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--- QUOTES

All life is Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

Her greatest progress is a deepened need. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, [T5]

Missing its aim is all that it can speak ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:4, 360

It is the supermind we have to bring down, manifest, realise. ~ Sri Aurobindo

He laid experience at the Godhead's feet;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan

A voice cried, 'Go where none have gone! Dig deeper, deeper yet
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

Man lifted up the burden of his fate
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn

The key to the flaming doors of ecstasy. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn

Yet when he is most near, she feels him far. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.06, [T5]

All can be done if the god-touch is there
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn

He sees within the face of deity, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge, [T5]

And in her bosom nursed a greater dawn
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Return to Earth

Mind flowed unknowing in the sap of life ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair, [T5]

The palace woke to its own emptiness;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Call to the Quest

The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Always the Ideal beckoned from afar.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal

At play with him as with her child or slave, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame

A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces

See God everywhere and be not frightened by masks
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Assent to thy high self, create, endure.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

If even then we make mistakes, yet God makes none.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

... a single word that breaks the seals of the mind...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

But still the invisible Magnet drew his soul
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair, [T5]

I am stronger than death and greater than my fate
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate

Our life is a paradox with God for key.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge, [T5]

The Knowledge brings also the Power and the Joy.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

But thou hast come and all will surely change:
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri

Convincing the abyss by heavenly form
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

I carry the fire that never can be quenched.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces

Only the Eternal's strength in us can dare
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal

Time's sun-flowers' gaze at gold Eternity:
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Heavens of the Ideal

And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

A thinking entity appeared in Space.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms of the Little Life

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn, [T5]

The zero covers an immortal face.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother

And drinks experience like a streng thening wine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

Devotion is the key which opens the door to liberation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Each part in us desires its absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life

Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent of Night, [T5]

As if in a struggle of the Void to be.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms of the Little Life

He has need of darkness to perceive some light
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, [T4]

What it knew was an image in a broken glass,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, In the Self of Mind, [T5]

His hunger for the eternal thou must nurse
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces, [T5]

' . . . the supreme Mage, the divine Magician, . . .' [the Lord]
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge, [T5]

Its signs stare at us like an unknown script,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge, [T5]

Plastic and passive to the all-shaping Fire
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

A vast surrender was his only strength
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother

Here was a quiet country of fixed mind
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries

If all forms, quantities, qualities were to disappear, this would remain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD 1.09-08

His little hour is spent in little things.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life

The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Make the abysm a road for Heaven's descent,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life

But all power is in the end one, all power is really soul-power.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

ekas tis thati viras tis thati - he stands alone, he stands as a hero.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Glossary of terms

Her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces, [T5]

Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from God.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri

He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

Like one who wakes to find his dreams were true
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T0]

All here can change if the Magician choose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Let Him choose for thee a king's palace or the bowl of the beggar.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

There can be no firm foundation in sadhana without equality, samata.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

There is a purpose in each stumble and fall. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

All time is one body, Space a single look.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

Study cannot take the same or a greater importance than sadhana.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, [T2]

All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, [T5]

The principle of the Yoga is rejection-throwing out of the being.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T5]

All that denies must be torn out and slain
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother, [T5]

His soul was freed and given to her alone.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother, [T5]

It is the soul in us which turns always towards Truth, Good and Beauty.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, [T5]

She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame, [T5]

A fiery portion of the Wonderful,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

And crying for a direction in the void
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

299. Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

Supermind is the vast self-extension of the Brahman that contains and develops.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

This too must now be overpassed and left
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

And yet she cannot choose but labours on;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life

Only the one who can give everything, enjoys the Divine All everywhere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T3]

He journeys sleepless through an unending night;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

He who seeks the Divine must consecrate himself to God and to God only.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

Tied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

A beam of the Eternal smites his heart,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

Action solves the difficulties which action creates. Inaction can only paralyse and slay.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin

It becomes itself in the world by knowing itself; it knows itself by becoming itself.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Purity is to accept no other influence but only the influence of the Divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T5]

And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

His days were a long growth to the Supreme.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

To be alone with the Divine is the highest of all privileged states for the sadhak.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation

A wide God-knowledge poured down from above,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

Ever she circled towards some far-off Light.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, [T5]

Having once seen God, man can have no farther object in life than to reach and possess Him.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad

Sraddha: the soul's belief in the Divine's existence, wisdom, power, love and grace.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, -- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

When naked of ego and mind it hears the Voice
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, [T5]

Love, joy and happiness come from the psychic. The Self gives peace or a universal Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I

Self-conscious existence is the essential nature of the Being; that is Sat or Purusha.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

A prayer, a master act, a king idea
   Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue, [T5]

A mighty shuddering coil of ecstasy
   Crept through the deep heart of the universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate

this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defense.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 241

those who rely on the Divine will arrive in spite of all difficulties, stumbles or falls.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

When mind is still, then Truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

A point she had reached where life must be in vain
   Or, in her unborn element awake,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue, [T5]

And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation

Whether it seem good or evil to men's eyes,
   Only for good the secret Will can work.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Word of Fate

All things are in nature and all things are in God, but for practical purposes we will differentiate between them.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

In the subconscient knowledge or consciousness is involved in action, for action is the essence of Life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD, 1.08-9

My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness, [T5]

The trudge of Time changed to a splendid march;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release, [T5]

454. In those whom God loves, have delight; on those whom He pretends not to love, take pity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Man demands miracles that he may have faith; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga


   Each day was a spiritual romance,
   As if he was born into a bright new world;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame

An all-inclusive concentration is the difficult achievement towards which we must labour
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

One of the two great steps in this Yoga is to take refuge in the Mother.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T1]

All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

Aspiration is a call to the Divine, will is the pressure of the conscious force on Nature.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T5]

Obey thy nature and fulfil thy fate:
   Accept the difficulty and godlike toil
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, [T5]

Then with a magic transformation's speed
   They rushed into each other and grew one
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul

A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness

Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness

It lived upon the margin of the Idea
   Protected by Ignorance as in a shell.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life

Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, [T5]

252. I have failed, thou sayest. Say rather that God is circling about towards His object.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

265. Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

That is always the end at which we arrive and we can only escape it by refusing to complete the journey.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

... a shadow depends on light for its existence, but light does not depend for its existence on the shadow
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

At the top of the head or above it is the right place for yogic concentration in reading or thinking.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

But within there is a soul and above there is Grace. 'This is all you know or need to know'
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, [T5]

For Life is Force and Force is Power and Power is Will and Will is the working of the Master-consciousness.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Three fundamental aspects of the Divine - the Individual or Immanent, the Cosmic and the Transcendent
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The English Bible is a translation, but it ranks among the finest pieces of literature in the world. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art

A Light there is that leads, a Power that aids;
   Unmarked, unfelt it sees in him and acts:
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

But like a shining answer from the gods
   Approached through sun-bright spaces Savitri.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Call to the Quest, [T5]

For the key is hid and by the Inconscient kept;
   The secret God beneath the threshold dwells.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

34. O Thou that lovest, strike! If Thou strike me not now, I shall know that Thou lovst me not.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

Love and serve men, but beware lest thou desire their approbation. Obey rather God within thee.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Bhakti

Her spirit, guilty of being, wandered doomed,
   Moving for ever through eternal Night.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal

Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives;
   He would guide the world, himself he cannot guide ...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
   A dead resistance in the mortals heart,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

A slowly changing order binds our will.
   This is our doom until our souls are free.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life, [T5]

However man's mind may tire or fail his flesh,
   A will prevails cancelling his conscious choice .
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

My love is not a hunger of the heart, My love is not a craving of the flesh; It came to me from God, to God returns.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Divine Plan

Offer, first, all your actions as a sacrifice to the Highest and the One in you and to the Highest and the One in the world; ~ Sri Aurobindo, (CWSA 19)

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
   It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Sincerity ::: To allow no part of the being to contradict the highest aspiration towards the Divine
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [50], [T6]

At last the soul turns to eternal things,
   In every shrine it cries for the clasp of God
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death, [T5]

By the flame one enjoys a treasure that verily increases day by day, glorious, most full of hero-power.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire, [T3]

God in thy victory, God in thy defeat, God in thy very death & torture, - God who will not be defeated & who cannot die.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad

The Spirit's greatness is our timeless source
   And it shall be our crown in endless Time.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, [T5]

Yoga through work is the easiest and most effective way to enter into the stream of this Sadhana.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

A moment's sweetness of the All-Beautiful
   Cancelled the vanity of the cosmic whirl.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Adoration of the Divine Mother, [T5]

There is only one aim to be followed, the increase of the Peace, Light, Power and the growth of a new consciousness in the being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, (CWSA 23)

Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD 1.10-13

This now he willed to discover and exile,
   The element in him betraying God.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, [T5]

Extended within the Infinite,...headless and footless, concealing his two ends. - Rig Veda
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Boundaries of the Ignorance

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight,
   Brea the her divine illimitable air,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

244. Suffer yourself to be tempted within so that you may exhaust in the struggle your downward propensities.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

A greater perfection can only be arrived at by a higher power entering in and taking up the whole action of the being.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

It is this greater consciousness and higher existence which is the peculiar and appropriate object of Yogic discipline.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

One has to call the Mother's Force, even if one does not feel open at the moment. Very often by calling the opening comes and Force too comes.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

521. If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Bhakti #suffer

uryam ugrata yuddhalipsattahasya - heroism, impetuosity, the urge towards battle, loud laughter (the attributes of Mahakali)
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Glossary of terms

Even the smallest meanest work became
   A sweet or glad and glorious sacrament
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

When you have time, you can meditate on her with the thinking attitude that She is with you, She is sitting in front of you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Mother India, [T1]

There all the truths unite in a single Truth,
   And all ideas rejoin Reality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release, [T5]

What is God after all?
   An eternal child
   playing an eternal game
   in an eternal garden.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, Thoughts And Glimpses

304. There are two ways of avoiding the snare of woman; one is to shun all women and the other to love all beings.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

But few are they who tread the sunlit path;
   Only the pure in soul can walk in the light
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, [T5]

Make of thy daily way a pilgrimage,
   For through small joys and griefs thou movst towards God.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone; I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, (Gita 18:66), [T5}

All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Suprarational Good, 148

All has to be done by the working of the Mother's force aided by your aspiration, devotion and surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T2]

Heaven's sun forces its way through death and night;
   Its light is seen upon our being's verge...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

The mechanical mind is a sort of engine - whatever comes to it it puts into the machine and goes on turning it round and round - no matter what it is. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Across the threshold's sleep she entered in
And found herself amid great figures of gods
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Book of Yoga, The Finding of the Soul, 524

Do not let your mind go back on a work that is finished. It belongs to the past and all re-handling of it is a waste of power.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

the mental psychic :::
...Thus the veiled psychic urge may express itself in the mind by a hunger in the thought for the knowledge of the Divine... ~ Sri Aurobindo

Thus for a while she trod the Golden Path;
   This was the sun before abysmal Night.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

44. If God draw me towards Heaven, then, even if His other hand strive to keep me in Hell, yet must I struggle upward.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

For nothing is known while aught remains concealed;
   The Truth is known only when all is seen.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

God is a great & cruel Torturer because He loves. You do not understand this, because you have not seen & played with Krishna.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole being; ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 146, [T5]

in absolute reliance on the Mother, fearing nothing, sorrowing over nothing ... a glad equanimity even in the face of difficulties... ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

312. Each man of us has a million lives yet to fulfil upon this earth. Why then this haste and clamour and impatience?
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma[53]

His human self like a translucent cloak
   Covered the All-Wise who leads the unseeing world.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

Even imagined experiences (honestly imagined) can help to mental realisation and mental realisation can be a step to total realisation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

Sadhana [means] the practice by which perfection, Siddhi, is attained; sadhaka, the Yogin who seeks by that practice the Siddhi.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 45

But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,
   Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul, [T5]

Do not let your mind labour in anticipation on a work that has to be done. The Power that acts in you will see to it at its own time.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

When once the higher consciousness begins to act, the difficulty diminishes and there is a clear progress from truth to greater truth.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

43. If God assigns to me my place in Hell, I do not know why I should aspire to Heaven. He knows best what is for my welfare.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

The more she plunged into love that anguish grew;
   Her deepest grief from sweetest gulfs arose.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Joy of Union; the Ordeal of the Foreknowledge

All ocean lived within a wandering drop.
   A time made body housed the illimitable.
   To live this mystery out our soul comes here.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair

I am the inviolable Ecstasy;
   They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, [T5]

When we repeat the Name of the Mother, it begins to echo in all your consciousness, outside as well as inside you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T2]

All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more and more successful reproduction of the divine image.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

All things here are the one indivisable eternal transcendent and cosmic Brahman that is in its seeming divided in things and creatures...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Concentrate more upon what you are to be, on the ideal, with the faith that, since it is the goal before you, it must and will come.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, [T1]

The Mother is the goal, everything is in her : if she is attained, all is attained. If you dwell in her consciousness, everything else unfolds of itself.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo?, [T1]

The secret of our apparent bondage is the Spirit's play by which It consents to forget God-consciousness in the absorption of Nature's movement.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad

313. Stride swiftly for the goal is far; rest not unduly, for thy Master is waiting for thee at the end of thy journey.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma, 53, [T5]

For all we have acquired soon loses worth,
   An old disvalued credit in Times bank,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness

But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,
   Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation

No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The control over the thoughts and the power of seeing the image of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo in the head are a very good beginning.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, [T5]

The Self, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the Transcendent, - the One in all aspects is then the object of Yogic knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear,
The Spirit's bare and absolute potencies
Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

... I am now able to put myself into men and change them, removing the darkness and bringing light, giving them a new heart and a new mind.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes

All is possible if there is a true faith, a complete consecration, a sincere and pure aspiration and a persistent endeavour.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, 539

Every day should be regarded as a day when a descent may take place or a contact established with the higher consciousness.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, [T5]

As for withdrawal of Grace, it might be said that few are those from whom the Grace withdraws, but many are those who withdraw from the Grace.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

He has no method and every method. His system is a natural organization of the highest processes and movements of which the nature is capable.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness. ~ Sri Aurobindo

26. When I see others suffer, I feel that I am unfortunate, but the wisdom that is not mine, sees the good that is coming and approves.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

All philosophy is concerned with the relations between two things, the fundamental truth of existence and the forms in which existence presents itself to our experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Aspiration, call, prayer are forms of one and the same thing and are all effective; you can take the form that comes to you or is easiest to you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

These limitations of his power, knowledge, life, delight of existence are the whole cause of man's dissatisfaction with himself and the universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

This is the power of Mahalakshmi and there is no aspect of the Divine Shakti more attractive to the heart of the embodied beings.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

This equality and this oneness are the indispensable twin foundation we must lay down for a divine being, a divine consciousness, a divine action.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

And yet in the end we are obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive experiences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD, 1.5

The object of meditation is to open to the Mother and grow through many progressive experiences into a higher consciousness in union with the Divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

There is nothing which is beyond the reach of the God-lover or denied to him; for he is the favorite of the Divine Lover and the self of the Beloved.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

To enter into a deeper or higher consciousness or for that deeper or higher consciousness to descend into you-that is the true success of meditation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

A mere confused instability is not the right way. When the confusion comes, you should remain quiet, reject it and call in the Mother's light and force.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

410. Others boast of their love for God. My boast is that I did not love God; it was He who loved me and sought me out and forced me to belong to Him.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

I have never heard of a Yogin who got the peace of God and turned away from it as something poor, neutral and pallid, rushing back to cakes and ale.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art

The higher Truth is all the time working in us but through the lower power - Aparashakti. It is when we become conscious of the play of this higher Power then only yoga begins. ~ Sri Aurobindo,

From the non-being to true being,
from the darkness to the Light,
from death to Immortality.
OM Peace! Peace! Peace!
(Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I.3.28)
So be it.
~ Sri Aurobindo

His failure is not failure whom God leads; ...
   It knows its steps, its way is inevitable,
   And how shall the end be vain when God is guide?
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

42. They say that the Gospels are forgeries and Krishna a creation of the poets. Thank God then for the forgeries and bow down before the creators.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

A certain kind of Nirvana experience is necessary even for this Yoga. That is, the world must become in a way nothing to you because, as it is constituted, it is a work of ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo

He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.
   All he had been and all towards which he grew
   Must now be left behind or else transform
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable, [T5]

We perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids [63]

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.
   This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

The Supreme has laid his luminous hand upon a chosen human vessel of his miraculous Light and Power and Ananda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Consecration, 88

283. Death is sometimes a rude valet; but when he changes this robe of earth for that brighter raiment, his horseplay and impertinences can be pardoned.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

Always remember the Mother. Call upon her. Then the difficulties will go away. Do not be afraid, do not be perturbed by the difficulties. Call upon the Mother steadily. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Annual, Issue 27

Only those thoughts are true the opposite of which is also true in its own time and application; indisputable dogmas are the most dangerous kind of falsehoods.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

In a supreme golden sheath the Brahman lies, stainless, without parts. A Splendour is That, It is the Light of Lights, It is That which the self-knowers know.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena And Other Upanishads

How to remember the Mother during work?

   One starts by a mental effort - afterwards it is an inner consciousness that is formed... it is always conscious of her.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Correspondences, 17

In whatever form and with whatever spirit we approach him, in that form and with that spirit he receives the sacrifice. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, [T5]

373. Shall I accept death or shall I turn and wrestle with him and conquer? That shall be as God in me chooses. For whether I live or die, I am always.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma, 473

At last to open thy eyes consent and see
   The stuff of which thou and the world are made.
   Inconscient in the dumb inconscient Void
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal

Detect first what is false or obscure in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T5]

Whatever name he gives to this Power or whether he gives it a name or not, it is Isha, the Lord, whose presence he must feel around every object and movement in the Universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad

A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

The Mother - The power of the Divine Consciousness is the goal, everything is in her; if she is attained, all is attained. If you dwell in her consciousness, everything else unfolds itself.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

A radical and total change of consciousness is not only the whole meaning but, in an increasing force and by progressive stages, the whole method of the integral Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

"Errors, falsehoods, stumblings!" they cry. How bright and beautiful are Thy errors, O Lord! Thy falsehoods save Truth alive; by Thy stumblings the world is perfected. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Selfishness is the only sin, meanness the only vice, hatred the only criminality. All else can easily be turned into good, but these are obstinate resisters of deity.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

21. God had opened my eyes; for I saw the nobility of the vulgar, the attractiveness of the repellent, the perfection of the maimed and the beauty of the hideous.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

The words supermind and supramental were first used by me, but since then people have taken up and are using the word supramental for anything above mind.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, 142

A light was with him, an invisible hand
   Was laid upon the error and the pain
   Till it became a quivering ecstasy,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

The Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer and all-embracing Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [Intro-3 27]

All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature mental and vital and physical is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfections. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

And by sleep the human example teaches us that we mean not a suspension of consciousness, but its gathering inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD 1.10-14

Always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Aspire for your will to be one with the Divine will, concentrate in the heart and be plastic to whatever experience comes, neither forcing nor resisting any spiritual experience
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,

By readiness I did not mean capacity but willingness. If there is the will within to face all difficulties and go through, no matter how long it takes, then the path can be taken. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

He who knows the Truth, the Knowledge, the Infinity that is Brahman shall enjoy with the all-wise Brahman all objects of desire. - Taittiriya Upanishad (II. 1.) ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Problem of Life 220

Remember the true basis of yoga... Obedience to the divine Will, nor assertion of self-will is the very first mantra... learn thou first absolutely to obey. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Ashram Diary 1984, August 21 and September 9

Keep yourself open to the Mother and in perfect union with her. Make yourself entirely plastic to her touch and let her mould you swiftly towards perfection. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T2]

Nor should he forget the aim of these external aids which is to awaken his soul to the Divine within him. Nothing has been finally accomplished if that has not been accomplished.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The Mother alone is your destination. She contains everything in herself. To have her is to have everything. If you live in her Consciousness, there will be an automatic flowering of every other thing.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

0:He whose self has become all existences, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad.1 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Soul

261. Perceive always and act in the light of thy increasing perceptions, but not those of the reasoning brain only. God speaks to the heart when the brain cannot understand him.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

302. The mediaeval ascetics hated women and thought they were created by God for the temptation of monks. One may be allowed to think more nobly both of God and of woman.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

Remember always that you too are Brahman and the divine Shakti is working in you; reach out always to the realisation of God's omnipotence and his delight in the Lila. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, [T5]

the best means to bring forward the psychic :::
Aspiration, constant and sincere, and the will to turn to the Divine alone are the best means to bring forward the psychic. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III, [T5]

The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the Supermind descent is at all possible-for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155

Still, right thought only becomes effective when in the purified understanding it is followed by other operations, by vision, by experience, by realisation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge

What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

Be sure that the Mother will be always with you to carry you upon the path. Difficulties come and difficulties go, but, she being with you, the victory is sure.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T1]

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
   Creatrix, the Eternals artist Bride,
   Linger not long with thy transmuting hand.
   Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

Philosophy is only a way of formulating to ourselves intellectually in their essential significance the psychological and physical facts of existence and their relation to any ultimate reality that may exist. ~ Sri Aurobindo

To arrive by the shortest way at the largest development of spiritual power and being and divinise by it a liberated nature in the whole range of human living is our inspiring motive.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

What has to be overcome is the opposition of the Ignorance that does not want the transformation of the nature. If that can be overcome, then old spiritual ideas will not form an obstacle. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I

266. There are three forms in which the comm and may come, the will and faith in thy nature, thy ideal on which heart and brain are agreed and the voice of Himself or His angels.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

A certain class of minds shrink from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their temperament forbids them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what they cannot understand as something monstrous and sinful. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Live always as if you were under the very eye of the supreme and the Divine Mother. Do nothing, try to think and feel nothing that would be unworthy of the Divine Presence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, 852

We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532

And if it is a play of the All-Existence, then we may well consent to play out our part in it with grace and courage, well take delight in the game along with our divine Playmate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation

But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids

Still have we parts that grow towards the light,
Yet are there luminous tracts and heavens serene
   And Eldorados of splendor and ecstacy
   And temples to the godhead none can see
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

To understand divine movements one must enter into the divine consciousness, till then faith and surrender are the only right attitude. How can the mind judge what is beyond all its measures?
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

It is quite natural to want to meditate after reading yogic literature - that is not the laziness.
   The laziness of the mind consists in not meditating, when the consciousness wants to do so.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

One has only to aspire sincerely and keep oneself as open as possible to the Mother's Force. Then whatever difficulties come, they will be overcome-it may take some time, but the result issue.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

Yet is the opposite truth also wholly true that if thou canst see all God in a little pale unsightly and scentless flower, not God entirely; he who knows Krishna only, knows not even Krishna.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Men hail in my coming the Almighty's force
   Or praise with thankful tears his saviour Grace.
   I smite the Titan who bestrides the world
   And slay the ogre in his blood-stained den.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces

Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries

The method of gathering of the mind is not an easy one. It is better to watch and separate oneself from the thoughts till one becomes aware of a quiet space within into which they come from outside. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Threefold Life, 29

7. He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness?
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, [7]

I make even sin and error stepping-stones
   And all experience a long march towards Light.
   Out of the Inconscient I build consciousness,
   And lead through death to reach immortal Life.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces

The Mother is the Divine Consciousness-Force that makes Him manifested. It is She who forms all worlds and beings and things and souls for the Divine Inhabitant. She is the Divine Will that is one with Divine Truth.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, [T6]

The Power of self-aware existence, whether drawn into itself or acting in the works of its consciousness and force, its knowledge and its will, Chit and Tapas, Chit and its Shakti,-that is Prakriti.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The Power of self-aware existence, whether drawn into itself or acting in the works of its consciousness and force, its knowledge and its will, Chit and Tapas, Chit and its Shakti,-that is Prakriti.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

In this investiture of fleshly life
A soul that is a spark of God survives
And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen
And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Godheads of the Little Life

The love of solitude is a sign of the disposition towards knowledge; but knowledge itself is only achieved when we have a settled perception of solitude in the crowd, in the battle and in the mart.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

Awaken the psychic in you, let the inner being come out and replace the ego, then the latent power also will become effective. You can then do the work and the service to which you aspire.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram

In work there must be a rule and discipline and as much punctuality as possible in regard to time.
*
To be able to be regular is a great force, one becomes master of one's time and one's movements. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

It was the hour before the Gods awake.
   Across the path of the divine Event
   The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
   In her unlit temple of eternity,
   Lay stretched immobile upon Silence marge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, object:01.01

All undelight, all pain and suffering are a sign of imperfection, of incompleteness; they arise from a division of being, an incompleteness of consciousness of being, an incompleteness of the force of being.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The glory of the integer of his soul.
A union of the Real with the unique,
A gaze of the Alone from every face,
The presence of the Eternal in the hours
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

5. That which thinks not by the mind,^1 that by which the mind is thought, know That to be the Brahman and not this which men follow after here. ^1 Or "that which one thinks not with the mind" ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena And Other Upanishads, page 6

If you want only the very greatest, none of these can enter - only Vyasa and Sophocles. Vyasa could very well claim a place beside Valmiki, Sophocles beside Aeschylus.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Poetry And Art, Great Poets of the World, 369

77 - Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius. It is dangerous for an army to be led by veterans; for on the other side God may place Napoleon. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

The sacrifice and the divine return for our sacrifice then become a gladly accepted means towards our last perfection; for it is recognised now as the road to the fulfilment in us of the eternal purpose.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man's unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

Illumined theocracies of the seeing soul
   Throned in the power of the Transcendent's ray.
   A vision of grandeurs, a dream of magnitudes
   In sun-bright kingdoms moved with regal gait:
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and the Fall of Life

This growth of the conscious being, an expansion, an increasing self-expression, a more and more harmonised development of his constituent members is the whole meaning and all the pith of human existence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The earth's uplook to a remote Unknown
   Is a preface only of the epic climb
   Of human soul from its flat earthly state
   To the discovery of a greater self
   And the far gleam of an eternal Light.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

It is, I suppose, the image of Sri Krishna as Lord of the divine Love and Ananda - and his flute calls the physical being to awake out of the attachments of the physical world and turn to that Love and Ananda.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,

One day the Face must burn out through the mask.
   Our ignorance is Wisdom's chrysalis,
   Our error weds new knowledge on its way,
   Its darkness is a blackened knot of light;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind

There are two allied powers in man; knowledge & wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

The use of your writing is to keep you in touch with the inner source of inspiration and intuition, so as to wear thin the crude external crust in the consciousness and encourage the growth of the inner being.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

He [man] is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Surrender is giving oneself to the Divine - to give everything one is or has to the Divine and regard nothing as one's own, to obey only the Divine will and no other, to live for the Divine and not for the ego.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The Divine is everywhere on all the planes of consciousness seen by us in different ways and aspects of his being. But there is a Supreme which is above all these planes and ways and aspects and from which they come. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I

the recipient of the sacrifice :::
   Whoever the recipient, whatever the gift, it is the Supreme, the Eternal in things, who receives and accepts it, even if it be rejected or ignored by the immediate recipient.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Whatever name is called the Power that answers is the Mother. Each name indicates a certain aspect of the Divine and is limited by that aspect; the Mother's Power is universal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Namajapa or Repetition of the Name

A Divine perfection of the human being is our aim. We must know then first what are the essential elements that constitute man's total perfection; secondly, what we mean by a divine as distinguished from a human perfection of our being.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

It is certainly much better to remain silent and collected for a time after the meditation. It is a mistake to take the meditation lightly - by doing that one fails to receive or spills what is received or most of it.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

It hears the Word to which our hearts were deaf,
   It sees through the blaze in which our thoughts grow blind;
   It drinks from the naked breasts of glorious Truth,
   It learns the secrets of eternity.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death

But the centre of all resistance is egoism and this we must pursue into every covert and disguise and drag it out and slay it; for its disguises are endless and it will cling to every shred of possible self-concealment.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

9. Gods three thousand and three hundred and thirty and nine waited upon the Fire. They anointed him with streams of the clarity, they spread for him the seat of sacrifice, and seated him within as priest of the call.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire

A map of subtle signs surpassing thought
Was hung upon a wall of inmost mind.
Illumining the world's concrete images
Into significant symbols by its gloss,
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness

It [the effectiveness of namajapa] depends on the person and how he does it. The Name of the Divine is in itself a power, if it is taken with the right faith and in the right attitude.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Namajapa or Repetition of the Name

There can be no question about the power to change, to develop, to awaken faculties that were not there before; this power exists already, but it can be raised to an acme by being lifted to a spiritual plane.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram

Drugs cure the body when they do not merely trouble or poison it, but only if their physical attack on the disease is supported by the force of the spirit; if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are superfluous.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

It is not at first easy to remember the presence in work; but if one revives the sense of the presence immediately after the work is over it is all right. In time the sense of the presence will become automatic even in work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

It is not at first easy to remember the presence in work; but if one revives the sense of the presence immediately after the work is over it is all right. In time the sense of the presence will become automatic even in work. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

359. Men burrow after little details of knowledge and group them into bounded and ephemeral thought systems; meanwhile all infinite wisdom laughs above their heads and shakes wide the glory of her iridescent pinions.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

When the will and energy are concentrated and used to control the mind, vital and physical and change them or to bring down the higher consciousness or for any other Yogic purpose or high purpose, that is called Tapasya.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, 102?

358. Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

A PRINCIPLE of active Will and Knowledge superior to Mind and creatrix of the worlds is then the intermediary power and state of being between that self-possession of the One and this flux of the Many.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Supermind as Creator, 130

If we surrender our conscious will and allow it to be made one with the will of the Eternal, then, and then only, shall we attain to a true freedom;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [97]

But it is in itself a secondary aim[transcending the ego]; to find, know and possess the Divine existence, consciousness and nature and to live in it for the Divine is our true aim and the one perfection to which we must aspire.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Clarity of knowledge and inner self-vision, subjugation of the ego, love, scrupulousness in selfless and dedicated works, are the four wheels of the chariot of Yoga. One who has them will progress safely on the path.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram

If part of the being surrenders, but another part reserves itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each time that that happens, you are yourself pushing the divine Grace away from you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T6]

All life, all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

On the other hand, every energy or activity that we can convert from its allegiance to the lower and dedicate to the service of the higher is so much gained on our road, so much taken from the powers that oppose our progress. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5]

The development of the experience in its rapidity, its amplitude, the intensity and power of its results, depends primarily, in the beginning of the path and long after, on the aspiration and personal effort of the sadhaka.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [58]

..yet it is with the old treasure as our initial capital or so much of it as we can recover that we shall most advantageously proceed to accumulate the largest gains in our new commerce with the ever-changeless and ever-changing Infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

O living power of the incarnate Word,
   All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:
   Thou art the force by which I made the worlds,
   Thou art my vision and my will and voice.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation

All the rest is either auxiliary and subordinate or accidental and otiose; that only matters which sustains and helps the evolution of his nature and the growth or rather the progressive unfolding and discovery of his self and spirit.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

A resolution means the will to try to get a thing done by the given time. It is not a binding 'promise' that the thing will be done by that time. Even if it is not, the endeavour will have to continue, just as if no date had been fixed.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men. They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods. Krishna himself was known by most as a man-only a few worshipped him as the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Soul, my soul
   Soul, my soul, yet ascend crossing the marge of life:
   Mount out far above Time, reach to the golden end
   ... Live there lost in God space, rapturous, vacant, mute,
   Sun-bright, timeless, immense, single and absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems

Surrender means to consecrate everything in oneself to the Divine, to offer all one is and has, not to insist on one's ideas, desires, habits, etc., but to allow the divine Truth to replace them by its knowledge, will and action everywhere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

Happy, inert, he lies beneath her feet:
   His breast he offers for her cosmic dance
   Of which our lives are the quivering theatre,
   And none could bear but for his strength within,
   Yet none would leave because of his delight.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

What is most important [in meditation] is the change of consciousness of which this feeling of oneness is a part. The going deep in meditation is only a means and it is not always necessary if the great experiences come easily without it.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

Beyond mind is a supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth; all its motion and feeling and sense and outcome are instinct and luminous with the inmost reality of things and express nothing else.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

God cannot cease from leaning towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga

Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Our sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself in a wrong and imperfect way with the workings of the divine Force.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 59

You can remember at the beginning and offer your reading to the Divine and at the end again. There is a state of consciousness in which only a part of it is reading or doing the work and behind there is the consciousness of the Divine always.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

For whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with them for the good of the Sadhaka and for the good of all.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.01

We call it the Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness, because it is a principle superior to mentality and exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 153

But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, 23

Only were safe who kept God in their hearts:
   Courage their armour, faith their sword, they must walk,
   The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,
   Casting a javelin regard in front,
   Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Descent into Night, [T5]

We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T5]

All this is Brahman immortal, naught else; Brahman is in front of us, Brahman behind us, and to the south of us and to the north of us and below us and above us; it stretches everywhere. All this is Brahman alone, all this magnificent universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena And Other Upanishads

In the same Upanishad, Agni is invoked for purely moral functions as the purifier from sin, the leader of the soul by the good path to the divine Bliss, and he seems to be identified with the power of the will and responsible for human actions
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret Of The Veda, [7]

The attitude you express in your letter is quite the right one - whatever sufferings come on the path, are not too high a price for the victory that has to be won and, if they are taken in the right spirit, they become even a means towards the victory. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

the demand on us :::
   This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and devoted self-giving to the Eternal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

All-vision gathered into a single ray,
   As when the eyes stare at an invisible point
   Till through the intensity of one luminous spot
   An apocalypse of a world of images
   Enters into the kingdom of the seer.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T4]

280. If thy heart is troubled within thee, if for long seasons thou makest no progress, if thy strength faint and repine, remember always the eternal word of our Lover and Master, 'I will free thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.'
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma, [T1]

I have said that we are always with you and it is true, but to feel it you must draw back from your vital and be able to concentrate in your inner being. If you do that faithfully and sincerely, after a time you will feel the connection and the support.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 152

You have either to train the memory by practising to remember - or if you cannot do that, try only to understand, read much and let the memory remember what it can. There are people who have a bad memory but they succeed in their studies in spite of it.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

Yes, there are happy ways near to God's sun;
   But few are they who tread the sunlit path;
   Only the pure in soul can walk in light.
   An exit is shown, a road of hard escape
   From the sorrow and the darkness and the chain;
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated from this lower birth and death;
   by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD 1.5-19

Knowledge of the way is not enough - one must tread it, or if one cannot do that, allow oneself to be carried along it. The human vital and physical external nature resist to the very end, but if the soul has once heard the call, it arrives, sooner or later. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of phenomena depends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes and if we know the causes of error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour with some hope towards their elimination. For knowledge is power and mastery.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

It is for this meaningful development of consciousness by thought, will, emotion, desire, action and experience, leading in the end to a supreme divine self-discovery, that Man, the mental being, has entered into the material body.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works

The Sruti tells us that it is no use taking refuge in suicide or the shortening of your life, because those who kill themselves instead of finding freedom, plunge by death into a worse prison of darkness - the Asuric worlds enveloped in blind gloom.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, [121 or 122]

If you can't as yet remember the Divine all the time you are working, it does not greatly matter. To remember and dedicate at the beginning and give thanks at the end ought to be enough for the present. Or at the most to remember too when there is a pause...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

when it arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine principle and wait as in complete silence as it can comm and for the light from above.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 316

47. When I was asleep in the Ignorance, I came to a place of meditation full of holy men and I found their company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

The conditions for living ever in union with Purushottama: -
1. Loss of egoism - including all ambition (even "spiritual" ambition), pride, desire, self-centered life, mind, will.
2. Universalization of the consciousness.
3. Absolute surrender to the transcendental Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo

All-Knowledge packed into great wordless thoughts
Lodged in the expectant stillness of his depths
A crystal of the ultimate Absolute,
A portion of the inexpressible Truth
Revealed by silence to the silent soul.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

The Master of Wisdom in his first coming to birth in the supreme ether of the great Light, - many his births, seven his mouths of the Word, seven his Rays, - scatters the darknesses with his cry. Rig Veda.3 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance towards the Sevenfold Knowledge

The intelligence can also follow this trend, but is ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Personality

God:::
Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love!

Thou who disdainest not the worm to be
Nor even the clod,
Therefore we know by that humility
That thou art God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,

In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance

The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace
   Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;
   A sample from the laboratory of God
   Of which he holds the patent upon earth,
   Comes to him wrapped in golden coverings
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

[...]The Divine is Anandamaya and one can seek him for the Ananda he gives; but he has also in him many other things and one may seek him for any of them, for peace, for liberation, for knowledge, for power, for anything else of which one may feel the pull or impulse.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

the spiritual transformation :::
The spiritual change is the established descent of the peace, light, knowledge, power, bliss from above, the awareness of the Self and the Divine and of a higher cosmic consciousness and the change of the whole consciousness to that. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III

368. The Vedanta is God's lamp to lead thee out of this night of bondage and egoism; but when the light of Veda has dawned in thy soul, then even that divine lamp thou needest not, for now thou canst walk freely and surely in a high and eternal sunlight.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma, [T8]

Thus said Ramakrishna and thus said Vivekananda. Yes, but let me know also the truths which the Avatar cast not forth into speech and the prophet has omitted from his teachings. There will always be more in God than the thought of man has ever conceived or the tongue of man has ever uttered.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo

68-The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was God's corrective for egoism. But man's egoism meets God's device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Jnana

The master of existence lurks in us
   And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
   In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
   The immanent lives in man as his house;
   He has made the universe his pastime's field,
   A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

328. There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine. He bestows as much labour of divine energy on the formation of a shell as on the building of an empire. For thyself it is greater to be a good shoemaker than a luxurious and incompetent king. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

And if we can thus be free in the spirit, we shall find out all the wonder of God's workings; we shall find that in inwardly renouncing everything we have lost nothing. 'By all this abandoned thou shalt come to enjoy the All.'
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Renunciation

But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

fruits of the sacrifice :::
   The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [109]

But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 6

the priest and the mage, the man of piety, the just man, the man of wisdom, the saint, the prophet, the Rishi, the Yogi, the seer, the spiritual sage and the mystic ... the saint, the devotee, the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier of the spirit
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it: you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

Everything must be given to the Divine within us, to the universal All and to the transcendent Supreme. An absolute concentration of our will, our heart and our thought on that one and manifold Divine, an unreserved self-consecration of our whole being to the Divine alone
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 89

The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hestitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 169

A single thinker in an aimless world
   Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
   He saw the purpose in the works of Time.
   Even in that aimlessness a work was done
   Pregnant with magic will and change divine.
   The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms of the Little Life

It is the way of complete God-realisation, a complete Self-realisation, a complete fulfillment of our being and consciousness, a complete transformation of our nature - and this implies a complete perfection of life here and not only a return to an eternal perfection elsewhere
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman, this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge

Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
   The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
   Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
   His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
   Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

Always we must repeat to the doubting intellect the promise of the Master, 'I will deliver thee from all sin and evil; do not grieve.' At the end, the flickerings of faith will cease; for we shall see his face and feel always the Divine Presence.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Master of the Work, 245, [T3]

A Tree :::

A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven amorous.

This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.


~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems,

Its touch can turn difficulties into opportunities, failure into success and weakness into unfaultering strength. For the grace of the Divine Mother is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure, a thing decreed, inevitable and irresistible.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

There must be, first, the effort towards at least an initial and enabling self-transcendence and contact with the Divine; next, the reception of that which transcends, that with which we have gained communion, into ourselves for the transformation of our whole conscious being; ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, [T5]

247. Men in the world have two lights, duty and principle; but he who has passed over to God, has done with both and replaced them by God's will. If men abuse thee for this, care not, O divine instrument, but go on thy way like the wind or the sun fostering and destroying.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma

8. O Fire, they have set thee here the Messenger, the Immortal in generation after generation, the Carrier of offerings, protector of man and the Godhead of his prayer. Gods alike and mortals sit with obeisance before the all-pervading Master of the peoples, the ever-wakeful Fire.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns To The Mystic Fire

My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
   I guard the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
   Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
   For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven.
   Love is the far Transcendent's angel here
   Love is man's lien on the Absolute
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death

An essential movement of the Yoga is to draw back from the outward ego sense by which we are identified with the action of mind, life and body and live inwardly in the soul. The liberation from an externalised ego sense is the first step towards the soul's freedom and mastery.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 633 [T7]

God is our wise and perfect friend, because he knows when to smite and when to fondle; when to slay us no less then when to save and to succour... There must be faith in the love and wisdom of God,... working out all for our good even when it is apparently veiled in evil. ~ Sri Aurobindo, 1984 Ashram Diary, July 3 and Augst 22

To want to be a superman is a mistake, it only swells the ego. One can aspire for the Divine to bring about the supramental transformation, but that also should not be done till the being has become psychic and spiritualised by the descent of the Mother's peace, force, light and purity.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

But not the utter vision and delight.
A veil is kept, something is still held back,
Lest, captives of the beauty and the joy,
Our souls forget to the Highest to aspire.
In that fair subtle realm behind our own
The form is all, and physical gods are kings.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter

a sign of progress :::
   We may even come to feel that the body is in a certain sense non-existent except as a sort of partial expression of our vital force and of our mentality. These experiences are signs that the mind is coming to a right poise regarding the body...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, 345

'O strong forerunner, I have heard thy cry.
   One shall descend and break the iron Law,
   Change Nature's doom by the lone spirit's power.
   A limitless Mind that can contain the world,
   A sweet and violent heart of ardent calms
   Moved by the passions of the gods shall come.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon

Content to be with her and feel her near
He makes the most of the little that she gives
And all she does drapes with his own delight.
A glance can make his whole day wonderful,
A word from her lips with happiness wings the hours.
He leans on her for all he does and is: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge

Afflicted by his harsh divinity,
   Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased
   The daily oblation of her unwept tears.
   All the fierce question of man's hours relived.
   The sacrifice of suffering and desire
   Earth offers to the immortal Ecstasy
   Began again beneath the eternal Hand.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn

These drops [of consciousness] happen to all sadhaks; their causes are various; sometimes it is a pull from below, sometimes an invasion from outside, sometimes a less ascertainable cause. When it happens, one must always remain as quiet as possible behind and call back the better condition.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III

The supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 280

362. Limit not sacrifice to the giving up of earthly goods or the denial of some desires and yearnings, but let every thought and every work and every enjoyment be an offering to God within thee. Let thy steps walk in thy Lord, let thy sleep and waking be a sacrifice to Krishna.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma, [T1]

All thoughts really come from outside, but one is not conscious of their coming. You have become conscious of this movement. There are different ways of getting rid of them; one is to reject them one by one before they can come in; another is to look at them with detachment till they fade away.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The house of the Divine is not closed to any who knock sincerely at its gates, whatever their past stumbles and errors. Human virtues and human errors are bright and darkwrappings of a divine element within which once it pierces the veil, can burn through both towards the heights of the Spirit.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The incarnate dual Power shall open God's door,
   Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.
   The superman shall wake in mortal man
   And manifest the hidden demigod
   Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force
   Revealing the secret deity in the cave.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation

If we call in rajas again to correct this error and bid it ally itself to sattwa and by their united agency endeavour to get rid of the dark principle, we find that we have elevated our action, but that there is again subjection to rajasic eagerness, passion, disappointment, suffering, anger.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 250

Remind yourself always that the Divine Force is there, that you have felt it and that, even if you seem to lose consciousness of it for a time or it seems something distant, still it is there and is sure to prevail For those whom the Force has touched and taken up, belong thenceforth to the Divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The life you lead conceals the light you are.
Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;
Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds
While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,
Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,
The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Call to the Quest

Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

All here can change if the Magician choose.
   If human will could be made one with God's,
   If human thought could echo the thoughts of God,
   Man might be all-knowing and omnipotent;
   But now he walks in Nature's doubtful ray.
   Yet can the mind of man receive God's light,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain

In the Upanishad the sun is the symbol of the supramental Truth and it is said that those who pass into it may return but those who pass through the gates of the Sun itself do not; possibly this means that an ascent into the supermind itself above the golden lid of overmind was the definitive liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

Afterwards we may more easily find the one common principle and the one common power from which all derive their being and tendency, towards which all subconsciously move and in which, therefore, it is possible for all consciously to unite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Three Steps of Nature [9]

Concentration, for our Yoga, means when the consciousness is fixed in a particular state (e.g. peace) or movement (e.g. aspiration, will, coming into contact with the Mother, taking the Mother's name); meditation is when the inner mind is looking at things to get the right knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [concentration is:]

The goal of yoga is always hard to reach, but this one is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

It is not sufficient to worship Krishna, Christ or Buddha without, if there is not the revealing and the formation of the Buddha, the Christ or Krishna in ourselves. And all other aids equally have no other purpose; each is a bridge between mans unconverted state and the revelation of the Divine within him.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

(1) Offer yourself more and more - all the consciousness, all that happens in it, all your work and action.
(2) If you have faults and weaknesses, hold them up before the Divine to be changed or abolished.
(3) Try to do what I told you, concentrate in the heart till you constantly feel the Presence there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the Supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,

We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Four Aids, 54, [T5]

When the vital joins in the love for the Divine, it brings into it heroism, enthusiasm, intensity, absoluteness, exclusiveness, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the total and passionate self-giving of all the nature. It is the vital passion for the Divine that creates the spiritual heroes, conquerors or martyrs.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her - the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga

It is necessary first to found the higher consciousness in the mind and heart. To deal with the lower nature before that means to fall into the struggle and confusion and disorder of the vital, for it all comes up. With the mind and heart prepared, one can deal with the vital without all that superfluous trouble.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,

A certain amount of purification is necessary before there can be any realisation of the Divine and that is what has been going on in you. It is after all not a very long time since the real purification began and it is never an easy work. So the impatience may be natural, but it is not exactly reasonable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Purity

O Death, if thou couldst touch the Truth supreme
Thou wouldst grow suddenly wise and cease to be.
If our souls could see and love and clasp God's Truth,
Its infinite radiance would seize our hearts,
Our being in God's image be remade
And earthly life become the life divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

In fact, however, the divine Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Synthesis of the Systems, 46

It is no doubt as you say, [1] but that is always the difficulty of the physical consciousness until it has been enlightened from within.
   [1] The correspondent wrote that although she wanted to get rid of her desires, confusions and wrong movements, the outward, physical part of her being wanted to hold on to them.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

... In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe, - this thought or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the worker. ...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice [112] [T1]

As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies or the stumblings of his nature. For the Force that works in him is impersonal -- or superpersonal-and infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 61

The passage from the lower to the higher is the aim of Yoga; and this passage may effect itself by the rejection of the lower and escape into the higher, - the ordinary view-point, - or by the transformation of the lower and its elevation to the higher Nature. it is this, rather, that must be the aim of an integral Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Where you are? In the Mother's presence here and close to me. Where you are going? Towards union with the Divine through dedication and service. What you are doing here? Service and self-giving to the Divine. The rest depends, as the Mother writes to you, on the simplicity and fullness with which you give yourself and serve.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

People say like that [the Transcendent is something beyond Sachchidananda] because the transcendent Absolute is not only what to us is existence but also what to us is non-existence. But there is really no such thing as non-existence. So the Transcendent can be conceived as transcendent Sat, transcendent Chit, transcendent Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I

The name of the Divine is usually called in for protection, for adoration, for increase of bhakti, for the opening up of the inner consciousness, for the realisation of the Divine in that aspect. As far as it is necessary to work in the subconscious for that, the Name must be effective there.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Namajapa or Repetition of the Name

As individual egos we dwell in the Ignorance and judge everything by a broken, partial and personal standard of knowledge; we experience everything according to the capacity of a limited consciousness and force and are therefore unable to give a divine response or set the true value upon any part of cosmic experience.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 396, [T3]

Have confidence in the Mother and be sure that the liberation from these things will surely come. What the soul feels is the sign of the spiritual destiny as of the spiritual need. What opposes is a remnant of the nature of the human ignorance. Our help will be there with you fully to overcome it. 27 February 1935
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

Our purpose in Yoga is to exile the limited outward-looking ego and enthrone God in its place as the ruling Inhabitant of the nature. And this means, first, to disinherit desire and no longer accept the enjoyment of desire as the ruling human motive. The ...
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita

Sincerity means more than mere honesty. It means that you mean what you say, feel what you profess, are earnest in your will. As the sadhak aspires to be an instrument of the Divine and one with the Divine, sincerity in him means that he is really in earnest in his aspiration and refuses all other will or impulse except the Divine's. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II

three knots binding us to our lower nature :::
   Again our renunciation must obviously be an inward renunciation; especially and above all, a renunciation of attachment and the craving of desire in the senses and the heart, of self-will in the thought and action and of egoism in the centre of the consciousness.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, [T5]

WILL, KNOWLEDGE and love are the three divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen, be the foundation of an integral Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Love and the Triple Path

The main difficulty in the sadhana consists in the movements of the lower nature, ideas of the mind, desires and attractions of the vital, habits of the body consciousness that stand in the way of the growth of the higher consciousness - there are other difficulties, but these make the bulk of the opposition.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III, Difficulties of the Path

By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
And all my silence wide and deep with thee.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Return to Earth

A thousand questions can be asked about anything whatsoever, but to answer would require a volume, and even then the mind would understand nothing. It is only by a growth in the consciousness itself that you can get some direct perception of these things. But for that the mind must be quiet and a direct feeling and intuition take its place.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV

This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition of the ego-sense at its very basis and source. In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

Occultism is in its essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical limits of being, an attempt in particular to possess and organise the mysterious, occult, outwardly still undeveloped direct power of Mind upon Life and of both Mind and Life over Matter. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

An absolute supernatural darkness falls
   On man sometimes when he draws near to God:
   An hour arrives when fail all Nature's means;
   Forced out from the protecting Ignorance
   And flung back on his naked primal need,
   He at length must cast from him his surface soul
   And be the ungarbed entity within:
   That hour had fallen now on Savitri.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Issue

Every man has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of strength and perfection in however small a sphere, which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it, use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings

... The undivine, therefore, is all that is unwilling to accept the light and force of the Mother. That is why I am always telling you to keep yourself in contact with the Mother and with her Light and Force, because it is only so that you can come out of this confusion and obscurity and receive the Truth that comes from above. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

For the World-Transcendent embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him.
   The individual is a centre of the whole universal consciousness; the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the Formless and Indefinable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD, 1.5-11

A cry came of the world's delight to be,
   The grandeur and greatness of its will to live,
   Recall of the soul's adventure into space,
   A traveller through the magic centuries
   And being's labour in Matter's universe,
   Its search for the mystic meaning of its birth
   And joy of high spiritual response,
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release

And even the All is at first too hard for him; for he himself in his active consciousness is a limited and selective formation and can open himself only to that which is in harmony with his limited nature. There are things in the All which are too hard for his comprehension or seem too terrible to his sensitive emotions and cowering sensations.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The aim of a human perfection must include, if it is to deserve the name, two things, self-mastery and a mastery of the surroundings; it must seek for them in the greatest degree of these powers which is at all attainable by our human nature. Man's urge of self-perfection is to be, in the ancient language, svarat and samrat, self-ruler and king.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

three first approaches of Karma Yoga :::
   Equality, renunciation of all desire for the fruit of our works, action done as a sacrifice to the supreme Lord of our nature and of all nature, - these are the three first Godward approaches in the Gita's way of Karmayoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [105]

The material movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance. These things are a language, a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of symbols, not themselves the deepest truest sense of the things they intimate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge

All visions have a significance of one kind or another. This power of vision is very important for the Yoga and should not be rejected although it is not the most important thing-for the most important thing is the change of the consciousness. All other powers like this of vision should be developed without attachment as parts and aids of the Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,

God & the World is my subject, ... the conditions in which the kingdom of heaven on earth can be converted from a dream into a possibility, - by the willed evolution in man of his higher nature, by a steady self-purification and a development in the light of this divine knowledge towards the fulfilment of his own supra-material, supra-intellectual nature.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad

The boy with the flute is Sri Krishna, the Lord descended into the world-play from the divine Ananda; his flute is the music of the call which seeks to transform the lower ignorant play of mortal life and bring into it and establish in its place the lila of his divine Ananda. It was the psychic being in you that heard the call and followed after it.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III

When you fall from the contact, the first and only thing you have to do is to reestablish it - to remain quiet and open yourself. Everything else you must detach yourself from and reject. It is because you listen to ideas and suggestions of all kinds and still attach value to the old kind of "experiences", that you cannot reestablish the contact. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T4]

"I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
O Void that makest room for all to be ...

Thou art my shadow and my instrument.
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
To force the soul of man to struggle for light"
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real

The triple Path of devotion, knowledge and works ... seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal operations by turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccupations and activities and concentrating them on the Divine.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga, 37 [T1]

As comes a goddess to a mortal's breast
And fills his days with her celestial clasp,
She stooped to make her home in transient shapes;
In Matter's womb she cast the Immortal's fire,
In the unfeeling Vast woke thought and hope,
Smote with her charm and beauty flesh and nerve
And forced delight on earth's insensible frame.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Glory and the Fall of Life

conditions of the psychic opening :::
The realisation of the psychic being, its awakening and the bringing of it in front depend mainly on the extent to which one can develop a personal relation with the Divine, a relation of Bhakti, love, reliance, self-giving, rejection of the insistences of the separating and self-asserting mental, vital and physical ego. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - III

The Isha Upanishad also speaks of the golden lid hiding the face of the Truth by removing which the Law of the Truth is seen and the highest knowledge in which the One Purusha is known (so'ham asmi) is described as the kalyan.atama form of the Sun. All this seems to refer to the supramental states of which the Sun is the symbol.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, Integral Yoga and Other Paths -IV

Above them is the miracle of eternal beauty, an unseizable secret of divine harmonies, the compelling magic of an irresistible universal charm and attraction that draws and holds things and forces and beings together and obliges them to meet and unite that a hidden Ananda may play from behind the veil and make of them its rhythms and its figures.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother

The Mother guides, helps each according to his nature and need, and, where necessary, herself intervenes with her Power enabling the sadhak to withstand the rigours and demands of the Path. She has placed herself - with all the Love, Peace, Knowledge and Consciousness that she is - at the disposal of every aspiring soul that looks for help.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, [T2]

Our object is to change into the divine nature, but the divine nature is not a mental or moral but a spiritual condition, difficult to achieve, difficult even to conceive by our intelligence. The Master of our work and our Yoga knows the thing to be done, and we must allow him to do it in us by his own means and in his own manner.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Master of the Work, 247 [T6]

But Indra does not turn back from the quest like Agni and Vayu; he pursues his way through the highest ether of the pure mentality and there he approaches the Woman, the manyshining, Uma Haimavati; from her he learns that this Daemon is the Brahman by whom alone the gods of mind and life and body conquer and affirm themselves, and in whom alone they are great. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena And Other Upanishads, 83

Never allow this idea I am not able, I am not doing enough to come and vex you; it is a tamasic suggestion and brings depression and depression opens the way to the attacks of the wrong forces. Your position should be, Let me do what I can; the Mothers force is there, the Divine is there to see that in due time all will be done.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Mother With Letters On The Mother, Letters On The Mother

The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Four Aids

410 - Devotion is not utterly fulfilled till it becomes action and knowledge. If thou pursuest after God and canst overtake Him, let Him not go till thou hast His reality.
If thou hast hold of His reality, insist on having also His totality. The first will give thee divine knowledge, the second will give thee divine works and a free and perfect joy in the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human

All human beings are full of ego. If you want to change, you must be very quiet and always aspire for a higher consciousness to come down into you in which there is not the ego. When it comes down, the real change will come. But you must be quiet within, not worried and restless - you must open confidently to the Mother's Force and let it work in you.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - IV, Ego and Its forms

BUT NOW the destined spot and hour were close;
   Unknowing she had neared her nameless goal.
   For though a dress of blind and devious chance
   Is laid upon the work of all-wise Fate,
   Our acts interpret an omniscient Force
   That dwells in the compelling stuff of things,
   And nothing happens in the cosmic play
   But at its time and in its foreseen place.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Destined Meeting-Place

Wherever the Divine is, everything is - it is only concealed, not non-existent. The Divine is there below in the inconscience itself - mind and life are concealed in Matter, so is Supermind and Sachchidananda. The below is not something outside the Divine Existence. But as mind manifested in Matter only after the descent of Mind opened it into creation, so it is with Supermind. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I

[the nature of the psychic being :::
   It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the Divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun; it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards divinity and draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial of it, from all that is false and undivine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, [T2]

The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.03

The intellectual understanding is only the lower buddhi; there is another and a higher buddhi which is not intelligence but vision, is not understanding but rather an over-standings in knowledge, and does not seek knowledge and attain it in subjection to the data it observes but possesses already the truth and brings it out in the terms of a revelatory and intuitional thought.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga

The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all powers of our human existence into a means of reaching the divine Being. In an ordinary Yoga one main power of being or one group of its powers is made the means, vehicle, path. In a synthetic Yoga all powers will be combined and included in the transmuting instrumentation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Principle of the Integral Yoga, 609 [yoga is:]

the four standards of spiritual conduct :::
   There are four main standards of human conduct that make an ascending scale. The first is personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law of the nature.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom [193]

the one thing needful ::: To know, be and possess the Divine is the one thing needful and it includes or leads up to all the rest; towards the sole good we have to drive and this attained, all the rest that the divine Will chooses for us, all the necessary form and manifestation, will be added.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Synthesis of the Systems, 41 [T1]

Her self was nothing, God alone was all,
   Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.
   A sacred darkness brooded now within,
   The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
   This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
   This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
   This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.
   But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul


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