvatī by her mother + kanyā maid, virgin] The daughter of Himavat, who became the consort of Siva; also called Parvati and Durga. Uma-Kanya “being her esoteric name, and meaning the ‘Virgin of light,’ Astral Light in one of its multitudinous aspects” (SD 1:92). Now the goddess is worshiped as Durga-Kali (the black and inaccessible one); in this character “human flesh was offered to her every autumn; and, as Durga, she was the patroness of the once murderous Thugs of India, and the special goddess of Tantrika sorcery. But in days of old it was not as it is now. The earliest mention of the title ‘Uma-Kanya’ is found in the Kena-Upanishad; in it the now blood-thirsty Kali, was a benevolent goddess, a being of light and goodness, who brings about reconciliation between Brahma and the gods. She is Saraswati and she is Vach. In esoteric symbology, Kali is the dual type of the dual soul — the divine and the human, the light and the dark soul of man” (TG 352).

vibhūti (Mahasaraswati vibhuti) ::: manifestation in human nature of the qualities of Mahasarasvati.



QUOTES [30 / 30 - 136 / 136]


KEYS (10k)

   20 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
   3 Sri Aurobindo
   2 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   2 Kabir
   1 Satyananda Saraswati
   1 Sri Aurobindo
   1 ?

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   38 Chinmayananda Saraswati
   37 Sivananda Saraswati
   13 Krishnananda Saraswati
   9 Vishnudevananda Saraswati
   9 Satyananda Saraswati
   4 Sivananda Radha Saraswati
   4 Kabir
   3 Devdutt Pattanaik
   3 Chidananda Saraswati
   3 Chandrasekharendra Saraswati
   2 Venkatesananda Saraswati
   2 Sanjeev Sanyal
   2 Brahmananda Saraswati
   2 ?

1:Act now. Live now. Know now. Realize now. Be happy now. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
2:You have to plod on and scale many hills. You cannot climb the Everest in one jump. There is no jumping on the spiritual path. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
3:The spiritual path is full of hurdles. If you conquer one obstacle, another obstacle is ready to manifest. Great patience, perseverance, vigilance, and undaunted strength are needed. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
4:Moral purity and spiritual aspiration are the first steps in the seeker's path. Without a strong conviction in moral values, there can surely be no spiritual life, or even a good life. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
5:Yoga nidra is the yoga of aware sleep. In this lies the secret of self healing. Yoga Nidra is a pratyahara technique in which the distractions of the mind are contained and the mind is relaxed. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
6:Stern self-discipline is absolutely essential. Self-discipline does not mean suppression, but taming the brute within. It means humanization of the animal and spiritualization of the human. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
7:Spiritual progress is slow, as the spiritual Sadhana is difficult and laborious. It is like the spiral. In the beginning, great striving is needed. Be patient; be persevering; and be steady. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
8:During the period of Sadhana, keep the mind fully occupied with spiritual pursuits. Keep yourself at the farthest distance from everything that would stir up your passions. Then only you will be safe. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
9:Watch whether you are stationary in the spiritual path, retrogressing, or advancing. If your Japa, meditation or Vedantic Vichara thickens your veil and fattens your egoism, it is not then a spiritual Sadhana. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
10: Agni is the energy of consciousness, Varuna is the vastness of consciousness, Mitra is the harmony. Ila is the revelation, Saraswati inspiration, Bharati is the Goddess of the Divine Word. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, 04, 10.04 - Transfiguration,
11:That which brings well-being to man is Dharma. Dharma supports this world. The people are upheld by Dharma. That which secures preservation of beings is Dharma. Dharma leads to eternal happiness and immortality. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
12:Do not lose heart. Obstacles are stepping stones to success. They will develop your will. Do not allow yourself to be crushed by them. Defects remind you of perfection. Sin reminds you of virtue. Chose the positive path. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
13:The gradual inward progress is mostly silent and unseen, like the quiet unfolding of a bud into a flower in the hours of the night. Therefore, do not be dejected. Do not depress yourself with the idea that you are not progressing. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
14:Do not be carried away by name and fame. You can renounce your wife, children, parents, house, friends, and relatives. It is very, very difficult to renounce the intellectual pleasure, the pleasure from name and fame. I seriously warn you. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
15:Let the Sadhana be regular, continuous, unbroken, and earnest. Not only regularity, but also continuity in Sadhana and meditation is necessary if you want to attain Self-realization quickly. A spiritual stream once set going does not dry up. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
16:The Lord is within you, He is seated in your heart. Whatever you see, hear, taste & touch is God. Therefore hate not anybody, cheat not anybody, harm not anybody. Love & be one with all. You will soon attain eternal bliss, immortality, & perennial joy. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
17:You must have a mind that will obey u at all times sincerely & carry out all ur commands in the best possible manner at any time. Steady & systematic practice of Yoga will make the mind very obedient & faithful. You will be successful in every attempt. ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
18:Prayer does not demand high intelligence or eloquence. God wants your heart when you pray. Even a few words from a pure, humble soul, though illiterate, appeals to God more than the eloquent, flowing words of an orator. Pray to God freely like a little child ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
19:Do not stop the Sadhana when you get a few glimpses of realization. Continue practice till you are fully established in the unconditioned Brahman. If you stop practice & move about in the world, there is every likelihood of a downfall. The reaction will be tremendous ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
20:Be firm, steady, & steadfast. People will mock at you; be silent. People will insult you; be silent. People will spread evil rumours about you; be silent. Stick to the spiritual path. Do not swerve. Seek the truth wherever it may lead you to, & whatever be the cost and sacrifice ~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
21:Do not test ur spiritual strength & purity when u are a beginner on the spiritual path. Do not rush into evil associations when u are a spiritual neophyte to show that u have the courage to face sin & impurity. It will be a serious mistake. You will be running into a grave danger~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
22:Oct 22 Every bit of Sadhana done is surely recorded without fail in your hidden consciousness. No Sadhana ever goes in vain. Every bit of it is credited immediately towards your evolution. This is the law. Think not negative thoughts, but calmly go on with the Sadhana. Be regular at it.~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati,
23: 11. O Divine Fire, thou art Aditi, the indivisible Mother to the giver of the sacrifice; thou art Bharati, voice of the offering, and thou growest by the word. Thou art Ila of the hundred winters wise to discern; O Master of the Treasure, thou art Saraswati who slays the python adversary. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, 1.03 - Hymns_of_Gritsamada,
24:    The faculty of knowledge of the Rishis was based on this subtle realisation. And this subtle realisation has its different levels, classifications and variations which the Vedic seers have termed Ila, Saraswati, Sarama and Dakshina. These four names have been plausibly interpreted as sruti (Revelation), smrti (Inspiration), bodhi (Intuition) and viveka (Discrimination). We are not going to probe further into the mystery. We just want to point out the difference between the outlook of the ancients and that of the moderns. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, 08, 36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas,
25:As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, sruti, which gives the inspired word, so Ila represents dr.s.t.i, the truthvision. If so, since dr.s.t.i and sruti are the two powers of the Rishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, we can understand the close connection of Ila and Saraswati. Bharati or Mahi is the largeness of the Truth-consciousness which, dawning on man's limited mind, brings with it the two sister Puissances. We can also understand how these fine and living distinctions came afterwards to be neglected as the Vedic knowledge declined and Bharati, Saraswati, Ila melted into one. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda, 1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts,
26:the central notion of the Veda :::
   The sense of the first two verses is clear enough when we know Saraswati to be that power of the Truth which we call inspiration. Inspiration from the Truth purifies by getting rid of all falsehood, for all sin according to the Indian idea is merely falsehood, wrongly inspired emotion, wrongly directed will and action. The central idea of life and ourselves from which we start is a falsehood and all else is falsified by it. Truth comes to us as a light, a voice, compelling a change of thought, imposing a new discernment of ourselves and all around us. Truth of thought creates truth of vision and truth of vision forms in us truth of being, and out of truth of being (satyam) flows naturally truth of emotion, will and action. This is indeed the central notion of the Veda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda,
27:   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 distri bute in the sacrifice to each godhead its portion. Each god, too, has his female energy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, 1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics,
28:    The fourth group: Saraswati, the wealth of the fullest inspiration of the complete Truth, signifies speedy and rhythmic truth. She is the divine hearing. No doubt, we see and meet the Truth with our divine vision, but to make, the Truth active and dynamic and fill the creation with the power of Truth we needs must take the help of divine hearing. As the truth possesses a form, even so it has a name. It is precisely because of form and name that the truth becomes concrete. The form of truth is Visible in the divine vision, the name of truth in the divine hearing. Saraswati gives the divine name and Ila gives the divine form to the truth. Under the inspiration of Saraswati the truth casts aside all untruths. Hence she is called Pavaka(the Purifier). Above the mind there abides the vast ocean of Truth. We have neither any knowledge nor any experience of it. In a sense, we are quite unconscious of it. Saraswati raises the intelligence into the vast ocean of Truth and purifies it Afterwards she brings it down to our understanding. She manifests the complete knowledge in all its facets and make them living. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, 08, 36.08 - A Commentary on the First Six Suktas of Rigveda,
29:He continuously reflected on her image and attributes, day and night. His bhakti was such that he could not stop thinking of her. Eventually, he saw her everywhere and in everything. This was his path to illumination.

   He was often asked by people: what is the way to the supreme? His answer was sharp and definite: bhakti yoga. He said time and time again that bhakti yoga is the best sadhana for the Kali Yuga (Dark Age) of the present.

   His bhakti is illustrated by the following statement he made to a disciple:

   To my divine mother I prayed only for pure love.
At her lotus feet I offered a few flowers and I prayed:

   Mother! here is virtue and here is vice;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
   Mother! here is knowledge and here is ignorance;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
   Mother! here is purity and impurity;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.

Ramakrishna, like Kabir, was a practical man.
He said: "So long as passions are directed towards the world and its objects, they are enemies. But when they are directed towards a deity, then they become the best of friends to man, for they take him to illumination. The desire for worldly things must be changed into longing for the supreme; the anger which you feel for fellow man must be directed towards the supreme for not manifesting himself to you . . . and so on, with all other emotions. The passions cannot be eradicated, but they can be turned into new directions."

   A disciple once asked him: "How can one conquer the weaknesses within us?" He answered: "When the fruit grows out of the flower, the petals drop off themselves. So when divinity in you increases, the weaknesses of human nature will vanish of their own accord." He emphasized that the aspirant should not give up his practices. "If a single dive into the sea does not bring you a pearl, do not conclude that there are no pearls in the sea. There are countless pearls hidden in the sea.

   So if you fail to merge with the supreme during devotional practices, do not lose heart. Go on patiently with the practices, and in time you will invoke divine grace." It does not matter what form you care to worship. He said: "Many are the names of the supreme and infinite are the forms through which he may be approached. In whatever name and form you choose to worship him, through that he will be realized by you." He indicated the importance of surrender on the path of bhakti when he said:

   ~ Swami Satyananda Saraswati, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya,
30: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,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:As you are, you see everything else. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
2:The purification of the mind is very necessary. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
3:Calming the mind is yoga, not just standing on the head ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
4:The greatest victory you can win is over your own mind. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
5:Anything that you throw comes back. All your actions are echoes. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
6:Who will be the happiest person? The one who brings happiness to others. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
7:..just do, leave it there, if it comes let it come, but don't look for it. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
8:True love knows no bargains. It is one-way traffic: giving, giving, giving. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
9:Yoga believes in transforming the individual before transforming the world. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
10:Yoga began with the first person wanting to be healthy and happy all the time. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
11:Our own true nature is Infinite Joy! Always happy, Always peaceful, Always free. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
12:In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
13:Now will never leave. It is always here. Like a clear canvas, it awaits our painting. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
14:If you are becoming more easeful, peaceful & useful then you know you are growing. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
15:Doesn't the bible say "blessed are the pure in the heart, so they shall see God?" when? ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
16:Not only does charity begin at home. Everything begins at home, including spirituality. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
17:Yoga is not only learning to stand on your head but also learning to stand on your feet. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
18:You are not given the light by anyone—not even by a spiritual teacher. You are that light. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
19:If we only look within, we will see he Light as if we were seeing our own image in a mirror. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
20:We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
21:Mere philosophy will not satisfy us. We cannot reach the goal by mere words alone. Without practice, nothing can be achieved. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
22:The stones of a river start out rough, but with the current continually bumping and polishing them, they end up being beautiful. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
23:[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
24:When even one virtue becomes our nature, the mind becomes clean and tranquil. Then there is no need to practice meditation; we will automatically be meditating always. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
25:At various points in our lives, or on a quest, and for reasons that often remain obscure, we are driven to make decisions which prove with hindsight to be loaded with meaning. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
26:Only when there is purity in the heart; a heart peaceful and free from egoism&
27:Music is the celestial sound, and it is sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much, much greater than any other power in the world. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
28:Any kind of expectation creates a problem. We should accept, but not expect. Whatever comes, accept it. Whatever goes, accept it. The immediate benefit is that your mind is always peaceful. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
29:Though we can't always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
30:Let us all dedicate our lives for the sake of the entire humanity. With every minute, every breath, every atom of our bodies we should repeat this mantra: dedication, dedication, giving, giving, loving, loving. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
31:Equality comes in realizing that we are all doing different jobs for a common purpose. That is the aim behind any community. The very name community means let's come together to recognize the unity. Come ... unity. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
32:The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
33:Truth is the same always. Whoever ponders it will get the same answer. Buddha got it. Patanjali got it. Jesus got it. Mohammed got it. The answer is the same, but the method of working it out may vary this way or that. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
34:[C]ontinence is a very important part of yoga. If a handful of people come forward with strong wills, nothing is impossible. One Buddha changed half the globe; one Jesus, three quarters of the world. We all have that capacity. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
35:When you win and the other fellow loses, what do you see? A losing face. There is great joy in losing and making the other person win and have a happy face. Who will be the happiest person? The one who brings happiness to others. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
36:As the mind, so the person; bondage or liberation are in your own mind. If you feel bound, you are bound. If you feel liberated, you are liberated. Things outside neither bind nor liberate you; only your attitude toward them does that. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
37:Yoga believes in transforming the individual before transforming the world. Whatever change we want to happen outside should happen within. If you walk in peace and express that peace in your very life, others will see you and learn something. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
38:The cause of bandha and moksha (bondage and liberation) is our own minds. If we think we are bound, we are bound. If we think we are liberated, we are liberated. . . . It is only when we transcend the mind that we are free from all these troubles. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
39:. . . I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
40:These Sutras are reminiscent of the Four Noble Truths of Lord Buddha: the misery of the world, the cause of misery, the removal of that misery, and the method used to remove it. Patanjali tells us that pain can be avoided. He further tells us that its cause is ignorance. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
41:If you do not pour water on your plant, what will happen? It will slowly wither and die. Our habits will also slowly wither and die away if we do not give them an opportunity to manifest. You need not fight to stop a habit. Just don’t give it an opportunity to repeat itself. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
42:Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
43:There’s no value in digging shallow wells in a hundred places. Decide on one place and dig deep. Even if you encounter a rock, use dynamite and keep going down. If you leave that to dig another well, all the first effort is wasted and there is no proof you won’t hit rock again. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
44:If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won’t find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
45:It's very simple. Keep your body as clean as possible, your mind as clear as possible. That's all you need. And do it in anyway you can, in your own way. It doesn't matter. That's why I say &
46:We don’t exhaust the Bible even after reading it hundreds of times. Each time we read it we see it in a new light. That is the greatness of the holy scriptures. They are that way because they were created by holy prophets who experienced the truth. Each time we read these works we elevate ourselves to see a little more. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
47:Our own bodies are changing every second. Yet we take the body to be our Self; and, speaking in terms of it, we say, I am hungry or I am lame; I am black or I am white. These are all just the conditions of the body. We touch the truth when we say, My body aches, implying the body belongs to us and that therefore we are not that. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
48:Devotion gradually progresses to higher levels. . . . One type goes to God and asks Him to remove his suffering. Another one will ask for money or material things. A third will request liberation or release from his bondage. And the fourth will not ask for anything. He will just enjoy praying and praising his Lord. That is the highest form of prayer. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
49:The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christtian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
50:We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove
51:What is it that dies? A log of wood dies to become a few planks. The planks die to become a chair. The chair dies to become a piece of firewood, and the firewood dies to become ash. You give different names to the different shapes the wood takes, but the basic substance is there always. If we could always remember this, we would never worry about the loss of anything. We never lose anything; we never gain anything. By such discrimination we put an end to unhappiness. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Vidyam deehe Saraswati. ~ Rahul Pandita,
2:We can,We must ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
3:If I rest,I rust ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
4:Just love. The rest is bullshit. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
5:Fewer the thoughts, greater the peace. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
6:Remember, 'Even this will pass away! ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
7:Remember, 'Even this will pass away.' ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
8:The Present is the womb of the future. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
9:Taste goodness before you recommend it. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
10:He who submits to discipline is a DISCIPLE. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
11:Maranam Bindu Patanat, Jivanam Bindu Rakshanat. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
12:Illness begins with "I", Wellness begins with "we ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
13:Yoga is the state where you are missing nothing. ~ Brahmananda Saraswati,
14:The secret of success in life is time rightly used. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
15:Without sattva you can never reach the Supreme. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
16:To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
17:The duty that we owe to the Universe is our religion. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
18:An ounce of practice is better than tons of theory. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
19:Children are not vessels to be filled but lamps to be lit. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
20:The meaning of life is found by diving deep, deep within. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
21:Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
22:Man is subject to all kinds of hardships and misfortunes. ~ Chandrasekharendra Saraswati,
23:Happiness depends on what you can give, not on what you can get. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
24:Leave aside your regrets of the past and anxieties of the future ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
25:Adaptability is a most desirable habit or quality for success in life. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
26:The results of action depends upon the very quality of the action. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
27:Health is wealth. Peace of mind is happiness. Yoga shows the way. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
28:Happiness, therefore, is measured by the tranquillity of one’s mind. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
29:Man can change his destiny-not by wishing for it, but by working for it. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
30:That man who is regular and punctual will get sure success in all walks of life. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
31:The more the evil in a man, the less he will respond to sincere and pure love. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
32:It is Maya that makes you feel, “This man is inferior and the other man is superior. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
33:What we have is a gift from Him. What we do with what we have is our gift to him ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
34:He should discard the texts altogether, as the man who seeks rice discards the husk. ~ Chidananda Saraswati,
35:Tranquility is the Truth, Truth is beauty beauty is happiness and bliss is divine ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
36:Drugs allows us to taste the beyond but do not make us masters of the transcendental. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
37:Real peace comes only to those who control the body and mind with self-discipline. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
38:Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
39:Man is not a creature of circumstances. His thoughts are the architects of his circumstances. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
40:The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
41:Crave for a thing, you will get it. Renounce the craving, the object will follow you by itself. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
42:The spirit of advaita is not to keep away from anything, but to keep in tune with everything ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
43:Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
44:Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret to success. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
45:The really poor man is not the one who lacks money, but the one who lacks the joy of the heart. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
46:Every objet in the world promises satisfaction, but it never gives satisfaction -it only promises. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
47:As a painter paints pictures on a wall, the intellect goes on creating the world in the heart always. ~ Brahmananda Saraswati,
48:In all adversities there is always in its depth, a treasure of spiritual blessings secretly hidden. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
49:The real guru is the pure intellect within; and the purified, deeply aspiring mind is the disciple. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
50:A knowledge more secret than the Svara Yoga, a wealth more useful than Svara Yoga, have never been found. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
51:Saraswati. ‘But today Hansa insisted on coming along with me. I like Hansa. She is no ordinary bird. Give her ~ Devdutt Pattanaik,
52:Silently hear everyone. Accept what is good. Reject and forget what is not. This is intelligent living. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
53:There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
54:Saints and sages are still alive. Great masters are still operating. It is up to you to find where they are. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
55:As the thoughts so the mind. If thoughts are good, mind is good. If thoughts are bad, the mind is called bad. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
56:The future is carved out of the present moment. Tomorrow's harvest depends upon today's ploughing and sowing. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
57:Blessed is he who keeps daily diary and compares the work of this week with that of the last, for he will realize God quickly! ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
58:Do not make the mistake of thinking that the soul is inside you, because if the soul is inside you, you will be outside it. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
59:Prayer,in its truest sense,is an attempt to invoke the mightier potential that is already in us,through mental integration. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
60:There is no point in speaking to people who have either no faith or refuse to develop it through their own experience. ~ Chandrasekharendra Saraswati,
61:Yoga aims to remove the root cause of all diseases, not to treat its symptoms as medical science generally attempts to do. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
62:Let each man take the path according to his capacity, understanding and temperament. His true guru will meet him along that path. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
63:The soul's illness is more terrible and more difficult to understand than the illness of the body or any other type of malady. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
64:The self is not the individual body or mind, but rather that aspect deep inside each individual person that knows the truth. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
65:They indeed are fools who are satisfied with the fruits of their past effort and do not engage themselves in self-effort now. ~ Venkatesananda Saraswati,
66:"Our prosperity, our friends, our bondage and even our destruction are all in the end rooted in our tongue," says a famous adage. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
67:The spiritual path is very, very easy for a man of determination, patience, endurance, self-sacrifice, dispassion and a strong will. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
68:Love is a consistent passion to give, not a meek persistent hope to receive. The only demand of life is the privilege to love all. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
69:People don't realise that to be free means to be firmly attached to a system, that discipline is the road to a higher freedom. ~ Chandrasekharendra Saraswati,
70:Thoughts are giant-powers. They are more powerful than electricity. They control your life, mould your character, and shape your destiny. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
71:Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
72:We are in conflict with the world; otherwise, there would be no necessity to put forth tremendous effort to meet the world and its demands. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
73:O Man! Be ever prepared. Live this moment as though it is your last moment on this earth and acquire the maximum spiritual wealth here and now. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
74:the ancient Persians also talk of an original ‘Aryan’ homeland and even name the river Helmand in Afghanistan after the Saraswati (i.e. Harahvaiti). ~ Sanjeev Sanyal,
75:We always imagine that the Supreme Being is very far away -many, many millions of light years away- yet It is very near, in our throat itself. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
76:It makes no difference whether you worship God, Jehovah, Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Christ or Krishna- it is still and always one and the same God. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
77:But the self-controlled man, moving among objects, with his senses under restraint, and free from both attraction and repulsion, attains peace. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
78:Geography is not just about the physical terrain, but also about the meaning that we attribute to it. Thus, the Saraswati flows, invisibly, at Allahabad. ~ Sanjeev Sanyal,
79:If you want to prove yourself to God, improve yourself. Words of guidance are so simple, yet so deep - anybody can win, if he be the soul entry. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
80:That higher awakening is called God-consciousness. In that condition, you will see that all the objects of the world are your own universal self. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
81:Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
82:Expose yourself to aloneness. When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality - about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
83:Physically you are identical with and inseparable from the cosmic material substance, and socially you are inseparable from the large mass of humanity. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
84:An evil man is a saint of the future. See good in everything. Destroy the evil-finding quality. Develop the good-finding quality. Rise above good and evil. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
85:By unswerving devotion to Me, a man crosses over three Gunas - I am the Abode of Brahman, Eternal and Immutable, of everlasting Dharma and Absolute Bliss. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
86:Lakshmi is Vishnu’s bhoga-patni, connecting him with the earthly needs of man. Saraswati is Vishnu’s moksha-patni, connecting him with the spiritual needs of man. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik,
87:Never complain, about the number of hours you have put in, to do a job, Your nobility must estimate how much of you Was put into each hour of your daily work ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
88:Yoga is not an ancient myth buried in oblivion. It is the most valuable inheritance of the present. It is the essential need of today and the culture of tomorrow ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
89:Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone, let him not lower himself; for the Self alone is the friend of oneself and this Self alone is the enemy of oneself (5). ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
90:Until we discover this Spiritual Centre in ourselves, the God in us, we will be confused, miserable, unsatisfied and disturbed, an enigma to ourselves and to others. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
91:After the demands of the ego and its greed surrendered, the struggle for fulfillment of personal desires lessens; life takes on a new zest like a breath of fresh air. ~ Sivananda Radha Saraswati,
92:Do not store in your brain useless information. Learn to unmind the mind. Unlearn whatever has been of no use to you. Then only can you fill your mind with divine thoughts. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
93:Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only; all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
94:Just as, when we touch a live wire, the electric force infuses itself into our body, when we deeply meditate on God the power of the whole universe seeks entry into our personality. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
95:The intelligent student, after studying vedic texts, is solely intent on acquiring wisdom and realization. He should discard the texts altogether, as the man who seeks rice discards the husk. ~ Chidananda Saraswati,
96:Yoga nidra is the yoga of aware sleep. In this lies the secret of self healing. Yoga Nidra is a pratyahara technique in which the distractions of the mind are contained and the mind is relaxed. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
97:Yoga nidra is the yoga of aware sleep. In this lies the secret of self healing. Yoga Nidra is a pratyahara technique in which the distractions of the mind are contained and the mind is relaxed. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
98:Mind, Prana and Veerya are one. By controlling the mind, you can control Prana and semen. By controlling Prana you can control the mind and semen. By controlling semen, you can control the mind and Prana. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
99:Yoga is anything which reveals or reflects the wholeness that we truly are, and the world is anything that makes us feel that we are fragmented, dissected, cut into pieces and out of tune with ourselves. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
100:If we want to overcome fear, we must mentally deny fear and concentrate on the opposite quality, courage. The positive always overcomes the negative. The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
101:SUCCESS TONIC
• 1 tsp confidence
• 1 tsp courage
• 2 tsp patience
• 4 tsp prayer
• 4 tsp perseverance
• 4 tsp joy
• 6 tsp enthusiasm
Take one teaspoonful of this tonic three times daily. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
102:Both renunciation of action and the performance of action lead to Nirvana (Liberation); but these performance of action is superior to renunciation of action. The action of today becomes the destiny of tomorrow. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
103:if you have a strong power of endurance, patience and fine health, if your dispassion is intense and of a sustained type and if you are willing to do some selfless service to mankind, you need not worry about money. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
104:Sattva brings non-attachment and infuses in the mind discrimination and renunciation. It is the Rajasic mind that causes the ideas ‘I’ and ‘mine’ and the difference of body, caste, creed, colour, order of life, etc. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
105:Saraswati, in her manifestation as Divine Speech, represents a route, through mantra, to grasping the underlying spiritual laws of the universe and through them the attainment of personal spiritual and material power. ~ Thomas Ashley Farrand,
106:Without discipline in spiritual pursuits, the central nervous system doesn't have a chance to adjust and grow with the increased demand. It would be like putting a high voltage into a small bulb—it is bound to explode. ~ Sivananda Radha Saraswati,
107:By introducing you to yourself it enables you to discover for yourself the true meaning of life and thus enrich every moment of it. Such self-discovery can lead to greater understanding of fellow-beings and therefore to true love. ~ Venkatesananda Saraswati,
108:Far beyond your intellect, far beyond your understanding, lies inexhaustible knowledge and wealth, strength and power, peace and joy. Do not use your intellect to find the answers for God and his manifestations. Everything is God. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
109:Janaka gave his daughters to the sons of Dashratha, saying, ‘I give you Lakshmi, wealth, who will bring you pleasure and prosperity. Grant me Saraswati, wisdom. Let me learn the joy of letting go.’ This ritual came to be known as kanya-daan, ~ Devdutt Pattanaik,
110:If you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
111:Yoga philosophy teaches that real man is not his body, but that the immortal I, of which each human being is conscious to some degree according to his mental evolution, is not the body but merely occupies and uses the body as an instrument. ~ Vishnudevananda Saraswati,
112:Chalk out a programme of life. Draw your spiritual routine. Stick to it systematically and regularly. Apply yourself diligently. Waste not even a single precious minute. Life is short. Time is fleeting. That "tomorrow" will never come. Now or never. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
113:The difficulty in weaning the mind from worldly thoughts, from external objects, and fixing it on God is the same as in making the Ganga flow towards Gangotri instead of its natural flow towards Ganga-Sagar. It is like rowing against the current of the Yamuna. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
114: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 Saraswati,
115:You know why you are doing something. And if it is against your life, your principles and ideals it is bothersome. And no one wants to be bothered. So you conveniently try to curtain it off, turn a blind eye, and put it out of sight so that it won't bother you. This is what the Mind does. ~ Chidananda Saraswati,
116:Give up all sorts of fears, worries, anxieties and cares. Do not be disheartened by failures and setbacks. Draw strength and courage from God dwelling in the chamber of your heart. Pain is the best thing in the world. It is an eye-opener. It awakens your dormant faculties. Never forget this. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
117:Humility and gratitude go hand in hand... Awareness increases so that we become grateful for everything we are given. We have to learn, literally learn, to be grateful for what we receive day by day, simply to balance the criticism that day by day we voice because of powerful emotions. ~ Sivananda Radha Saraswati,
118:Isavasyamidam Sarvam: every content of the universe is throbbing with the Life of the Lord. Smile with the flowers and the green grass. Smile with the shrubs, ferns and twigs. Develop friendship with all neighbours, dogs, cats, cows, human beings, trees, in fact, with all nature’s creations. You will have a perfect and rich life. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
119:This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore nil desperandum. March forward hero! ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
120:What man needs is not philosophy or religion in the academic or formalistic sense of the term, but ability to think rightly. The malady of the age is not absence of philosophy or even irreligion but wrong thinking and a vanity which passes for knowledge. Though it is difficult to define right thinking, it cannot be denied that it is the goal of the aspirations of everyone. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati,
121:The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island. ~ Amit Chaudhuri,
122:Presently we have to train our unconscious to function better. Then we can depend upon our instincts, that will be noble instincts. At this moment, our instincts are very impure. When we have practiced for a long time, living the higher values of life and following the instructions of great masters or the Scriptures, that is when you have trained your unconscious. Then when a situation comes, you can to an extent, depend on your inner voice. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
123:The energy that is wasted during one sexual intercourse is tantamount to the energy that is spent in physical labour for ten days or the energy that is utilized in mental work for three days. Mark how precious is the vital fluid, semen! Do not waste this energy. Preserve it with great care. You will have wonderful vitality. When Veerya is not used, it is all transmuted into Ojas Sakti or spiritual energy and stored up in the brain. Western doctors know little of this salient point. Most of your ailments are due to excessive seminal wastage. ~ Sivananda Saraswati,
124:De repente, senti como se a terra estivesse escorregando debaixo de mim e o céu estava expandindo e recuando. Algum momento depois eu experenciei uma força terrível que brotava da base do meu corpo como uma explosão atômica. Eu senti que eu estava vibrando muito rápido, as correntes de luzes eram terríveis. Eu experenciei a suprema bem aventurança, como o clímax do desejo de um homem, e isso continuou por longo tempo. Todo o meu corpo estava se contraindo, até que o sentimento de prazer tornou-se bastante insuportável e eu perdi completamente a consciência de meu corpo. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
125:Silence allows you to watch your mind and become aware of the thoughts that you may be acting on unconsciously. When you see the thoughts, you can make a conscious choice to act on the thought or change your mind, instead of going along with the noise. I have seen people who don't want to look at themselves keep going until something happens that makes them stop — a sickness or an accident — but it gives them that reflective, quiet space where they can face what is difficult in their mind. We each have a unique purpose to fulfill in this life and inklings can come in those quiet moments. ~ Sivananda Radha Saraswati,
126:the central notion of the Veda :::
   The sense of the first two verses is clear enough when we know Saraswati to be that power of the Truth which we call inspiration. Inspiration from the Truth purifies by getting rid of all falsehood, for all sin according to the Indian idea is merely falsehood, wrongly inspired emotion, wrongly directed will and action. The central idea of life and ourselves from which we start is a falsehood and all else is falsified by it. Truth comes to us as a light, a voice, compelling a change of thought, imposing a new discernment of ourselves and all around us. Truth of thought creates truth of vision and truth of vision forms in us truth of being, and out of truth of being (satyam) flows naturally truth of emotion, will and action. This is indeed the central notion of the Veda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda,
127:Na mitologia hindu, o despertar de Kali foi descrito em muitos detalhes. Quando Kali se ergue vermelha de raiva, todos os deuses e demônios ficam aturdidos e todo mundo fica em silêncio. Eles não sabem o que ela vai fazer. Eles pedem ao Senhor Shiva para pacificá-la, mas Kali ruge ferozmente jogando-o para abaixo e de pé sobre seu peito, com sua boca aberta, sedenta por carne e osso. Quando os devas realizam orações para pacificar Kali, ela se torna calma e tranqüila.
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De acordo com a filosofia do yoga, Kali, a primeira manifestação do inconsciente, é um poder terrível; ela domina completamente a alma individual, representada por sua posição sobre o Senhor Shiva. Às vezes acontece que, pela instabilidade mental, algumas pessoas entram em contato com seu corpo inconsciente e vêem elementos ferozes e pouco auspiciosos – fantasmas, monstros, etc. quando Kali, o poder inconsciente do homem, é despertada, ela eleva-se até encontrar a manifestação mais adiante, o superconsciente, a outorgadora de gloria e perfeição. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
128:In India, music as well as painting and the drama is considered a divine art. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—the Eternal Trinity—were the first musicians. The Divine Dancer Shiva is scripturally represented as having worked out the infinite modes of rhythm in His cosmic dance of universal creation, preservation and dissolution, while Brahma accentuated the time-beat with the clanging cymbals and Vishnu sounded the holy mridanga or drum. Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, is always shown in Hindu art with a flute, on which he plays the enrapturing song that recalls to their true home the human souls wandering in maya delusion. Saraswati, Goddess of Wisdom, is symbolised as performing on the vina, mother of all stringed instruments. The Sama Veda of India contains the world’s earliest writings on musical science. The foundation stone of Hindu music is the ragas or fixed melodic scales. The six basic ragas branch out into 126 derivative raginis (wives) and putras (sons). Each raga has a minimum of five notes: a leading note (vadi or king), a secondary note (samavadi or prime minister), helping notes (anuvadi, attendants) and a dissonant note (vivadi, the enemy). Each one of the six basic ragas has a natural correspondence with a certain hour of the day, season of the year and a presiding deity who bestows a particular potency. Thus (1) the Hindole Raga is heard only at dawn in the spring, to evoke the mood of universal love; (2) Deepaka Raga is played during the evening in summer, to arouse compassion; (3) Megha Raga is a melody for midday in the rainy season, to summon courage; (4) Bhairava Raga is played in the mornings of August, September, October, to achieve tranquillity; (5) Sri Raga is reserved for autumn twilights, to attain pure love; (6) Malkounsa Raga is heard at midnights in winter, for valour. The ancient rishis discovered these laws of sound alliance between nature and man. Because nature is an objectification of Aum, the Primal Sound or Vibratory Word, man can obtain control over all natural manifestations through the use of certain mantras or chants. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,
129:Joy Seekers Certainly, every one of you will admit that what we seek in life is peace and joy. The way of seeking and the field in which we are seeking may be different from man to man, from place to place, and from era to era. But all of us are demanding the same joy everywhere and at all times. Joy or peace, as generally understood, is that which we experience when, in the external circumstances, we come to live a pattern which we have demanded for ourselves at a given period of time and place. That which was, in our childhood, a great happiness and joy, may not again provide for us an equal happiness or peace in our youth. A blue glass marble or a tennis ball would have been a joyous present when one was in one’s childhood. But the same present would not bring any happiness to us if it is presented to us at our diamond jubilee; conversely, it may even be painful, inasmuch as it would remind us of our old age and the impending ‘calamitous day’! Examples can be multiplied to justify the working definition of joy or peace that we have made just now. In this, the difficulty or the failure of man is mainly because the demand of the physical man is not necessarily the demand of the emotional; in the same individual the intellectual personality would still have a third type of demand and, perhaps, the spiritual seeker in him would have yet another demand. Thus, four distinct sets of demands are made by each individual at the same period of time and space. Certainly, no two happenings can come to pass at one and the same time and place, the happenings being conditioned by both time and place. Therefore, however much we may try to bring about, through certain new changes, a perfect scheme of things in our life and a hope to gain out of it a perfect satisfaction for all the four personalities in us, we shall only end up with sheer disappointment. Our Hope But, if there be a technique by which we can train, discipline and integrate all these wild and madly revolting personalities in us together into one unit, certainly, we can thereafter order much more freedom and happiness for ourselves in the outer world. These techniques are together termed as ‘religion’ by the great seers. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati,
130:Pingala pode ser definida como a energia dinâmica, ativa, masculina, positiva, yang, dentro de nossa personalidade. Ela tem um lado físico e mental. Suas qualidades materiais são luz, calor, solar, energia acumulando, criatividade, organização, focalizada (centrípeta) e contrativa. O lado mental positivo, dinâmico, dentro do sistema de Freud é o Eros, o princípio do prazer, e no sistema de Jung é a personalidade consciente, o lado racional e discriminativo. Podemos dizer que pingala é a energia psicossomática, aparentemente dirigida, a mente agindo sobre o corpo para motivar os órgãos da ação, os karmendriyas. Ela é a energia básica da vida.
Ida é a energia dentro da personalidade, o qual é passiva, receptiva, feminina, negativa, yin. A um nível físico, ela é escura, fria, lunar, energia de dissipação, desorganização, entrópica, expansiva (centrífuga) e relaxante. No plano mental que Freud chamou Tanatos, o instinto da morte, e Jung chamou de anima, o inconsciente, íntimo feminina, emocional, sentimento intuitivo e não discriminatório, o fundo sobre o qual as diferenças podem ser vistas e que podem ser unificadas. Este é o aspecto soma físico do homem, onde a energia é dirigida para dentro, e o corpo age sobre a mente. Ida controla os órgãos dos sentidos, ou gyanendriyas, e, portanto, nos dá conhecimento e consciência do mundo em que vivemos.
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Carl Jung expressou as visões tântricas quando descreveu a força motriz da auto-realização, a qual chamou de “individuação”, como uma interação dialética entre os opostos, iniciando com o conflito e culminando em síntese e integração. Quando o equilíbrio perfeito é alcançado, estabilizado e aperfeiçoado, um estado de paz dinâmico é alcançado, que é um paradoxo, uma união de opostos, a síntese de fazer e não fazer, uma maneira totalmente nova de perceber e experenciar a vida.
Poucos de nós realizam este terceiro estado espiritualizado, e muitos de nós oscilam de um estado a outro. A cada 90 a 180 minutos ida e pingala alternam sua posição dominante e somente por uns poucos segundos, ou minutos, sushumna entra em existência possível. É a meta de todas as técnicas de yoga balancear e equilibrar ida e pingala, força da vida e consciência, para que eles se unam em ajña chakra para criar a luz interna do conhecimento e bem-aventurança, e revelar a verdade. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
131:Anahata chakra desperta no cérebro refinando as emoções e seu despertar é caracterizado por um sentimento universal de amor ilimitado por todos os seres. Claro que existem muitas pessoas no mundo que praticam bondade e caridade, mas eles têm egoísmo. Sua caridade não é uma expressão espiritual e de compaixão do Anahata chakra, ele é compaixão humana.
Quando você tem compaixão humana você abrir hospitais e centros de alimentação ou então, dar roupas, dinheiro e medicina por caridade, mas é caridade humana. Como podemos ver a diferença entre caridade humana e caridade espiritual? Na caridade humana, há sempre um elemento de egoísmo. Se eu quiser fazer-te um hindu dando-lhe coisas, esta é uma manifestação da caridade humana. Ou se eu quiser fazer-te meus seguidores eu posso mostrar-lhe uma grande bondade, mas a bondade humana. No entanto, quando Anahata desperta todas as suas ações são controladas e governadas por altruísmo e você desenvolve compaixão espiritual. Você entende que o amor não envolve negociação, é livre de expectativa.
Toda forma de amor é contaminada pelo egoísmo, mesmo o amor que você tem com Deus, porque você está esperando alguma coisa Dele. Talvez, neste mundo, o amor com um mínimo de egoísmo é um amor de mãe. Claro que não é totalmente altruísta, mas porque o sacrifício de uma mãe é tão grande, seu amor tem um mínimo de egoísmo.
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Uma vez um santo tinha quase concluído esta peregrinação, e estava carregando uma vasilha cheia de água do Ganges. No momento em que ele entrou no recinto do templo, onde foi para o banho Shivalingam , encontrou um burro que estava desesperadamente precisando de água. Imediatamente ele abriu o seu recipiente e deu água para o burro. Seus companheiros de viagem gritaram, "Ei, o que você está fazendo? Você trouxe essa água de tão longe para dar banho ao Senhor Shiva e quando chega aqui você o dá a um animal ordinário!" Mas o santo não viu dessa forma. Sua mente estava trabalhando em uma freqüência diferente e mais elevada.
Aqui está outro exemplo: uma vez Senhor Buda estava indo para um passeio à noite. Ele deparou-se com um homem velho e ficou muito comovido pelo sofrimento da velhice. Em seguida ele viu uma pessoa morta, e novamente ele ficou muito comovido. Quantas vezes é que vamos ver homens velhos? Será que ficaremos comovidos como ele ficou? Não, porque as nossas mentes são diferentes. O despertar de um chakra altera a freqüência da mente e imediatamente influencia o nossos relacionamentos com as pessoas no dia-a-dia e o nosso ambiente. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
132:He continuously reflected on her image and attributes, day and night. His bhakti was such that he could not stop thinking of her. Eventually, he saw her everywhere and in everything. This was his path to illumination.

   He was often asked by people: what is the way to the supreme? His answer was sharp and definite: bhakti yoga. He said time and time again that bhakti yoga is the best sadhana for the Kali Yuga (Dark Age) of the present.

   His bhakti is illustrated by the following statement he made to a disciple:

   To my divine mother I prayed only for pure love.
At her lotus feet I offered a few flowers and I prayed:

   Mother! here is virtue and here is vice;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
   Mother! here is knowledge and here is ignorance;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
   Mother! here is purity and impurity;
   Take them both from me.
   Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.

Ramakrishna, like Kabir, was a practical man.
He said: "So long as passions are directed towards the world and its objects, they are enemies. But when they are directed towards a deity, then they become the best of friends to man, for they take him to illumination. The desire for worldly things must be changed into longing for the supreme; the anger which you feel for fellow man must be directed towards the supreme for not manifesting himself to you . . . and so on, with all other emotions. The passions cannot be eradicated, but they can be turned into new directions."

   A disciple once asked him: "How can one conquer the weaknesses within us?" He answered: "When the fruit grows out of the flower, the petals drop off themselves. So when divinity in you increases, the weaknesses of human nature will vanish of their own accord." He emphasized that the aspirant should not give up his practices. "If a single dive into the sea does not bring you a pearl, do not conclude that there are no pearls in the sea. There are countless pearls hidden in the sea.

   So if you fail to merge with the supreme during devotional practices, do not lose heart. Go on patiently with the practices, and in time you will invoke divine grace." It does not matter what form you care to worship. He said: "Many are the names of the supreme and infinite are the forms through which he may be approached. In whatever name and form you choose to worship him, through that he will be realized by you." He indicated the importance of surrender on the path of bhakti when he said:

   ~ Swami Satyananda Saraswati, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya,
133:No corpo feminino, o ponto de concentração está no mooladhara chackra, o qual está situado no colo do útero, logo atrás da abertura do útero. Este é o ponto onde o espaço e o tempo unem-se e explodem na forma de uma experiência. Esta experiência é conhecida como orgasmo na linguagem comum, mas na linguagem do Tantra ele é chamado um despertar. A fim de manter a continuidade desta experiência, é necessário que um acumulo de energia acontece naquele ponto em particular, ou bindu. Normalmente isso não acontece porque a explosão de energia dissipa-se por todo o corpo por meio do ato sexual. para evitar isso a mulher deve ser capaz de segurar sua mente em absoluta concentração naquele ponto em particular. Para isto, a prática é conhecida como sahajoli.
Na verdade, sahajoli é a concentração no bindu, mas isto é muito difícil. Portanto, a pratica de sahajoli, que é a contração da vagina, bem como dos músculos uterinos, deve ser praticada por um longo período de tempo.
Se é ensinada a menina, uddiyana bandha desde a mais tenra idade, ela aperfeiçoará sahajoli naturalmente com o tempo. Uddiyana bandha é sempre praticada com a retenção externa. É importante saber realizar isto em qualquer posição. Normalmente é praticado em siddhayoni asana, mas deve-se ser capaz de realizar em vajrasana ou na postura do corvo também. Quando você pratica uddiyana bandha, e outros dois bandhas – jalandhara e moola bandha ocorrem espontaneamente.
Anos desta prática irá criar um senso de concentração no ponto correto no corpo. Esta concentração é mais mental em sua natureza, mas ao mesmo tempo, uma vez que não seja possível fazê-lo mentalmente, tem de começar de algum ponto físico. Se a mulher for capaz de concentrar-se e manter a continuidade da experiência, ela pode despertar sua energia para níveis superiores.
De acordo com o tantra, há duas diferentes áreas do orgasmo. Uma é na zona nervosa, que é a experiência comum para muitas mulheres, e a outra é em mooladhara chakra. Quando sahajoli é praticado durante o maithuna (o ato da união sexual), mooladhara chakra desperta e o orgasmo espiritual, ou tântrico, acontece.
Quando a yoguini é capaz de praticar sahajoli por 5 a 15 minutos, ela pode reter o orgasmo tântrico pelo mesmo período de tempo. Retendo esta experiência, o fluxo de energia é revertido. A circulação do sangue e das forças simpáticas e parassimpáticas move-se para cima. Neste ponto, ela transcende a consciência normal e vê a luz. É assim que ela entra no estado profundo de dhyana. A menos que a mulher seria capaz de praticar sahajoli, ela não será capaz de reter os impulsos necessários para o orgasmo tântrico, e conseqüentemente ela terá o orgasmo nervoso, que é de curta duração e seguida de insatisfação e exaustão. Isto é muitas vezes a causa da histeria de uma mulher e da depressão. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
134:Assim como no regime da criação, Shakti é o criador e Shiva é o testemunho de todo o jogo, no tantra a mulher tem o estado do guru e o homem do discípulo. A tradição tântrica é atualmente passada da mulher para o homem, na prática tântrica, é a mulher quem inicia. É só por seu poder que o ato de maithuna acontece. Todas as preliminares são feitas por ela. Ela coloca a marca na testa do homem e fala pra ele meditar. Na relação ordinária, quem controla é o homem e a mulher participa. Mas no tantra eles trocam de papéis. A mulher torna-se a operadora e o homem o seu intermédio. Ela tem que ser capaz de despertá-lo. então, no momento certo, ela deve criar o bindu para que ele possa praticar vajroli. Se o homem perde seu bindu, significa que a mulher não conseguiu realizar suas funções adequadamente.
No tantra se diz que Shiva é incapaz sem Shakti. Shakti é a sacerdotisa. Portanto, quando Vama marga é praticado, o homem deve ter uma atitude absolutamente tântrica com a mulher. Ele não pode comportar-se com ela como os homens geralmente fazem com outras mulheres. Normalmente, quando um homem olha uma mulher, ele torna-se apaixonado, mas durante o maithuna ele não deve. Ele deve vê-la como a mãe divina, a Devi, e aproximar-se dela como uma atitude de devoção e entrega, não com luxúria.
De acordo com o conceito tântrico, as mulheres são mais dotadas de qualidades espirituais e seria uma coisa sábia se elas assumissem posições elevadas na área social. Então, haveria maior beleza, compaixão, amor e compreensão em todas as esferas da vida. O que estamos discutindo aqui não é sociedade patriarcal versus matriarcal, mas tantra.
No relacionamento entre marido e mulher, por exemplo, há dependência e posse, enquanto que no tantra cada parceiro é independente, um para si mesmo. Outra coisa difícil na sadhana tântrica é cultivar a atitude de impassionalidade. O homem tem de se tornar praticamente um bramacharya, a fim de libertar a mente as emoções dos pensamentos sexuais e da paixão, que normalmente surgem na presença de uma mulher.
Ambos os parceiros devem ser absolutamente purificados e controlados interna e externamente antes de praticar o maithuna. É difícil para a pessoa comum compreender isto porque para a maioria das pessoas a relação sexual é o resultado da paixão e da atração emocional ou física, tanto para a procriação quanto para o prazer. É somente quando você está purificado que estes instintos sexuais estarão ausentes. Isto acontece porque, de acordo com a tradição, o caminho do Dakshina marga deve ser seguido por muitos anos antes do caminho do Vama marga poder ser iniciado. Então, a interação do maithuna não acontece por uma gratificação física. O propósito é muito claro – o despertar de sushumna, o aumento da energia de Kundalini no mooladhara chakra e a explosão nas áreas inconscientes do cérebro.
Se isto não ficar claro, quando você praticar os kriyas e sushumna se tornar ativa, você não será capaz de confrontar o despertar. Sua cabeça vai ficar quente e você nãos será capaz de controlar a paixão e o excitamento, porque você não tranqüilizou seu cérebro.
Portanto, em minha opinião, somente aqueles que são adeptos no yoga estão qualificados para o Vama marga. Este caminho não é para ser usado indiscriminadamente como um pretexto para a auto-indulgência. Ele se destina para os sadhakas maduros e chefes de família sérios, que são evoluídos, que têm praticado sadhana para despertar o potencial energético e atingir o samadhi Eles devem utilizar este caminho como um veículo para o despertar, caso contrário torna-se um caminho de queda. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
135:Quando Shiva e Shakti se unem no sahasrara, a pessoa experimenta o samadhi, a iluminação ocorre no cérebro e as áreas silenciosas começam a funcionar. Shiva e Shakti permanecem unidos por algum tempo, e durante este período há uma perda total da consciência, pertencente um a outro. Ao mesmo tempo um bindu desenvolve. Bindu significa um ponto, uma gota, e bindu é o substrato de todo o cosmos. Dentro do bindu está a sede da inteligência humana e a sede de toda a criação. Em seguida, bindu se divide em dois, e Shiva e Shakti manifestam-se novamente em dualidade. Quando a ascensão aconteceu, ela foi somente a subida de shakti, mas agora quando a descida acontece, Shiva e Shakti, ambos, descem para os planos grosseiros e há novamente o conhecimento da dualidade. Depois da união total há uma espécie de retorno pelo mesmo caminho da ascensão. A consciência bruta que se tornou refinada, novamente torna-se embrutecida. Este é o conceito da encarnação divina ou avatar.
Quando alguém atinge o mais elevado pináculo de samadhi, purusha e prakriti, ou Shiva e Shakti estão em total união e somente advaita existe, a experiência não dual. Ao mesmo temo, quando não há sujeito/objeto mais distinto, é muito difícil para alguém diferenciar. Se ele está falando com um homem ou com uma mulher, ele não sabe, ele não percebe a diferença. Ele pode até mesmo ser associado com pessoas espirituais ou divinas sem estar ciente disto, porque neste momento, sua consciência está reduzida ao nível da inocência de um bebê. Assim, no estado de samadhi, você é um bebê. Um bebê não pode falar da diferença entre um homem e uma mulher porque ele não tem distinção física ou sexual. Ele não pode distinguir um estudioso de um idiota, ele não pode nem mesmo ver qualquer a diferença entre uma serpente e uma corda. Ele pode segurar uma cobra como segura uma cobra. Isso só acontece quando a união está acontecendo.
Quando Shiva e Shakti descem para os planos grosseiros, que é o mooladhara chakra, eles se separam e vivem como duas entidades. Há dualidade no mooladhara chakra, há dualidade na mente e sentidos e no mundo de nomes e formas, mas não há dualidade no samadhi. Não há nenhuma vidência ou experiência no estado de samadhi. Não há ninguém para dizer como o samadhi porque ele é uma experiência não-dual.
É muito difícil entender por que Shiva e Shakti, ambos, descem para os planos brutos após terem atingindo a mais elevada união. Qual é o objetivo da destruição do mundo e a criação novamente? Qual é o objetivo de transcendência da consciência se você tem de voltar para ele novamente? Por que se preocupar em despertar Kundalini e uni-la com Shiva no sahasrara se você tem de voltar para o mooladhara novamente? Isto é algo muito misterioso e podemos perguntar, "Por despertar Kundalini absolutamente?" Por que construir uma mansão se você sabe que terá de pô-la abaixo quando ela estiver concluída? Na verdade, criamos um monte de coisas que serão destruídas. Então, porque fazê-lo absolutamente? Fazemos muita sadhana para transcender os chakras e ascender da terra para o céu. Então, quando chegamos ao paraíso e nos tornamos um com a grande realidade, de repente decidimos voltar para baixo. E não só, nós trazemos a grande unidade conosco. Seria mais fácil entender se Shakti voltasse sozinha e Shiva permanecesse no céu. Talvez, quando Shakti está prestes a sair, Shiva diga: "Espere, estou indo com você."
Quando Shiva e Shakti descem aos níveis mais grosseiros da consciência, há a dualidade novamente. Isso é porque o homem auto-realizado é capaz de compreender a dor e todos os assuntos da vida mundana. Ele compreende todo o drama da dualidade, multiplicidade e diversidade. Às vezes nós, simples mortais, estamos em um dilema para compreender como este homem, como a mais elevada realização, é capaz de lidar com as dualidades sem esperanças da vida. ~ Satyananda Saraswati,
136: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,

IN CHAPTERS [52/52]



   26 Integral Yoga
   11 Yoga
   1 Sufism
   1 Poetry
   1 Occultism
   1 Mysticism


   16 Sri Aurobindo
   12 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
   12 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   8 Satprem
   7 The Mother


   10 Amrita Gita
   7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
   5 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
   4 Vedic and Philological Studies
   4 The Secret Of The Veda
   4 Agenda Vol 02
   2 God Exists
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   2 Agenda Vol 01


01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   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.
   Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.

0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   The story narrated in the film went like this: Narada, as usual, was having fun. (Narada is a demigod with a divine position that is, he can communicate with man and with the gods as he pleases, and he serves as an intermediary, but then he likes to have fun!) So he was quarrelling with one of the goddesses, I no longer recall which one, and he told her (Ah, yes! The quarrel was with Saraswati.) Saraswati was telling him that knowledge is much greater than love (much greater in that it is much more powerful than love), and he replied to her, You dont know what youre talking about! (Mother laughs) Love is much more powerful than knowledge. So she challenged him, saying, Well then, prove it to me.I shall prove it to you, he replied. And the whole story starts there. He began creating a whole imbroglio on earth just to prove his point.
   It was only a film story, but anyway, the goddesses, the three wives of the Trimurti that is, the consort of Brahma, the consort of Vishnu and the consort of Shivajoined forces (!) and tried all kinds of things to foil Narada. I no longer recall the details of the story Oh yes, the story begins like this: one of the three I believe it was Shivas consort, Parvati (she was the worst one, by the way!)was doing her puja. Shiva was in meditation, and she began doing her puja in front of him; she was using an oil lamp for the puja, and the lamp fell down and burned her foot. She cried out because she had burned her foot. So Shiva at once came out of his meditation and said to her, What is it, Devi? (laughter) She answered, I burned my foot! Then Narada said, Arent you ashamed of what you have done?to make Shiva come out of his meditation simply because you have a little burn on your foot, which cannot even hurt you since you are immortal! She became furious and snapped at him, Show me that it can be otherwise! Narada replied, I am going to show you what it is to really love ones husbandyou dont know anything about it!

0 1959-01-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   As for your arrival here, the day you mentioned is the Saraswati Puja I will go downstairs to give blessings. If you arrive on the previous day, the 11th I will arrange to see you at 10 oclock, and then you can begin your mantra on the 12th.
   Simply send me word to let me know if this is all right. Tell me also if you need money for your return, and how much, in time for me to send it.

0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I am going downstairs on the 21st, for Saraswati Puja.2 They have prepared a folder with a long quotation from Savitri and five photos of my face taken from five different angles.
   The title of the folder is the line from Savitri that gave me the most overpowering experience of the entire book (because, as I told you, as I read, I would LIVE the experiencesreading brought, instantly, a living experience). And when I came to this particular line I was as if suddenly swept up and engulfed in (the is wrong, an is wrongits neither one nor the other, its something else) eternal Truth. Everything was abolished except this:
  --
   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.
   Savitri, Vol. 29, XI.I.702.

0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   On the previous day, January 21, Saraswati Puja, Mother had given a message and photos to each disciple.
   Later, on the 27th, Mother remarked: 'I was reading about this very thing yesterday in The Secret of the Veda, in the first hymn translated by Sri Aurobindo (the reference is to the colloquy between Indra and Agastya, Rig Veda I.170cf. The Secret of the Veda, Cent. Ed., X.241 ff.), and it helped me put my finger on the problem. In this hymn there is a dispute between Indra and the Rishi because the Rishi wants to progress too quickly without first passing through Indra [the god of the Mind], and Indra stops him; finally they reach an agreement. Sri Aurobindo's commentary is quite interesting: when one has the INDIVIDUAL power to go directly, but neglects the steps which are still necessary for the whole, for the universal movement, then one is stopped short. That is absolutely my experience.'

0 1961-01-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Oh, another little example. You know those photos I distributed on the 21st for the Saraswati Puja) Amrita told me he was going to send them to X,1 I but I told him, No, dont bother. (The 21st was a terrible day for me. All the dasyus of the world were in league against me, trying to stop me I understood this afterwards, when I saw those things.2 So thats what it is! I said to myself, Thats what has been going on!) Then after the night of the 24th, I went down for balcony-darshan3 with such a foursquare certaintyyou know, cubic: such a cubic certainty and I said to Amrita, You can send him those photos today, without an explanation, without a word, with nothing but a feeling of certainty, a kind of definite and absolute THATS HOW IT IS.
   And that is a change, truly a change.

0 1961-01-31, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (A little later, concerning the Saraswati Puja photos that Mother first refused to send to X on the 21st, then decided to send on the 25th, with a kind of imperative cubic certainty.)
   X has replied. He said something like this, which Amrita translated: I have received the photos. It is a I dont know whether he said illumination or flame, ascending towards the Truth, leading towards the Truth. Thats the impression it gave him: that it was leading somewhere.

0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   When she next saw Satprem, Mother added the following correction: "After you left, they came. It's not I who remembered they MADE me remember! There was Saraswati saying, 'What about my sitar?' And Krishna, 'What about my flute?' (Mother laughs) There was another one also, I don't remember who. They were really upset! They told me right away, 'What are you talking about! We LOVE music.' All right. 'Fine,' I said (Mother laughs). It's trueKrishna is a great musician, and Saraswati is the perfection of expression.... Now that we have acknowledged their merits (Mother bows), go on with your reading."
   Ysaye (1838-1931): celebrated Belgian violinist, colleague of Rubinstein.

10.04 - Transfiguration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Agni is the energy of consciousness, Varuna is the vastness of consciousness, Mitra is the harmony. Ila is the revelation, Saraswati inspiration, Bharati is the Goddess of the Divine Word.
   In the mental world we meet abstractions, lifeless ideas, forms without a soul. In reality, however, all movements in man, all forces in nature are more than mere movements and forces, they are personalities, embodiments of conscious beings. Indeed the Puranic tradition has elaborated this conception almost to its extreme limit. Those people crowded the world with an infinite number of Gods and Goddesses. They speak of 33 crores of Gods. The earth is the playfield of all godlings.

1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  That was the general aspect of the ancient worship in Greece, Rome, India and among other ancient peoples. But in all these countries these gods began to assume a higher, a psychological function; Pallas Athene who may have been originally a Dawn-Goddess springing in flames from the head of Zeus, the Sky-God, Dyaus of the Veda, has in classical Greece a higher function and was identified by the Romans with their Minerva, the Goddess of learning and wisdom; similarly, Saraswati, a river Goddess, becomes in India the goddess of wisdom, learning and the arts and crafts: all the Greek deities have undergone a change in this direction - Apollo, the Sun-God, has become a god of poetry and prophecy, Hephaestus the Fire-God a divine smith, god of labour. In India the process was arrested half-way, and the Vedic Gods developed their psychological functions but retained more fixedly their external character and for higher purposes gave place to a new pantheon. They had to give precedence to Puranic deities who developed out of the early company but assumed larger cosmic functions, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahma - developing from the Vedic Brihaspati, or Brahmanaspati, - Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga. Thus in India the change in the gods was less complete, the earlier deities became the inferior divinities of the Puranic pantheon and this was largely due to the survival of the Rig Veda in which their psychological and their external functions co-existed and are both given a powerful emphasis; there was no such early literary record to maintain the original features of the Gods of Greece and Rome.
  This change was evidently due to a cultural development in these early peoples who became progressively more mentalised and less engrossed in the physical life as they advanced in civilisation and needed to read into their religion and their deities finer and subtler aspects which would support their more highly mentalised concepts and interests and find for them a true spiritual being or some celestial figure as their support and sanction.
  --
  He is not thinking of the Nature-Power presiding over the outer element of fire or of the fire of the ceremonial sacrifice. Or he speaks of Saraswati as one who impels the words of Truth and awakes to right thinkings or as one opulent with the thought: Saraswati awakes to consciousness or makes us conscious of the "Great Ocean and illumines all our thoughts." It is surely not the River Goddess whom he is thus hymning but the Power, theRiver if you will, of inspiration, the word of the Truth, bringing its light into our thoughts, building up in us that Truth, an inner knowledge. The Gods constantly stand out in their psychological functions; the sacrifice is the outer symbol of an inner work, an inner interchange between the gods and men, - man givingwhat he has, the gods giving in return the horses of power, the herds of light, the heroes of Strength to be his retinue, winning for him victory in his battle with the hosts of Darkness, Vritras, Dasyus, Panis. When the Rishi says, "Let us become conscious whether by the War-Horse or by the Word of a Strength beyond men", his words have either a mystic significance or they have no coherent meaning at all. In the portions translated in this book we have many mystic verses and whole hymns which, however mystic, tear the veil off the outer sacrificial images covering the real sense of the Veda. "Thought", says the Rishi, "has nourished for us human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens; it is the milch-cow which milks of itself the wealth of many forms" - the many kinds of wealth, cows, horses and the rest for which the sacrificer prays; evidently this is no material wealth, it is something which Thought, the Thought embodied in the Mantra, can give and it is the result of the same Thought that nourishes our human things in the Immortals, in the Great Heavens. A process of divinisation, and of a bringing down of great and luminous riches, treasures won from the Gods by the inner work of sacrifice, is hinted at in terms necessarily covert but still for one who knows how to read these secret words, nin.ya vacamsi, sufficiently expressive, kavaye nivacana. Again, Night and Dawn the eternal sisters are like "joyful weaving women weaving the weft of our perfected works into the form of a sacrifice."
  Again, words with a mystic form and meaning, but there
  --
  one hymn says, Saraswati makes conscious for us or of which
  she makes us conscious by the ray of intuition - pra cetayati
  --
  that Saraswati makes us conscious of the great waters; that
  too probably is the meaning of the rays which come from the

1.01 - Hatha Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.028 - Bringing About Whole-Souled Dedication, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The other point is that this practice will not bring results in only a few days. Sa tu drghakla nairantarya satkra sevita dhabhmi (I.14), says Patanjali. In many cases the result will not follow at all, due to obstructing prarabdhas. There were great seekers, sadhakas, who used to perform japa purascharana, the chanting of a mantra, for years and years together, with the hope of having the vision of the deity. But they had no vision of the deity. We hear of the story of the purascharanas performed by Sage Vidyaranya of yore, Yogi Sri Madhusudana Saraswati and others, but they had no vision. The reason mentioned is that they had obstructing prarabdhas.
  We have three kinds of prarabdha the tamasica, the rajasica and the sattvica. The tamasica and rajasica prarabdhas will not allow even the rise of aspiration for God. The tamasica prarabdha will always bring the most intense form of obstacles, including a mood of lethargy, indolence, sleepiness, and even doubt of the possibility of gaining any such realisation at all, as yoga promises. Atheism, materialism and lack of faith are due to the working of tamasica prarabdhas. As long as these types of prarabdha function, as long as the tamasica prarabdhas are active, there is no question of the practice of yoga we can do nothing.

1.02 - Karma Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  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.

1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  seems unnatural to the average Indian, who will bow respectfully before Christ (with as much spontaneous reverence as before his own image of God), but who will see also the face of God in the laughter of Krishna, the terror of Kali, the sweetness of Saraswati, and in the thousands upon thousands of other gods who dance, multicolored and mustachioed, mirthful or terrifying, illuminated or compassionate, on the deliriously carved towers of Indian temples. A God who cannot smile could not have created this humorous universe,13 said Sri Aurobindo. All is His face, all is His play, terrible or beautiful, as many-faceted as our world itself. For this country so teeming with 13
  Thoughts and Aphorisms, 17:138

1.03 - Hymns of Gritsamada, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    11. O Divine Fire, thou art Aditi, the indivisible Mother to the giver of the sacrifice; thou art Bharati, voice of the offering, and thou growest by the word. Thou art Ila of the hundred winters wise to discern; O Master of the Treasure, thou art Saraswati who slays the python adversary.
    12. O Fire, when thou art well borne by us thou becomest the supreme growth and expansion of our being, all glory and beauty are in thy desirable hue and thy perfect vision. O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side.
  --
    8. May Saraswati effecting our thought and goddess Ila and Bharati who carries all to their goal, the three goddesses, sit on our altar-seat and guard by the self-law of things our gapless house of refuge.
    9. Soon there is born a Hero of golden-red form, an aspirant to the Godheads, a mighty bringer of riches and founder of our growth to wideness. Let the Maker of forms loosen the knot of the navel in us, let him set free the issue of our works; then let him walk on the way of the Gods.9

1.03 - Japa Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.04 - Nada Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Saraswati is known to us in the Purana,the Muse with her feet on the thousand leaved lotus of the mind, the goddess of thought, learning, poetry, of all that is high in mind and its knowledge. But, so far as we can understand from the Purana, she is the goddess of mind only, of intellect & imagination and their perceptions & inspirations. Things spiritual & the mightier supra-mental energies & illuminations belong not to her, but to other powers. Well, we meet Saraswati in the Vedas;and if she is the same goddess as our Puranic & modern protectress of learning & the arts, the Personality of the Intellect, then we have a starting pointwe know that the Vedic Rishis had other than naturalistic conceptions & could call to higher powers than the thunder-flash & the storm-wind. But there is a difficulty Saraswati is the name of a river, of several rivers in India, for the very name means flowing, gliding or streaming, and the Europeans identify it with a river in the Punjab. We must be careful therefore, whenever we come across the name, to be sure which of these two is mentioned or invoked, the sweet-streaming Muse or the material river.
  The first passage in which Saraswati is mentioned, is the third hymn of the first Mandala, the hymn of Madhuchchhanda Vaisvamitra, in which the Aswins, Indra, the Visve devah and Saraswati are successively invokedapparently in order to conduct an ordinary material sacrifice? That is the thing that has to be seen,to be understood. What is Saraswati, whether as a Muse or a river, doing at the Soma-offering? Or is she there as the architect of the hymn, the weaver of the Riks?
  The passage devoted to her occupies the three final & culminating verses of the sacred poem. Pavaka nah Saraswati vajebhir vajinivati Yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. Chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam Yajnam dadhe Saraswati. Maho arnas Saraswati prachetayati ketuna Dhiyo visva vi rajati. Now there is here mention in the last verse of a flowing water, arnas, whether sea or river, but this can be no material stream, since plainly the rest of the passage can only refer to a goddess whose functions are subjective. She is dhiyavasuh, stored or rich with understanding, she is the impelling power of truths, she is the awakener of or to right thoughts. She awakens something or brings it forward into consciousness (pra-chetayati) by the perceptive intelligence and she governs or shines through all the movements of the fixing & discerning mind. There are too many words here that do ordinarily & ought here to bear a purely subjective sense for any avoidance of the clear import of the passage. We start then with the conception of Saraswati as a goddess of mind, if not the goddess of mind and we have then to determine what are her functions or activities as indicated in this important passage and for what purpose she has been summoned by the son of Visvamitra to this sacrifice.
  What exact sense are we to apply to vajebhir vajinivati when it is spoken of a subjective Power? It is a suggestion I shall make and work out hereafter by application to all the hundreds of passages in which the word occurs that vaja in the Veda means a substantial, firm & copious condition of being, well-grounded & sufficient plenty in anything material, mental or spiritual, any substance, wealth, chattels, qualities, psychological conditions.
  --
  But greater capacities, mightier functions are demanded of Saraswati.Mind and discerning intelligence, however active and well-stored, may give false interpretation and mistaken counsel. But Saraswati at the sacrifice is chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam. It is she who gives the impulsion to the truths that appear in the mind, it is she who, herself conscious of right thoughts and just processes of thinking, awakens to them the mental faculties. Therefore, because she is the impelling force behind intellectual Truth, and our awakener to right thinking, she is present at the sacrifice; she has established and upholds it, yajnam dadhe. This sacrifice, whatever else it may be, is controlled by mental enlightenment and rich understanding and confirmed in & by truth and right-thinking. Therefore is Saraswati its directing power & presiding goddess.
  But by what power of Saraswatis are falsehood & error excluded and the mind and discerning reason held to truth & right-thinking? This, if I mistake not, is what the Rishi Madhuchchhanda, the drashta of Veda has seen for us in his last and culminating verse. I have said that arnas is a flowing water whether river or sea; for the word expresses either a flowing continuity or a flowing expanse. We may translate it then as the river of Mah or Mahas, and place arnas in apposition with Saraswati. This goddess will then be in our subjective being some principle to which the Vedic thinkers gave the names of Mah and Mahas for it is clear, if the rest of our interpretation is at all correct, that there can be no question of a material stream & arnas must refer to some stream or storehouse of subjective faculty. But there are strong objections to such a collocation. We shall find later that the goddess Mahi and not Saraswati is the objectivising feminine power and divine representative of this Vedic principle Mahas; prachetayati besides demands an object and maho arnas is the only object which the structure of the sentence and the rhythm of the verse will allow. I translate therefore Saraswati awakens by the perceptive intelligence the ocean (or, flowing expanse) of Mahas and governs diversely all the movements (or, all the faculties) of the understanding.
  What is Mah or Mahas?The word means great, embracing, full, comprehensive. The Earth, also, because of its wideness & containing faculty is called mahi,just as it is called prithivi, dhara, medini, dharani, etc. In various forms, the root itself, mahi, mahitwam, maha, magha, etc, it recurs with remarkable profusion and persistence throughout the Veda. Evidently it expressed some leading thought of the Rishis, was some term of the highest importance in their system of psychology. Turning to the Purana we find the term mahat applied to some comprehensive principle which is supposed itself to be near to the unmanifest, avyaktam but to supply the material of all that is manifest and always to surround, embrace and uphold it. Mahat seems here to be an objective principle; but this need not trouble us; for in the old Hindu system all that is objective had something subjective corresponding to it and constituting its real nature. We find it explicitly declared in the Vishnu Purana that all things here are manifestations of vijnana, pure ideal knowledge, sarvani vijnanavijrimbhitaniideal knowledge vibrating out into intensity of various phenomenal existences each with its subjective reason for existence and objective case & form of existence. Is ideal knowledge then the subjective principle of mahat? If so, vijnanam and the Vedic mahas are likely to be terms identical in their philosophical content and psychological significance. We turn to the Upanishads and find mention made more than once of a certain subjective state of the soul, which is called Mahan Atma, a state into which the mind and senses have to be drawn up as we rise by samadhi of the instruments of knowledge into the supreme state of Brahman and which is superior therefore to these instruments. The Mahan Atma is the state of the pure Brahman out of which the vijnana or ideal truth (sattwa or beness of things) emerges and it is higher than the vijnana but nearer us than the Unmanifest or Avyaktam (Katha: III.10, 11,13 & VI.7). If we understand by the Mahan Atma that status of soul existence (Purusha) which is the basis of the objective mahat or mahati prakriti and which develops the vijnanam or ideal knowledge as its subjective instrument, then we shall have farther light on the nature of Mahas in the ancient conceptions. We shall see that it is ideal knowledge, vijnanam, or is connected with ideal knowledge.
  But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice,the final & conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic & Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter & material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar & Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality & vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manasei ther in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted & enlightened by buddhipredominates & by the laws of mind determines the life & movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,not unknown to the Vedaconstitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyaktalost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain & only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength & being. Between the upper hemisphere & the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge & pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide & immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth & right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth & ideal knowledge.
  We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
  --
  We can now understand the intention of the Rishi in his last verse and the greatness of the climax to which he has been leading us. Saraswati is able to give impulsion to Truth and awaken to right thinking because she has access to the Maho Arnas, the great ocean. On that level of consciousness, we are usually it must be remembered asleep, sushupta. The chetana or waking consciousness has no access; it lies behind our active consciousness, is, as we might say, superconscious, for us, asleep. Saraswati brings it forward into active consciousness by means of the ketu or perceptive intelligence, that essential movement of mind which accepts & realises whatever is presented to it. To focus this ketu, this essential perception on the higher truth by drawing it away from the haphazard disorder of sensory data is the great aim of Yogic meditation. Saraswati by fixing essential perception on the satyam ritam brihat above makes ideal knowledge active and is able to inform it with all those plentiful movements of mind which she, dhiyavasu, vajebhir vajinivati, has prepared for the service of the Master of the sacrifice. She is able to govern all the movements of understanding without exception in their thousand diverse movements & give them the single impression of truth and right thinkingvisva dhiyo vi rajati. A governed & ordered activity of soul and mind, led by the Truth-illuminated intellect, is the aim of the sacrifice which Madhuchchhanda son of Viswamitra is offering to the Gods.
  For we perceive at once that the yajna here can be no material sacrifice, no mere pouring out of the Soma-wine on the sacred flame to the gods of rain & cloud, star & sunshine.
  --
  I do not propose to study the earlier verses of the hymn with the same care as we have expended on the closing dedication to Saraswati,that would lead me beyond my immediate purpose. A rapid glance through them to see whether they confirm or contradict our first results will be sufficient. There are three passages, also of three verses each, consecrated successively to the Aswins, Indra & the Visve Devah. I shall give briefly my own view of these three passages and the gods they invoke.
  The master word of the address to the Aswins is the verb chanasyatam, take your delight. The Aswins, as I understand them, are the masters of strength, youth, joy, swiftness, pleasure, rapture, the pride and glory of existence, and may almost be described as the twin gods of youth and joy. All the epithets applied to them here support this view. They are dravatpani subhaspati, the swift-footed masters of weal, of happiness and good fortune; they are purubhuja, much enjoying; their office is to take and give delight, chanasyatam. So runs the first verse, Aswin yajwaririsho dravatpani subhaspati, Purubhuja chanasyatam. O Aswins, cries Madhuchchhanda, I am in the full rush, the full ecstasy of the sacrificial action, O swift-footed, much-enjoying masters of happiness, take in me your delight. Again they are purudansasa, wide-distributing, nara, strong. O strong wide-distributing Aswins, continues the singer, with your bright-flashing (or brilliantly-forceful) understanding take pleasure in the words (of the mantra) which are now firmly settled (in the mind). Aswina purudansasa nara shaviraya dhiya, Dhishnya vanatam girah. Again we have the stress on things subjective, intellectual and spiritual. The extreme importance of the mantra, the inspired & potent word in the old Vedic religion is known nor has it diminished in later Hinduism. The mantra in Yoga is only effective when it has settled into the mind, is asina, has taken its seat there and become spontaneous; it is then that divine power enters into, takes possession of it and the mantra itself becomes one with the god of the mantra and does his works in the soul and body. This, as every Yogin knows, is one of the fundamental ideas not only in the Rajayogic practice but in almost all paths of spiritual discipline. Here we have the very word that can most appropriately express this settling in of the mantra, dhishnya, combined with the word girah. And we know that the gods in the Veda are called girvanah, those who delight in the mantra; Indra, the god of mental force, is girvahas, he who supports or bears the mantra. Why should Nature gods delight in speech or the god of thunder & rain be the supporter or bearer of any kind of speech? The hymns? But what is meant by bearing the hymns? We have to give unnatural meanings to vanas & vahas, if we wish to avoid this plain indication. In the next verse the epithets are dasra, bountiful, which, like wide-distributing is again an epithet appropriate to the givers of happiness, weal and youth, rudravartani, fierce & impetuous in all their ways, and Nasatya, a word of doubtful meaning which, for philological reasons, I take to mean gods of movement.As the movement indicated by this and kindred words n, (natare), especially meant a gliding, floating, swimming movement, the Aswins came to be especially the protectors of ships & sailors, and it is in this capacity that we find Castor & Polydeuces (Purudansas) acting, their Western counterparts, the brothers of Helen (Sarama), the swift riders of the Roman legend. O givers, O lords of free movement, runs the closing verse of this invocation, come to the outpourings of my nectar, be ye fierce in action;I feel full of youthful vigour, I have prepared the sacred grass,if that indeed be the true & early meaning of barhis. Dasra yuvakavah suta nasatya vriktabarhishah, Ayatam rudravartani. It is an intense rapture of the soul (rudravartani) which Madhuchchhandas asks first from the gods.Therefore his first call is to the Aswins.
  --
  But he is not content with the inner sacrifice. He wishes to pour out this strength & joy in action on the world, on his fellows, on the peoples, therefore he calls to the Visve Devah to come, A gata!all the gods in general who help man and busy themselves in supporting his multitudinous & manifold action. They are kindly, omasas, they are charshanidhrito, holders or supporters of all our actions, especially actions that require effort, (it is in this sense that I take charshani, again on good philological grounds), they are to distribute this nectar to all or to divide it among themselves for the action,dasvanso may have either force,for Madhuchchhanda wishes not only to possess, but to give, to distribute, he is dashush. Omasas charshanidhrito visve devasa a gata, daswanso dashushah sutam. He goes on, Visve devaso apturah sutam a ganta turnayah Usra iva swasarani. Visve devaso asridha ehimayaso adruhah, Medham jushanta vahnayah. O you all-gods who are energetic in works, come to the nectar distilled, ye swift ones, (or, come swiftly), like calves to their own stalls,(so at least we must translate this last phrase, till we can get the real meaning, for I do not believe this is the real or, at any rate, the only meaning). O you all-gods unfaltering, with wide capacity of strength, ye who harm not, attach yourselves to the offering as its supporters. And then come the lines about Saraswati. For although Indra can sustain for a moment or for a time he is at present a mental, not an ideal force; it is Saraswati full of the vijnana, of mahas, guiding by it the understanding in all its ways who can give to all these gods the supporting knowledge, light and truth which will confirm and uphold the delight, the mental strength & supply inexhaustibly from the Ocean of Mahas the beneficent & joy-giving action, Saraswati, goddess of inspiration, the flowing goddess who is the intermediary & channel by which divine truth, divine joy, divine being descend through the door of knowledge into this human receptacle. In a word, she is our inspirer, our awakener, our lurer towards Immortality. It is immortality that Madhuchchhandas prepares for himself & the people who do sacrifice to Heaven, devayantah. The Soma-streams he speaks of are evidently no intoxicating vegetable juices; he calls them ayavah, life-forces; & elsewhere amritam, nectar of immortality; somasah, wine-draughts of bliss & internal well being. It is the clear Yogic idea of the amritam, the divine nectar which flows into the system at a certain stage of Yogic practice & gives pure health, pure strength & pure physical joy to the body as a basis for a pure mental & spiritual vigour and activity.
  We have therefore as a result of a long and careful examination the clear conviction that certainly in this poem of Madhuchchhanda, probably in others of his hymns, perhaps in all we have an invocation to subjective Nature powers, a symbolic sacrifice, a spiritual, moral & subjective effort & purpose. And if many other suktas in this & other Mandalas confirm the evidence of this third hymn of the Rigveda, shall we not say that here we have the true Veda as the Rishis understood it and that this was the reason why all the ancient thinkers looked on the hymns with so deep-seated a reverence that even after they came to be used merely as ceremonial liturgies at a material sacrifice, even after the Buddha impatiently flung them aside, the writer of the Gita had to look beyond them & Shankara respectfully put them on the shelf of neglect as useless for spiritual purposes, even after they have ceased to be used and almost to be read, the most spiritual nation on the face of the earth still tenaciously, by a sort of divine instinct, clings to them as its supreme Scriptures & refers back all its spirituality and higher knowledge to the Vedas? Let us proceed and see whether this is not the truest as well as the noblest reading of the riddle the real root of Gods purpose in maintaining this our ancient faith and millennial tradition.

1.05 - Bhakti Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.06 - Raja Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  of Swami Bhaskaranandaji Saraswati, and looked uncommonly like the
  late Cardinal Manning, only more ingenuous. His eyes beamed with

1.07 - Jnana Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The next passage to which I shall turn is the eighth verse of the eighth hymn, also to Indra, in which occurs the expression , a passage which when taken in the plain and ordinary sense of the epithets sheds a great light on the nature of Mahi. Sunrita means really true and is opposed to anrita, false for in the early Aryan speech su and s would equally signify, well, good, very; and the euphonic n is of a very ancient type of sandhioriginally, it was probably no more than a strong anuswartraces of which can still be found in Tamil; in the case of su this n euphonic seems to have been dropped after the movement of the literary Aryan tongue towards the modern principle of Sandhi,a movement the imperfect progress of which we see in the Vedas; but by that time the form an, composed of privative a and the euphonic n, had become a recognised alternative form to a and the omission of the n would have left the meaning of words very ambiguous; therefore n was preserved in the negative form, omitted from the affirmative where its omission caused no inconvenience,for to write gni instead of anagni would be confusing, but to write svagni instead of sunagni would create no confusion. In the pair sunrita and anrita it is probable that the usage had become so confirmed, so much of an almost technical phraseology, that confirmed habit prevailed over new rule. The second meaning of the word is auspicious, derived from the idea good or beneficent in its regular action. The Vedic scholars give a third sense, quick, active; but this is probably due to confusion with an originally distinct word derived from the root , to move on rapidly, to be strong, swift, active from which we have to dance, & strong and a number of other derivatives, for although ri means to go, it does not appear that rita was used in the sense of motion or swiftness. In any case our choice (apart from unnecessary ingenuities) lies here between auspicious and true. If we take Mahi in the sense of earth, the first is its simplest & most natural significance.We shall have then to translate the earth auspicious (or might it mean true in the sense observing the law of the seasons), wide-watered, full of cows becomes like a ripe branch to the giver. This gives a clear connected sense, although gross and pedestrian and open to the objection that it has no natural and inevitable connection with the preceding verses. My objection is that sunrita and gomati seem to me to have in the Veda a different and deeper sense and that the whole passage becomes not only ennobled in sense, but clearer & more connected in sense if we give them that deeper significance. Gomatir ushasah in Kutsas hymn to the Dawn is certainly the luminous dawns; Saraswati in the third hymn who as chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam shines pervading all the actions of the understanding, certainly does so because she is the impeller to high truths, the awakener to right thoughts, clear perceptions and not because she is the impeller of things auspiciousa phrase which would have no sense or appropriateness to the context. Mahi is one of the three goddesses Ila, Saraswati and Mahi who are described as tisro devir mayobhuvah, the three goddesses born of delight or Ananda, and her companions being goddesses of knowledge, children of Mahas, she also must be a goddess of knowledge, not the earth; the word mahi also bears the sense of knowledge, intellect, and Mahas undoubtedly refers in many passages to the vijnana or supra-rational level of consciousness, the fourth Vyahriti of the Taittiriya Upanishad. What then prevents us from taking Mahi, here as there, in the sense of the goddess of suprarational knowledge or, if taken objectively, the world of Mahat? Nothing, except a tradition born in classical times when mahi was the earth and the new Nature-worship theory. In this sense I shall take it. I translate the line For thus Mahi the true, manifest in action, luminous becomes like a ripe branch to the giveror, again in better English, For thus Mahi the perfect in truth, manifesting herself in action, full of illumination, becomes as a ripe branch to the giver. For the Yogin again the sense is clear. All things are contained in the Mahat, derived from the Mahat, depend on theMahat, but we here in the movement of the alpam, have not our desire, are blinded & confined, enjoy an imperfect, erroneous & usually baffled & futile activity. It is only when we regain the movement of the Mahat, the large & uncontracted consciousness that comes from rising to the infinite,it is only then that we escape from this limitation. She is perfect in truth, full of illumination; error and ignorance disappear; she manifests herself virapshi in a wide & various activity; our activities are enlarged, our desires are fulfilled. The connection with the preceding stanzas becomes clear. The Vritras, the great obstructors & upholders of limitation, are slain by the help of Indra, by the result of the yajnartham karma, by alliance with the armed gods in mighty internal battle; Indra, the god within our mental force, manifests himself as supreme and full of the nature of ideal truth from which his greatness weaponed with the vajra, vidyut or electric principle, derives (mahitwam astu vajrine). The mind, instinct with amrita, is then full of equality, samata; it drinks in the flood of activity of all kinds as the sea takes in the rivers. For the condition then results in which the ideal consciousness Mahi is like a ripe branch to the giver, when all powers & expansions of being at once (without obstacle as the Vritras are slain) become active in consciousness as masterful and effective knowledge or awareness (chit). This is the process prayed for by the poet. The whole hymn becomes a consecutive & intelligible whole, a single thought worked out logically & coherently and relating with perfect accuracy of ensemble & detail to one of the commonest experiences of Yogic fulfilment. In both these passages the faithful adherence to the intimations of language, Vedantic idea & Yogic experience have shed a flood of light, illuminating the obscurity of the Vedas, bringing coherence into the incoherence of the naturalistic explanation, close & strict logic, great depth of meaning with great simplicity of expression, and, as I shall show when I take up the final interpretation of the separate hymns, a rational meaning & reason of existence in that particular place for each word & phrase and a faultless & inevitable connection with what goes before & with what goes after. It is worth noticing that by the naturalistic interpretation one can indeed generally make out a meaning, often a clear or fluent sense for the separate verses of the Veda, but the ensemble of the hymn has almost always about it an air bizarre, artificial, incoherent, almost purposeless, frequently illogical and self-contradictoryas in Max Mullers translation of the 39th hymn, Kanwas to the Maruts,never straightforward, self-assured & easy. One would expect in these primitive writers,if they are primitive,crudeness of belief perhaps, but still plainness of expression and a simple development of thought. One finds instead everything tortuous, rugged, gnarled, obscure, great emptiness with great pretentiousness of mind, a labour of diction & development which seems to be striving towards great things & effecting a nullity. The Vedic singers, in the modern version, have nothing to say and do not know how to say it. I sacrifice, you drink, you are fine fellows, dont hurt me or let others hurt me, hurt my enemies, make me safe & comfortablethis is practically all that the ten Mandalas have to say to the gods & it is astonishing that they should be utterly at a loss how to say it intelligibly. A system which yields such results must have at its root some radical falsity, some cardinal error.
  I pass now to a third passage, also instructive, also full of that depth and fine knowledge of the movements of the higher consciousness which every Yogin must find in the Veda. It is in the 9th hymn of the Mandala and forms the seventh verse of that hymn. Sam gomad Indra vajavad asme prithu sravo brihat, visvayur dhehi akshitam. The only crucial question in this verse is the signification of sravas.With our modern ideas the sentence seems to us to demand that sravas should be translated here fame. Sravas is undoubtedly the same word as the Greek xo (originally xFo); it means a thing heard, rumour, report, & thence fame. If we take it in that sense, we shall have to translate Arrange for us, O universal life, a luminous and solid, wide & great fame unimpaired. I dismiss at once the idea that go & vaja can here signify cattle and food or wealth. A herded & fooded or wealthy fame to express a fame for wealth of cattle & food is a forceful turn of expression we might expect to find in Aeschylus or in Shakespeare; but I should hesitate, except in case of clear necessity, to admit it in the Veda or in any Sanscrit style of composition; for such expressions have always been alien to the Indian intellect. Our stylistic vagaries have been of another kind. But is luminous & solid fame much better? I shall suggest another meaning for sravas which will give as usual a deeper sense to the whole passage without our needing to depart by a hairs breadth from the etymological significance of the words. Sruti in Sanscrit is a technical term, originally, for the means by which Vedic knowledge is acquired, inspiration in the suprarational mind; srutam is the knowledge of Veda. Similarly, we have in Vedic Sanscrit the forms srut and sravas. I take srut to mean inspired knowledge in the act of reception, sravas the thing acquired by the reception, inspired knowledge. Gomad immediately assumes its usual meaning illuminated, full of illumination. Vaja I take throughout the Veda as a technical Vedic expression for that substantiality of being-consciousness which is the basis of all special manifestation of being & power, all utayah & vibhutayahit means by etymology extended being in force, va or v to exist or move in extension and the vocable j which always gives the idea of force or brilliance or decisiveness in action or manifestation or contact. I shall accept no meaning which is inconsistent with this fundamental significance. Moreover the tendency of the old commentators to make all possible words, vaja, ritam etc mean sacrifice or food, must be rejected,although a justification in etymology might always be made out for the effort. Vaja means substance in being, substance, plenty, strength, solidity, steadfastness. Here it obviously means full of substance, just as gomad full of luminousness,not in the sense arthavat, but with another & psychological connotation. I translate then, O Indra, life of all, order for us an inspired knowledge full of illumination & substance, wide & great and unimpaired. Anyone acquainted with Yoga will at once be struck by the peculiar & exact appropriateness of all these epithets; they will admit him at once by sympathy into the very heart of Madhuchchhandas experience & unite him in soul with that ancient son of Visvamitra. When Mahas, the supra-rational principle, begins with some clearness to work in Yoga, not on its own level, not swe dame, but in the mind, it works at first through the principle of Srutinot Smriti or Drishti, but this Sruti is feeble & limited in its range, it is not prithu; broken & scattered in its working even when the range is wide, not unlimited in continuity, not brihat; not pouring in a flood of light, not gomat, but coming as a flash in the darkness, often with a pale glimmer like the first feebleness of dawn; not supported by a strong steady force & foundation of being, Sat, in manifestation, not vajavad, but working without foundation, in a void, like secondh and glimpses of Sat in nothingness, in vacuum, in Asat; and, therefore, easily impaired, easily lost hold of, easily stolen by the Panis or the Vritras. All these defects Madhuchchhanda has noticed in his own experience; his prayer is for an inspired knowledge which shall be full & free & perfect, not marred even in a small degree by these deficiencies.

1.08 - Adhyatma Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If the Veda is a great religious and psychological document and not an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants passages which preserve, in spite of the unavoidable difficulties of an archaic language, their ancient truth on their surface. The totality of the Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, constant in its ideas and unchanging in its terms that we may hope from even one such text a help considerably beyond the measure of its actual length & scope in fixing the nature of theVedic outlook and helping us to some clue to the secret of its characteristic expressions. Our desideratum is a passage in which the god of the Riks must be a mental or moral Power, the thoughts religious, intellectual or psychological in their substance, the expressions insistent in their clear superphysical intention.We will begin with a striking passage in a hymn, put by Vyasa very early in the order of his collection.It is the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhanda, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the three closing riks of the hymn are the indicative passage
   Saraswati, a name familiar to the religious conceptions of the race from our earliest eras, & of incessant occurrence in poetic phraseology and image, is worshipped yearly even at the present day in all provinces of the peninsula no less than those many millenniums ago in the prehistoric dawn of our religion and literature. Consistently, subsequent to the Vedic times, she has been worshipped everywhere & is named in all passages as a goddess of speech, poetry, learning and eloquence. Epic, Purana and the popular imagination know her solely as this deity of speech & knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests itself: In any given passage may it not be the Aryan river, Saraswati, which the bards are chanting? even if they sing of her or cry to her as a goddess, may it not still be the River, so dear, sacred & beneficent to them, that they worship? Or even where she is clearly a goddess of speech and thought, may it not be that the Aryans, having had originally no intellectual or moral conceptions and therefore no gods of the mind and heart, converted, when they did feel the need, this sacred flowing River into a goddess of sacred flowing song? In that case we are likely to find in her epithets & activities the traces of this double capacity.
  For the rest, Sayana in this particular passage lends some support [to] this suggestion of Saraswatis etymological good luck; for he tells us that Saraswati has two aspects, the embodied goddess of Speech and the figure of a river. He distributes, indeed, these two capacities with a strange inconsistency and in his interpretation, as in so many of these harsh & twisted scholastic renderings, European & Indian, of the old melodious subtleties of thought & language, the sages of the Veda come before us only to be convicted of a baffling incoherence of sense and a pointless inaptness of language. But possibly, after all, it is the knowledge of the scholar that is at fault, not the intellect of the Vedic singers that was confused, stupid and clumsy! Nevertheless we must consider the possibility that Sayanas distribution of the sense may be ill-guided, & yet his suggestion about the double role of the goddess may in itself be well-founded. There are few passages of the ancient Sanhita, into which these ingenuities of the ritualistic & naturalistic interpretations do not pursue us. Our inquiry would protract itself into an intolerable length, if we had at every step to clear away from the path either the heavy ancient lumber or the brilliant modern rubbish. It is necessary to determine, once for all, whether the Vedic scholars, prve ntan uta, are guides worthy of trustwhe ther they are as sure in taste & insight as they are painstaking and diligent in their labour,whether, in a word, these ingenuities are the outcome of an imaginative licence of speculation or a sound & keen intuition of the true substance of Veda. Here is a crucial passage. Let us settle at least one side of the account the ledger of the great Indian scholiast.
  Madhuchchhanda turns to Saraswati at the close of his hymn after successively calling to the Aswins, Indra & the Visvadevas. To each of these deities he has addressed three riks of praise & invocation; the last three of the twelve reiterate in each verse the name, epithets & functions of Saraswati. The Sukta falls therefore into four equal parts of which the last alone immediately concerns us.
    Pvak nah Saraswat, vjebhir vjinvat,
  --
  On the strength of Sayanas commentary these lines would have to bear in English the following astounding significance. Let the purifying goddess of Speech, equipped by means of food offerings with a ritual full of food, desire (that is to say, up-bear) the sacrifice, she who is the cause of wealth as a result of the ritual. Sender of pleasant & true sayings and explainer (of this sacrifice) to the performers of the ritual who have a good intelligence, the goddess of Speech upholds the sacrifice. The river Saraswati makes known by her action (that is, her stream) much water, she (the Muse) illumines all the ideas of the sacrificer. Truly, whatever Saraswati may do for the sacrificer,who does not appear at all in the lines except to the second sight of Sayana,the great scholar does not succeed in illumining our ideas about the sense of the Sukta. The astonishing transition from the Muse to the river & the river to the Muse in a single rik is flagrantly impossible. How does Saraswatis thoughtful provision of much water lead to her illumination of the sacrificers evidently confused intellect?Why should dhiy in dhiyvasu mean ritual act, and dhiyo in dhiyo vsv ideas? How can desire mean upbear, ritual act mean wealth or action mean a stream of water? What sense can we extract from arnah prachetayati in Sayanas extraordinary combination? If s nritnm expresses speech or thought, why should the parallel expression sumatnm in defiance of rhythm of sound & rhythm of sense, refer to the sacrificers? I have offered these criticisms not for any pleasure in carping at the great Southern scholar, but to establish by a clear, decisive & typical instance the defects which justify my total rejection of his once supreme authority in Vedic scholarship. Sayana is learned in ritualism, loaded with grammatical lore, a scholar of vast diligence and enormous erudition, but in his mentality literary perception & taste seem either to have been non-existent or else oppressed under the heavy weight of his learning. This and other defects common enough in men of vast learning whose very curiosity of erudition only lead them to prefer a strained to a simple explanation, the isolated suggestions of single words to a regard for the total form & coherence, & recondite, antiquarian or ceremonial allusions to a plain meaning, render his guidance less than useful in the higher matters of interpretation and far from safe in questions of verbal rendering.
  The effectual motive for Sayanas admission of Saraswatis double rle in this Sukta is the expression maho arnas, the great water, of the third rik. Only in her capacity as a river-goddess has Saraswati anything to do with material water; an abundance of liquid matter is entirely irrelevant to her intellectual functions. If therefore we accept arnah in a material sense, the entrance of the river into the total physiognomy of Saraswati is imposed upon us by hard necessity in spite of the resultant incoherence. But if on the other hand, arnah can be shown to bear other than a material significance or intention, then no other necessity exists for the introduction of a deified Aryan river. On the contrary, there is an extraordinary accumulation of expressions clearly intellectual in sense. Pvak, dhiyvasuh, chodayitr snritnm, chetant sumatnm, prachetayati ketun, dhiyo vsv vi rjati are all expressions of this stamp; for they mean respectively purifying, rich in understanding, impeller of truths, awakening to good thoughts, perceives or makes conscious by perception, governs variously all the ideas or mental activities. Even yajnam vashtu and yajnam dadhe refer, plainly, to a figurative moral upholding,if, indeed, upholding be at all the Rishis intention in vashtu. What is left? Only the name Saraswati thrice repeated, the pronoun nah, and the two expressions vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnah. The rest is clearly the substance of a passage full of strong intellectual and moral conceptions. I shall suggest that these two expressions vjebhir vjin vat and maho arnah are no exception to the intellectuality of the rest of the passage. They, too, are words expressing moral or intellectual qualities or entities.
  The word vja, usually rendered by Sayana, food or ghee,a sense which he is swift to foist upon any word which will at all admit that construction, as well as on some which will not admit it,has in other passages another sense assigned to it, strength, bala. It is the latter significance or its basis of substance & solidity which I propose to attach to vja in every line of the Rigveda where it occursand it occurs with an abundant frequency. There are a number of words in the Veda which have to be rendered by the English strength,bala, taras, vja, sahas, avas, to mention only the most common expressions. Can it be supposed that all these vocables rejoice in one identical connotation as commentators and lexicographers would lead us to conclude, and are used in the Veda promiscuously & indifferently to express the same idea of strength? The psychology of human language is more rich and delicate. In English the words strength, force, vigour, robustness differ in their mental values; force can be used in offices of expression to which strength and vigour are ineligible. In Vedic Sanscrit, as in every living tongue, the same law holds and a literary and thoughtful appreciation of its documents, whatever may be the way of the schools, must take account of these distinctions. In the brief list I have given, bala answers to the English strength, taras gives a shade of speed and impetuosity, sahas of violence or force, avas of flame and brilliance, vja of substance and solidity. In the philological appendix to this work there will be found detailed reasons for concluding that strength is in the history of the word vja only a secondary sense, like its other meanings, wealth and food; the basic idea is a strong sufficiency of substance or substantial energy. Vja is one of the great standing terms of the Vedic psychology. All states of being, whether matter, mind or life and all material, mental & vital activities depend upon an original flowing mass of Energy which is in the vivid phraseology of the Vedas called a flood or sea, samudra, sindhu or arnas. Our power or activity in any direction depends first on the amount & substantiality of this stream as it flows into, through or within our own limits of consciousness, secondly, on our largeness of being constituted by the wideness of those limits, thirdly, on our power of holding the divine flow and fourthly on the force and delight which enter into the use of our available Energy. The result is the self-expression, ansa or vyakti, which is the objective of Vedic Yoga. In the language of the Rishis whatever we can make permanently ours is called our holding or wealth, dhanam or in the plural dhanni; the powers which assist us in the getting, keeping or increasing of our dhanni, the yoga, s ti & vriddhi, are the gods; the powers which oppose & labour to rob us of this wealth are our enemies & plunderers, dasyus, and appear under various names, Vritras, Panis, Daityas, Rakshasas, Yatudhanas. The wealth itself may be the substance of mental light and knowledge or of vital health, delight & longevity or of material strength & beauty or it may be external possessions, cattle, progeny, empire, women. A close, symbolic and to modern ideas mystic parallelism stood established in the Vedic mind between the external & the internal wealth, as between the outer sacrifice which earned from the gods the external wealth & the inner sacrifice which brought by the aid of the gods the internal riches. In this system the word vja represents that amount & substantial energy of the stuff of force in the dhanam brought to the service of the sacrificer for the great Jivayaja, our daily & continual life-sacrifice. It is a substantial wealth, vjavad dhanam that the gods are asked to bring with them. We see then in what sense Saraswati, a goddess purely mental in her functions of speech and knowledge, can be vjebhir vjinvat. Vjin is that which is composed of vja, substantial energy; the plural vj h or vj ni the particular substantialities of various composed. For the rest, to no other purpose can a deity of speech & knowledge be vjebhir vjinvat. In what appropriateness or coherent conceivable sense can the goddess of knowledge be possessed of material wealth or full-stored with material food, ghee & butter, beef & mutton? If it be suggested that Speech of the mantras was believed by these old superstitious barbarians to bring them their ghee & butter, beef & mutton, the answer is that this is not what the language of the hymns expresses. Saraswati herself is said to be vjinvat, possessed of substance of food; she is not spoken of as being the cause of fullness of food or wealth to others.
  This explanation of vjebhir vjinvat leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type & nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions & physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct & true origin & even a previous existence in the religion & psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,were capable of such high thoughts & perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images & symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct & virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech & thought by the abstractions & formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised & the symbol.
  What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought & speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great,maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta.We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life & mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately aboveManas, preceding it therefore & containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy&Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness &Self-Being (Chit&Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit & Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness & self-delight. Annam, Prana & Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life & matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah & Swar, mental, vital & material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects & creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahn, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange & subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefa thers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been & cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source & substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad & Purana as only the interpretation & later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.
  Vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnas are therefore fixed in their significance. The word vashtu in the tenth Rik offers a difficulty. It is equivalent to vahatu, says the Brahmana; to kmayatu, says Sayana; but, deferring to the opinion of the Brahmana, he adds that it means really kmayitw vahatu. Undoubtedly the root va means in classical Sanscrit to desire; but from the evidence of the classical Sanscrit we have it established that in more ancient times its ordinary meaning must have been to subdue or control; for although the verb has lost this sense in the later language, almost all its derivatives bear that meaning & the sense of wish, will or desire only persists in a few of them, va, wish and possibly va, a woman. It is this sense which agrees best with the context of the tenth rik and is concealed in the vahatu of the Brahmanas. There is no other difficulty of interpretation in the passage.
  What then is it that Madhuchchhanda, son of Viswamitra, has to say in this Sukta of the goddess of inspiration, speech and knowledge? He does not directly address her, but he assigns to this deity the general control, support and illumination of the sacrifice he is performing. Let Saraswati he says control our Yajna. The epithets which fill the Rik must express either the permanent & characteristic qualities in her which fit her for this high office of control or the possible & suitable qualities with which he wishes her to be equipped in the performance of that office. First, pvak. She is the great purifier. It is as we shall see not a literary inspiration he invokes, but a divine inspiration, an inspiration of truths and right thoughts and, it may be, right feelings. Saraswati by this inspiration, by this inspired truth & knowledge & right feeling, is asked to purify, first, the mental state of the Yogin; for a mind unpurified cannot hold the light from on high. Knowledge purifies, says the Gita, meaning the higher spiritual knowledge which comes by ruti, divine inspiration; there is nothing in the whole world so pure as knowledge: Saraswati who purifies, Pvak Saraswat. Vjebhir vjin vat. She is full of substantial energy, stored with a great variety in substance of knowledge, chitraravastama, as is said in another hymn of the strong god Agni. The inspiration & resultant knowledge prayed for is not that of any isolated truth or slight awakening, but a great substance of knowledge & a high plenty of inspiration; the mental state has to be filled with this strong & copious substance of Saraswati.Dhiyvasuh. She is rich in understanding. Dh in the Veda is the buddhi, the faculty of reason that understands, discerns & holds knowledge. This inspiration has to be based on a great intellectual capacity which supports & holds the flood of the inspiration. Thus rich, thus strong & plenteous, thus purifying the divine inspiration has to hold & govern the Sacrifice.
  The thought passes on in the eleventh Rik from the prayer to the fulfilment. Yajnam dadhe Saraswat. Saraswati upholds the Yajna; she has accepted the office of governance & already upbears in her strength the action of the sacrifice. In that action she is Chodayitr unritnm, chetant sumatnm. That great luminous impulse of inspiration in which the truths of being start to light of themselves and are captured and possessed by the mind, that spiritual enlightenment and awakening in which right thoughts & right seeing become spontaneously the substance of our purified mental state, proceed from Saraswati & are already being poured by her into the system, like the Aryan stream into the Indus. Mati means any activity of the mind; right thoughts in the intellect, right feelings in the heart, right perceptions in the sensational mind, sumati may embrace any or all of these associations; in another context, by a different turn of the prefix, it may express kindly thoughts, friendly feelings, happy perceptions.
  In the last Rik the source of this great illumination is indicated. Spiritual knowledge is not natural to the mind; it is in us a higher faculty concealed & sleeping, not active to our consciousness. It is only when the inspiration of a divine enlightenment,Saraswat ketun, in the concrete Vedic language,seizes on that self-luminous faculty & directs a ray of it into our understanding that we receive the high truths, the great illuminations which raise us above our normal humanity. But it is not an isolated illumination with which this son of Viswamitra intends to be satisfied. The position for him is that the human perception & reason, but asleep, sushupta, achetana, on the level of the pure ideal knowledge. He wishes it to awake to the divine knowledge & his whole mental state to be illumined by it. The divine Inspiration has to awaken to conscious activity this great water now lying still & veiled in our humanity. This great awakening Saraswati now in the action of the Sacrifice effects for MadhuchchhandasMaho arnah prachetayati. The instrument is ketu, enlightening perception. With the knowledge that now streams into the mind from the ocean of divine knowledge all the ideas of the understanding in their various & many-branching activity are possessed and illumined. Dhiyo viv vi rjati. She illumines variously or in various directions, or, less probably, she entirely illumines, all the activities of the understanding. This invasion & illumination of his whole mental state by the state of divine knowledge, with its spontaneous manifestation of high truths, right thoughts, right feelings, the ritam jyotih, is the culmination of this sacrifice of Madhuchchhandas.
  Shall we suppose that a sacrifice with such a governance, such circumstances & such a crowning experience is the material offering of the Soma wine into a material fire on a material altar? Every expression in the text cries out against such an impossibility. This sacrifice must be a mental, moral subjective activity of which the Soma-offering is only a material symbol. We see at once that the Gita was not reading a later gloss into the Vedic idea in its description of the many kinds of Yajna in its [fourth] chapter. The modern Yoga and the ancient Yajna are one idea; there is only this difference that the Vedic Rishis regarded all the material & internal riches that came by Yoga as the gift of the gods to be offered to them again so that they may again increase them & supremely enrich our lives with all the boons that they, our friends, helpers, masters of world-evolution are so eager to shower upon us, the vessels & instruments of that evolution. The whole Vedic theory is succinctly stated in two slokas of the Gita. (III.10, 11)
  --
  Greatly has this short passage helped us. It has shown us the true physiognomy of Saraswati as the goddess of inspiration & inspired knowledge & the true nature of the Vedic Yajna; it has fixed the great Vedic terms, vja, dh & ketu; but above all it has given us a firm foundation for a religious & spiritual interpretation of Veda, a brilliant starting point for an inquiry into its truth & its ancient secret. We can now hope to be delivered from the obscuration of Veda by the ritualists & its modern degradation into the document of a primitive & barbarous religion. Its higher & truer sense shows itself in this brief passage like the dim line of land seen on the far horizon.
    The metre of the Vedic hymns depends as in English on the number of syllables in the line, quantity only entering in [as] an element of rhythmic variation. The sign marks a naturally long a, i, u,to which e & o must be added. Vowels followed by a double consonant are long as in Latin & Greek. V & y are often interpreted as separate short syllables as if they were u and i.
  --
  If the Vedas have a deep religious and psychological significance such as I have attributed to them, if they are not, as the disciples of the Europeans suppose, an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants, in the fixed formulae and individual variations of these voluminous songs to a small number of strongly characterised deities, some individual riks, some occasional passages, some entire hymns, even, which, in spite of the difficulties of an archaic diction & the concealing veil of a changed vocabulary, still bear the ancient truth on their very surface. The totality of the Rig Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, so constant in its common terms, so fixed & unchanging in its principal ideas that even one such rik, passage or hymn ought to exceed the limits of its single text & shed a wide light over the whole surface of Vedic thought & phraseology. Is there any such passage easily discoverable? There is one, I think, which occurs very early in the collection and by the nature of its presiding deity, its strongly subjective purport & its clear and striking language seems to fulfil our desideratum. It occurs in the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhandas, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the last three riks of the hymn constitute the indicative passage.
  In Saraswati we have a deity with subjective functions the first desideratum in our enquiry. Still, there is a doubt, a difficulty. Saraswati of the Epics & Puranas, Saraswati, as she is worshipped today throughout India is, no doubt, a purely subjective goddess and presides only over intellectual and immaterial functions. She is our Lady of Speech, the Muse, the goddess of Poetry, Art and Learning. Saraswati, the flowing, is also the name of more than one river in modern India, but especially of the sacred stream in upper India supposed to join secretly in their confluence the waters of theGanges and Yamuna and form with them the holy Triveni or triple braid of waters in which the ceremonial ablution of the devotee is more potent than at almost any other Indian place of pilgrimage and gives the richest spiritual fruit to the believing pilgrim. But in our modern religious ideas there is no real connexion, except of name, between the goddess and the river. In the Veda also there is a Saraswati who is the goddess of speech; in the Veda also there seems to be an ancient river Saraswati, although this stream is placed by Vedic scholars in the Panjab and not in the vicinity of Prayaga and Ayodhya. Were these two deities,for every river and indeed every natural object was to the Vedic Rishis a divine being,the same goddess Saraswati? Sayana accepts, even in this passage, their identity; she is, he tells us, [].1 If this identity were accepted, we would have to ask ourselves by what process of subjective metamorphosis a material Panjab river came to be the deity of Speech, the female power of Brahma, the Muse and tutelar goddess of scholar and poet. Or was not rather the goddess of speech eponymous of the river and subsequently imaged in it by the Vedic symbolists? But before we descend to these ulterior questions, we must first know for certain whether Sayana is right in his identification of the river and the Muse. First of all, are they the same in this passage? secondly, are they the same in any passage of the Veda? It is to the first question alone that we need address ourselves for the present; for on its solution depends the whole purport, value and helpfulness of these three Riks for the purposes of our enquiry into the sense and secret of the Vedas.
    Blank in MS; in his commentary on the passage under discussion, Sayana describes Saraswati as: dvividh . . . vigrahavaddevat nadrp ca.Ed.
  ***
  --
  If we are right, as we must now assume, in our interpretation of these three riks, then the conclusion is irresistible that the whole of this third Sukta in the Veda, & not only its closing verses, relates to an activity of moral & mental sacrifice and the other gods invoked by Madhuchchhandas are equally with Saraswati Powers of subjectiveNature, Indra not the god of rain, but a mental deity, the Aswins not twin stars, or, if stars, then lights of a sublimer heaven, the Visvadevas, gods not of general physical Nature, but supraphysical and in charge of our general subjective or subjective-objective activity. The supposition is inadmissible that the hymn is purely ritual in its body and only in-grafted with a spiritual tail. The physical functions of the gods in the Veda need not be denied; but they must be alien to the thought of Madhuchchhandas in this Sukta,unless as in some hymns of the Veda, there is the slesha or double application to subjective & objective activities. But this is improbable; for in the lines of which Saraswati is the goddess, we have found no reference either open or covert to any material form or function. She is purely the Muse and not at all the material river.
  We must examine, then, the rest of the hymn and by an impartial scrutiny discover whether it yields naturally, without forcing or straining, a subjective significance. If we find that no such subjective significance exists & it is the gods of rain & of stars & of material activities who are invoked, a serious if not a fatal doubt will be cast on the validity of the first step we have gained in our second chapter. Here, too, we must follow the clue by which we arrived at the subjective physiognomy of Saraswati. We must see what is the evidence of the epithets & activities assigned to the several deities of the Sukta.
  The first three riks are devoted to the Aswins & run in this strain:
  --
  When we look carefully at the passage before us, we find an expression which strikes one as a very extraordinary phrase in reference to a god of lightning and rain. Indryhi, says Madhuchchhanda, dhiyeshito viprajtah. On any ordinary acceptance of the meaning of words, we have to render this line, Come, O Indra, impelled by the understanding, driven by the Wise One. Sayana thinks that vipra means Brahmin and the idea is that Indra is moved to come by the intelligent sacrificing priests and he explains dhiyeshito, moved to come by our understanding, that is to say, by our devotion. But understanding does not mean devotion and the artificiality of the interpretation is apparent.We will, as usual, put aside the ritualistic & naturalistic traditions and see to what the natural sense of the words themselves leads us. I question the traditional acceptance of viprajta as a compound of vipra & jta; it seems tome clearly to be vi prajtah, driven forward variously or in various directions. I am content to accept the primary sense of impelled for ishita, although, whether we read dhiy ishito with the Padapatha, or dhiy shito, it may equally well mean, controlled by the understanding; but of themselves the expressions impelled & driven forward in various paths imply a perfect control.We have then, Come, O Indra, impelled (or controlled, governed) by the understanding and driven forward in various paths. What is so driven forward? Obviously not the storm, not the lightning, not any force of material Nature, but a subjective force, and, as one can see at a glance, a force of mind. Now Indra is the king of Swar and Swar in the symbolical interpretation of the Vedic terms current in after times is the mental heaven corresponding to the principle of Manas, mind. His name means the Strong. In the Puranas he is that which the Rishis have to conquer in order to attain their goal, that which sends the Apsaras, the lower delights & temptations of the senses to bewilder the sage and the hero; and, as is well known, in the Indian system of Yoga it is the Mind with its snares, sensuous temptations & intellectual delusions which is the enemy that has to be overcome & the strong kingdom that has to be conquered. In this passage Indra is not thought of in his human form, but as embodied in the principle of light or tejas; he is harivas, substance of brightness; he is chitrabhnu, of a rich & various effulgence, epithets not easily applicable to a face or figure, but precisely applicable to the principle of mind which has always been supposed in India to be in its material element made of tejas or pure light.We may conclude, therefore, that in Indra, master of Swarga, we have the divine lord of mental force & power. It is as this mental power that he comes sutvatah upa brahmni vghatah, to the soul-movements of the chanter of the sacred song, of the holder of the nectar-wine. He is asked to come, impelled or controlled by the understanding and driven forward by it in the various paths of sumati & snrit, right thinking & truth. We remember the image in the Kathopanishad in which the mind & senses are compared to reins & horses and the understanding to the driver. We look back & see at once the connection with the function demanded of the Aswins in the preceding verses; we look forward & see easily the connection with the activity of Saraswati in the closing riks. The thought of the whole Sukta begins to outline itself, a strong, coherent and luminous progression of psychological images begins to emerge.
  Brahmni, says Sayana, means the hymnal chants; vghatah is the ritwik, the sacrificial priest. These ritual senses belong to the words but we must always inquire how they came to bear them. As to vghat, we have little clue or evidence, but on the system I have developed in another work (the Origins of Aryan Speech), it may be safely concluded that the lost roots vagh & vgh, must have conveyed the sense of motion evident in the Latin vagus & vagari, wandering & to wander & the sense of crying out, calling apparent in the Latin vagire, to cry, & the Sanscrit vangh, to abuse, censure. Vghat may mean the sacrificial priest because he is the one who calls to the deity in the chant of the brahma, the sacred hymn. It may also mean one who increases in being, in his brahma, his soul, who is getting vja or substance.
  --
  We can now examine the functioning of the Visvadevas as they are revealed to us in these three riks of the ancient Veda: Come, says the Rishi, O Visvadevas who in your benignity uphold the activities of men, come, distributing the nectar-offering of the giver. O Visvadevas, swift to effect, come to the nectar-offering, hastening like mornings to the days (or, like lovers to their paramours). O Visvadevas, who stumble not in your work, for you are mighty for all activity and do no hurt, cleave in heart to the sacrifice & be its upbearers. The sense is clear & simple. The kindly gods who support man in his action & development, are to arrive; they are to give abroad the nectar-offering which is now given to them, to pour it out on the world in joy-giving activities of mind or body, for that is the relation of gods & men, as we see in the Gita, giving out whatever is given to them in an abundant mutual helpfulness. Swiftly have they to effect the many-sided action prepared for them, hastening to the joy of the offering of Ananda as a lover hastens to the joy of his mistress. They will not stumble or fail in any action entrusted to them, for they have full capacity for their great world-functions, nor, for the like reason, will they impair the force of the joy or the strength in the activity by misuse, therefore let them put their hearts into the sacrifice of action and upbear it by this unfaltering strength. Swiftness, variety, intensity, even a fierce intensity of joy & thought & action is the note throughout, but yet a faultless activity, fixed in its variety, unstumbling in its swiftness, not hurting the strength, light & joy by its fierceness or violent expenditure of energydhishnya, asridhah, adruhah. That which ensures this steadiness & unfaltering gait, is the control of the mental power which is the agent of the action & the holder of the joy by the understanding. Indra is dhiyeshita. But what will ensure the understanding itself from error & swerving? It is the divine inspiration, Saraswati, rich with mental substance & clearness, who will keep the system purified, uphold sovereignly the Yajna, & illumine all the actions of the understanding, by awakening with the high divine perception, daivyena ketun, the great sea of ideal knowledge above. For this ideal knowledge, as we shall see, is the satyam, ritam, brihat; it is wide expansion of being & therefore utmost capacity of power, bliss & knowledge; it is the unobscured light of direct & unerring truth, and it is the unstumbling, unswerving fixity of spontaneous Right & Law.
  We have gathered much from this brief hymn, one of the deepest in thought in the Veda. If our construction is correct, then this at least appears that the Veda is no loose, empty & tawdry collection of vague images & shallow superstitions, but there are some portions of it at least which present a clear, well-knit writing full of meaning & stored with ideas. We have the work of sages & thinkers, rishayah, kavayah, manshinah, subtle practical psychologists & great Yogins, not the work of savage medicine-men evolving out of primitive barbarism the first glimpses of an embryonic culture in the half-coherent fumble, the meaningless ritual of a worship of personified rain, wind, fire, sun & constellations. The gods of the Veda have a clear & fixed personality & functions & its conceptions are founded on a fairly advanced knowledge & theory at least of our subjective nature. Nor when we look at the clearness, fixity & frequently psychological nature of the functions of the Greek gods, Apollo, Hermes, Pallas, Aphrodite, [have we] the right to expect anything less from the ancestors of the far more subtle-minded, philosophical & spiritual Indian nation.

1.09 - Kundalini Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts
  author class:Sri Aurobindo
  --
  HE SYMBOLISM of the Veda betrays itself with the greatest clearness in the figure of the goddess Saraswati.
  In many of the other gods the balance of the internal sense and the external figure is carefully preserved. The veil sometimes becomes transparent or its corners are lifted even for the ordinary hearer of the Word; but it is never entirely removed.
  --
  But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment. She is, plainly and clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divine
  Inspiration.
  --
   spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical and psychological view of Nature and the world and the gods - and this, though by no means certain, is for the present the accepted view,1 - we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at least already advancing from the physical and naturalistic conception of the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is not only the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same time one of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question at once arises, whence came this extraordinary identification? And how does the connection of the two ideas present itself in the
  Vedic hymns? And there is more; for Saraswati is important not only in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding farther let us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what they can teach us.
  The association of a river with the poetical inspiration occurs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are not conceived of as rivers; they are only connected in a not very intelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This stream is the river Hippocrene, the fountain of the Horse, and to account for its name we have a legend that it sprang from the hoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock with his hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where the mountain had been thus smitten. Was this legend merely a Greek fairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident that if it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to a psychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspiration, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been an attempt to put into concrete figures certain psychological facts.
  --
  Punjab. The psychological significance of Saraswati carries with it a psychological significance for the whole symbol of the Vedic waters.2
   Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but with other goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols and especially with Bharati and Ila. In the later Puranic forms of worship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharati and Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi, the Large, Great or Vast. The three, Ila, Mahi or Bharati and
   Saraswati are associated together in a constant formula in those hymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to the
  --
  "May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birth to the bliss, take their place on the sacrificial seat, they who stumble not," or "who come not to hurt" or "do no hurt." The epithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movement with its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfalls of sin and error. The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of the tenth Mandala:
  A no yajnam bharat tuyam etu, il.a manus.vad iha cetayant;
  --
  Yamuna and Saraswati and their confluence are in the Tantric imagery Yogic symbols, and they are used, though in a different way, in Yogic symbolism generally.
   Saraswati and Her Consorts
  --
  "May Bharati come speeding to our sacrifice and Ila hither awakening our consciousness (or, knowledge or perceptions) in human wise, and Saraswati, - three goddesses sit on this blissful seat, doing well the Work."
  It is clear and will become yet clearer that these three goddesses have closely connected functions akin to the inspirational power of Saraswati. Saraswati is the Word, the inspiration, as
  I suggest, that comes from the Ritam, the Truth-consciousness.
  --
   Saraswati comes to our rescue against the last absurd supposition, but it negatives equally the naturalistic interpretation. This characterisation of Mahi, Saraswati's companion in the sacrifice, the sister of the goddess of inspiration, entirely identified with her in the later mythology, is one proof among a hundred others that light in the Veda is a symbol of knowledge, of spiritual illumination. Surya is the Lord of the supreme Sight, the vast
  Light, br.haj jyotih., or, as it is sometimes called, the true Light, r.tam jyotih.. And the connection between the words r.tam and br.hat is constant in the Veda.
  --
  Mahi is full of the rays of this Surya; she carries in her this illumination. Moreover she is sunr.ta, she is the word of a blissful Truth, even as it has been said of Saraswati that she is the impeller of happy truths, codayitr sunr.tanam. Finally, she is viraps, large or breaking out into abundance, a word which recalls to us that the Truth is also a Largeness, r.tam br.hat. And in another hymn, (I.22.10), she is described as varutr dhis.an.a, a widely covering or embracing Thought-power. Mahi, then, is the luminous vastness of the Truth, she represents the Largeness, br.hat, of the superconscient in us containing in itself the Truth, r.tam. She is, therefore, for the sacrificer like a branch covered with ripe fruit.
  Ila is also the word of the truth; her name has become identical in a later confusion with the idea of speech. As Saraswati is an awakener of the consciousness to right thinkings or right states of mind, cetant sumatnam, so also Ila comes to the sacrifice awakening the consciousness to knowledge, cetayant.
  She is full of energy, suvra, and brings knowledge. She also is connected with Surya, the Sun, as when Agni, the Will is invoked
  --
  As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, sruti, which gives the inspired word, so Ila represents dr.s.t.i, the truthvision. If so, since dr.s.t.i and sruti are the two powers of the
  Rishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, we can understand the close connection of Ila and Saraswati. Bharati or Mahi is the largeness of the Truth-consciousness which, dawning on man's limited mind, brings with it the two sister Puissances. We can also understand how these fine and living distinctions came afterwards to be neglected as the Vedic knowledge declined and
  Bharati, Saraswati, Ila melted into one.
  We may note also that these three goddesses are said to
  --
  Such, then, is the character of Saraswati as a psychological principle, her peculiar function and her relation to her most immediate connections among the gods. How far do these shed any light on her relations as the Vedic river to her six sister streams?
  The number seven plays an exceedingly important part in the
  --
  - as the Great Water, maho arn.as, - an expression which gives us at once the origin of the later term, Mahas, - or sometimes mahan arn.avah.. We see in the third hymn the close connection between Saraswati and this great water. Let us examine a little more closely this connection before we proceed to the consideration of the Vedic cows and their relation to the god
  Indra and Saraswati's close cousin the goddess Sarama. For it is necessary to define these relations before we can progress with the scrutiny of Madhuchchhandas' other hymns addressed without exception to the great Vedic deity, King of Heaven, who, according to our hypothesis, symbolises the Power of Mind and especially the divine or self-luminous Mind in the human being.

1.10 - Mantra Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  subject class:Yoga

1.10 - The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  HE THREE riks of the third hymn of Madhuchchhandas in which Saraswati has been invoked, run as follows, in the Sanskrit: -
  Pavaka nah. sarasvat, vajebhir vajinvat; yajnam vas.t.u dhiyavasuh..
  --
  By this constant awakening and impulsion, summed up in the word, perception, ketu, often called the divine perception, daivya ketu, to distinguish it from the false mortal vision of things, - Saraswati brings into active consciousness in the human being the great flood or great movement, the Truthconsciousness itself, and illumines with it all our thoughts. We must remember that this truth-consciousness of the Vedic Rishis is a supra-mental plane, a level of the hill of being (adreh. sanu) which is beyond our ordinary reach and to which we have to climb with difficulty. It is not part of our waking being, it is hidden from us in the sleep of the superconscient. We can then understand what Madhuchchhandas means when he says that
   Saraswati by the constant action of the inspiration awakens the
  --
  But this line may, so far as the mere grammatical form of it goes, be quite otherwise translated; we may take maho arn.as in apposition to Saraswati and render the verse " Saraswati, the great river, awakens us to knowledge by the perception and shines in all our thoughts." If we understand by this expression,
  "the great river", as Sayana seems to understand, the physical river in the Punjab, we get an incoherence of thought and expression which is impossible except in a nightmare or a lunatic asylum. But it is possible to suppose that it means the great flood of inspiration and that there is no reference to the great ocean of the Truth-Consciousness. Elsewhere, however, there is repeated reference to the gods working by the vast power of the great flood (mahna mahato arn.avasya) where there is no reference to Saraswati and it is improbable that she should be meant. It is true that in the Vedic writings Saraswati is spoken of as the secret self of Indra, - an expression, we may observe, that is void of sense if Saraswati is only a northern river and
  Indra the god of the sky, but has a very profound and striking significance if Indra be the illumined Mind and Saraswati the inspiration that proceeds from the hidden plane of the supra-
  102
  --
   mental Truth. But it is impossible to give Saraswati so important a place with regard to the other gods as would be implied by interpreting the phrase mahna mahato arn.avasya in the sense
  "by the greatness of Saraswati". The gods act, it is continually stated, by the power of the Truth, r.tena, but Saraswati is only one of the deities of the Truth and not even the most important or universal of them. The sense I have given is, therefore, the only rendering consistent with the general thought of the Veda and with the use of the phrase in other passages.
  Let us then start from this decisive fact put beyond doubt by this passage - whether we take the great stream to be Saraswati itself or the Truth-ocean - that the Vedic Rishis used the image of water, a river or an ocean, in a figurative sense and as a psychological symbol, and let us see how far it takes us. We notice first that existence itself is constantly spoken of in the
  Hindu writings, in Veda, Purana and even philosophical reasoning and illustration as an ocean. The Veda speaks of two oceans, the upper and the lower waters. These are the ocean of the subconscient, dark and inexpressive, and the ocean of the superconscient, luminous and eternal expression but beyond the human mind. Vamadeva in the last hymn of the fourth Mandala speaks of these two oceans. He says that a honeyed wave climbs up from the ocean and by means of this mounting wave which is the Soma (amsu) one attains entirely to immortality; that wave or that Soma is the secret name of the clarity (ghr.tasya, the symbol of the clarified butter); it is the tongue of the gods; it is the nodus (nabhi) of immortality.
  --
  Thus we find that both Veda and Purana use the same symbolic images; the ocean is for them the image of infinite and eternal existence. We find also that the image of the river or flowing current is used to symbolise a stream of conscious being. We find that Saraswati, one of the seven rivers, is the river of inspiration flowing from the Truth-consciousness. We have the right then to suppose that the other six rivers are also psychological symbols.
  But we need not depend entirely on hypothesis and inference, however strong and entirely convincing. As in the hymn of Vamadeva we have seen that the rivers, ghr.tasya dharah., are there not rivers of clarified butter or rivers of physical water, but psychological symbols, so we find in other hymns the same compelling evidence as to the image of the seven rivers. For this purpose I will examine one more hymn, the first Sukta of the third Mandala sung by the Rishi Vishwamitra to the god Agni; for here he speaks of the seven rivers in language as remarkable and unmistakable as the language of Vamadeva about the rivers of clarity. We shall find precisely the same ideas recurring in quite different contexts in the chants of these two sacred singers.

1.19 - The Victory of the Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Sarama found the fastness, the wideness of the luminous cows; thereby the human creature enjoys the bliss," svadhyo diva a sapta yahv, rayo duro vi r.tajna ajanan; vidad gavyam sarama dr.d.ham urvam, yena nu kam manus. bhojate vit.. These are evidently not the waters of the Punjab, but the rivers of Heaven, the streams of the Truth,2 goddesses like Saraswati, who possess the Truth in knowledge and open by it the doors of the beatitude to the human creature. We see here too what I have already insisted on, that there is a close connection between the finding of the Cows and the outflowing of the Rivers; they are parts
  Note that in I.32 Hiranyastupa Angirasa describes the waters released from Vritra as "ascending the mind", mano ruhan.ah., and elsewhere they are called the waters that have the knowledge, apo vicetasah. (I.83.1).
  --
  Truth to which we arrive is his own home and the own home of the other gods, and the final home also of the soul of man. And this immortality is described as a beatitude, a state of infinite spiritual wealth and plenitude, ratna, rayi, vaja, radhas, etc.; the opening doors of our divine home are the doors of the felicity, rayo durah., the divine doors which swing wide open to those who increase the Truth (r.tavr.dhah.) and which are discovered for us by Saraswati and her sisters, by the seven Rivers, by Sarama; to them and to the wide pasture (ks.etra) in the unobstructed and equal infinities of the vast Truth Brihaspati and Indra lead upward the shining Herds.
  With these conceptions clearly fixed in our minds we shall be able to understand the verses of Vamadeva which only repeat in symbolic language the substance of the thought expressed more openly by Parashara. It is to Agni the Seer-Will that Vamadeva's opening hymns are addressed. He is hymned as the friend or builder of man's sacrifice who awakes him to the vision, the knowledge (ketu), sa cetayan manus.o yajnabandhuh. (IV.1.9); so doing, "he dwells in the gated homes of this being, accomplishing; he, a god, has come to be the means of accomplishment of the mortal," sa ks.eti asya duryasu sadhan, devo martasya sadhanitvam apa. What is it that he accomplishes? The next verse tells us. "May this Agni lead us in his knowledge towards that bliss of him which is enjoyed by the gods, that which by the thought all the immortals created and Dyauspita the father out-pouring the Truth"; sa tu no agnir nayatu prajanann, accha ratnam devabhaktam yad asya; dhiya yad visve amr.ta akr.n.van, dyaus.pita janita satyam uks.an. This is Parashara's beatitude of the Immortality created by all the powers of the immortal godhead doing their work in the thought of the Truth and in its impulsion, and the out-pouring of the Truth is evidently the out-pouring of the waters as is indicated by the word uks.an,

1.20 - The Hound of Heaven, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Light and Darkness, Sarama who leads in the search for the radiant herds and discovers both the path and the secret hold in the mountain must be a forerunner of the dawn of Truth in the human mind. And if we ask ourselves what power among the truth-finding faculties it is that thus discovers out of the darkness of the unknown in our being the truth that is hidden in it, we at once think of the intuition. For Sarama is not Saraswati, she is not the inspiration, even though the names are similar. Saraswati gives the full flood of the knowledge; she is or awakens the great stream, maho arn.ah., and illumines with plenitude all the thoughts, dhiyo visva vi rajati. Saraswati possesses and is the flood of the Truth; Sarama is the traveller and seeker on its path who does not herself possess but rather finds that which is lost.
  Neither is she the plenary word of the revelation, the Teacher of man like the goddess Ila; for even when what she seeks is found, she does not take possession but only gives the message to the seers and their divine helpers who have still to fight for the possession of the light that has been discovered.

17.02 - Hymn to the Sun, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   That establishes felicity, discovers treasures, gives lavishly; O Saraswati, that do thou here affirm. [49]
   The gods carry out the sacrifice with sacrifice; those were the first and pristine laws.

1.kbr - Poem 9, #Songs of Kabir, #Kabir, #Sufism
  Where millions of Saraswatis, Goddess of Music, play on the veena
  There is my Lord self-revealed: and the scent of sandal and flowers dwells in those deeps.

2.01 - Mandala One, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  (10) May purifying Saraswati, opulent with her plenitudes, rich in thought, desire our sacrifice.
  (11) Impeller of true words, awakener to right thinkings, Saraswati upholds our sacrifice.
  (12) Saraswati awakens us by the intuition conscious of theGreat Sea of the Light and illumines all our thoughts.
  ***
  --
  (9) May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi, the three goddesses born of the sphere of delight sit unfailingly beside our flame.
  (10) I call here Twastha supreme whose shape is the world; may he be to us absolute and pure.

2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  Shakti is described as Saraswati. Then the Lord is described as
  manishi, the Thinker. It is the thought of the Lord that is the

2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  ALICE IN WONDERLAND

2.08 - On Non-Violence, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, he has criticised Dayananda Saraswati who has, according to him, abolished image-worship and set up the idolatry of the Vedas. He forgets, I am afraid, that he is doing the same in economics by his Charkha and Khaddar, and, if one may add, by his idolatry of non-violence in religion and philosophy.
   In that way everyone has established idol-worship. He has criticised the Arya Samaj but why not criticise Mahomedanism? His statement is adulatory of the Koran and of Christianity which is idolatry of the Bible, Christ and the Cross. Man is hardly able to do without externals and only a few will go to the kernel.

2.09 - SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  SEVEN REASONS WHY A SCIENTIST BELIEVES IN GOD

2 - Other Hymns to Agni, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  8. In unison may Bharati with her Muses of invocation, Ila with gods and men, and Fire, Saraswati with her powers of inspiration come down to us, the three goddesses sit upon this seat of sacrifice.
    19 Or, may they so shine with their lights that Mitra may take pleasure in us and Varuna
  --
  55 Or, in the river Drishadwati, in Apaya and in Saraswati.
  56 Or, himself a begetter;
  --
  8. May Ila, Saraswati and Mahi,7 the three goddesses who create the bliss sit on the sacred seat, they who never err.
  9. O maker of forms, hither benignant arrive all-pervading in thy fostering to us and in thyself; in sacrifice on sacrifice us upward guard.
    7 Ila, goddess of revelation; Saraswati, goddess of inspiration; Mahi, goddess of the Vast Truth, Mahas or r.tam br.hat.
  10. O Tree,8 there where thou knowest the secret names of the gods make rich our offerings.
  --
  8. In unison may Bharati with her Muses of invocation, Ila with gods and men, and Fire, Saraswati with her powers of inspiration come down to us, the three goddesses sit upon this seat of sacrifice.
    6 Or, be with us for our happy journey.
  --
  5. O Fire, go on thy embassy and fail not towards the gods with the company of those who fashion the Word: sacrifice to Saraswati and the life-powers, and the two riders of the horse and the waters and to all the gods for the giving of the ecstasy.
  6. Vasishtha kindles thee, O Fire, slaying the destroying demon, sacrifice for the Wealth to the many-thoughted goddess:12 many are the roads of thy approach, O knower of all things born. Do you always guard us with all kinds of weal.
  --
  10. I choose the protection of Indra and the Fire with Saraswati
  at their side, for whom the sacred song breaks into light.6
  --
  8. May Bharati come swiftly to our sacrifice, Ila awakening to knowledge here like a human thinker, and Saraswati, the three goddesses, - may they sit, perfect in their works, on this sacred seat of happy ease.
  9. He who fashioned in their forms this earth and heaven, the Parents, and fashioned all the worlds, him today and here, O missioned priest of the call, do thou worship, strong for sacrifice, having the knowledge, even the divine maker of forms.

30.07 - The Poet and the Yogi, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Even at the very commencement of his immortal epic, Meghnadbadh he invokes Saraswati the white-armed Mother of knowledge. The feeling or firm conviction is that the Mother of Knowledge is also the giver of liberation. That is why the poetry that is a help and a means to attain liberation has a special appeal to our heart.
   Of course, there are poets whose creations totally lack spirituality or even something akin to it. For example, Catullus, of whom Sri Aurobindo says: "He has as much philosophy in him as a red ant."

33.14 - I Played Football, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   I have dabbled in football almost since my birth or, to be more exact, from the time I barely completed five. My hand was introduced to the pen or chalk and my feet touched the ball practically at one and the same time. Would you believe it, I had my formal initiation into studies, not once but twice, and on both occasions it was performed with due ceremony on a Saraswati Puja day, as has been the custom with us. The first time it took place, I was only four years old and I cannot now tell you why it had to be at that early age. It may be that I had gone into tantrums on seeing somebody else's initiation and a mock ceremony had to be gone through just in order to keep me quiet. But I had to go through the ceremony once again at the age of five, for according to the scriptures one cannot be properly initiated at the age of four, so the earlier one had to be treated as cancelled and a fresh initiation given to make it truly valid. Perhaps this double process has had something to do with the solid base and the maturity of my learning!
   But if I was to play football, I must at least get hold of a ball. Here you have your footballs by the dozen, as if they were tennis balls. But we had to move heaven and earth in those days in order to procure a single ball. Even the older boys could seldom boast of more than one, or at the most one and a half - one already half-worn and the other a mere half, an old tattered ball with a thousand patches like the shoes of Abu Salim in the story. But young people never lack devices. We discovered a substitute, the Indian grape-fruit or shaddock that looks like a ball. No doubt the touch was hard, but it could be reduced to a convenient softness with our kicks and blows and poundings with the fist. The only trouble was that the thing gave way soon afterwards on receiving such treatment. But this particular fruit was no rarity in our part of the country. There were any number of trees and it grew in profusion; there were several trees in our compound itself.

34.02 - Hymn To All-Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   With the ancient mantra we invoke them all - Bhaga and Mitra and Aditi and the unstumbling Daksha, Aryaman too, and Varuna and the twin Aswins. May Saraswati, Mother of bliss, create happiness for us.
   (4)

34.06 - Hymn to Sindhu, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   O Ganga and Yamuna and Saraswati! O Shutudri with thy companion Parushni! Cling to this hymn to you.
   O Marutbridha with thy companion Asikni, O Arjikiya with thy companion Vitasta and Sushoma lend your ears to me.

35.04 - Hymn To Surya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   Hymn To Bhavani Hymn To Saraswati
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Other Hymns and PrayersHymn To Surya
  --
   Hymn To Bhavani Hymn To Saraswati

35.05 - Hymn To Saraswati, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
  object:35.05 - Hymn To Saraswati
  author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
  --
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Other Hymns and PrayersHymn To Saraswati
   Hymn To Saraswati
   WHITE-hued white as the Kunda flower or the moon
  --
   May Saraswati save us, the Goddess, may she wipe out
   all our slothness unto the last.
   Oh Saraswati, thou art the great destiny, the supreme
   Knowledge, oh Beauty with lotus-eyes!
  --
   gleaming white, O Saraswati!
   ***

35.06 - Who Seeks Holy Places?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   Hymn To Saraswati An Introduction To The Vedas
   Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Other Hymns and PrayersWho Seeks Holy Places?
  --
   Hymn To Saraswati An Introduction To The Vedas

36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   "She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in consciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacrifice.
   " Saraswati, by the perception awakens in consciousness the great flood (the vast movement of the rtam) and illumines entirely all the thoughts." (Translated by Sri Aurobindo).
   In this instance too the fundamental idea is not something very abstruse. It is commonsense that the theme is related to the experience of Truth, the spiritual realisation and psychological concept. Acharya Sayana was at sea to interpret these few slokas in the light of natural phenomena and sacrificial ceremonies, so much so that he provokes our laughter as well as a sense of pity. We know Saraswati as the Deity of knowledge. So it is natural that the words dhiyavasuh (one whose wealth consists of pure intellect), dhiyo visvah (universal intellect), or words like sumati (right movements of thought) should be applicable to Saraswati. The word dhi (pure intellect) is well-known. But such an obvious meaning does not serve Sayana's purpose. So he used karma (action), i.e. the action of showering as a synonym for dhi. In another place concerning Mitra and Varuna it has been said that these two gods made up such dhi, as is ghrtacim, literally "besmeared with ghrta" (dhiyam ghrtacim sadhanta - 1.2.7). But according to the interpreter Sayana, the phrase dhiyarh ghrtacim means the rain that pours water! In some other context (1.14.6) Sayana himself says that the root ghr may also mean "to make something shine"; so the plain meaning of dhiyarh ghrtacim is the enlightened intellect. But Sayana preferred to interpret the word ghrta (lit. clarified butter) as water and rains. If we refer to the context where Sayana explains ghrta as effulgence it will be clearer to us that this effulgence is not even the physical external light; it refers to the inner illumination. There (1.14.6) Agni (fire) has been called (one with a blazing front; along with this adjective another adjective, namely manoyujah has also been used; it means that Agni has to be brought under control with the help of the mind. This very truth has been expressed elsewhere by the sage Vishwamitra:
   "Kindling the Vaishwanara fire with the aid of the mind." Agni is kavi-kratu. Sayana himself has explained the word kratu as making or action. We would like to call it the power of action - the Greek kratos. So kavi-kratu would mean one endowed with the power of action, the creative genius. It is well known that the Kavi, the poet, is a creator. The Veda has applied the epithet kavi to all the gods as well as to a man who has, attained or realised the divine knowledge. Agni kavikratuh means the dynamic power of vision. But this plain meaning amounts to a profound spiritual concept and ceases to be the fire with which we are familiar; that is why Sayana explains 'Kavi' as 'Kranta' - and 'Kavi-kratu' as the one who performs the action of sacrifice. We cite another instance. It is known to us all - I speak of the Gayatri Mantra: Tat saviturvarenyam Bhargo devasya dhimahi, dhiyo yo nah prachodayat (Let our intelligence dwell on the beloved light of that. creative godhead, the Sun who is the Creator, so that he may endow us with the right intelligence.)1
  --
   The faculty of knowledge of the Rishis was based on this subtle realisation. And this subtle realisation has its different levels, classifications and variations which the Vedic seers have termed Ila, Saraswati, Sarama and Dakshina. These four names have been plausibly interpreted as sruti (Revelation), smrti (Inspiration), bodhi (Intuition) and viveka (Discrimination). We are not going to probe further into the mystery. We just want to point out the difference between the outlook of the ancients and that of the moderns.
   The ancient seers dealt with supraphysical truths. Modern science and philosophy deal with abstract concepts. But these concepts are born of the rational intellect. We may call them theories, well-arranged and systematised; hence nothing extraordinary. But the ancient seers realised and tried to express the transcendental Truth and its Power. There is a play of Power behind the world of phenomena which at once resolves itself into more and more subtle forms and evolves from the deepest level to the grosser manifestations. The seers of yore were wont to study the origin and nature of all the different stages. of subtle forms knitting them into a system. By virtue of their spiritual insight they discovered that the world consists of different levels of existence sphere after sphere ranging from the gross to the subtle, peak after peak in an ascending order. One existence runs through them all. The supreme Being is there in each part. The Power of the self-same Being works in each and every part, differing in form and function in different levels of manifestation. Nevertheless there is a symmetry due to the fact that all becomings and their dynamis proceed from one fundamental Being. Again, the truth in one level is reflected on other levels, for it is the same Power of the Supreme Being that travels from the most subtle to the most gross manifestation. So there is a parallelism in the nature of all the levels of existence.
  --
   The Vedas have a spiritual mystery of their own. We do not say that it is we who have discovered that spiritual mystery for the first time. As regards this we have already referred to Sayana and the Nirukta. Even in this modern age there are some who have endeavoured to present a spiritual interpretation of the Vedas. Perhaps Dayananda Saraswati is the pioneer among them. Pundit Durgadas Lahiri and Dwijadas Dutt have paid much attention to this aspect of the Vedas. But our spiritual interpretation widely differs from theirs. In fact, we would rather call our interpretation metaphysical and not spiritual. Dayananda's spiritual interpretation was based on the ctrine of Ishwara, Dwijadas's on that of the Brahman, and Durgadas's on the devotional religious feeling. No doubt, the Vedas have all these. But these scholars have shown only in brief the general form of spirituality in the Vedas. The mysteries of the Vedas are far more deep and subtle. The Veda is a Yogic science, a system of science and kowledgeacquired through Yoga.
   The very name Veda is self-explanatory. The Veda signifies knowledge. It is derived from the root "vid" (to know). The Veda particularly refers to the embodiment of that knowledge which is the soul and basis of the culture, education and civilisation of the Hindus, the Indians, the whole Aryan race. This knowledge was realised by a body of aspirants called Rishis - where and when it is difficult to trace with certainty. And it is the succession of the Rishis, the realised ones, that has kept up, multiplied and systematised this knowledge. The Veda is otherwise called Shruti, for it is said that from generation to generation the disciples used to receive the Vedic mantras from their preceptors by hearing and store them up in their memory. But this is only a secondary human interpretation. The real reason why the Veda is called Shruti is that the Seers received, by an occult hearing, these mantras pregnant with knowledge. At times they could see the mantras during their meditation. Hence they are called the Seers of mantras and the knowledge acquired by them goes by the name Shruti (things heard). And this gives us the clue to the reason why the Veda is supposed to have no human origin, neither a beginning nor an end. The Divine Knowledge is not a human creation. It comprises the principles of truth inherent in creation. And it will endure for all time, The Seers are merely the instruments for its manifestation.

36.08 - A Commentary on the First Six Suktas of Rigveda, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
   The fourth group: Saraswati, the wealth of the fullest inspiration of the complete Truth, signifies speedy and rhythmic truth. She is the divine hearing. No doubt, we see and meet the Truth with our divine vision, but to make, the Truth active and dynamic and fill the creation with the power of Truth we needs must take the help of divine hearing. As the truth possesses a form, even so it has a name. It is precisely because of form and name that the truth becomes concrete. The form of truth is Visible in the divine vision, the name of truth in the divine hearing. Saraswati gives the divine name and Ila gives the divine form to the truth. Under the inspiration of Saraswati the truth casts aside all untruths. Hence she is called Pavaka(the Purifier). Above the mind there abides the vast ocean of Truth. We have neither any knowledge nor any experience of it. In a sense, we are quite unconscious of it. Saraswati raises the intelligence into the vast ocean of Truth and purifies it Afterwards she brings it down to our understanding. She manifests the complete knowledge in all its facets and make them living.
   In the Vedic literature, very often we get the reference to vak(Word). So it will be no exaggeration on our par to hold that the aim of the Vedic spiritual discipline is to get the significant sound aspect of the truth. And for this the Vedic seers of truth are called the seers of mantras O the creators of mantras. Vakis the living image of truth There lies a rhythm in the being of truth and the movement of this rhythm produces a note which was later on called nada(the unsounded sound) or Shabda Brahman (the Brahman manifested as Sound). When the rhythm of this note is found in out intelligence and mind, it takes the form of a sentence and this very thing is called a true mantra. The more a language can express intimately and direct the primal form and rhythm of truth, the more the mantra becomes living. Therefore the aspirant who has acquired this mantra has also acquired truth and the power of truth. The Vedic seers have placed the name of truth in different categories, e.g., Rk,

3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  of Vritra and his hosts. That Agni is, like Indra, Saraswati and
  others, a slayer of Vritra and releaser of the waters, there are sev.
  --
  Maruts, Rudra, Vishnu, Saraswati, with the object of provoking
  by the sacrifice the gifts of the gods, - cows, horses, gold and
  --
  that some of the gods, Varuna, Saraswati, had a psychological as
  well as a physical function. I go farther and say that this double
  --
  to Daksha & Saraswati, Ila, Sarama & Mahi the activities of the
  Truth & Right, to the Rudras, Maruts & Adityas, the play of

Bhagavad Gita, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  author class:Swami Sivananda Saraswati
  

- TABLE OF CONTENTS -



r1914 08 14, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   2) Saraswati in the Samadhi.
   3) intense telepathy.
  --
   The Saraswati bhava must now subordinate its predominance. It forms the mould only, not the contents.
   ***

WORDNET














IN WEBGEN [10000/164]

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Vishnudevananda Saraswati ::: Born: December 31, 1927; Died: November 9, 1993; Occupation: Author;
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Chidananda Saraswati ::: Born: September 24, 1916; Died: August 28, 2008;
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Krishnananda Saraswati ::: Born: April 25, 1922; Died: November 23, 2001; Occupation: Author;
Brahmananda Saraswati ::: Born: December 21, 1870; Died: May 20, 1953;
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2018110.Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24253980-saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33290777-saraswati-s-intelligence
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39924691-saraswati-ka-gyan-saraswati-s-intelligence---hindi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8517800-saraswati-park
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/121729.Chinmayananda_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13997953.Niranjananda_Swami_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16370427.Nelly_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17680228.Saraswati_Pratikshya
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2071596.Satyananda_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215068.Sivananda_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/349493.Swami_Niranjanananda_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4640633.Saraswati_Nagpal
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5338547.Dayananda_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5449511.Risa_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5560834.Satyadharma_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/598729.Chandrasekharendra_Saraswati
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7582093.Swami_Satyananda_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Chinmayananda_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Niranjananda_Swami_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Satyananda_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Sivananda_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Swami_Prakashanand_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Satyadharma_Saraswati
Goodreads author - Chandrasekharendra_Saraswati
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Ganesha#CITEREFSaraswati2004
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Saraswati
selforum - shudra bhaga and mahasaraswati
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2018/07/finding-saraswati-river-restoring-flow.html
wiki.auroville - Mahasaraswati
Dharmapedia - Chandrashekarendra_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Chinmayananda_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Dayananda_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Dayananda_Saraswati_(Arsha_Vidya
Dharmapedia - Indus-Saraswati_civilization
Dharmapedia - Krishnananda_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Lakshmanananda_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Sivananda_Saraswati
Dharmapedia - Swami_Dayananda_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Balasaraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chinmayananda_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dayanand_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Dayananda_Saraswati.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Saraswati.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niranjanananda_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Satchidananda_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Satyananda_Saraswati
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shantananda_Saraswati
https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/Saraswati
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Vishnudevananda_Saraswati
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dayananda_Saraswati.ogg
Atmaprajnananda Saraswati
Aulocera saraswati
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Kailash Rai Saraswati Vidya Mandir, Jhumri Telaiya
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